FORGET the media hype of the Labour leadership contest for a few minutes.

Forget the furore of the right-wing newspapers with their prefixes gone mad — “hard-left, militant, extreme left-wing” — when saying anything about Jeremy Corbyn, and let’s concentrate on three of the key aspects of Jeremy’s bid that are setting him apart from the other candidates — compassion, honesty and hope.

Pre-Blair, compassion is what the Labour Party stood for. While the Tories and their millionaire mates made money and to hell with everyone else, Labour had compassion for vulnerable people — the disabled, the carers, the poor, those fallen on hard times and made redundant and unemployed, those who had suffered workplace injuries and could no longer work.

Then as Labour cosied up to big business, losing the last two general elections in the process, we ceased to be compassionate, we ceased to care.

Instead the special advisers in the London-dominated Westminster bubble decided that disabled people and carers, well, they were not worth bothering about because the computer said so.

As a focus group, the disabled, carers and poor simply didn’t matter as the data said they were so far down the list of those who would potentially vote Labour, it wasn’t worth spending time talking to them about their concerns and what policies they would like to see Labour adopt.

Labour let the suits talk “about” the poor but not to us — the middle-class vote was all too important to court and catch.

After all that was how Tony Blair had won his elections, surely the same formula could still work?

The answer is a blunt No. It didn’t work.

Labour left its core vote behind and arrogantly presumed we would have nowhere else to run to.

Compassion was a dirty word. The special advisers were in charge and they knew best because anything that was happening outside the London bubble didn’t count. How wrong they have been proven.

So in walks Jeremy Corbyn — a candidate for the leadership who the right of the party and the suits dismissed in the early days as merely the voice of the left getting a hearing but who would surely finish a distant fourth in the race.

Wrong again. Corbyn has articulated a vision of Labour, and indeed of the wider society, that ordinary people yearn for.

Read any Corbyn speech, hear him at any public appearance. In his gentle manner he has been making arguments about renationalising the railways, protecting public-sector pay, arguing for a living wage, then reached out and put an arm around the vulnerable and spoken about compassion.

He knows how desperate disabled people are about the closure of the independent living fund.

He knows about the stress terminally ill people are being placed under in order to claim the new personal independence payment (PIP) that has replaced disability living allowance.

And he knows intrinsically how carers who are struggling to get by on £62.10 a week are providing a vital service, yet are having social services care and respite being stripped away from them.

Corbyn realises that a decent society has compassion for the vulnerable. He knows the work capability tests for severely sick people and the PIP assessments made by private firms like Capita are not about helping people at all but are just a means to save money and hand vast millions to the private firms running the tests.

Corbyn connects with all sections of society and not just the “wealth creators” that the other candidates and previous Labour leaders are so keen to triumph.

He listens and acts as he sees the poorest in society and increasingly more working poor people being forced to turn to foodbanks for handouts, as their wages cannot cover the rent, the heating and food any longer.

Then there’s honesty. An honest politician would make most of us laugh until we cried.

But Corbyn’s honest and open approach when looking at the way forward, when giving us his vision of a Labour Britain under his leadership, has connected with Labour members aged 16 to 105.

He simply doesn’t accept Tory austerity. He knows there is another way and while Ed Miliband shackled himself to ideas of “balancing the books” (same as the Tories), being tough on immigration (same as the Tories) and being even tougher on welfare (same as the Tories), Corbyn is different in saying: let’s make the big corporations pay their taxes and then we can free young people from the burden of huge student debts.

He wants to ensure those who are earning in excess of six-figure salaries contribute to society as they have the broadest shoulders to do so.

Corbyn as leader will rid us of “welfare” and bring back “social security.” Workers will pay in for when those hard times fall and then have the security of knowing the state will step in with compassion.

Isn’t that what we want? A fair and decent Labour Party which puts workers first, collectively bargains for workers’ rights and protects the vulnerable from poverty?

In foodbank Britain where soup kitchens are on the rise even for those who work, where working mothers are visiting and using clothes banks to clothe their kids and get their school uniforms, we need a Labour leader who is not in the Westminster bubble looking out.

We need a leader who thinks for themselves without hanging on the words of special advisers who have jumped straight from university to Parliament without having any experience of the wider world or travelled north of the Watford Gap.

And then there’s hope — we have had little of that both as Labour members, supporters and voters, but also as a movement of working-class people with our own dreams and aspirations.

Post-2010, hope has been very thin on the ground. Hope that we could defeat the Con-Dems in the election, hope that the policies threatening our very way of life would be consigned to the Tory dustbin of history.

That was all we had and it was taken away from us. We listened in vain for Labour policies that would bring some stability to our lives — granted, abolishing the bedroom tax was one, but where were the rest?

A vain promise, a living wage was five years in the future, and then the incredible child benefit freeze for a few years.

Where was our hope that by then we would even have a decent roof over our heads?

Corbyn is offering real, tangible hope. Hope to the young who have mostly given up on politics. Corbyn is speaking the language of the young on tuition fees, the environment and decent jobs and homes.

For those of us wearied by constant attacks on the cost of living, he is promising a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and a purge of zero-hours, unstable work.

All ordinary people want is what previous generations had — a warm secure home, a job that pays the bills, clothes for the kids and enough to allow for a holiday, an NHS in public ownership we can turn to when needed, knowing we will get the best possible healthcare available for free without fear of having to have a chequebook in our hands to pay for it first.

Simple but precious things.

Corbyn is offering hope that we have lost and that the younger generation can’t even remember having. Hope that our lives will improve for the better. And the hope that the working class can follow our own aspirations is intoxicating for people whose backs have been used to bear the burden of Tory-imposed austerity.

So those of you who are party members and those who have a vote through the affiliation of their union, vote for Corbyn as leader and let’s have compassion, honesty and hope at the heart of our Labour Party.

• Bernadette Horton is a Labour Party member and disability activist.