THESE are exciting times for the Labour Party. That’s because we have a leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who believes in the core values and key aspirations of the Labour Party. He proposes to run on a platform at the general election in 2020 which will excite voters put off politics by the focus group-obsessed machinations of the New Labour years.

Jeremy, during the leadership campaign this summer, was a breath of fresh air. I introduced him as he launched his rail manifesto at King’s Cross and I spoke at a rally for Jeremy in Derby. “Jez we can! Jez we can!” chanted the Corbynistas.

And Jez we did. I saw how Jeremy got people excited about politics again who had previously been turned off by the Labour Party’s race to the middle ground — hence the enormous number of energised new members and supporters who have been flocking to join, or in some cases rejoin, the Labour Party.

Harold Wilson famously said: “The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.” The party — our party — lost its way when it forgot that. When it became obsessed with worrying about the latest piece of “research” from a free-market think tank or a CBI-sponsored focus group, rather than representing the ambitions and aspirations of the vast majority of ordinary hard-working men and women in this country.

That’s why we endorsed Jeremy early on, as well as Tom Watson for deputy leader and Sadiq Khan as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London. So Aslef, as Kevin Maguire pointed out in his column in the Daily Mirror, got a hat-trick at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on September 12.

Jeremy is proud — not embarrassed or ashamed — to talk about public ownership. He understands that ordinary people are suffering in this Conservative age of austerity brought in by David Cameron and George Osborne to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich and to bail out the bankers who caused the economic crisis in 2008. Jeremy wants to rebuild Britain and create a fairer, more modern society and a more productive economy that delivers for all the people and is fit for the 21st century.

The railway industry — the industry in which we work and organise — is a perfect example of what has gone wrong and how it can be put right.

It’s time to bring back into public ownership not just the railway but key parts of the British economy such as the Royal Mail and the public utilities of electricity, water and gas — which are natural monopolies and which properly belong to the British people. Because we can all see that privatisation hasn’t worked. On every measure put forward by John Major 20 years ago, rail privatisation has failed. Fares and public subsidies have soared — we now have the highest fares in Europe — while trains have got more crowded.

It’s outrageous that companies can, at no risk, make a private profit for their shareholders at public expense. That’s millions of pounds leaking every day which could be used to bring down fares, ploughed back in investment in new infrastructure, or returned — like the £1 billion made by East Coast when it was in public ownership — to the Treasury to pay for schools or hospitals or housing.

First Great Western — the privateer dubbed Worst Great Western by critics of the service they provide — has just spent a fortune on a glossy rebranding exercise. The company took three full-page ads in the Daily Telegraph on September 21 announcing that it is graciously “giving the west back its Great Western Railway.” Over the coming months, they promised, “we’ll be undertaking the biggest fleet overhaul since the steam age. Heralding a new age of faster, more comfortable electric trains to bring prosperity to our great western region.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. What they neglect to mention is that they’re not buying those trains.

Because investment in the railways, in the form of infrastructure, innovation and rolling stock, comes from the government. The taxpayer makes the public commitment, while the company takes a private profit.

Birmingham New Street — Britain’s busiest interchange, handling a train every 37 seconds in the heart of England — has just reopened after a £750 million upgrade. This was all paid for by the taxpayer, through Network Rail, but I was left wondering whether it is now a train station or a retail park. It has 43 shops on the concourse and a 450,000 sq ft retail complex above. But no new train capacity.

The privatised train operating companies are good at makeovers and rebranding — a new paint job or advertising campaign — but bad at putting in their own money. They only talk of short-term tactics, not long-term strategy.

That’s why we need a Labour government elected in 2020 committed to putting our fragmented, privatised railway back together as a modern, integrated and publicly owned system fit for the 21st century.

We welcome Jeremy’s announcement that Labour will take the franchises back as they run out. The risk is what happens in the interim: possibly more direct awards or longer franchises to frustrate change, and we must campaign now to ensure that Network Rail is not broken up and privatised.

We need to get the privatised freight operating companies (FOCs) back into public ownership too, put an end to the waste in that sector and halt the race to the bottom whereby one FOC underbids another to try to get the work.

And we need to bring the rolling stock companies back into the public sector, too. Their privatisation in the 1990s was known as “the great giveaway” in the industry — a scandal on a par with those oligarchs in Russia who picked up, for a song, oil and gas companies worth a fortune.

There’s a lot to do. But as Clement Attlee showed as prime minister of a radical Labour government from 1945-51, it can be done. I believe that Jeremy, at the head of a radical Labour government, will protect the NHS, invest in education, bring the railways and public utilities back into public ownership and launch a building programme for social housing which will kick-start our economy.

Because we now have a party that wants to hear the voices of the workers and the dispossessed in civil society and not hide, like the Tories with their Trade Union Bill, behind repressive dictatorship-type legislation.

• Mick Whelan is general secretary of Aslef.