GALLOWAY CONDEMNS WIND MAST DECISION IN BRONTE COUNTRY
George Galloway has condemned the decision by a very small number of Bradford councillors to allow planning permission for a wind mast to go ahead in the heart of Bronte country on Thornton Moor, Denholme.
"The Bronte sisters are three of the greatest authors in the English language," said Galloway. "The parsonage in Haworth where they lived is rightly a museum to their lives and their art.
"During the election campaign, I raised the fact that the council had done nothing to highlight the birthplace of the Bronte sisters in Thornton to attract tourism. This is despite the fact that there have been not one but two acclaimed and very popular films, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, in the last few months.
"Haworth and the surrounding moors are part of this great heritage and must be both preserved and promoted vigorously. Instead a philistine Labour councillor, Imdad Hussain, has damned those who have protested the spoiling of this historic area as "nimbys". That is a disgraceful thing to say.
"Wind power will be a significant element in future energy strategy to stop global warming. But account must be taken of the special historic significance of this moor and the Bronte way that crosses it. A pilot wind mast, with the promise of more to follow, is entirely unnecessary in this area.
"I wholeheartedly support those seeking to preserve our heritage in Bronte country and I will be seeking any and every opportunity to reverse this act of vandalism and to stop further wind farm developments here."
George Galloway: My return to Westminster is 'advance party for army gathering in the North'
Apr 16 2012
Daily Record
RESPECT'S George Galloway returned to the House of Commons today insisting he was "just the advance party" for the army "mustering in the North". The Bradford West MP, who overturned a 5000 majority to storm home with a 10,000-vote lead in last month's by-election, claimed voters were "alienated and discontented".
Speaking at Parliament's St Stephen's entrance, Galloway vowed to use his first week back in the Commons to raise the war in Afghanistan, likening it to Vietnam. He said: "It is good to be back but I'm just the advance party. There's an army mustering in the North and in the great industrial and post-industrial cities of this country, an army of discontented, alienated people who feel that this place has let them down, it has failed the country and it has failed the people. I notice that New Labour is terrified of any further by-elections and I can understand why because this concept that I have coined, it's rather rude, that three cheeks of the same backside pretty much sums them up as far as most people in the country are concerned."
Galloway, accompanied by his fourth wife, 27-year-old Dutch/Indonesian anthropologist Putri Pertiwi, said he would press for action in the "wake of the frankly disastrous military situation which is becoming like Vietnam 1968". He added: "We have to get out of Afghanistan."
He told reporters today that Bradford was "bitterly sinking into a blackhole" in comparison to the progress being made in neighbouring Leeds but since he had been elected the "Bradford Bulls have won four games in a row and Bradford City Football Club has won".
In an interview with the Big Issue, out today, Galloway claimed he is the "Robin Hood" of British politics. He said: "If I was a bigamist, I'd be under arrest. If I was a tax dodger, I'd be under arrest. I'm the most inquired-into individual in British politics. By a country mile. If I did things wrong, be sure I'd be already in big trouble. We have a prevailing orthodoxy: there's a few inches of political life in which it's acceptable to have a different view but if you challenge the fundamentals of policy, you're an outlaw. You're Robin Hood."
When asked to explain the "effect" he has on women, Mr Galloway said: "I'm the artist formerly known as Gorgeous George. I prefer the company of women. Because I don't drink, I don't swear, I'm not crude, sometimes male company turns me off. And from an early age I was the person who drove everybody home and I always saved the prettiest girl to drop off last."
Galloway also told The Big Issue "you can have a whale of a time" without drink and drugs. He said: "Music, making love, children: it's all you need really. I love children very much and hope to have more. Your own children and grandchildren literally piling on top of you on the sofa is as good as it gets. It's far more fun than getting tanked down the old Bull 'n' Bush."
Sketch: a hot date with Gorgeous George Galloway Michael Deacon watches George Galloway, the new MP for Bradford West, make his return to the House of Commons.
Michael Deacon,
Parliamentary Sketchwriter
telegraph.co.uk
17 Apr 2012
The Commons – or at least those of us who write about it – should be glad George Galloway is back. Since he stopped being MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, the House has missed him. Admittedly, it often missed him even when he was MP for Bethnal Green and Bow; he didn't exactly have the most impressive attendance record. Yesterday, however, he did turn up, for the first time since he won Bradford West in his self-proclaimed “Bradford spring”. Sadly we were treated to only the briefest glimpse of him; this was, so to speak, a mere flash of ankle. Gorgeous George, like all the most expert flirts, knows how to leave his admirers wanting more.
He was officially presented to the House at 3.30pm, after Education Questions. He had two sponsors (the chaps who stand beside you while you wait for the Speaker’s summons). One was Gerry Sutcliffe, Labour MP for Bradford South; the other was Sir Peter Tapsell, our longest-serving MP (Commons debut: 1959) and thus known as the Father of the House.
How intriguing to see Sir Peter and Mr Galloway together: the House’s most venerable Conservative and its most explosive radical, standing shoulder to shoulder. Well, not quite shoulder to shoulder: of the two Mr Galloway is by some distance the shorter. But he has never been a man to let his self-confidence be shaken by a want of inches.
Arriving in the chamber with a good five minutes of Education Questions left on the clock, he straightened his tie and smoothed his hair, as if awaiting a hot date. Passing the time while MPs jabbered about A-level grade inflation, he, Sir Peter and Mr Sutcliffe chatted cheerily. Whatever they were talking about, it seemed to please Mr Galloway immensely. His golden-brown face was screwed up in pleasure. He looked like a delighted walnut.
At last the big moment came. “Order,” cried the Speaker. “Would the Honourable Member wishing to take his seat please come to the table?” The House fell silent. Swapping his grin for a look of almost funereal gravity, Mr Galloway stepped forward, bowed his head to the Speaker once, reached the table, bowed his head again.
“I, George Galloway,” he read aloud, “do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law.” Interesting: in recent years Mr Galloway has been much noted for his increasingly voluble holiness – he name-checks God more often than most rappers do – yet he’d affirmed the MPs’ oath, rather than sworn on the Bible (or indeed some other holy book).
Having signed in – the whole ceremony is like a strange combination of getting married and checking in at a hotel – Mr Galloway went to shake the Speaker’s hand. For some little time, out of earshot, the Speaker engaged him in conversation – all the while holding on to Mr Galloway’s hand, occasionally giving it an extra shake. It was a bit like watching a teenage girl who meets her pop star idol and can’t bear to let him go.
But finally the new MP for Bradford West escaped the Speaker’s grasp, and, as lightly as an expensive scent, wafted out of the chamber.
My colleague Helen Pidd is in Bradford, where it sounds as if the election has turned ugly. She's just sent me this.
Things are getting testy in Bradford, where George Galloway's Respect party is challenging the political establishment in 12 out of the 30 wards up for grabs. Salma Yaqoob, leader of Respect, has just tweeted that her brother's car was attacked by "Labour supporters" in the city this afternoon.
I have just spoken to her brother, Farrukh Haroon, who has been helping the Respect campaign. The 36-year-old says he was outside the Iqra school polling station in the Manningham area of the city – a ward Respect is confident of winning from Labour – when the alleged attack happened.
Haroon says he and his cousin had been driving up and down the Drummond Road with a megaphone, shouting Respect slogans "and saying stuff about Labour's support for the war" when they attracted the attention of some Labour supporters outside the primary school. He claims that they "attacked" the car, yanking off a wing mirror and pulling the keys from the ignition, snapping them into three pieces. Two children in the back of Haroon's car were "terrified", he says, and one was so frightened he jumped out of the car and tried to run away.
More from Helen Pidd in Bradford. It sounds as if she's reporting from a war zone, not an election.
The Bradford elections turned ugly in the final hours of campaigning, with police receiving reports of harassment, intimidation and violence from all sides.
The Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford South, David Ward, has made a formal complaint to police after allegedly being "harassed and intimidated" by campaigners for George Galloway's Respect party. Jeanette Sunderland, the leader of Bradford Lib Dems, has also given a statement to police claiming to have been assaulted by Respect supporters while out canvassing on Wednesday night.
Sunderland said: "It's the sort of behaviour we fought against from the British National Party. We got rid of them and we'll get rid of these thugs too."
A spokesman for Respect denied the allegations and said the party would be making its own police complaint. "Jeanette Sunderland assaulted our guy, not the other way around. We have three videos of the incident which we are happy to share with police to prove it," said Ron McKay, adding: "This is a complete waste of police time. It's absolutely typical Lib Dem practice in byelections, totally unscrupulous. We will have to join the queue to waste police time."
More from Bradford, where Respect are winning seats, but George Galloway is nowhere to be seen. My colleague Helen Pidd has sent me this.
It's slow going in Bradford, with results at least an hour off yet. George Galloway may have already claimed victory for two of his 12 candidates (in the City and Bradford Moor wards), but the actual count has barely begun. He was basing his claim on rough tallies produced during the verification process, when the number of ballot papers are counted to ascertain the turnout.
Galloway himself is nowhere to be seen: he claims he is boycotting the count because the council would not allow his two longtime aides, Rob Hoveman and Ron McKay to attend. His detractors think he is staying away because he has realised Respect will not repeat his byelection success, reasoning that he would not shun an opportunity to hog the limelight.
Respect seem confident of winning at least four seats - in the Manningham and Heaton wards as well as City and Bradford Moor. And they think Bradfordians will follow their advice and vote "yes" in the referendum for an elected mayor. But nothing is confirmed as yet.
Respect have beaten Ian Greenwood, the leader of Bradford council (or ex-leader, as he will be soon). There were four recounts before the result was declared.
Here's a tweet from my colleague Helen Pidd who's at the count.
Helen Pidd@helenpidd
Well, that's it - Respect have kicked out Ian Greenwood, Labour leader of Bradford council, by 18 votes,
Helen Pidd doesn't hang around. She's filed this from the Bradford count.
George Galloway's winning streak continued in Bradford on Thursday when five rookie politicians from his Respect party won seats in the city council – including one swiped from the Labour leader of the administration.
Ian Greenwood, who has run the council since 2010 and has been a councillor in Bradford for 17 years, loses his £50,000 a year job. He was defeated by Alyas Karmani, onetime head of race relations for the Welsh Assembly, who these days is a youth worker and an expert on sexual violence.
In a bruising campaign which resulted in the police being called to address complaints of attacks on all sides, Respect won three other seats from Labour in the city and another from the Conservatives. The resurgent party contested 12 out of the 30 seats up for grabs in the Yorkshire town, hoping to capitalise on Galloway's tumultuous victory in the Bradford West byelection in March.
The only woman to win a seat for Respect was Ruqayyah Collector, already a veteran campaigner at 28 having led the successful campaign to have the controversial Leeds University lecturer, Professor Frank Ellis, suspended as the University investigated whether he was in breach of the Race Relations
Act. She won the student-heavy City Ward, beating Labour by around 700 votes.
Before Thursday's election, Bradford city council was run by a minority Labour-led administration. Three votes short of a majority, Labour required help from the trio of Greens on the council to pass key motions.
Despite making a few gains from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, Labour was denied an overall majority when Greenwood lost Little Horton to Respect. They now hold 45 seats - exactly half of the 90 in the whole administration.
The colourful, and controversial George Galloway
An Phoblacht (Irish Republican news)
30th April 2012
THE Bradford West by-election on 29 March saw a spectacular victory for George Galloway and the left-wing Respect Party, winning what Westminster’s newest MP described as “the most sensational result in British by-election history.”
Two weeks before polling day, the bookies had him as a 200/1 outsider; by the eve of the poll, they had stopped taking bets on him. With a 37% swing, a 10,000 majority and more votes than all the other parties put together, he took this formerly safe Labour seat since 1974 from under the noses of all the main political parties. We meet in London. George has arrived for our interview straight from his first intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions, where he challenged the British Government over the war in Afghanistan.
We begin by talking about what the by-election result in the ailing industrial city in Yorkshire, in the north of England, says about the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat Government and the opposition Labour Party. Few had seen this coming, the mainstream parties among them, nor the massive scale of the victory.
“We saw it coming,” George insists convincingly. “There is obviously more than one factor but the fundamental issue is the rejection of the three main parties. They are completely discredited. They have left in their wake the expenses scandal, the Iraq War and various big let-downs over the last decade or more.
Firstly, there was a really profound alienation from the main parties. It surprised even me how tangible that feeling was. I found myself pushing at open door after open door. Secondly, there is the absolutely chronic state of things in Bradford West. The economy is on the floor. There is literally a hole in the city centre, where they have knocked down a fair part it for a development that hasn’t happened. It turns out that they didn’t impose any penalty clauses on the developer if they failed to develop it, so you have a city council that knocked down its own city centre with no means of enforcing it to be rebuilt! Remarkable. And then there is mass unemployment in the constituency, especially amongst young people, which has tripled in a year and risen by 40% in the last three months.”
The Respect candidate’s highlighting of the injustices faced by young people played a big part in attracting their support and engagement in politics in very large numbers for the first time ever. This in particular contributed to what he dubbed ‘The Bradford Spring’. His profile, energy, noted determination and political conviction gave Galloway an extra edge and made him stand out from his rivals for the seat.
“I had credibility with a large number of people in the constituency before I got there. They listen to my radio show, and watch the TV shows and YouTube speeches. I was not a stranger when I arrived there.”
Opposing racism, war and austerity were the key issues in the Respect campaign but sections of the media focused on his support from within the Muslim community. “I’m supposed to feel guilty about that. Muslims support me because I support them. I defend them at home and abroad, just as I would defend any minority or any victim of British invasion and occupation, and indeed have done so all my life in relation to Ireland.”
The new MP points out that he secured support across all sections of the community. “It was said I won because of the Muslims when in the University Ward (which is as the name suggests home to people from very diverse backgrounds), I won 85% of the vote in an eight-horse race — surely a record in itself.”
We move on to discuss the wider international situation. Given his consistent opposition to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and to imperialist interventions in general, and his unstinting support for the Palestinian people, what’s his view of the current situation, in particular the Middle East?
“It is a very dangerous moment, especially between now and November when President Obama will presumably be re-elected. Israel has a window between now and November to really exploit everything in the hope that President Obama will have no alternative but to support them and, if the balloon goes up, to enter the war against Iran.
“Meanwhile, they are pursuing what is effectively a proxy war in Syria. They are not against Syria for any of the bad things about Syria (of which there are many) but for the good things about Syria: namely that it refuses to break relations with the Palestinian resistance, the Lebanese resistance and relations with Iran. It has to be for those reasons because all of the other bad reasons about Syria are shared with all of the Arab dictatorships.
“I heard a British minister the other day saying that ‘one family rule’ in Syria was unacceptable. Yet it didn’t appear to have struck him that virtually every government in the Middle East is one-family rule, and in the case of Saudi Arabia they have even given their name to the country.
“So it’s a proxy war against Syria but it is not going well. The attempts to bounce Russia and China into endorsing another Libya-style war failed. The big talk of the Arab dictators about intervention in Syria turned out to be just that, and the regime proved it is not without support. Of course, there are millions of Syrians who hate the regime, millions who don’t and millions in between. So it’s a very dangerous moment but somehow I feel we are past the moment of maximum danger on both fronts.”
Moving on to discuss his views on Ireland and the political progress of the Good Friday Agreement, what does he think about the current dynamics which as Sinn Féin and others would argue are moving towards Irish unity?
“I supported Sinn Féin before the Agreement and I support Sinn Féin after it. I think that the leadership of Sinn Féin is head and shoulders above the rest of the political leadership in Ireland, North and South, and I trust their judgement.
“I support the line of the Sinn Féin leaders and I respect them very much. I have known them more than 20 years and, in football terms, they have played a blinder. I agree that the march is ineluctably towards Irish unity. It may be a long time before that is formalised but in fact and in practice I think the border becomes more and more meaningless and will, in time, wither away. As Marx predicted the state would one day wither away, I think this border will wither away.”
Looking at the wider issue of the Left within Europe, given the economic crisis and the austerity offensive by right-wing governments in Ireland, Britain and elsewhere, what does he think are the prospects for advancing progressive alternatives?
“They are definitely brightening. I think that the Greek election will throw up a plurality of the vote for the Left of Pasok parties. The overwhelming majority of Greek voters are going to vote centre or Left. There are developments underway now here in Britain. There were, of course, important developments in Ireland. Sinn Féin did extremely well and other left-wing and progressive organisations did so too.
“That all points to the discrediting of the elite that I talked about earlier and the hunger for alternatives. If politicians are credible and can deliver the message in contemporary terms, rooted among the people, you can do spectacularly well.
“We ought to try and work together as much as we can on a European level. Not least because here in Britain there is a kind of Europhobic tendency which, far from being dead, has seen UKIP recently overtake the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls. We need to have an alternative to that.”
George Galloway describes his background as being born “in an attic in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee which is known as Tipperary”. Does this help explain what formed his combativeness and political drive?
“I suppose so. I kissed the Blarney Stone, literally, as a child — twice. But what it more properly explains is my hatred of imperialism. I was brought up in a house where every time my maternal grandfather had a drink he would tell me the story of how they executed James Connolly in his chair. We lived in the same street that James Connolly had lived in, St Mary’s Lane. My grandfather idolised James Connolly and was absolutely fixated on his death. It was the grotesque nature of that execution, of a man strapped to a chair because he couldn’t stand due to his wounds being executed. From when I was five years old, I can remember as a small child not knowing what he was talking about except for those words ‘James Connolly’ and his being shot in his chair.
“So I was brought up to hate imperialism and to hate British imperialism in particular. In my family the Union Jack was routinely referred to as ‘The Butcher’s Apron’. My first child actually got into trouble at school when she was eight or nine for describing the flag as ‘The Butcher’s Apron’. I managed to get my late grandfather’s words into The Penguin Book of Quotations. He really did coin this: when I told him that the teacher had said that Britain had an empire so vast that upon it the sun never set, he really did answer ‘That’s because God would never trust Britain in the dark.’ So Tipp, as it was known, had lots of people like us.”
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
