George Galloway: Spode de nos jours

31 March 2012

THE by-election victory of George Galloway in Bradford, brought about by his shameless pandering to Islamists, was shocking in many respects. That such an unprincipled demagogue could get anywhere near a position of power was surprising in itself, but he has of course had more comebacks – and more black marks against his character – than Sinatra. 

At the same time, it is easy to understand why people are impressed by his old-fashioned oratorical flourishes, and his talent for stoking passion and indignation is indisputable. With Britain falling apart under the stultifying command of a few dozen millionaire bean-counters and Daily Mail-style Poujadists, and while the current government uses the wholly avoidable financial failures of the last ten years to justify policies like “workfare” for the poor and tax cuts for the rich, one can appreciate the appeal of the sort of radical rhetoric that the Labour Party is no longer capable of providing. 

Writing in The Guardian, Galloway describes the way Labour has been eviscerated and emasculated by Blair and his successors, and about the “sado-monetarist  austerity” of the Coalition and the genuine fears about a privatised NHS or education system in the years to come. He is also on firm ground when he says that cities like Bradford have been betrayed by a political system skewed in favour of London and the already rich.

So radical is good, but how truly radical is he? He is certainly no Tony Benn. His rhetoric in the Guardian differs profoundly from his hustings speeches in Bradford, where he clearly positioned himself as a holier-than-thou Mullah. His old enemy Hitchens would have said that Galloway's sycophantic meetings with the likes of Saddam Hussein (“I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability” ) and Bashar al-Assad (“Syria is lucky to have (him) as her President”) demonstrate the enduring affinities between unreconstituted Stalinism and actually-existing Baathism, and provide everything that needs to be said about Gorgeous George's true political instincts. In 2005, Hitchens summed him up thus: 

The "anti-war" movement has as its new star a man who is openly pro-war, but openly on the other side. A man who supported the previous oppressors of the region—the Soviet army in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—who supports its current oppressors—Bashar Assad and his Lebanese proxies—and who still has time to endorse its potential future tyrants in the shape of the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. Galloway began his political life as a fifth-rate apologist for the Soviet Union, but he has now diversified into being an apologist for Stalinism, for fascism, and for jihadism all at once! 

There are other questions about Galloway, including the allegations that he and his ex-wife personally profited from the UN “oil for food” programme. Not just a pimp for fascism, but one of its prostitutes too, wrote Hitchens. Galloway himself rigorously denies all these charges, but despite being notoriously quick to seek the services of Sue, Grabbit and Run whenever his character is maligned, he does not appear to have contested some of the claims, including those by Hitchens.

Galloway’s friend, Christopher Silvester, made a good fist of defending him in The Independent a few years ago, saying he was committed to his principles and – despite an exiguous voting record – has been a fine and diligent constituency member of parliament. Silvester also said allegations of personal profit were not borne out either by the value of his properties or by his lifestyle.

The press have been throwing dirt and none of it has stuck, Galloway has repeatedly said, and it was actually The Daily Telegraph’s libel settlement, and not a wedge of ill-gotten gains, that allowed him to buy his house in Portugal. So what’s the truth in all this? Allegations of graft might be beside the point because his principles themselves are fundamentally corrupt. He has changed seamlessly from a Stalinist apologist to a shill of the sharia-state mullahs at the Islamic Forum of Europe. All in all, he seems of a type: the vain and self-important, self-consciously “charismatic” rabble-rousing thug in thrall to power – a Roderick Spode of our time.