George Galloway: Bradford vs Bethnal Green (UPDATED August 2012)

Update 14 October 


The Guardian assesses the effect of his rape comments on his Bradford spring: ' He insisted his comments had not caused a setback in Bradford. "I haven't lost support in Bradford, no. The people who spoke to you, or the ones you are speaking to me about, never supported me in the first place," he said. While it is true that national membership of Respect continues to grow – having reached 2,000 now, compared with just 300 before the Bradford byelection, according to the party secretary Chris Chilvers – it is disingenuous for Galloway to claim he has not lost support in the constituency.

At the beginning of this month George Galloway said he would sue the NUS (BBC) for accusing him of being a rape denier.

Has Oona King dashed Diane's real hope?

Today Oona King announced that she would fight Ken Livingstone for selection as Labour's London mayoral candidate. Was this post the real target of Diane Abbott - she hinted as much to the Independent before the election?

Is this rivalry between the Labour Party's two most prominent black women or has there been an agreement? May be their relationship has improved since 1997 (from the Independent in 1997): "There is also, it is said, a "history" between her and the first black woman to be an MP, Diane Abbott, about whether or not Ms King tried to take Ms Abbott's seat in the neighbouring constituency, Hackney North. A Labour Party source described the relations between the two as "at best an armed neutrality".

There was some mention of Diane in Oona King's autobiography "House Music" but I can't remember if it was happy or not.

Pay £1000 for right not to vote?

In the latest issue of Hackney Today Jules Pipe says: "A wide-ranging campaign this year to increase the number of people on the electoral role, has resulted in 10,000 more residents being able to vote in Hackney."

I'll be one of those new ones on the electoral role. Nothing like the threat of a £1000 fine! I don't know if that threat was about voting or if it had more to do with the 2011 census. Either way it worked.

The turnout for the 2005 General Election in Hackney South and Shoreditch was 49.7% and in Hackney North and Stoke Newington it was 49.6%. I assume that the 50% who didn't vote were on the electoral role. An increase in 10,000 disinterested voters on the electoral role could make the turnout even worse.

But nothing much seems to work. In 2005, in neighbouring Bethnal Green and Bow, the massively hyped contest between George Galloway and Oona King - which saw Galloway win by 823 votes - pulled a 52% turnout. That was up 4 percentage points on the 48% in 2001. So even a dramatic battle doesn't make much difference to inner city voters with an average turnout at 10% below the national average.

The figures come from the Guardian and can be found most easily on Theyworkforyou.com

For something vaguely related: Navel-gazing intro, Candi-dating in Hackney

Diane Abbott vs Alastair Campbell

Diane Abbott Vs Alastair Campbell on the BBC's This Week.

I didn't see this myself but saw it highlighted on Andrew Gilligan's blog. I suspect the tension between them isn't just ideological (Diane probably gets on well with lots of people who supported the Iraq war) - it's just that Diane and Alastair don't like each other as people.

Although Abbott and Portillo challenge Campbell about him bullying journalists, judging by Oona King's autobiography (House Music) - and no doubt lots of other evidence - it was Labour MPs who were most at Campbell's mercy. I don't know if the press manager in the movie In the Loop is based on Campbell. If it is, he must have been impressively horrible!

Candidate 8: Labour promotes ghettoisation

Candidate 8: Jonathan Fryer, Lib Dem

Jonathan Fryer lives in Tower Hamlets but he said that Hackney appears to be a happier place. The reason is because different communities in the borough interact with each other. But he doesn’t believe this happiness has much to do with Labour Party policies, which he thinks encourage ghettoisation.

Candidate 8 described his home borough as “an odd place” where the poor and the rich, the large communities of white British and Bangladeshi exist side-by-side, but their paths rarely cross.

He said: “Hackney seems to be a happier place. There’s much more interaction in Hackney. In Tower Hamlets there’s a bit of a problem with the community not having much interaction, they don’t have the level of contact they do here.”

He was critical of the Labour approach to race relations: “The way that the Labour Party sees people in class terms and in groups and doesn’t understand that while there are group identities and community identities, if you deal with people entirely as groups and de-personalise them it can be quite negative."

Fryer said that the focus on groups resulted in "ghettoisation" but he said he believed that Britain was a leader in Europe when it came to community cohesion. He said that while Labour figures like former Bethnal Green and Bow MP, Oona King, had been working on this issue, the Labour approach was flawed.

I asked him how bad he thinks the financial crisis will it get?

“I have a lot to do with Vince Cable. He believes that, in the short-term, it is going to get very bad. He saw this crisis years ago and got barracked in the house of commons as a doom and gloom merchant.

Fryer said that there was not a great deal of faith in the government talking about “green shoots” of recovery.

But he said: “Part of it is rebuilding confidence. When people are worried about the possibility of unemployment or generally not confident they’re not spending the markets are getting less and then they start closing down. We don’t have to run far from where we are now to see shops closing down and it’s not always because people haven’t got money, they just aren’t spending it.

I asked how people in Hackney could not be spending if this is one of the poorest boroughs in the country – and they can’t afford not to spend it. So any change in spending won’t be as great as it is in richer areas?

He said: “To a certain extent people in Hackney are poor but they will have been stashing some money away. If they’re west Indian, then it’ll be for a trip back to Jamaica, or for their kids and they’re not spending it, they’re saving it. It would be interesting to know to what extent this is happening. It’s depressing when you see accounts of burglaries and people saying they had £3000 or so in cash stolen from them.”

He said one of the key issues for Hackney was transport: “Clearly there are big transport problems and I think that some of the things we were promised won’t happen and as long as Hackney isn’t plugged into the underground system it is going to miss out.”

I asked him what sort of relationship he would have with MPs?

“Here in Hackney it is Labour. MPs have to have a good working relationship with their MEP to know where EU funding would be possible.” He said that ten years ago MEPs couldn’t go into the House of Commons except by the same route as normal members of the public which he said was “grotesque” but while this had improved, there needs to be far more contact between MPs and MEPS.

Do you eventually want to be a normal MP?

I don’t want to be an MP. An MEP is the height of my ambition.

One of his main hobby horses is that Britain is not educating its children to be European: “The government scrapped learning a second language from the age of 14 a few years ago. And British kids are competing against kids in Germany where they speak 2-3 languages.

I asked if this meant that boroughs like Hackney, which have hundreds of languages, might be seen as a resource?

“One relevant thing is that with Turkish, it is a marginal language in the EU (Cyprus is a member but not north Cyprus). Turkey is very likely to become a member in 10-15 years. I think it would be useful to say to Turkish families here to make sure they keep their language skills because it is going to be very useful and British born ethnic Turks will have a really strong position in the Europe of the future.”

Should UK politicians seek support from abroad?

The previous post mentions George Galloway's trip to Bangladesh before the 2005 General Election.

The reference was made in connection with Hackney-based fundamentalist Christian Reverend George Hargreaves being criticised by the BNP for apparently seeking support for his party in Nigeria.

Whether or not this is something that UK politicians should or shouldn't do, I don't know. But may be it is an aspect of politics that should be more closely monitored - particularly in boroughs with strong links to areas outside the UK.

Galloway beat Oona King by a margin of just 823 votes and the majority of his support came from the Muslim Bangladeshi community which makes up more than 40 per cent of population of his Bethnal Green and Bow constituents.

As such it is likely that his two week trip to Bangladesh played an important part in his victory.

In a speech made at one village on 7 March 2005, Galloway said: "I'm going to be a champion of Bangladesh in London... I will be a champion of Bangladesh in the world. I will fight so Bangladesh receives justice."

He also said: "I'm asking you, my brothers, to telephone every relative and friend in East London, to write them a letter, to send a message, tell them what you heard here... You can strike a blow for dignity when the General Election comes."

When he got back from Bangladesh Galloway was asked: "Do you still intend to become a "Champion of Bangladesh" if you are elected in Bethnal Green and Bow? How do you think that being a "Champion of Bangladesh" will benefit people in Bethnal Green and Bow?

His reply was: "Taking a few words out of the context of thousands I delivered, publicly and privately on a recent visit to Bangladesh, inevitably leads to misrepresentation. My job is not to represent any foreign country or its interests in parliament, nor, of course, would I do so.

"But I do intend to become a champion for all of the people of Bethnal Green and Bow, whatever their race, religion or ethnic origin."

Whether or not the people back in Bangladesh would ever have known that these words were out of context is hard to say. Meanwhile the majority of his constituents back in Tower Hamlets had no idea that he had said the words at all.

As far as I can tell Galloway has stuck to his word and not become a champion of Bangladesh since winning his seat and I don't know if he has been back to the country since. Meanwhile his attention remains focused on the middle east.

However Bangladesh could do with a champion. I'm not sure how accurate or useful this is, but it seems that Bangladesh has more people living in it than the combined global population of Palestinians (c.10m, although 80% of those in Gaza Strip below the poverty line) the entire population of Iraq (31m - now with around 30 per cent living below the poverty line) and the UK population of around 60m (14% below the poverty line in 2003). Add them all up to 100m and may be about 30-40 per cent live below the poverty line.

Meanwhile Bangladesh has a population of 153m with 45 per cent living below the poverty line.

However the reasons why Galloway doesn't spend much time on Bangladesh is that, if he did address human rights abuses or corruption... or anything else, he would lose the support of one faction or other within the Bangladeshi community.

The issue received some attention back in 2005 but not much. This is an extract from an angry piece published in April 2005 by a member of the Socialist Workers Party (which later split from Respect). The piece mentions some of the problems associated with Galloway's trip. Here is an excerpt: "Despite being asked to respond to these instances (of human rights abuses) Galloway has maintained a diplomatic silence. Could it be, as suggested by Private Eye, that Galloway has compromised himself in his ambition to get elected, being aware that “most Bangladeshis in London, whose votes Respect is seeking, support either the Awami League or the Bangladesh National Party, the two groups back home most closely implicated in such abuses” (Private Eye April 1-14)?

"Either way, it is clearly untenable for comrades in the SWP to maintain a silence on such issues. Votes from the Bengali community must be won on a principled basis, not through courting reactionary “politicians and businessmen”

In case you're wondering, I'm not a member of the SWP or the BNP (Bangladesh or British).