Time out

As George Galloway seeks to unseat another Labour MP, voters must be reminded of his rancid ideology and poor parliamentary record

Here’s a trick question: who represents Bethnal Green and Bow in Parliament? It sounds like an easy one: George Galloway. But it’s not true. For 88 per cent of the time, the constituency I live in – one of the poorest in Britain, with a desperate need for an advocate – is not represented at all. Galloway has one of the worst voting records in parliament: out of 651 MPs, only 10 have voted less frequently than Galloway. Five are members of Sinn Fein, who do not believe in taking their seats. Four are speakers or deputy speakers who are not allowed to vote. Then there is George.

He has higher priorities than representing the desperately poor people who voted for him. So far, he spent this parliament jetting off to Cuba to write a biography of ageing dictator Fidel Castro, holed up in the Big Brother house impersonating a cat, presenting a twice-weekly radio programme on TalkSport, testifying about corruption charges in Washington D.C., writing a column for the Daily Record, flying to Syria to tell the local people they are ‘very lucky’ to be ruled by a Ba’athist dictator, and sunning himself in his second home in Portugal. This might explain why he has one of the worst records for replying to constituents’ letters.

And now he is running to not-represent another seat in the East End – Poplar and Canning Town, currently held by Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick. If the 2005 fight in Bethnal Green and Bow is any guide, it will be extremely ugly. Galloway paraded across the constituency saying that ‘Oona King is waging war on Muslims at home and abroad’, and distributing leaflets to conservative Bangladeshis bearing pictures of Oona as a young woman, before she became an MP, in a low-cut top. He benefited from absurd rumours that Oona was in favour of banning halal meat and had donated money to the Israeli government.

Fitzpatrick must learn from the way that campaign played out. Oona King’s fightback was brave and tough, and she was a brilliant constituency MP, but it got its message wrong. Throughout the campaign the Labour team told people ‘Vote Galloway, Get the Tories.’ They warned that splitting the left vote would let the right in. It never rang true: the Tories were never going to win in the heart of the East End.

Worse, it prevented them from taking on Galloway in full and from the front. His dire voting record was never the subject of Labour literature – so most people didn’t know about it. While he was accusing Oona of supporting the ‘murder of Muslims,’ his long track record of literally saluting men who murdered more Muslims than Ariel Sharon could ever dream of was never challenged.

Galloway’s campaigning style in Muslim areas is to adopt a kind of inverse Powellism – telling the Muslim community it is under siege from a brutal terrorist state that will stop at nothing. Rivers of blood, he implies, are only months away. Adopting Islamic fundamentalist language, he said that Tony Blair would ‘burn in the hellfires’, that ‘the two beautiful daughters’ of the Arab world, Jerusalem and Baghdad, were being ‘raped’, and so on.

Galloway must not be allowed to pass himself off as a defender of Muslims – when in reality he defends the mass-murderers of Muslims. It’s widely known he greeted Saddam Hussein (Muslim death toll: one million, minimum) in 1994 with the words: ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.’ He said this to a man who had ‘the strength’ to drain the swamps of the Marsh Arabs and shunt them into desert shacks. A man who had the ‘indefatigability’ to gas the Kurds. Galloway’s later defence – that he was saluting the Iraqi people – was absurd. He went on in his speech to say he had been to Palestine and that people were naming their children ‘after you’. They were naming their children Saddam, not Iraq.

But this is only one small scratch in Galloway’s pro-Ba’athism. He spent Christmas 1999 with Saddam’s murderous foreign minister Tariq Aziz, even going disco-dancing with him. Once Aziz was captured, Galloway called for him to be released without charge. Not to an international court; just released, on the grounds he is ‘an eminent diplomatic and intellectual person’ held ‘without any justification’.

In his autobiography I’m Not the Only One (written on his constituents’ time, of course), his apologism becomes even more drastic. Galloway actually refers to the Shi’ites Saddam murdered in the 1980s as ‘a fifth column’ who ‘actively undermined the Iraqi war effort in the interests of their country’s enemy’. Nobody outside Saddam’s squalid regime used this terminology; it was purely a justification for the mass slaughter of the dictator’s enemies. How about the passage where Galloway defends Saddam’s claim to Kuwait, describing the province as ‘clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion’? What about his statement that, ‘In my experience none of the Ba’ath leaders have displayed any hostility to Jews.’ This beggars belief: the Baíathists had publicly hanged Jews, and the Iraqi newspapers (all Ba’ath-sanctioned) were filled with insane ranting against global Jewry. In all his many visits to Saddam’s Iraq, did he not pick up a single newspaper?

Or how about Galloway’s claim that Saddam’s mass murder of (Muslim) democrats, Kurds and other anti-Saddam forces in 1991 was a ‘civil war’ that ‘involved massive violence on both sides’? Again, only Ba’athists have ever used this language or narrative.

Every single criticism of Saddam can be quickly qualified. When Galloway was shown the vast scale of Saddam’s palaces, he replied, ‘Our own head of state has a fair bit of real estate herself.’ Yes, but British people are not – to use Galloway’s words – ‘dying like flies’ on the streets outside. There are even large slabs of outright praise for Saddam in his rancid book. ‘Just as Stalin industrialized the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraqis’ own Great Leap Forward,’ he says, and amazingly, this isn’t a criticism. ‘He managed to keep his country together until 1991. Indeed, he is likely to have been the leader in history who came closest to creating a truly Iraqi national identity, and he developed Iraq and the living, health, social and education standards of his own people.’

His real attitude towards Saddam slipped out in the Big Brother house, when Rula Lenska asked him, ‘Was he [Saddam] hated by the ordinary [Iraqi] people?’ He replied: ‘Not at all; not at all...as is obvious now; now they admit that. He was hated by political opponents as he suppressed all opposition political forces, but he wasn’t hated by the ordinary Iraqi – no, not at all.’

Fitzpatrick must make Galloway – with his rancid ideology and his virtually non-existent record as a parliamentarian – the core issue of his campaign. Throughout this parliament, Galloway has put making cash ahead of representing his constituents. He had made opposing the government’s anti-terror legislation one of the core points in his 2005 election campaign – but when the most crucial vote on this issue reached the floor of the House, he was off in Cork earning £1,000 speaking at a theatrical one-man show for Clive Conway Celebrity Productions. The choice for the people of Poplar is clear – do you want to be represented in parliament by Jim Fitzpatrick, or not represented in parliament at all?

To contact Jim Fitzpatrick’s campaign call 020 7536 0562. Or visit his website at www.jimfitzpatrickmp.co.uk

Johann Hari writes for the Independent.

01 Nov 2007 00:00

 

Comments

• Posted by Alastair on 11 December 2007, 9:19:16 PM I am no huge fan of Galloway. But this article reflects a frighteningly narrow view of what politics consists of. Sure, he isn't in the House much. And he's not doing well on replying to his constituents letters. King and Fitzpatrick will no doubt outdo him on both fronts. And that will not make them effective representatives of their constituents. Galloway probably has a public profile in the top ten of any British MPs - because he is a hugely energetic communicator, not just a 'self-promoter', in the national sphere. I just wish those of us left of Johann and Oona didn't have to rely on a twerp like Galloway to make the points that badly need making about the political timidity of people like King and Fitzpatrick (who he?) who think that 'representing' some of the poorest people in Britain means voting for policies that do nothing for them, with the New Labour whip, but being good enough to reply to their letters.
• Posted by Andy Ray on 13 December 2007, 3:01:56 AM And, with friends like jonathan Hari -- who character-assasins Galloway and accuses him to favour Castro the "ageing dictator" (instead of Bush or the Saudis, we suppose?) -- Fitzpatrick doesn't need enemies!