BACK THE PEASANTS REVOLT!

What's hit Labour is a peasant's revolt. It's not a takeover by the loony left, or the last trot of the Trots. Both are now too weak for that. It's a revolt of the party members fed up with a Finance Friendly leadership, the endless dilution of their own demands  and the diet of austerity- lite imposed by a leadership more anxious to appear respectable  than to serve the purposes of the people.

Given, by the simple accident that the left was able at the last minute to scrape through a candidate which its never done before, the peasants seized the opportunity to yell "Blair a la lanterne" and chuck out the generation of compromisers who offered a Labour future of endless deference to business, the Tory media and greedy bankers and corporations but peanuts to the people and no hope to the harried and the victims of an unnecessary austerity well calculated to shift the balance of power and wealth to those who already have too much of both. 

This revolt of a party peasantry which the career politicians who lead the party had relied on to be dumbly quiescent changes everything. No use now the careerists sulking in their tents, the Blairites trying to wreck the new leadership or the quibblers carping about wearing a poppy or leaving NATO, Labour has to make the new settlement work or face a future of disgruntled and declining membership and sullen grassroots. Let traitors flinch and cowards sneer, they can't go back and will only damage the party if they try. They've no God given right to lead the party in a direction it doesn't want to go, and must accommodate to its wishes.

There'll be stumbles, mistakes and pains of adjustment. There'll be an enormous press barrage of dirt and sneers. Michael Faloony the Tory boot boy will warn of a defenceless ruined future worse than the one the present government is building. Ignore the lot,concentrate on basics rather than encouraging Sinn Fein or Hamas or trying to be a world power and the world's PC. So focus on the basic needs of the people : housing, health, education, a better life for their kids and an end to this painful pointless austerity  and Labour can win by offering the politics of principle and the economics of hope.

Of course we'll need a little help from the government because oppositions don't win, governments lose, but the Conservatives are helpful here because a recovery based on ever rising house prices and debt which pins its hopes on giving more to the wealthy to boost the same trickle down horses do for roads and turning Britain into a deregulated tax haven on Thames to attract the world's funny money. Funny money can't work and won't work. Labour must do its job of opposing all this bitterly rather than attempting to compromise with it and offer a kinder version. Now is the time for all good women and men to come to the aid of the party rather than acting like egocentric sulky bastards.