I've really no idea what this is supposed to mean, but I think the character with GG's face for a mouth seems to be Miliband... then again, a lot of Rowson's cartoons are like trying to decipher a cryptic crossword.
Galloway and religion
Melanie McDonagh
spectator.co.uk
31st March 2012
A few years ago, The Spectator, in an inspired notion for the Easter issue, asked a number of prominent individuals whether they believed in the Resurrection. And among the surprises was George Galloway, who replied emphatically in the affirmative: ‘Yes, I believe in the Resurrection. I believe God restored the life of Jesus of Nazareth and took him to his bosom. The example of suffering and sacrifice followed by vindication is central to my religious belief.’ One hopes there wasn’t an element of hubris here, whereby George identified himself with Christ — suffering followed by vindication — but the fact remains that it was a very public profession of faith from a politician who was, then as now, best known for his identification with Muslim causes.
Is there a way of squaring the George Galloway of the Easter Spectator issue with the campaign he waged in Bradford West, where he made an unambiguous appeal to the Islamic community as Muslims? An interesting piece by Andrew Gilligan in today’s Telegraph says squarely that his campaign was reminiscent of politics of the US Bible Belt and that his victory was ‘thoroughly contaminated with the politics of religion’. Mr Galloway was certainly quite unamibuous about doing God. On his election, he declared: ‘All praise to Allah!’ During the campaign itself, last Sunday, he said, ‘God knows who is a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim... A Muslim is somebody who’s not afraid of earthly power but who fears only the Judgment Day. I’m ready for that, I’m working for that and it’s the only thing I fear.’
One reading of these remarks is that they are purely opportunistic. Another is that Mr Galloway is to all intents and purposes no longer Christian. Me, I think he’s been rather clever. His remark that God knows who is a Muslim — defined as one who submits himself to God — is analogous to those unbelievers who would once remark of themselves that they were more truly Christian than the professing sort who let their faith down in practice. He is putting as broad a definition on the word Muslim as it will bear, and is clever enough to refer the interpretation of the matter to God, who is not to be pinned down. Indeed his remarks about his Muslim Labour opponent as a man who is never out of the pub are squarely derived from the notion that by their fruits you shall know them — Muslim is as Muslim does, as it were.
His making much of his teetotalism would not recommend him particularly to the Catholic community from which he came — though there is a forgotten Irish-Catholic tradition of total abstinence from alcohol on the part of ‘pioneers,’ of whom Mr Galloway may be one — but the fact that he has never drunk is undeniably an asset which he makes the most of, and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t. As for his remarks about the Day of Judgment, he is perhaps the only Christian politician who is not afraid to talk openly and quite explicitly about his faith; all Christians believe in the Day of Judgment but not many admit to it in public, except in the safe formulae of the Creed, said in the confines of a church.
Yasmin Alibhai Brown, the Muslim commentator popular with the BBC as a moderate, predictably declared on Any Questions that it was quite wrong to view the Bradford by-election as a Muslim victory, on the basis that an actual Muslim candidate was defeated. That’s an unsustainable view; Muslim voters did not put their faith to one side in this election, they rejected someone perceived as an inadequate Muslim for a man who sounded Muslim and certainly made much of being a man of faith. Indeed, this victory has been for that elusive creature, much beloved of the BBC, the ‘person of faith’ (as opposed to an actual Muslim or Catholic). That’s the card Mr Galloway played, and if Muslims read it as tantamount to him being Muslim himself, well, that’s fine by him. (The word Allah, for instance, is simply Arabic for ‘God’). What he comes across as to me is not a Christian denying his faith but as rather a good casuist.
But it wasn’t, of course, just Muslims who voted for Mr Galloway but quite a few white voters. What did he have for them, apart from giving them a chance to wipe the eye of the big, tainted parties? Well, he’s rare in contemporary British politics in being a genuinely impressive speaker, and rather humorous with it. He also has a reputation as an excellent constituency MP. You know, it’s not impossible that these old-fashioned attributes played a part in his victory, and that he may turn out, qua MP, to be good for the people of Bradford.
Slightly OT, but that NewsSniffer website linked to by the article Luke posted (3 posts up) is an excellent resource. I'm currently sifting through the 29 revisions of the BBC reporting on the 2008-9 Israeli attacks on Gaza. (link)
How women won it for George Galloway The maverick politician spoke to Muslim women directly, told local men to respect their wives' opinions and mobilised his female supporters to hit the doorsteps. One week on, the women who secured Galloway's victory speak out
Helen Pidd
guardian.co.uk,
4th of April 2012
Every five years, for all of her adult life, Farida Faizi went through the same old routine. "I'd answer the door around election time," she said, "and the Labour man would say: 'Is your dad in?' or: 'Can I speak to your husband?'" Faizi is 41 years old, runs her own jewellery business and has four children. But she accepted it. The Labour canvassers would have a word with her husband, just like always, and then they would both vote Labour. Just like always. It was the way things went in many Asian households in Bradford West.
Three weeks ago, something in her snapped. She met her niece, 31-year-old Naz Rehman, who told her about a new punk in town going by the name of George Galloway. Faizi remembered Galloway from the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother ("which I quite enjoyed, by the way"), but soon learned he was standing in the byelection in her constituency, promising to be "new broom" who would not only clean up the dog-eared city but also sweep away the old guard who took her vote for granted.
"Something awakened inside of me," said Faizi this week, over a cup of tea with Naz and another niece, Sara. Within a day or two of Faizi's awakening she was asking her husband to look after the kids and standing in her veil in Morrisons car park, handing out Respect leaflets to the other shoppers. She didn't just talk to other Muslim women with their faces covered by a niqab, she insists. "I spoke to people from all walks of life. They were very welcoming, I didn't get no abuse, no negative thoughts. It's difficult, because you've got to overcome this taboo first," she says, pointing to her veiled face. "People think that because I'm wearing it, they're not sure whether they should confront me or not. But I don't bite from underneath."
Anyway, she says, "there was a lot of mummies shopping that day. I spoke to a lot of mummies who couldn't understand what was going on, but I spoke to them in our own language [Urdu and Punjabi] and I explained to them, and they said: 'Oh, can we take a leaflet home, then, please?' and some of them just said: 'Well, which box number is it?' We'd tell them George was No 2 on the ballot and they would say: 'Oh, well, we'll vote George. Our husbands and dads are telling us not to, but they are not going to be with us when we put that paper in their ballot box.'"
And that, in a nutshell, is how Galloway managed to score what he called "the most sensational result in British electoral history" last Thursday. You might have heard it was his long-term opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which won him a 10,000 majority in an Asian-heavy constituency more than usually sensitive to foreign conflict. You may have read that he managed to cut the Tory vote down to 2,746 from over 12,000 – and ate so voraciously into the Lib Dem vote that they lost their deposit – because the people in Bradford West treated the byelection as a referendum on the government's austerity programme.
You've no doubt also been told his victory was also a sign of alienation in Britain's three-party electoral system. All these things are true. But if you want to know how he actually did it, it's not so complicated: he managed to get the women on side. And this, says Respect leader Salma Yaqoob, was "absolutely key" to Galloway's victory. It's something Labour had grasped by the time a grey-faced Yvette Cooper appeared on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday. "My sense … is that we weren't connecting enough with Muslim women in Bradford," said the shadow home secretary. One of her colleagues, MP for Bassetlaw John Mann, had already written that Labour failed in Bradford West because they had "no Muslim doorknockers, no Urdu speaker, no hijab-wearing woman talking to Muslim women voters".
While Labour canvassers were failing to communicate on the doorstep, women like Shabana Bashir, a multilingual 39-year-old language teacher and former Respect council candidate, were being welcomed into the living rooms of Punjabi speakers such as 73-year-old Zeenat Bi, who lives in Girlington. Bi has voted Labour, along with her whole extended family, for all of the 40 years she has lived in Bradford. Not this time. The tide had turned. Bashir gave her a lift to the polling station on election day, and Bi was so excited that night that she couldn't sleep. "I came downstairs and prayed that the right man would win," she said this week via a translator. "When the result came in, my phone rang and rang. The next day my whole street had a party. I just kept saying: 'Thank God, thank God.'"
Labour's catastrophic miscalculation in Bradford West has consequences for a number of the seats which are likely to come up for grabs in further byelections this year – most notably Birmingham Hodge Hill. Liam Byrne, shadow work and pensions minister, currently the MP there, plans to stand down to run for mayor of Birmingham, assuming the residents of Britain's second city plump for an elected mayor at next month's referendum. Hodge Hill was 35.8% Muslim at the 2001 census; in the 2010 election Respect's Yaqoob came close to snatching neighbouring Hall Green from Labour. This week Yaqoob said "never say never" when asked if she had her eye on Byrne's seat. For now, she said, they were concentrating on whittling down a cast of well over 300 people who had applied in the past week to run to be among the 30 Respect councillors the party will field in the local elections on 3 May. (Today she confirmed that four out of the party's nine target seats would be contested by women.)
It might seem strange that Galloway, who has had a colourful love life and who married his fourth wife over the weekend – apparently abandoning his third within months of the birth of their second child – should connect so well with female voters. Especially those from a religious background who might be expected to be more than usually moralistic about matters such as fidelity. But not one female Galloway voter I spoke to in Bradford this week seemed to give two hoots about what he gets up to in his private life.
Nasreen Ahmed, a 47-year-old mother of four picking her kids up from Girlington Primary school on Tuesday, shrugged when being told about the fourth Mrs Galloway. "I'm on my second marriage too," she said, "and as long as he keeps his personal and political life separate, I don't mind." No one seemed perturbed that Galloway only attended 8% of parliamentary votes while representing the people of Bethnal Green and Bow between 2005 and 2010, nor that the Charity Commission alleged in 2007 that £230,000 out of the £1.4m raised by his Iraqi children's charity came from "improper" sources, via Iraq's food for oil programme (a charge Galloway has always denied). Instead, many women found it inspirational that Galloway's party, Respect, was headed by a woman. "Having a woman as leader does send a strong message of equality and non-discrimination," said Yaqoob. "There is a symbolism having a woman at the top, especially a Muslim woman, given this nonsense about the oppression of Muslim women."
Galloway decided to run in the Bradford West byelection only a month ago, a few days after the long-serving Labour MP, Marsha Singh, announced he was to stand down because of ill health. With 18 years of parliamentary service under his belt, the 57-year-old Galloway had a good idea of how to win an election – even if he had suffered two recent black eyes at the ballot box, having failed both to charm the burghers of Poplar and Limehouse in 2010 after relinquishing his Bethnal Green and Bow seat, and to convince his old comrades in Glasgow to anoint him an MSP at last year's Scottish parliamentary elections.
But he knew that in order to overturn the Labour hegemony in Bradford West, he would need to reach out to sections of the community Labour had long ignored: young people and women, particularly the women of the Asian community, which in the 2001 census made up 38% of the constituency. Beenash Faris remembers one of the first public meetings Galloway held, just three weeks ago, in a function room of the Cafe Regal, "a new concept in Kashmiri, Pakistani and Indian casual dining" situated in Bradford's White Abbey Road. She had heard Galloway had thrown his hat in the ring and wanted to hear what he was all about. A Bradford-born intelligence analyst who specialises in assessing the effect of welfare cuts on children, she wanted to hear what this outsider had to offer the city she loves. "So I put my hand up and asked him a question about welfare reform," says the 29-year-old. Before she knew it, Galloway had appointed her "Women's Involvement Strategy Head", tasking her with coming up with a plan for including the women of Bradford West in the election campaign.
Together with Yaqoob, Faris and other women worked out how best to use the two weeks left before polling day to get out the female vote. As Faris says herself, "it wasn't rocket science." First they got their hands on a list of the 10,700 or so constituents registered for postal votes. Then they assigned pairs of women to knock on each door and introduce their "sisters" to the politics of Galloway, choosing to call during the day when the man of the house was likely to be at work. They also targeted primary schools, waiting at the school gates when the optimum number of mums would be gathered. "It didn't take much to convince them," says Faris now. "Their primary concern was their children's futures. They could see that in all this time of Labour rule, prospects for young people had got worse, not better, what with unemployment and the fiasco with tuition fees."
Many women were fed up with the state of Bradford's depressing town centre, blighted by a big hole where the Westfield shopping centre was to have been built until, two years ago, after years of delays, the project was put on hold. On Ive Gate, once a key pedestrianised shopping street in the town centre, 21 out of 33 shops are now either pawn shops, discount shops, charity shops, bookies or just empty.
It was despair for her three daughters' futures which spurred Shabana Bashir to join the Galloway campaign. Every day for the two weeks leading up to polling day, the Esol (English as a second language) teacher and lone parent would rise at 6am so that she had time to make the evening meal before she got her girls up ready for school. She'd make something easy – "spaghetti bolognese or something the girls could just heat up when they got home" – and drop them off, before heading to the nerve centre of the Galloway campaign, Chambers Solicitors in Grattan Road near Bradford's red-light district. Sometimes she wouldn't come home until 11pm. George needed women like her, she says now, "to fill in gaps in the campaign that they couldn't have filled without us". Beenash Faris likes to think of George's women campaigners as the "magical sauce" in his campaign – she was going to say "secret weapon", she said, but stopped herself, "because Muslims are all too often associated with weapons and jihad".
It was in the unassuming offices of Chambers Solicitors where his army of highly motivated and inspirational women campaigners plotted his victory. Mahmoona Begum, 23, a student at the University of Bradford, explained how they decided to make the temporary HQ as welcoming and unthreatening as possible for women. "We took one of the offices and advertised on the Facebook group that at a certain time, it was women-only. Women could come in, get some campaign literature and then practice a pitch. Lots of them didn't know what to say on a doorstep, so we helped them practice what they might want to say."
What Galloway managed to do, agree Naz Rehman and her auntie Farida, is make women feel that they mattered. "He has got that personal touch. He went out there into communities. He spoke to people. He made people feel important. He made the women feel important, he made youngsters feel important and that's a lesson for the other parties to learn."
There were arguably two key events in the short byelection campaign which galvanised female support for Galloway. The first was on 20 March, when one of Galloway's campaigners, a 28-year-old man called Abu-Bakr Rauf, collapsed and died on the campaign trail. Galloway had known Rauf and his wife, Kauser, for years, through the Palestinian freedom movement. At 1.30pm on the day after his death, Kauser spoke at a memorial service held for her late husband in the car park of Mumtaz, the famous Pakistani restaurant in the city, where Abu-Bakr had died less than 24 hours earlier. While many of the 50 or so people at the event struggled to control their emotions, Kauser's voice barely faltered. Holding on to her baby daughter, Arabia, Kauser told those present that they had a duty to carry on the election campaign immediately – and win it for Abu-Bakr.
Her words inspired everyone there, explains Faris. "Abu-Bakr died doing what he believed in and people wanted to continue his fight." Salya Shaban, an 18-year-old Palestinian student, said that was the moment she decided to devote herself to getting Galloway elected. "I decided I didn't want to waste another moment of my life doing something that wasn't beneficial to community, to humanity," she says. Sumara Bi Sultan, a 26-year-old media student, thinks Kauser's speech was an inspiration. "It gave all of us something to fight for that we could relate to."
The second galvanising moment, says Naz Rehman, was a speech Galloway gave at a Respect rally held on the Sunday before the byelection. "It's something he said directly to the Asian men. He said: 'You need to remember that women are half of your power. If you are not going to let your women get involved and stand by your side, you are taking away half of your own strength'. I think that was a very powerful speech."
It's important to remember, though, that Galloway did not only win over the Asian vote. No numbers are available to prove this definitively, but it was clear at the election count on Thursday night that he trounced Labour in mostly white areas too, such as Clayton and Thornton. All but a small handful of his female campaigners were Asian, but they made a point of going out and talking to all women, regardless of skin colour.
But even his most fervent supporters warn Galloway that he can't take their support for granted. "Women here have got a taste for democracy now," warns Faizi. "They know now how it works. If they don't like what he does in Bradford West, they'll vote him out again."
Galloway win proves there's some hope for politics
Mark Steel
6th of April 2012
Britain is different now, since George Galloway was elected in Bradford. Partly this is because he's splendidly unpredictable, so it's possible he'll resign to compete in the Olympics at weightlifting. He's also baffled the politicians and commentators who think they know how politics works. So the suggestion is made that the outcome was a result of Galloway unfairly courting the Muslim vote.
Because as anyone knows, if you want to trick a Muslim to vote for you, it's best to be a Scottish Catholic standing against a Labour Muslim. That's why the entire Pakistani parliament is made up of Celtic fans, and the current prime minister of Bangladesh is Andy McDowell, from Falkirk.
One example of this was an interview with Galloway on Radio 5Live the day after the election. The interviewer kept asking: "Why did you choose Bradford West?" Galloway stomped off, but I wonder whether the answer might be because that's where the election was.
So if he'd gone to Exeter instead, when he asked: "Are you voting for me today", he'd have been told, "Well, much as I like some of your policies, I'm afraid I'm not going to vote for you as there's no election. They're having one in Bradford, why don't you try there?"
Then we heard a "political analyst" downplay the result by saying: "It's hard to see he could have achieved this outcome in Plymouth or Norwich." Presumably if a Tory wins an election in the Cotswolds he says, "Yes he won, but he wouldn't have if the election had been in Sunderland so it doesn't really count." Today he'll tell us, "Aung San Suu Kyi claims the results are a success, but it's hard to see she could have achieved this outcome in Belgium."
So then they sneer that he won votes by opposing the war in Afghanistan, as if this is cheating. Because the rules are you have to agree with cuts and wars, so on every issue the Tories have to say, "We've cut this", the Liberal Democrats say, "We helped, and it's a good job we were there or the Tories wouldn't have spelt the thing they're cutting properly". But the main issue was the cuts, and one ward in which Galloway won a large majority was the student area, probably because he opposes the tuition fees.
The campaign didn't just win votes; one meeting attracted 1,200 people. So maybe the main thing that's changed is it's proved that people, can be reconnected with politics. But it helps to be against pointless wars, and making the poor poorer, and to go about it like Galloway, quietly and with humility and never making yourself the centre of attention.
Why Do They Hate George Galloway So Much?
by PATRICK COCKBURN
counterpunch.org
The ferocity of the attacks on George Galloway by the British commentariat is one of the most revealing outcomes of his victory in the Bradford West by-election. News presenters saw no problem in conducting interviews with the newly elected MP that were largely a shower of insulting and unproven accusations. Columnists wrote thousands of shrill words warning readers that he and his victory were atypical and had no broader significance for the country. And, if his success did have any relevance, it was the ominous one of illustrating deepening racial division in Britain, despite the fact that Galloway continually explained that he had won in non-Muslim as well as Muslim majority wards.
There is an amusing half-hour to be spent watching YouTube clips of television interviews with Galloway in the days after he was elected. With a few honorable exceptions – Sky was more even-handed here than the BBC or ITN – most of the interviewers appeared in the role of prosecuting attorneys. They had the air of men and women who knew they were not going to be reprimanded by their employers, however rude they were to the successful candidate. They were convulsed with rage because Galloway said complimentary things to Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad when he met them. Of course he had, as had every other visitor from Donald Rumsfeld to Tony Blair who had been to see these autocrats when they were in power. Other criticism was of astonishing naivety. For instance, had not Galloway played ethnic politics by cultivating Muslim voters? Of course he had since they were numerous in the constituency, but then so had Labour to a far greater extent by selecting a Pakistani Muslim as its candidate.
These interviews, analyses and commentaries told one more about the cast of mind of inner circles of the British political class than it did about Galloway or the people of Bradford. Since few reporters appear to have gone to the city before or after the election, and commentators were quick to say the result did not matter, it was difficult even to establish basic facts about the poll, such as why people voted the way they did. It is an old American journalistic dictum that “comment is free and facts are expensive”, but US op-ed writers and their television counterparts at least make more effort than in Britain to pretend to first-hand knowledge of whatever they are commenting about.
The underlying theme for Galloway’s critics is that he is a demagogue appealing to irrational passions, but to make this charge stick it is necessary to take a peculiar view of recent world politics as it affects Britain. At the centre of Galloway’s campaigns for the past two decades has been opposition to four policies supported by American and British governments: the sanctions against Iraq between 1990 and 2003; the American and British occupation of Iraq; foreign intervention in Afghanistan; and the blockade of Gaza.
All these are important issues, but even raising them invites allegations of demagoguery. For instance, The Economist, after recording that Galloway is “a hate figure for the British establishment”, claims he won his seat “mostly by touting his opposition to the war in Afghanistan.” (Note the use of the loaded word “touting”.) But what should be more relevant to current British politics than the Afghan war where 407 British soldiers have been killed and a small British army of 9,500 is still fighting? It is a conflict in which men and women have died and are dying in vain: their intervention has achieved nothing; the Taliban are not being defeated and this should long have been self-evident.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former British ambassador in Kabul and the Foreign Secretary’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, says in his excellent memoir Cables from Kabul that failure is not more openly admitted by journalists because of “the media’s need for copy, both visual and written, which can be obtained only by embedding with a military machine”. As for the average British politician, worried about “leaks to the press suggesting he was not backing our boys”, he ends up taking the advice of the generals, however self-serving and disastrous this has proved in the past. On a small scale the atmosphere is closer to the First World War than the Second World War, with critics of official policy being caricatured as unpatriotic. As a result, politicians and generals responsible for failures hold their jobs, ready to fail again.
Already British commentators often treat the Iraq War as if it were as distant as the Boer War. When Galloway so much as mentions it he is treated either as an eccentric, raising dead issues, or as a rogue, exploiting ancient feuds. His focus on 13 years of UN sanctions against Iraq is portrayed as even more outré, but I was often in Iraq for many of those years and I watched the collapse of a whole society into poverty. I remember stopping in Diyala province and being mobbed by farmers holding X-rays of their sick children, hoping against hope that I might be a doctor. Hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily. Galloway was one of the few politicians who tried to make an issue of this man-made catastrophe which did nothing to bring down Saddam Hussein and inflicted terrible injuries on the Iraqi people, but unfortunately he failed.
The invasion of Iraq turned into an even greater disaster. Many Iraqis wanted to get rid of Saddam, but very few wanted their country to be occupied by foreign powers. Given the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead, and Iraq torn apart by one of the most savage sectarian conflicts in history, was it really so wrong for Galloway to oppose this war?
Few statements by the new member for Bradford West seem to have enraged pundits so much as his comparison between his own electoral victory and the Arab Spring. One interviewer, her voice rippling with distaste, asked how he could compare his success with a movement in which thousands had died. But Britain does sometimes feel like Egypt, a country in which disasters occur but somehow nobody running the country is ever held responsible and where power circulates within a narrow clique. Decisions on war and peace have been delegated to the US. Wars are fought supposedly to defend Britain against terrorism, when all the evidence is that they provoke it. It says something about the comatose nature of British politics that an effective critic of these failed wars like Galloway, who beats an established party, should be instantly savaged as a self-serving demagogue.
PATRICK COCKBURN is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.
Enemies dared to write me off.. now I'll put them right By George Galloway
WELL, it's been 10 days that shook my world, and one or two others too.
I've been elected in a landslide, married, carried aloft, let down, betrayed, re-entered Parliament, doorstepped by the Fleet Street rat-pack like I'd never been away, Paxman'd (though things ain't what they used to be) on Newsnight, smeared on the Channel 4 show 10 O'Clock Live by a Tory boy I'd never heard of, libelled, praised and I'm not even an MP yet!
Parliament is on holiday and I haven't sworn my allegiance to Her Majesty and all her heirs and successors yet, though I've got my car park space back, picked up a mountain of post and had a warm welcome from the workers there, some of whom I've known for a quarter of a century.
The postmen in particular. "Been a lot quieter around here without you," one said, and he didn't just mean the reduction in suspicious packages.
In the Bradford by-election, Respect won the largest increase in their vote of any party in the UK since 1945, and we took the seat off a Labour Party in opposition and with the Government drifting badly.
When I won in east London in 2005, it was the first left of Labour parliamentary victory in England since 1945.
Now I've taken two rock-solid Labour seats in seven years. I do recall telling them they'd rue the day they expelled me, despite the pleas of Michael Foot and Tony Benn at my kangaroo court, and now, I think, they do.
There are so many lessons for Labour and others in those facts it's difficult to know where to begin.
Some will have to be dropped in over the coming weeks.
But the first is that we have to stop the war. Or, rather, wars.
Iraq is still bleeding from the Blair-led invasion and all the hatred it unleashed around the world.
Afghanistan is consuming the lives of young British soldiers like there's no tomorrow (as there isn't for them). The summer offensive is still to come, with Israel and its British and
American sponsors threatening Armageddon over Iran.
With our country, like Paxman, a caricature of its former power, we simply can't afford to go on like this.
We have neither the blood nor the treasure to be roaming around the world setting other people's countries on fire.
Our home fires are dangerously close to going out and must be tended with all our attention and resources.
The yellow Quisling Lib Dems, headed like Paxo to the knackers' yard surely, tried everything they could in Bradford to turn my demand for the end of the war into a sword to strike me with.
Day after day they launched the same press release, accusing me of insulting our troops because I said they died in vain. They demanded the "blood sacrifice" (Tony Blair's phrase for what we had in store, though other people's blood of course) should continue because it would betray the fallen to, er, stop the falling.
But people, whether white or of Asian descent, are past falling for that echo of Passchendaele and the Somme where the Tommies sang, "We're here, because we're here, because we're here." And for no other reason.
Then there is the baseless and derogatory story that I, a blue-eyed paleface, played the "race card" against, er, a brown-faced New Labour man of Pakistani heritage and of Muslim faith (as he never tired of telling us).
It was said I won because of the Muslims, when in the University Ward, which is as the name suggests, I won 85per cent of the vote in an eight-horse race - surely a record in itself.
Why? Maybe because New Labour (whose leaders were all educated free at the best universities) introduced tuition fees (against my fierce opposition) and the Tories and Lib Dems tripled them, the latter having signed a "pledge" practically in their own blood to abolish fees during the last election.
For others it's my "charisma" what done it, this usually said by the same media whores who have spent decades insulting, lying, even defaming me as a no-good no-mark of considerably little importance.
Everybody hated me, they never tired of telling you. Now my victory is a "one-off" because, well, there's only one of me.
One New Labour figure even said I'd won because I'd gone on Big Brother, which, he said, allowed me uniquely to connect with young people. Well, I told you so on that one too, though not even my best friends believed that.
The truth is, I didn't win for one damn reason but, as Harold MacMillan once put it, it was "one damn thing after another".
Nobody except the bookies and readers of the Daily Record even saw it coming.
With the honourable exception of the Guardian, not a single English paper covered the by-election, and not a single broadcaster. There was more coverage in the Record than in the Yorkshire Post.
Spend half an hour on YouTube viewing the after-match interviews and see the level of malignant ignorance in which so many of our broadcasters have sunk, deep in metropolitan idiocy.
They can hardly contain their blind rage, and for their scribbling counterparts it was out with the chequebooks and business as usual.
Well, in the immortal words of Chumbawamba, I got knocked down, but I got up again and this time I'm intending, God willing, to stay on my feet.
But I warn the political establishment, dripping in blood from head to foot, that I come back not as the accused but as the accuser.
George Galloway fighting Bradford City and Bradford Bulls' corner
Simon Parker
thetelegraphandargus.co.uk
12th April 2012
George Galloway insists his pledge to bring Middle Eastern money to Valley Parade is no idle boast. The city’s newest MP says he genuinely plans to use his worldwide contacts to attract investment for the Bantams. But first he is in talks to try to help safeguard the future of the Bulls as they look for another £500,000 cash injection in the coming weeks.
Outspoken Galloway believes that reviving the fortunes of the two clubs is vital to save Bradford from “sinking”. He is keen to sit down with City owners Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes – once the Bulls have been taken off the critical list.
Galloway told the T&A: “Their situation is marginally more perilous in a sense of days rather than a determinate amount of time. But both are in a difficult condition and if I can help, then I will. I’m doing my best to stave off the imminent disaster and see what can be done viz-a-viz sponsorship or even taking a share. That’s not me personally but people I can influence. As a sports lover and Bradford MP and somebody expected to make a difference, I’m starting with iconic things like City and the Bulls. To go from world champions of rugby league to being on the verge of going under is a pretty catastrophic drop."
“And City have been twice in admin and there is always a danger of a third. You don’t want to talk them down but they are in a bad situation financially and in terms of their position in the Football League. We’ve got a city that is literally sinking in that big hole in the centre where Westfield should be. The sinking feeling one gets about the football and rugby league clubs obviously helps to portray the picture of a sinking city. We want to pull ourselves up from that as quickly as possible and these two clubs are something I can influence.”
City have heard grand plans of investment before which have come to nothing. They will wait to see if Galloway’s words are more than just politician’s rhetoric. The Bradford West MP, whose constituency includes Valley Parade, has been invited to the next home game against Macclesfield on April 21.
Galloway added: “If you’ve got a high profile and you have important international connections then we should try and put these two things together. I haven’t visited the football club yet but I do want to meet them. I want good relations with the people who are currently in charge. Both sporting stadia are impressive, iconic and historic. We need to join up our thinking on these things. It’s so important for the self image of Bradford. I watched Norwich beating Tottenham the other day. That’s a far smaller place than Bradford but what they are doing is pretty impressive. That’s the feelgood factor that sporting success can bring to a city.”
Lawn made it clear that City’s door is open. He said: “I would love to think there’s something behind it. But if George is serious, we will speak to him at any time. If people want to invest in Bradford City and can do better than Julian and I, then we will gladly walk away. That has never changed. But there's nobody queuing to come in. The last one we talked to about investing was Steve Parkin and that never got beyond talking."
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