A DUNDONIAN BRIT IN THE COURT OF KING GEORGE
George Galloway, newly elected 'Respect' MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, gave the Senate Committee on Homeland Affairs 'both barrels' this week, winning congratulations around the world.
It was an audacious challenge to the stuffed-shirt chairman Senator Norm Coleman, who was, in the words of the New York Post, left 'flat-footed' ('Brit fries senators in oil'). Galloway was right to take the fight to his accusers, having been smeared as an oil-profiteer when his true 'crime' was to oppose the invasion of Iraq.
Galloway has been a thorn in the side of the political establishment in Britain for many years, leading eventually to his expulsion from the Labour Party for denouncing the most recent attack on Iraq. Loathed by Labour and Tory alike, the radical Galloway has none the less succeeded in winning the grudging admiration of the British media.
British reports of the Capitol Hill contest gloried in the supposed superiority of the Parliamentary debating, as Scottish reports claimed his Glasgow street brawling style. George has tentatively been adopted by the usually cynical culturati as a standard-bearer for British pluck.
In the film Love Actually, a foppish Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) finally works up the nerve to put down a miniac President (Billy Bob Thornton). The scene, openly applauded in British cinemas, works because it is a fantasy. Our real Prime Minister is known for sucking up to the US President, something that galls every inner-patriot. But Galloway made the fantasy a reality.
Some former radicals have attacked Galloway for his egotism. Trotskyist-turned Bush supporting journalist Christopher Hitchens acquits him of financial corruption only to conclude that he is drunk on adulation. Like the radical MP Henry 'Orator' Hunt, or Howard Spring's anti-hero Hamer Radshaw in the novel Fame is the Spur, Galloway is something of an egotist of the left, lapping up the applause.
But people have all kinds of motivations for getting involved in politics. Egotism is hardly the worst sin. Indeed Galloway's recklessness has proven to be something of an asset. Rather like James Bond, every building he vacates promptly bursts into flames behind him, whether it is War on Want, his unduly commented upon marriage, or the Scottish Labour Party. That might not make for enduring relationships, but on the other hand, his cavalier approach has released him from many of the constraints that his more staid Labour Party comrades continue to wrap around them.
Hitchens (who Galloway rubbished in Washington rather successfully, if ecentrically, as a 'Trotskyist popinjay') also complains that the MP is a 'Stalinist'. But this too is unfair. If Galloway is a Stalinist he is a bedroom Stalinist, colouring in the Socialist Republics red in his school Atlas. After all, Galloway had not been born when Stalin died in 1953, and was an infant when Kruschev denounced him. By the time that Galloway was elected to Parliament (1987) the Soviet Union was already being dismantled. Those who were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain back then are today Galloway's sternest critics, like newspaper coumnist David Aaronovitch. What is more, the core of Galloway's activist support was provided by Hitchens' own former Trotskyist colleagues in the Socialist Workers Party.
Galloway should be criticised for his political ideology, which is, as he said in the Bethnal Green and Bow election campaign, unashamedly Old Labour. Galloway's rheteorical flourishes are taken from the past. His phrase about accusing the accusers is taken from the speeches of Clydeside Communist leader John Mclean, or more likely from the 1973 biography by his daughter Nan Milton. In what was no doubt a fantasy moment for Galloway, he cast himself as the accused in those other Senate Hearings, the House of Un-American Activities Committee, by saying 'I am not now, nor have I ever been an oil-trader'.
Galloway's politics of parliamentary socialism had already proved to be an inadequate alternative to capitalism when he first came to the attention of the party nationally, challenging Roy Hattersley for not supporting exchange controls. His dogged commitment to the party's 1945 programme of a welfare state is little more than nostalgia in an era when the welfare state has proved to be a suffocating trap, not a means of liberation.
Galloway's success in Bethnal Green and Bow was due primarily to the disaggregation of the old Labour Party's political constituency. The current Labour leadership's struggle to break free of the traditional labour bloc of trade unions and local government left room for third party candidates to come through. In the past the Green Party or even the British National Party on the right have taken advantage of this opening. But in this election, the Respect Coalition, put together by radical anti-war activists ceased the initiative.
Locally, Galloway could call on the talents of individuals like Asad Rehman, who worked for many years on the anti-racist campaign, the Newham Monitoring Project. In years gone by the NMP used its connections to deliver the Asian vote to Labour. But the Blairite sitting MP Oona King had little use for their brand of radical leftism, and their machine was delivered up to Galloway.
Galloway's opportunism did have negative consequences, primarily in his willingness to tack in the direction of cultural conservatism, underlining his opposition to abortion in such a way as might be thought to win votes from local Muslims. Locally, Respect picketed strip shows, and refused, in candidate Lindsey German's words 'to make a fetish out of gay rights'.
Galloway's élan and courage stand out in today's small-beer politics. Next to technocrats like Norm Coleman and Oona King his passion for what he believes in is laudable (we salute your indefatigability.). But politically, Galloway's old Labour politics have been tried and found wanting years ago. They are no alternative in the here and now, just nostalgia for an English Jerusalem that never was.
CREATIVITY GAP
THE CREATIVITY GAP by James Heartfield is published as a Blueprint Broadside on 12 May. Copies are free with Blueprint magazine, available at branches of WH Smith and other newsagents. To order a copy tel 020 8606 7549 or go to www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk * The Department of Trade and Industry wants to put design at the centre of boosting British export - but why are British firms putting less and less importance on design? * There are 123 675 Art and Design Students in Britain, one in every 16 students in higher education - so why is it that less than a quarter of them will be working in design related industries when they graduate? * Tony Blair says that, if no longer the workshop of the world, Britain can claim to be its drawing board - so why have design consultancies seen their fees halved since 2001? * The Department of Trade and Industry celebrates the knowledge-driven economy - so why is average productivity falling in Britain, and work becoming more labour-intensive, not less? * The National Lottery fund and the millennium commission helped to open museums and arts centres all over the country - but why have so many of them been closed down?
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