WHICH other newly elected party leader has marked an initial appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions by redefining how the House should conduct itself and relaying voters’ concerns directly to the PM?

Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to engage in a parliamentary parody of a Bullingdon Club members’ night out, preferring impassioned but orderly political debate, handed him the day.

The issues he highlighted — housing, tax credits and mental health service cuts — underlined sharp divisions between the progressive approach of his election campaign and the business-as-normal austerity agenda favoured by Tories and too many MPs on his own side.

Corbyn has known since day one that the media, with the exception of the Morning Star, will stop at nothing to clip his wings, undermine his position and present him as an electoral liability to be replaced as soon as possible.

Tory papers attack him directly while the liberal end of the press, in common with some Labour MPs, shakes its head sadly, bemoans “unforced errors” and urges him to play the Establishment game.

Such slippery tactics lie behind the efforts to make an issue over the Labour leader’s decision not to sing God Save the Queen at the Battle of Britain ceremony.

Corbyn is not a monarchist. Why should he or anyone be obliged to sing a dirge that links a supreme deity whose existence is at best debatable with a head of state position from which everyone but members of a single family are excluded?

Lord West, a former first sea lord and one of Gordon Brown’s worst ministerial appointments, believes that singing the national anthem “expresses one’s loyalty to the UK and British people.”

Perhaps his lordship should read the anthem’s lyrics because the “British people” don’t get a look-in.

They ask God to send the Queen victorious, scatter her enemies, frustrate their knavish tricks, pour the choicest gifts in store on her, save her from every latent foe and from the assassin’s blow while, presumably, the rest of us have to rely on our own resources.

The only nationality that does get a mention is the Scots but only as the butt of Irish-born military commander Field Marshal George Wade who played a role in putting down the 1715 Jacobite rising.

God is asked to give Wade mighty aid for victory so “May he sedition hush/And like a torrent rush/Rebellious Scots to crush.”

No wonder Nicola Sturgeon looked a little green round the gills when she mouthed the anthem alongside the Queen and Prince Philip recently.

Sturgeon drew some charges of hypocrisy for her apparent pro-monarchism.

How much more strident would such allegations have been if lifelong republican Corbyn had eulogised the head of a pampered rich family rather than, as he did, paying respectful tribute to those who opposed fascism and defended Britain against the might of the Luftwaffe.

His choice was entirely honourable and he should resist advice from whatever quarter to sing along in future.

Pressure to conform is a means to entrench Establishment views about the monarchy and reinforce working people’s status as subjects rather than citizens.

Corbyn’s reliance on Marie, Gail, Paul, Steven and Angela to pose questions to Cameron is a model worthy of replication.

Why not ask the electorate to give their views on the national anthem?

In fact, why not ask them to offer an alternative that counterposes patriotism to forelock-tugging subservience and which represents modern reality instead of military conquest and unaccountable entitlement to wealth and power?