EVER since Jeremy Corbyn secured a place on the ballot paper for the Labour leadership election, the Establishment has, in one united and very loud voice, been proclaiming that the Islington North MP is a political relic who would lead Labour into oblivion.

To support these dubious claims any number of Establishment — and especially Labour Establishment — figures have been rolled out. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are now seemingly united in their opposition to the almost unstoppable Corbyn campaign. Blair, apparently oblivious to the chaos unleashed with the Iraq war and his own role in the economic crisis, gave his usual pontifical lecture on why Corbyn must be stopped. His tirade was followed by an announcement from Brown that Labour could not win under a Corbyn leadership.

All the media, with the exception of the Morning Star, have trumpeted the same message. Corbyn is “unelectable” and those silly Labour Party members and affiliated supporters who say they are going to vote for him — some 57 per cent at the last poll — need, according to Blair, a “heart transplant.”

What is remarkable is that Corbyn, despite all the media hostility, goes from strength to strength. From starting as the 100-to-1 outsider he is now the firm favourite to win. Thousands of young Labour supporters have signed up to the party and the great majority appear to favour Corbyn. The Labour establishment doesn’t know what to do. Some have suggested calling off the contest. Peter Mandelson, one of the chief architects of New Labour, apparently asked the other three leadership candidates to withdraw in the hope that the contest would be declared void. To their credit the other candidates all said no.

Corbyn, in a whirlwind campaign across the country, including Scotland, is addressing packed audiences and overflow meetings.

Many observers liken it to the enthusiasm aroused by the independence campaign in Scotland which galvanised the young and brought many into politics for the very first time.

Corbyn’s anti-austerity message has captured the imagination of many voters. He is certainly the candidate most likely to win back disillusioned Labour voters in Scotland, who voted in large numbers at the general election for the anti-austerity message of the SNP. Without winning Scotland, Labour has no hope of ever forming a government.

In England too Corbyn looks like a winner. Many Labour voters stayed at home last time rather than trudge to the polls to vote for Miliband’s austerity-lite alternative. With the new vision of hope represented by Corbyn, many Labour supporters will come back to their political home and give their vote once again to a party that represents real change.

And what, come to think of it, was so “new” about New Labour? Well, absolutely nothing. Writing over 60 years ago in his acclaimed book Fifty Years’ March — the Rise of the Labour Party, former Daily Herald editor and Labour lord Francis Williams looked back with some clarity on Labour’s rise to power. The book was published in 1949 at the time of the reforming Clement Attlee-led Labour government. Williams had some advice about the economic policy of the first majority Labour government elected in 1929. Labour’s then chancellor of the exchequer was Philip Snowden and Williams said this of him: “He was incapable of

conceiving that Budgets might be left unbalanced in a depression as a deliberate act of policy and the deficit wiped out by a surplus in more prosperous years. He could not conceive that a strict annual accountancy was altogether inappropriate to the conditions of the time. Nor would he accept the suggestion that, even within a balanced Budget, money could be made available for unemployment payments and the maintenance of essential social services by suspending for the time being until the crisis was past the annual sinking fund payments for the redemption of the national debt.

“He regarded these payments as an essential act of financial integrity — and financial integrity in the narrow orthodox sense in which he conceived it had come to possess for him the force of a moral compulsion to which it was perfectly proper that human wellbeing should, if necessary, be sacrificed. He was determined to balance his Budget without increased taxation or any reduction in sinking fund payments. There was, therefore, no alternative but to enforce large cuts in the social services and the unemployment benefits. To this course he set himself.”

Not much difference in Snowden’s approach to that of Ed Balls and the shadow Labour cabinet over 80 years later. They were all committed to balancing the books, and for them the only way out of any economic crisis is to impose cuts.

Who are the real relics? They are the ones who remain committed to the old methods of resolving capitalism’s periodic crises. All they know is cut, cut and cut. Drive down wages and slash our social services.

Fortunately for thousands of new and old Labour Party members and supporters, there is now an alternative to these old rehashed ideas circulated as new and progressive.

That alternative is Corbyn. He offers hope and a different way out of the crisis. His message is simple: working people didn’t create this crisis, so why should they have to pay for it? Let the wealthy bear the cost of a crisis created by their own greed.

That is not the message that the corporations, their media and their Labour lieutenants want to hear. So from now until the last Labour leadership ballot is cast we are likely to hear lots more of the same.

Corbyn may still not win, but he has already given the Establishment and the New Labour apparatchiks and their ideological hangers-on a run for their money.