Snake Oil
Lots of words were written over the weekend - about George Galloway's emphatic win in the Bradford West by-election.
Here is the best piece I've read so far - written by David Aaronovich in The Times.
Which helps to explain why George was run out of town - politically speaking - in a place like Glasgow - yet he seems to have found a new spiritual home amongst the Muslim voters of Bradford.
From a one-time serious politician of the left - to a peddler of what amounts to no more than political snake oil - and all in one lifetime too.
Respect!
So why did he choose to stand in Bradford?
George Galloway fights only in Muslim seats where he can spin his narrative of grievance and victimhood
In the small hours of yesterday morning George Galloway took to the stage in West Yorkshire and declared the “Bradford Spring” — an “uprising” of the ordinary people against the political establishment.
As ever with Mr Galloway, those who knew anything about him were impressed mostly by his shamelessness. This was the man who, as the Arab Spring got under way in Syria, continued to express his admiration for the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad as a man of “reforming zeal” possessed of “a vision of Syria as a genuinely independent Arab country”.
None of that had mattered to a majority of those who voted in the Bradford West by-election. If solidarity with oppressed Muslims abroad was part of the Galloway appeal, such fellow feeling clearly did not extend to the people of Homs. As it did not to those taking such risks for democracy in Iran — a country for whose state propaganda outfit, Press TV, Mr Galloway has in his time done much service.
So what did matter? Why have Bradfordians wound up with the slate-voiced pussy of the Big Brother house as their Member of Parliament? Asked about his victory and her party’s defeat on the radio yesterday morning, Harriet Harman referred several times to the “particular problems” of the constituency but declined to specify what these were. It seems to me, however, that such circumspection is unnecessary.
Mr Galloway would not have stood in Bradford West had it not contained a very substantial Muslim population. In the general election of 2005 he fought and won the seat of Bethnal Green & Bow. The Muslim population there was about 40 per cent and he won with 36 per cent of the vote. In 2010 he stood in Poplar, East London, where the Muslim community represents something above 33 per cent. There was no collapse in the Tory vote and Mr Galloway came third with 17 per cent.
He passed on all the previous by-elections in this parliament, standing only for the Scottish Parliament last May, where his party achieved a vote share of 3 per cent (the Muslim population of Glasgow is about 3 per cent, but most will have voted for other parties). Then along comes Bradford West, where the census of 2001 showed a Muslim community of about 38 per cent.
So Mr Galloway is a specialist targeter of British Muslim votes. The idea spread around by his Respect colleagues that his principal attraction was his anti-austerity stance doesn’t bear even cursory examination. And indeed in Bradford some of his appeal to the voters was couched in sectional and religious language unprecedented in the past 60 years of British politics. One of his leaflets began thus: “God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for.”
Further down Mr Galloway laid claim to leading the decent, pious life: “I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully.”
While readers pick themselves up off the floor, I should add that those who have followed Mr Galloway for years will smile at the omission of adultery from the list of vices he abjures. I should just add that almost no Galloway event or pronouncement is now complete without several invocations of “Allah” in one form or another.
To get an idea of the strangeness of this, try to imagine a campaign in Hendon South where the winning candidate addresses voters with the sentiment “G-d knows who is a Jew and who is not”, boasts to the electorate that he keeps kosher and then implies that his opponent has been spotted mixing milk and meat. Such religiosity is rarely seen in British politics, thank the Eternal One, the Lord of Hosts.
But why would Mr Galloway think such an approach would work? John Mann, the Labour MP for Bassetlaw, wrote yesterday about campaigning in Toller ward in Bradford. “The 5 per cent of our target Labour promises who are white were rock solid,” he found, “but the 95 per cent of promises that were Asian names were rather different ... probably not a Labour vote.”
Mr Mann analysed part of the failure. “What was particularly disconcerting was having no Muslim doorknockers, no Urdu speaker, no hijab-wearing woman talking to Muslim women voters. Indeed that abiding memory was of a terribly deprived area where Galloway supporters, often in traditional dress codes, rallied their voters.”
But the Labour candidate was also a Muslim — from Toller. What he couldn’t do, however, was what Mr Galloway is so good at — rousing popular anger at the Establishment (of which Labour is inevitably part) and playing on a sense of grievance and victimhood that is particular to some Muslim communities. The reason why Iraq, for instance, evokes a response but Mr Galloway’s backing for the killers of Muslims in Syria does not, is because it fits a narrative of Muslims being oppressed by outsiders. In a sense it creates an internal community solidarity that would otherwise be eroded by the modern condition of Britain.
Some of this may explain why Ken Livingstone has managed to have a run-in with some of London’s Jews. Not only has he been oddly insensitive to the Jewish community but at the same time he has courted Muslim opinion with a creepy assiduity. This culminated in his speech to the Finsbury Park mosque two weeks ago in which Ken promised to “educate the mass of Londoners” in the teachings of Islam. Speaking about Muhammad’s last sermon, he told the audience: “I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands [its] words and message.”
It may be that Ken has, unnoticed, made similar promises to Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Methodists, Mormons, Scientologists and everyone else about their prophets and gurus. But we doubts it, my Precious, don’t we, because we knows that there are no voteses in it.
Mr Galloway’s victory shows something else too that has nothing to do with communalism. As Ed Miliband pointed out, only 4 in 10 Bradford voters opted for the three main parties. When something else plausible and exciting comes along (even if it is only a dictator-loving retread demagogue), many, many voters would like to flirt with it.
And that’s why we have back in Parliament a man whose first tweet after the election read: “Long live Iraq. Long live Palestine, free, Arab, dignified.” Uninterested in domestic concerns, George Galloway is probably the first Arab Nationalist to be elected to the British Parliament. He is far too flawed and too unusual to be a harbinger of mass gallowayism. He is the florid symptom of a problem — the pustule, but not the disease.
