In 2012 Left Foot Forward noted that Respect was running a ‘divisive and regressive' campaign. Three years later little has changed
Few people, when casting their vote on polling day, will have Judgment Day in mind. But Oldham’s Muslim population are being told by George Galloway to consider the ‘final day’ when they choose their candidate for local elections.
The Respect party leader, who is standing for re-election in Bradford West, visited the town on Sunday to officially launch the campaign for Respect Oldham council election candidate Tariq Mahmood Ullah.
According to Galloway, not only do the borough’s Muslims have to consider choosing the right candidate for their ward, but they have the added burden of voting on behalf of the Palestinians.
“The people of Gaza don’t have a vote,” Galloway declared. “If they did, they would vote for Tariq. A vote for Respect, therefore, is a vote for Palestinians.”
The green and red Respect Party bus visited Waterloo Street with Galloway on board, alongside Ullah – a married father-of-three – who is fighting for election in the St Mary’s ward, a predominantly Pakistani area. Labour’s Shadab Qumer will be fighting for re-election.
The atmosphere may have been electrifying for the majority male members of the community, who greeted Galloway as though he were the Messiah, but it was intimidating for someone like me, one of a handful of women at the campaign launch. During the rally most women chose to stay on the other side of the road, away from the men.
Starting with the Islamic blessing bismillah–ir–rahman–ir–rahim (In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful), Galloway described Ullah as a “lion” who has got the “sheep” (that’s politicians to you and me) ‘nervous already’.
It is commendable for politicians to try to get more people involved in the democratic process, and this is what Galloway seems to be doing. He is defending a 10,140 majority in Bradford West, where he won support from a cross-section of the city.
When Galloway claims to be speaking ;for those Labour has abandoned’ there may also be some truth to it. Although Oldham is a Labour-run council, two UKIP councillors were elected to the Council for the first time last year, with the party coming second in many of the 20 wards.
After winning Bradford West in 2012, Galloway claimed to have “smashed” the clan-based/biraderi bloc voting. “We don’t believe in biraderis,” he said in Oldham. “There’s nothing Islamic about biraderis, there’s nothing democratic about biraderis.”
Traditionally, when a candidate was chosen for the election, it would have been an elder selected by his clan on the basis of bloodlines rather than merit. For the second and third generation Pakistanis in the UK, the biraderi system is not as relevant as it was for the first generation of Pakistani settlers, who found that it provided essential support in the form of links back to the villages of Punjab and Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
But despite Galloway’s bluster, this continues today. And the journalist Nick Cohen was correct when he described Galloway’s politics as ‘unashamedly communalist’. Those who once identified with their ethnicity or their parent’s country of origin – i.e. British Pakistanis – now identify more with their faith, i.e. Islam. In this respect Galloway has found his ‘new revolutionary proletariat’, as Cohen puts it.
Galloway’s speech in Oldham was littered with Islamic terminology and religious rhetoric. He claimed that Muslims would have to account for their actions and the way they vote. This is nothing new – these were words recycled from a speech he gave back in 2012 in his by-election campaign.
Galloway also made references to grooming cases that have recently been in the news – two of the men who were jailed in 2012 for preying on vulnerable girls were from Oldham – claiming that it is unfair to label them “Muslim criminals”.
“These men are not vile perverts because they are Muslim, they are just vile perverts,” Galloway said, before going on to say that “the biggest terrorists in the world are white Christians in the White House. They killed one million Iraqis and they’re still doing it.”
Ratna Lachman, a human rights campaigner who chaired the hustings in Bradford earlier this month, remarked that personality rather than issue-based politics dominate in Bradford West.
That seemed to be the case in Oldham on Sunday. The Oldham candidate preferred to let Galloway do the talking for him, though when he did speak he merely said he wanted to “ease concerns some may have for Islam”. Very little was said about local issues and how Respect would address the needs of Oldham’s residents.
Opinion seems divided over Galloway. Some Bradford residents claim he has done little for the city. Records show he has spoken in four debates in the last year and has voted in 11.19 per cent of votes in this Parliament – well below average amongst MPs.
Meanwhile West Yorkshire Police are investigating after allegations were made on an anonymous website against Labour’s candidate Naz Shah. At the hustings earlier this month Galloway went on the offensive against Shah, accusing her of lying about her forced marriage. Muslim Women’s Network UK described Galloway’s comments as “irresponsible” and “counter-productive”.
Dan Holden wrote on Left Foot Forward in 2012 that Respect was running a ‘divisive and regressive’ campaign. Three years later and little has changed.
Iram Ramzan is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Twitter
38 Responses to “On the campaign trail with George Galloway”
Guest
I’m using a basic disqus function.
damon
You’re more like him than you think I reckon.
I think he’s pretty awful all round. Particularly about Israel/Palestine.
David Lindsay
He does that a lot.
David Lindsay
More than anything, the case of Lutfur Rahman illustrates that directly elected mayors are wholly out of place in this country. We ought not to have them. The next Government ought to abolish them forthwith, as well as requiring that councils return to the traditional committee system that, to his limited but real credit, Eric Pickles has at least permitted to be resumed voluntarily. The abolition of delegated planning decisions is also desperately needed.
But aspects of the Rahman judgement are worrying. It is now Common Law intimidation merely for identifiable supporters of a party or candidate to congregate on a pavement near a polling station on polling day. As for playing the race card, what about UKIP?
The revival of the old law of “undue spiritual influence” ought to be laughed out. But is it going to be applied in Northern Ireland, or in the West of Scotland, or on and around Merseyside, and elsewhere? Is it going to be applied in Brent Central, or in Finchley and Golders Green, or in Hampstead and Kilburn, or in Harrow East, or in Harrow West, or in Hendon, or in Hornsey and Wood Green, or in Hove? There, we are talking, not merely about a deity who for political purposes may or may not exist, but about voting on 7th May in the interests, and even under the direction, of a foreign state the very lively reality of which is most certainly not in any dispute.
Last week, I heard every candidate here in North West Durham tell a hustings that they were in favour of assisted suicide, apart from Pat Glass of Labour, who explained why she would vote against any such proposal. Who may not refer to that this side of the Election, and to whom? Whatever happened to equal citizenship?
I must emphasise that I carry no candle for the David Miliband-supporting Lutfur Rahman. He has certainly committed many serious offences. I hope that John Biggs is as anti-austerity and as anti-war as Rahman has at least affected to be. Just as I hope that Naz Shah is as anti-austerity and as anti-war as George Galloway. I have every reason to expect that she is. Come the next Tower Hamlets Mayoral Election, Galloway might very well be looking for a new challenge.
David Lindsay
Miliband was made Leader by the votes of trade union members. Working-class areas are about to return Labour MPs more solidly than at any time in the past, and far more solidly than in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
Today’s Labour front bench is the most socially diverse ever, the first politically mature fruits of the glorious harvest of comprehensive schools. Gone are the days when military and union discipline lined up ranks of old miners and railwaymen behind an officer class of Hampstead public schoolboys at the front. (Not, it must be said, to denigrate the achievements of that system in its day.)
Consider the British economy and society of the 1970s, and then consider that in 1979, three out of five Labour MPs had never done manual or even clerical work in their lives. Ever. Not even during the War or during National Service. Even in their teens, they had been recognised as not the type.
Just check the educational backgrounds of the present Shadow Cabinet against those of the Cabinets of Clement Attlee, or even Harold Wilson. Compare and contrast the present Labour front bench with the outgoing, heavily public school Cabinet of broadly the same vintage. The comparison is obvious and the contrast is stark. It is the comps that are the better schools. It is very high time to stop apologising for them.
Just wait for the results across the working-class areas of London, or of the North, or of the Midlands. Then compare them with the same seats 40, 50, 60 years ago. The working class in those days was 45 per cent Tory. It certainly isn’t now.
But then, Labour is the last patriotic party in British politics. It is funded by the tiny voluntary donations of millions of working British taxpayers, collected through their trade unions, which in the form that they exist in Britain are among the most quintessentially British of institutions, like the NHS or the Co-op. Labour is not funded by people who, if they are British at all, are constantly threatening to leave their country if they did not get their own way, but were instead compelled to pay their taxes, or to pay decent wages to working British taxpayers such as those whose tiny voluntary donations funded the Labour Party.