Bradford West is now the fourth constituency to have George Galloway
for its MP – itself an unusual record in modern politics. There is a
cruel saying in Westminster that no one is more "ex" than an ex-MP.
Galloway was expected to take on that unwanted status after being
expelled from the Labour Party in 2003, but made an extraordinary
comeback at the 2005 general election as MP for the hastily formed
Respect party in Bethnal Green and Bow.
In 2010, Labour jubilantly
saw him off when he ran against Jim Fitzpatrick in Poplar and
Limehouse, and again expected him to vanish from the scene. Even on
Thursday evening, after voting in Bradford West was almost over, Labour
officials were quite sure that they had held the seat, though they
acknowledged that Galloway had made an impact and expected him to come
second.
Instead, after Easter, Galloway will return to Parliament,
where he first made a mark 25 years ago. In the 1987 general election,
he reclaimed Glasgow Hillhead, which the Labour Party had lost in a
by-election in 1981 to Roy Jenkins, leader of the SDP. Most new MPs have
to wait years before they make the front pages of the national press.
Galloway achieved national fame straight away – but not in a good way.
As
early as 1981, newspapers had started taking an interest in this
political prodigy who described himself as having been "born in an attic
in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee, which is known as
Tipperary". He had joined Labour's Young Socialists at 13, and was still
in his teens when, remarkably, he was made secretary of the Dundee
Labour Party. At 20, he was a member of the Scottish Labour Executive,
and at 22 was Dundee's youngest councillor, despite being denounced by a
local priest for "living in sin" with his future wife, Elaine. By 1981,
he was one of the most articulate voices in Scotland of what was then
known as the Bennite left, and before he was 30, he was general
secretary of a major charity, War on Want.
At first, the charity
thrived from having this dynamic, gifted, politically astute young boss.
He improved its political connections and, when aid to the Horn of
Africa increased dramatically in the wake of the Live Aid concert, he
made War on Want the lead charity in channelling aid to the war-torn
Eritrean and Tigris provinces of Ethiopia.
But towards the end of
his time there, word began to spread that there was another, less
attractive side to this charismatic figure. The Sunday Mirror carried
damaging allegations of how Galloway had been conducting himself,
written by Alastair Campbell. Just after his election to Parliament,
Galloway called what was to be his last press conference as head of War
on Want and, under persistent questioning from journalists, admitted
that he had had sexual relations with two women during a conference in
Athens in 1985 – a revelation that earned him the nickname "Gorgeous
George".
"My wife won't leave me," he predicted. Actually, the
relationship was soon over. Four years later, Galloway met the
Palestinian-born biologist Amineh Abu-Zayyad. They married in a civil
ceremony in 2000, but she divorced him in January 2009, citing his
relations with other women. By then Galloway had a one-year-old son by
his Lebanese researcher Rima Husseini.
Galloway's commitment to
the Arab cause dates back at least 30 years, when he was instrumental in
the unusual decision to "twin" Dundee with the Palestinian town of
Nablus. After the first Gulf war, he began a campaign to end British
sanctions against Iraq, which would bring him further attention. In
1994, he visited Baghdad and was filmed telling Saddam Hussein: "Sir, I
salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."
Four
years later, he set up the Mariam Appeal, named after a four-year-old
Iraqi girl, Mariam Hamza, whom Galloway arranged to bring to Glasgow to
be treated for leukaemia. The appeal, which paid for a number of
Galloway's overseas trips, was never registered as a charity.
Nonetheless, the Charities Commission looked into it after it was wound
up in 2003, and again in 2007.
The second time around, the
commission alleged that £230,000 out of the £1.4m raised by the appeal
came from "improper" sources, via Iraq's food for oil programme.
Galloway, who has never been coy in his own defence, described the
commission's findings as "palpably false".
The Daily Telegraph
thought it had Galloway bang to rights when, in the ruins of Baghdad's
foreign ministry building, it found a document that referred to what
were alleged to be payments to the MP, measured in barrels of oil. It
has never been disputed that the document itself was genuine. However,
the Telegraph read too much into its find, and ran an editorial
implicitly accused Galloway of treason, for which he was later awarded
£150,000 in libel damages.
Though he was by no means the only
Labour MP to be opposed to the Iraq war, nor the most important,
Galloway was the only one expelled from the Labour Party. With his usual
love of a resounding phrase, he described George Bush and Tony Blair as
"wolves" and, in Labour's views, had incited foreign armies to fight
against British troops.
After his expulsion, he remained an
independent MP for Glasgow Kelvin and joined forces with the Socialist
Workers Party and others to create the Respect Party.
When
Galloway took Bethnal Green and Bow by 823 votes, in an abrasive,
bad-tempered race against Labour's Oona King, it was the first time
since 1951 that a party avowedly left of the Labour Party had won a seat
in the Commons. The east London seat, like Bradford West, had a high
proportion of young Muslims who admired Galloway's opposition to the
Iraq war.
His five years as a Respect MP were marked by two highly
publicised appearances in places where British MPs are not normally to
be found. In May 2005, he went to Washington to confront a Senate sub
committee which had accused him of profiting from Iraqi oil. The
senators were accustomed to dealing with witnesses who treated Congress
with reverence, and were completely at a loss in the face of Galloway's
abrasive way of using attack as the best form of defence.
In 2006,
Galloway went on Celebrity Big Brother, under the illusion that it
would allow him to relay his political views to the show's vast
audience. Actually, most of his political remarks were cut out, and all
that most viewers recalled was his bizarre impersonation of a cat.
Another
high-profile appearance was his public debates with the writer
Christopher Hitchens, who said of Galloway: "He looks so much like what
he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of
working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses
account, the cars and the hotels – all cigars and back-slapping. He is a
very cheap character and a short-arse." Galloway was equally insulting
in return.
The Respect Party split apart when Galloway fell out
with the SWP. When Galloway failed to be re-elected to the Commons in
2010, it looked as if Respect was heading for terminal decline, and that
there was no future for George Galloway except as a star of the
Iranian-owned Press TV and one of the last people in the UK to offer a
qualified defence of the regime in Syria.
When he announced that
he was running in Bradford West, it appeared to be a desperate attempt
by a half-forgotten man to draw attention to himself. Almost the only
people to spot what was actually happening were punters who bet so
heavily on a Galloway victory that the bookies are saying the result is
costing them £100,000. George Galloway is back on the scene.
A life in brief
Born: 16 August 1954, Dundee.
Family:
His father was a Scottish trade unionist. Twice divorced, since 2006,
Galloway has been married to Rima Husseini with whom has a son. Has a
daughter from his first marriage.
Education: Harris Academy, Dundee.
Career:
Elected MP for Glasgow Hillhead in 1987. Expelled from the Labour Party
in 2003 over his stance on Iraq, and the following year co-founded the
Respect Party. Won Bethnal Green in 2005 election, but at the 2010
election lost out in Poplar and Limehouse. This week he won Bradford
West.
He says: “By the grace of God we have won the most sensational victory in British political history.”
They say: “He looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue.” Christopher Hitchens
----
by Tariq Ali
George Galloway's stunning electoral triumph in the Bradford
by-election has shaken the petrified world of English politics. It was
unexpected, and for that reason the Respect campaign was treated by much
of the media (
Helen Pidd of the Guardian being an honourable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC toady, an obviously partisan compere on a
local TV election show,
who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat his
excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labour fiefdom since 1973, was
considered safe and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had been planning a
celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through at 2 am. He
is now once again focused on his own future. Labour has paid the price
for its failure to act as an opposition, having imagined that all it had
to do was wait and the prize would come its way. Scottish politics
should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the latest development in English
politics now will, though I doubt it. Galloway has effectively urinated
on all three parties. The Lib Dems and Tories explain their decline by
the fact that too many people voted!
Thousands of young people
infected with apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream
politics were dynamised by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on
these occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to
competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator,
though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a
shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are
mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was the
political content of the campaign that galvanised the youth: Respect
campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of Iraq and
Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal,
and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further
delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labour party for the
austerity measures targeting the less well off, the poor and the infirm,
and the new privatisations of education, health and the Post Office. It
was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000.
How did we get
here? Following the collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke's notion
that "In all societies, consisting of different classes, certain
classes must necessarily be uppermost," and that "The apostles of
equality only change and pervert the natural order of things," became
the commonsense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics, and big
money corrupted it absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of capital, we
witnessed the emergence of effective coalitions: as ever, the
Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labour and Tories in
the vassal state of Britain; socialists and conservatives in France;
the German coalitions of one variety or another, with the greens
differentiating themselves largely as ultra-Atlanticists; and the
Scandinavian centre-right and centre-left with few differences,
competing in cravenness before the empire. In virtually every case the
two- or three-party system morphed into an effective national
government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of capital
into the most hallowed domains of social provision was regarded as a
necessary reform. Private financial initiatives that punished the public
sector became the norm and countries (such as France and Germany) that
were seen as not proceeding fast enough in the direction of the
neoliberal paradise were regularly denounced in the Economist and the
Financial Times.
To question this turn, to defend the public
sector, to argue in favour of state ownership of utilities or to
challenge the fire sale of public housing was to be regarded as a
dinosaur.
British politics has been governed by the consensus
established by Margaret Thatcher during the locust decades of the 80s
and 90s, since New Labour accepted the basic tenets of Thatcherism (its
model was the New Democrats' embrace of Reaganism). Those were the roots
of the extreme centre, which encompasses both centre-left and
centre-right and exercises power, promoting austerity measures that
privilege the wealthy, and backing wars and occupations abroad.
President Obama is far from isolated within the Euro-American political
sphere. New movements are now springing up at home, challenging
political orthodoxies without offering one of their own. They're little
more than a scream for help.
Respect is different. It puts forward
a leftist social-democratic programme that challenges the status quo
and is loud in its condemnation of imperial misdeeds. In other words, it
is not frightened by politics. Its triumph in Bradford should force
some to rethink their passivity and others to realise that there are
ways in which the Occupiers of yesteryear can help to break the
political impasse.
