George Galloway - The House Magazine interview

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The House Magazine interview
19th April 2012

GALLOWAY ON WHY HE HAS NO COMMONS OFFICE
“I did write to the Speaker yesterday because I had been approached by the Opposition whip with responsibility for accommodation. I have no idea who he was, he didn’t introduce himself in the normal human way with his name, he gave only his title. I’ve never set eyes on him before but he seemed to imagine that I was his responsibility, which is not a concept I accept.

“The custom and practice for none of these things are written down, is that accommodation is sorted out with the ‘usual channels’ between the whips offices. But these conventions can’ apply to me because we don’t have whips, we don’t have any other member Parliament so I don’t accept that my fate so far as an office is concerned can be dealt with by the Labour accommodation whip not least because the obvious and logical solution would be to give me the room of the previous Member of Parliament for Bradford West, which is, my friends in the postal department who are good friends of mine, tell me he had a good and spacious room in Norman Shaw North, recently decorated which will be why isn’t now been given to another Labour Mp who’s been here for more than 20 years who already had an office…George Howarth.

“I said to the Speaker I find that surprising. It’s kind of clear to me that if an office was vacated by a MP and a senior Parliamentarian was elected in his stead you couldn’t have a more obvious and logical outcome than give me his room. But that’s now gone. This fellow the Opposition whip told me that he did have a room available but it had no window and the walls were hardboard partition in the Upper Committee Corridor. Well given I have a staff of four, I have to do a lot of interviews, receive a lot of visitors would be unacceptable in itself. But I have made the point to the Speaker that I have been elected to Parliament six times, in two countries, in four different constituencies, a record that only Winston Churchill can match. I am by any account a senior Parliamentarian, by the end of this Parliament I will have served 27 years in the House of Commons. I can’t be treated like a freshman who’s just arrived.

“So I won’t accept any flawed propositions. I don’t accept that the Labour whips are responsible for finding me an office, the House of Commons is responsible for finding me an office. If they don’t well, they’ll hear about it, whether it is by occupying this room which I’ve grown rather fond of or in the middle of the Central Lobby, I’ll set up an office with a trestle table there. So I hope that they receive this message through the good offices of The House magazine and sort it out.”

GALLOWAY ON WHY HE LOVES PARLIAMENT
“Only a fool wouldn’t be proud of the initials MP after their name. Unlike most people in the House I have no other initials, having left school very young and having no educational qualifications, MP is the only qualification I have and it’s something to be proud of because it’s something that other people decide and bestow upon you. It’s rather like an honorary degree but more serious. And so on a personal level I’m proud of the fact that I’m continually elected to Parliament especially in different places and against the prevailing orthodoxy. I defeated Roy Jenkins when no one expected me to, I have taken now two rock solid Labour constituencies since they expelled me. I told them that they would rue the day when they expelled me and I think they are rueing it now.

“But most importantly, it is a fantastic platform. A word spoken in here is worth 10,000 words spoken outside of here in the sense that the gravity attached to the national Parliament, the concentration of media, it’s kind of a big media machine, Parliament. Given that I’m in the business of conveying ideas and arguments, it’s obvious that this it he place to do it from. I spent a lot of the last Parliament that I was in. I spoke between 9/11 and leaving Parliament in 2010, I addressed well over 1,000 public meetings in all parts of this country. Thanks to YouTube most of them are immortalised, But they will be seen even on YouTube by tens of thousands of people. But speeches given in here and things said in here can reach millions of people in seconds, minutes and that’s obviously therefore an important theatre and I choose the word carefully of operations for us because we have urgent business. And we are in the business of communicating our thoughts about that.”

“Many MPs have a low reputation and some of them deservedly so. But if you’d been in Bradford in that campaign you would have seen the value, the importance that ordinary people can still be won to place in this institution. The hopes of 18,347 people and thousands of kids not yet able to vote who were absolutely deeply involved in our campaign, I’m talking 14-,15-year old kids who’ll be voters next time but who were won to the importance of capturing this House of Commons seat. That it could make a difference. So Parliamentarians have themselves to blame for a considerable extent for the disrepute that this institution is held in but it ought not to be held in disrepute. It is extremely important and we have to somehow win back a public appreciation of that more generally. I would just enter this caveat. Although collectively MPs are poorly regarded, my experience over 25 years is that individually MPs are not held in ill repute that they are treated with respect in their constitue4ncies and in many cases, deservedly so. People still say ‘I’m going to my MP’, people, by and large, know who their MP is. In most cases, nobody in adjoining constituencies knows and that’s part of the problem: the place has slightly shrunk not just in size but in calibre I think.”

GALLOWAY ON BEING A SINGLE MP
“My first pre election promise has already been kept. I constantly said to every elector: if you elect the other fellow on 29 March nobody will notice, if you elect me everybody will notice. Everybody will have to sit up and take notice and that’s already happened. If you Google the word Bradford since the 29th and compare it with any other period, you will be astounded. I haven’t done so but I confidently predict that. So Bradford is back on the political map in a way it hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t want to disparage previous in Bradford seats but it would be undeniable I think that the city has lost out because it’s Parliamentary group has not had the weight the recognition that I hope it will now have. So my first task is to highlight the problems in the city which are deeply profound even dangerous.

GALLOWAY ON BRADFORD'S YOUTH TIMEBOMB
“Bradford West has the youngest population in Britain and by 2020 it will be the youngest city in Europe. And it will have this is an astonishing fact it’s almost north African or south Asian in its statistic, by 2020 which is only eight years from now, half of the people, 50% of the people of Bradford will be under 25. Which should be a blessing but which is in danger of being a time bomb. Because if half the population in a major English city is under 25 and has no work and no money, that’s an accident waiting to happen. So something has to be done about the mass unemployment that exists in the city. Youth unemployment has tripled 12 months and has risen by 40 % in 12 weeks since the beginning of this year. Mass unemployment, at the same time as youth services and things to do for people who have no money almost disappear in front of your eyes. Youth clubs, boxing clubs, kick boxing clubs, football clubs with no budget at all from the local authority or the national state, which apart from anything else is economic lunacy. Because it costs the best part of £50,000 a year to keep a man in jail and jail is where a lot of the young people in Bradford will end up, have ended up. As well as destroying their family, condemning the future of the young man, the damage to the public realm and to the society, when you factor all that in its an enormously expensive failure when the devil finds work for idle hands. A mere fraction of that expenditure invested in boxing clubs that I now know quite well, would save these young people from that fate and save the society from far far greater expense. So I hope to win that argument. “

GALLOWAY ON GETTING JOBS FOR BRADFORD
“It’s twofold, to highlight the problems and demand Government action and local state action. We have a plan now underway to seize power in the local state both in the local council elections on 3rd may but most importantly in winning a referendum for a directly elected mayor, which would be elected in November. And showcasing internationally as well as nationally the many benefits that Bradford has. It’s actually genuinely a very beautiful city in a beautiful place and it’s 10 minutes from Leeds which is booming and where property prices are sky high. Property prices in Bradford would be laughably cheap if it weren’t for the fact that you would be laughing at the Bradford people. I can show you houses that would make your jaw drop that can be bought for less than £200,000. I’m talking a castle. If I sold my house in Streatham which is hardly Belgravia, I said I could buy a castle here. This is an asset. Low property values, low land values is an asset for people. The city is well connected with good motorways within striking distance of two great booming cities Manchester and Leeds, 70 miles away from a great port at Hull, it has tremendous potential. So I’ll be doing my best to market the city better for inward investment, for visitors, for people taking a punt in the property market, you can definitely do a lot worse with your money than buying a house in Bradford. We’ve got the National Media Museum which is the second busiest museum in the country. We’ve got the Alhambra Theatre which is a jewel and we’ve got the Odeon which is falling down. And we’ve got a big hole in the city centre where Westfield were supposed to be and where I want to metaphorically bury the people responsible for that calamity. We have this plan for a culture quarter involving the central Library…twinned with abolishing parking fees in the centre of the city. We’ve also got the cuisine. Everything even the tomato ketchup is spicy in Bradford. The food is amazing. For local people the most common dinner is chicken and chips with a drink thrown in for 99p and that’s because most people don’t have enough money to do anything else.”

GALLOWAY ON CAROLINE LUCAS
“I do admire her. My experience of her is in street politics and demonstrations I haven’t seen any of her Parliamentary interventions but she’s an outstanding figure.”

GALLOWAY ON VOICING PUBLIC FEARS ON AFGHANISTAN
“There are lots of ways that Parliament can be used to give a voice to people’s concerns and preoccupations outside. Because I think this is the main lesson of my victory. This place is a bubble really so far as most members are concerned. The fact that I can be really rather popular in the country with a mass audience on my radio shows, my Facebook and Twitter [have] 150,000 people and so on, and yet have very few friends in here is an indication of two parallel political societies or polities that exists in the country. There’s a large number of people out there who don’t think that their opinions are expressed in here, that there’s an iron clad consensus. That people don’t relate to, don’t’ think they speak for them: and on no issue more vividly than the Afghan war. Journalists still put to me as if it were some kind of negative, even crime, to be demanding an immediate end to the Afghan war oblivious to the fact that most people in the country want the war to end, as the opinion polls constantly show. But even if it wasn’t a majority, even if it was only 10 million people, where’s the voice for those people in here when you’ve got three front benches all supporting what they now I see call the mission. It’s no longer a war, it’s a mission. Well I don’t support the mission. And millions of people agree with me.”

“The chamber is my natural milieu and I’m going to spend much more time in it than I did last time.”

GALLOWAY ON VOTING IN THE HOUSE

“This will still be a problem. Because one of the peculiarities of our system here is that there is no way of registering an abstention, there’s no way of registering I don’t favour either of these propositions.

“The Prime Minister’s motion and the Leader of the Opposition’s amendment are unlikely to be things that I want to support at all. In a sane voting system I would be able to record the fact that I was here and that I don’t favour either rof these two things. Which is the reason for my low voting figures in the last Parliament. It’s not to be confused with poor attendance. I was in Parliament every day in Portcullis House every day, as the CCTV cameras prove. But voting is a different thing.

“Of course when I vote it will almost always be with Labour. But if their amendment contains things that I can’t agree with, I’m in trouble. I’ll be with Labour when I vote most of the time”

GALLOWAY ON AFGHANISTAN
"Well, we say that we should never have been there, that we could have left there on the same terms that we are going to leave there at any time in the last decade. Their thesis is that the danger is that when they withdraw the Taliban will take part. But the Taliban will take part and they would have taken part at any point in the last ten years and they will take part in the next twenty years or thirty or forty because the Taliban as described are the Afghan masses. They reject foreign occupation of their country."

"We don’t like their stripe. I’m one of the few people who can say that when Britain was giving them guns and money I was their opponent. I said to Mrs Thatcher, 'if I’m the last person standing in this House I will oppose your support for the obscurantist, fundamentalist, then not called Taliban, but then called Mujahadin'. And being introduced on the platform… it's very important to have a historical memory… actually appearing on the platform of the Conservative Party conference and taking a bow as afghan freedom fighters. Doing the same thing at the Republican national convention…. President Reagan introducing them… taking a bow as freedom fighters. What is that film? Rambo. At the end of which, this film is dedicated to the freedom fighters of Afghanistan – meaning the people who became the Taliban. So whenever anyone says to me ‘you’re pro Taliban’, I was able to say I was against, as I did actually in a prize winning speech right after 9/11 that won me the Parliamentary debater of the year in the Spectator awards, I said I despise Osama bin Laden, the medieval, obscurantist savage. The difference is I have always despised him. I despised him when you were giving him weapons, money, and diplomatic and political support. So I’m not with the Taliban, but I just don’t think you can choose other people’s governments. You cannot choose other people’s systems. If you try to do so it will end in disaster and that’s the fundamental error of our occupation of Afghanistan. So, we would never have been there, we could have left long ago, and lot of lives that have now gone especially one our side could have been saved, and much treasure. So it follows that we demand immediate withdrawal."

"And I’m going to make a prediction to you now: there is absolutely no way that this mission is going to last until 2014. The events over the last 72 hours, show the extent to which the military situation is deteriorating. The insurgency can strike at will, is striking at will, can do so in a coordinated fashion, in this case six attacks across diplomatic and politically important buildings, large number of dead. Because they’re ready to die. All of them died. I think 36 was the figure of insurgents that died. There’s 3600, 36000, maybe 36000 of these people who are prepared to die in these operations. And our soldiers, knowing that there’s a clock ticking to when they come back – I mean who wants to be the last to die in Afghanistan? So it’s absolutely doomed. By the way, there is nothing left wing about this argument, because my sponsor yesterday, Sir Peter Tapsell, a former army officer, 53 years in the House, as Conservative a gentleman as it's possible to imagine, would have agreed with every word I’ve just said there. Because we know about history. We know what happened to previous British expeditions as they were called then, and this ones going to end in the same way unless we get out quickly."

GALLOWAY ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN AFGHANISTAN
"Well, first of all nobody gave us, in the this small building, in this small country, the duty to reorder the world according to our values, even if those values were a consensus - which they are not. I mean, what are our values? I don’t drink for example. Downstairs tonight, in the Parliament itself, there will be legislators blind drunk. There will be people throughout this country living their lives to values which are not consensual. I don’t agree with them. And a large number of my constituents don’t agree with them. So I don’t know what our values are. But whatever they are we have no right, still less a duty to go around the world imposing them on other people."

"Number 2: have you seen women’s rights in Afghanistan, now, under our occupation? Have you looked at any pictures from Afghanistan – are the women dressed any different? Is the house run any differently? It's all hot air, all this stuff, and is used by people who’ve actually killed a large number of afghan women apparently with equanimity. When they rain down bombs and rockets on Afghan villages as they frequently do in the middle of the night, who is it that’s dying? Who is it that’s in the house all the time? It’s the families that are in the house, so it’s a very odd way of protecting women’s rights by invading, occupying, and conducting a ten nearly 11 year counter insurgency war. I’m in favour of women’s rights, but I’m not in favour of our country, which can't afford to do so in any case, invading and occupying other people's countries in support of them."

GALLOWAY ON ED MILIBAND – IS HE MORE ATTRACTIVE TO HIM THAN BLAIR?
"Well, Attila the Hun would be more acceptable to me than Tony Blair, who I note with some schadenfraude, on the television last night looks increasingly like the portrait of Dorian Gray dropping in front of us. Tony Blair is the most disastrous prime minister that Britain ever had. He has made us one of the three most hated countries in the world, he has cost the lives of well over a million people, getting on to two million people. He is soaked in blood from head to toe so anybody would have to be an improvement on him and Ed Miliband, you know, very milksop kind of way, has tiptoed on Iraq at least towards a position of half apologia but its certainly not sufficient."

"You know, just to whisper, and he did whisper, that Iraq was wrong at a Labour Party conference and then think that’s the… what’s the phrase he used? Let’s draw a line under this? I’m sorry, there is no line. There will not be a line until Labour is openly, constantly and vehemently disavowing that which they did and shunning the people responsible for it. Most of whom are still creeping around the corridors of power here not just still influential but hoping to get the top jobs back. So there is no line. The line has not been drawn. I was glad that he won given that in an election you have to choose between a series of options none of whom you necessarily agree with but in an election you hope that the person who is least bad wins. I was happy that he won but I can’t say that he’s been any kind of success."

GALLOWAY ON OBAMA – IS HE BETTER THAN BUSH?
"He’s better, but with all the caveats I’ve just entered. I hope that a second term Obama presidency will be one in which he begins to shake off some of the shackles which appear to have heavily circumscribed what he could do on various things. I have a New York radio show on Wed mornings on WBIA and I’m the only Obama supporter on the station. It’s a phone in show, and I spend an hour every week telling people they should vote Obama and people phone me up and say they can't possibly because for them he’s like Blair."

COULD LORD AHMED JOIN RESPECT
"There’s a thought. Our first member of the House of Lords. I did yesterday deal with this when I was giving interviews outside, that he’s welcome to fill in an application form if I can put it that way. So no commitments, but he’s welcome to fill in an application form. I heave many political disagreements with Lord Nazir but he’s a very significant figure in the population of people of Asian heritage and for Labour to treat him in the way they have treated him just makes me think they are on a suicide mission so far as their former loyal supporters in the country’s Asian population is concerned."

"I don’t know what he said, but if the meaning of what he said is that these leaders who call other men terrorists and put bounties on their heads are in fact themselves responsible for far greater acts of terror, and that no-one could survive calling for a bounty to be put on their heads then this is something that most people in the country will recognise is true. I always draw on St Augustine’s wonderful book City of God in which he describes an encounter between Alex the great and a pirate ship on the high seas. Ordering the pirate to halt, Alexander demands ‘how dare you terrorise these waters as a thief’. And the pirate captain answers ‘how dare you terrorise the whole world. You with your great navy you can call yourself an emperor and call other men as you please.’ That’s exactly what we have here. That the people who call themselves the international community, though they rarely are, hand out these labels against countries: rogue states, terrorist states, failed states, mad dogs, Hitler on the Nile/Euphrates/Mediterranean in the case of Gaddafi, they themselves are responsible for much bigger crimes, but they’re unable to see it that way and the media never points it out."

ON HIS SUPPORT FOR KEN LIVINGSTONE
"I’m openly campaigning for Ken Livingstone. He’s a friend of mine who I admire very much. I hope very much that he will win and insofar as I have influence in some communities in London I’m using it. I am already in East London."

GALLOWAY ON... HAS HE SPOKEN RECENTLY TO SENATOR COLEMAN?
"You mean ex-senator Coleman? Not only have I not, but I went to Minnesota to campaign against him in the election that he lost and had the privilege of being the first person I think in the state, but certainly the first foreigner, to utter the words ex-senator Norm Coleman. No I’m afraid he never contacted me again – rues the day that he ever did."

ON WHY SIR PETER TAPSELL AND GERRY SUTCLIFFE SPONSORED HIM
"Sir Peter is an old friend for obvious reasons. He’s a supporter of the Palestinian cause, he opposed the Iraq war, he oppose the Afghan war, he’s a very grand parliamentarian. He constantly scolded me throughout the last parliament for not making enough speeches not being enough in the chamber. I mean I used to dodge him the corridors because he would know exactly when I last spoke and so on. He used to keep a tab on it. So he was an obvious choice and he’s the father of the house and a man who believes in parliament as a national forum, as a cockpit if you like for a clash of ideas and so on."

"Gerry Sutcliffe is my parliamentary neighbour, was the captain of the House of Commons football team when I played in it obvious enough as a right winger. I did say to him during the election, in which rather embarrassingly he was the candidates minder, the Labour candidate’s, I did say to him in the middle of the campaign, I want my place back in the team you know and he answered: you never know. So he’s a person I admire, I know him well, and as the neighbouring MP was the obvious first ask. Nothing more should be read into it than that, I don’t want to put him in any trouble, but he agreed immediately without pause. One of, as I say, the many eccentricities of this place: theoretically if no-one had agreed to walk me to that table I would not have been able to swear and thus not been able to discharge the mandate I was given by the people. That is just daft. So clearly one of the Labour MPs had to do this and he was the obvious first one to ask and he agreed. Very well. I did speak to him [Nick Brown] but he advised me to try Gerry because he was the neighbour, and I did. I have very good relations for a very long time with Nick Brown – I wish he was still the chief whip."

ON RESPECT’S AIMS
"We hope to hold the balance of bower in Bradford city council on the 3rd of May. We hope to get a big yes vote for mayor. We hope to be successful in the mayoral elections in November. The party has tripled in three weeks, I should say form a very low base, but nonetheless tripled. The greatest area if growth is not Bradford but surrey, work that one out, the country of surrey is the greatest area of growth. A read belt around London seems to be forming. The media preoccupation is the local elections, but then the European elections next June, a year in June, will be very important for us. We'll be serious contenders in the Yorkshire and Humberside European seat and in the London European seat where I reasonably narrowly failed to get elected in 2004 so we’ll be working hard on that. We hope we can win one, maybe two seats in the European parliament, and the general election of course comes up in three years time and the prospects across Yorkshire and Lancashire, as well in our traditional bases in east London, are serious."

WILL HIS NEW SEAT MEAN HE WILL BE IN LONDON MORE?
"[That's a] very shrewd observation and puts into words what I think is the reality. No one in Bradford will be expecting to see me Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. That wasn’t true in Bethnal Green and Bow and therefore I will be in parliament in the week and I think everyone will be, all of the people who think like us mean, will be better off for that.

ON AFFIRMING THE OATH
"I tell you why I affirmed, which I wrote about in my column in the Daily Record on Monday morning. I don’t believe in the oath that I swore yesterday. It’s wrong to force people to swear oaths in which they don’t believe in order to take a seat in a democratic parliament but that’s the situ I was in. and I was not going to swear an oath in which I did not believe on a holy book. As for he rest, I don’t discuss that. I’m sorry. All I’ll say is, I believe in God."

DID HE WRITE PRIVATE EYE's BACKBITER COLUMN? THE GOSSIP HAS DECLINED..
"It has, yes. I worked for Private Eye for 20 years. I started writing the Letter From. And then I moved on to an occasional contributor on other pages."

DID JOHN REID PUNCH HIM?
"His life may have been saved by Dianne Abbot. It was during the first Iraq war in 1991. John Reid then was a drinker. Very harsh words were exchanged between he and I in the voting lobby, not during a vote in fact. We both exited the chambers through the back doors and in tor the voting and he in the Scottish language ‘breeged’ at me, made a lunge at me, and I was, being the sober person in the fight, about to knock him down when the redoubtable figure of Dianne Abbott leapt between us, on top of him and I was therefore disarmed, because first of all she’s a friend of mine and secondly she’s a woman. There’s nothing more I could do but it saved him from a very sore face."

DOES HE HAVE ANY SYMPATHY FOR ERIC JOYCE?
"None whatsoever. In fact he’s another victim of the curse of Galloway. So many of the people who have set out to be enemies of mine, from Eric Joyce to Hosni Mubarak, have ended up in trouble of one sort or another. So no, I know it's sinful to take pleasure in other peoples discomfort but I’m afraid I sinned on that occasion. No, I think these bars should be closed. No-one else can drink at their work. No-one else is allowed to drink alcohol while they’re working. Why are we? Moreover at public subsidised prices as was. I don’t know what they are now, but when I was in here before they were life of mars prices – 1970s prices. So, no – no sympathy whatsoever."

[luke]

for a parliament magazine you'd think they'd proof read it - its full of mistakes!

[faceless]

This is the 'uncut' version. I should have checked when I was posting... what a mess it is!