HOW refreshing to hear a Labour Party leader say to the Trade Union Congress: “I am, and always will be, an active trade unionist.”

To hear from a Labour leader who prizes the “organic link” between the labour movement and its party.

And who does not talk to the trade union movement as an external lobby to be alternately appeased and rebuffed as political calculations dictate but as one of us — “there are six million of us in this country,” “we are the largest voluntary organisation in Britain.”

The monopoly media had begun the sneers and scaremongering even before Jeremy Corbyn finished speaking, but his reference to his labour movement background is not merely an interesting personal anecdote.

A grounding in grassroots representation of cleaners, caretakers and school caterers “taught [him] a great deal about people.”

So has 32 years representing the people of Islington North, being returned with larger and larger majorities as the years pass by.

This is the point the pundits miss when they dismiss Corbyn — and, more recently, shadow chancellor John McDonnell — as lacking experience, though fresh-faced Blairites who’ve been in the Commons for five minutes rarely face the same accusation when they trot out their tired old platitudes about “tough choices” (attacks on the vulnerable), public-sector “reform” (privatisation) or “modernisation” (copying the Conservative Party).

Of course Corbyn is not a typical leader of the opposition. The Labour Party didn’t vote for one.

Thatcherite economics have been discredited by the bankers’ crash and politicians increasingly sound as if they are on another planet from the rest of us.

So decades of experience as an outstanding constituency MP — helping ordinary people resolve the problems they face — are a far better qualification for Corbyn and McDonnell to reconnect Labour to voters up and down the country than any amount of yah-boo front-bench posturing.

It was this innate emotional link to most Britons that led Corbyn to offer the TUC a more consistent, principled and popular policy list than his predecessors felt able to — a wholehearted struggle against the Trade Union Bill and for a Workers’ Rights Bill, against the Welfare Bill and for raising wages and controlling rents, against the whole shower of pampered poverty-deniers whose wealth and privilege choke off the chance of a decent life for the rest of us.

It was this link too that meant his first action on winning the Labour leadership was not to hold a press conference, but to head straight to a march offering our solidarity to refugees fleeing terror and civil war.

And to prioritise an event highlighting mental health issues over an appearance on a BBC breakfast show, attracting the predictable opprobrium of the press for not slavishly following their agenda.

Since Jeremy’s election the Establishment has bent over backwards to portray him as isolated and out of touch, but yesterday told a different story.

How many party leaders are mobbed by crowds of young fans as they arrive to address a conference?

How many can get two standing ovations before they’ve even said a word?

As Jeremy pointed out, the number of votes cast for him were more than twice the entire membership of the Conservative Party.

Thirty thousand people have joined Labour in the three days since he was elected.

His leadership is already beginning to build the mass movement we need if we are to overcome the mockery, distortions and lies and march to victory and a better, fairer country.