Category Archives: Galloway

The Death of Hugo Chavez

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Galloway, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela

Analyst-Hugo-Chavez-grooming-a-successor

by George Galloway

The Independent

The death of Hugo Chavez at just 58 is a body blow for the poor and the oppressed, throughout Latin America and the wider world. The most elected leader in the modern era, Chavez transformed Venezuela by the force of his will and a popular revolution which encompassed the marginal, the ethnic minorities, the workers, and key sections of the progressive intelligencia who saw in him a veritable Spartacus.

He rallied an army of not slaves, but those despised by the oligarchy as hewers of wood and drawers of the oil which previously made only the rich richer. Under Chavez’ revolution the oil wealth was distributed in ever rising wages and above all in ambitious social engineering. He built the fifth largest student body in the world, creating scores of new universities. More than 90% of Venezuelans ate three meals a day for the first time in the country’s history. Quality social housing for the masses became the norm with the pledge that by the end of the presidential term, now cut short, all Venezuelans would live in a dignified house.

Chavez’ ambitions were not limited to Venezuela alone. He fostered Latin American unity promoting democratic and socialist movements throughout the continent. He founded a Bank of the South, a University of the South, even a television station of the South – Tele Sur. And further afield he championed the Palestinian cause, giving citizenship to stateless Palestinian refugees. When Israel invaded Lebanon, from where I write, in 2006 he expelled the Israeli ambassador from Caracas – relations which remain severed. He stood up to North American hegemony and with the victims of imperial domination everywhere.

I knew him as a warm gregarious bear of a man, a force of nature.

My wife and I spent almost two weeks working in his presidential campaign late last year. It is heartbreaking to be writing what amounts to his obituary so soon after yet another of his great political triumphs. He will be remembered as a man who lived and died for his people, as a paratrooper, a tank commander, a president. Hasta siempre Comandante. Presente.

 

The Swp’s Descent into Liberalism

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Galloway, Respect, SWP, Trotskyism
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First off, it’s important to put things in their proper perspective. The SWP is a far left sect that is and has been mired in irrelevancy for a number of years now. From its high water mark, when it played a central role in the antiwar movement during its peak years around 2003-04, until today, it has suffered a steep decline in the quality of its analysis and with it anything resembling influence, traction, or effectiveness. It represents the fag-end of British Trotskyism, the political residue left lying forlorn and decaying on the beach after the tide of the left’s fortunes ran out long before now.

Cheap gestures have increasingly replaced serious politics when it comes to an organisation whose rapidly diminishing ranks reflects its embrace of liberalism. In concrete terms this amounts to positions that are almost indistinguishable from those regularly carried in the pages of the Guardian. A party that once stood resolute in its resistance to the war on Iraq in 2003, a war ultimately justified by the then Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on the premise that Iraq was ruled by a ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, who represses his own people, is the party which stood on the side of NATO in its military intervention in Libya in 2011, justified on the basis that Colonel Gaddafi was a ruthless dictator who represses his own people. More recently, the SWP has been a vociferous supporter of the western-backed, Saudi-armed Syrian opposition in a brutal civil war that presages the dying gasp of Arab nationalism.

But this and other political missteps pale in comparison to the following paragraph from a report in the most recent edition of Socialist Worker, the SWP’s weekly newspaper, on the upcoming by-election in Croydon in which Respect are standing the respected and dedicated anti-racist campaigner Lee Jasper.

“Respect’s Lee Jasper has tapped into anger around police racism in the Croydon run-off. But Socialist Worker is not calling for a vote for him, following Respect leader George Galloway’s disgraceful and well-publicised comments on rape. Instead we encourage supporters to vote for Labour in this instance.”

Just think about this for a moment. A revolutionary socialist organisation, presumably proud of its commitment to the interests of the working class at home and its record of opposition to Britain’s wars abroad, has come out and endorsed the candidate of a party of war, privatisation, inequality, and neoliberalism, rather than the candidate of a party that has opposed all of the aforementioned consistently and vigorously since its formation in 2004.

And the reason? George Galloway’s podcast on Julian Assange, during which the MP for Bradford West emphatically and unapologetically asserted that the rape allegations levelled against the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks were concocted with the objective of securing his detention by the Swedish authorities, preparatory to his extradition to the United States over the role of Wikileaks in revealing the high crimes committed by the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Even supposing you disagreed with Galloway’s comments, and there were those on the left who did, are we really saying they are enough to invalidate three decades of principled and tireless work championing the plight of the Palestinians, his unwavering anti imperialism and anti racism, his decades spent campaigning for social and economic justice at home, his work as not just ‘a’ but ‘the’ leading voice of the international antiwar movement, earning him the undying enmity of the political establishment and its bag carriers in the liberal media, which surprise surprise has led the witchhunt against him in reaction to the podcast?

If the SWP felt strongly enough not to endorse the Respect candidate in this by-election, it could have refused to endorse any candidate. It could have endorsed the Communist candidate. It could even have endorsed the ‘Nine Eleven Was An Inside Job’ candidate. But, no, it instead chooses to endorse the Labour candidate. And not just any Labour candidate, mind you, but Labour councillor Steve Reed, a man who’s been described as more Blairite than Tony Blair.

On a wider note, the stench of moralism has come to engulf the far left in recent years, illustrative of the yawning gap that has opened up between it and the constituency it claims to represent – the working class. This has manifested in the rise of identity politics and lifestylism as the fulcrum of political activity to the detriment of class. The result has been an inexorable lapse into the kind of political degeneration represented by this endorsement in the pages of the Socialist Worker.

Leon Trotsky, whose political legacy the SWP purports to uphold, was one of the 20th century’s most influential and inspirational thinkers, someone whose personal courage helped inspire a revolution that left the international ruling class trembling in its boots. Many of Trotsky’s works and statements have stood the test of time, none more so than this admonition, which could have been written with today’s Socialist Workers Party in mind.

“‎The party that leans upon the workers but serves the bourgeoisie, in the period of the greatest sharpening of the class struggle, cannot but sense the smells wafted from the waiting grave.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Senior Met Counter Terrorism Officer Placed on ‘restricted Duties’ over Galloway Dirty Tricks Claims

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Galloway

BBC News

A senior Metropolitan Police officer has been placed on restricted duties after George Galloway claimed he entered his home without consent.

In an Early Day Motion, the Respect MP for Bradford West said the officer used an alias to attack him on Facebook in an “apparent dirty tricks operation”.

Mr Galloway also claimed the counter-terrorism officer slept in his home.

Scotland Yard said it was voluntarily referring the case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

In the motion, Mr Galloway states: “This House expresses its concern at the involvement of a very senior officer in the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism branch SO15 in an apparent dirty tricks operation against the honourable member for Bradford West (Galloway).

“[It] notes that the officer entered the honourable member’s London home without his knowledge or consent, the honourable member never having met or heard of him, and he slept in the honourable member’s home.”

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “The matter has been passed to the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] directorate of professional standards to investigate and a voluntary referral is being made to the IPCC.

“The officer has been placed on restricted duties pending the outcome of the investigation.”

Galloway Uncovers Police ‘dirty Tricks’ Campaign. Demands Investigation

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Galloway, Police

Press Statement

Respect

A senior Metropolitan police counter-terrorism officer has been involved in a campaign of disinformation and ‘dirty tricks’ against George Galloway, which involved an agent in the MP’s constituency office and also setting up a series of fake email addresses in an attempt to smear him.

Galloway, the MP for Bradford West, will tomorrow ask the Home Secretary whether the operation against him and the Bradford Respect party branch by the officer (‘K’) in the Met’s counter-terrorism unit SO15 was sanctioned by his superiors, or whether it was a freelance campaign using police resources. He will also bring it to the attention to the Speaker of the House of Commons.

‘A very senior officer in SO15 has been feeding disinformation aimed at damaging me to a national newspaper and to others, aided by a member of staff in Bradford who has now been suspended,’ Galloway said. ‘This involved him using the Met email as well as creating at least two false email addresses to spread the deceit. I have incontrovertible evidence. He either did this a freelance or it was sanctioned by his superiors. I will be asking the Home Secretary tomorrow (Monday 15 October) to act on this and also bringing it to the attention of the Speaker of the House of Commons.’

Among the ‘allegations’ made by Officer K through the Met police email was that he had evidence that there was voter fraud in the Bradford by-election – which Galloway won with a majority of more than 10,000.

The officer also slept in George’s house in Streatham, London, along with the female agent on Galloway’s staff, Ms A, when the MP was away, and he had to confess this when investigation of a break-in to the home would have discovered his fingerprints and DNA.

Ms A has now been suspended.

Ends

Background:

George Galloway’s house in Streatham was broken into in June in broad daylight (and not for the first time). His aide Ms A was in the house and allegedly saw the profiles of the two thieves. A parliamentary laptop was stolen.

Ms A then said that she had a ‘friend’ in the Met who could advise on security. She invited him round that day, which was the first time George met Mr K of the elite counter-terrorism branch SO15. Within 48 hours it transpired that this was not the first time the SO15 man had been in the house. He had to tell the officers investigating the break-in that his fingerprints would be found in the house as he had been sleeping there with Ms A while George was away. This is surely in breach of the police behavioural code. George pointed this out informally to the investigating officers but heard no more about this or, indeed, the result of their burglary investigation.

Although this was clearly gross misconduct and a dismissible offence George decided to give Ms A another chance.

It is now clear that Ms A was not just personally involved with the officer but that she was his agent inside the Bradford branch of Respect, passing on gossip and lies damaging to George and Respect to the case officer.

From evidence we hold it is clear that the two then decided not only to funnel disinformation to a national newspaper but to create it. Using his official email address at the Met Mr K claimed that he had evidence that there was voter fraud in George’s successful by-election victory (which George won by more than 10,000 votes). He also sent several further lengthy emails from this address to his accomplice, Ms A.

The SO15 officer also set up at least two other email addresses to send out his disinformation – nosoup, junaidakram900 and nabeel.raja38.

We are of course aware of the identity of SO15′s Mr K but have decided not to publish it on security grounds. We also have photographs of him and Ms A, both separately and together.

Real Londoners Not Actors: Yes We Ken

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blogging, Boris Johnson, education, Galloway, green party, Ken Livingstone, Labour Party, LGBT, London, Media, OCCUPY, Police, Progress, RMT, strikes, Students, Tower Hamlets, Trade Unions, transport

You may have seen that Labour’s opponents now claim that the people shown in our election broadcast were actors.

Today Ken’s campaign is releasing this video of some of the people in the broadcast. They answer for themselves how they are the real deal, and how London will be better of with Ken. In its own quiet way it says more than a thousand hysterical Tory attacks: real Londoners explaining why they chose to back Labour in this election.

Which Side Are You On?

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Articles, blogging, Boris Johnson, constitution, Diane Abbott, Ed Miliband, EDL, education, Galloway, green party, housing, Islamophobia, Ken Livingstone, Labour Party, LGBT, London, Media, no to AV, OCCUPY, Police, Progress, racism, Respect, RMT, strikes, Students, Tower Hamlets, Trade Unions, transport
by Conrad Landin
 

The Daily Telegraph supporting Boris Johnson? Surely not! For many, Andrew Gilligan’s promotion to the paper came as a relief. No longer would his hysterical opinions be broadcast to the capital’s retreating commuters as a point of course.

But when self-proclaimed Labour supporters take to its pages to shaft their own party less than a month before a crucial election, we can no longer be passive.

Lynton Crosby, the hard-right Tory campaign director, emailed the Tory members this weekend.

In an attempt to string out the mayoral tax row, Crosby invokes a number of sources, including the Telegraph, Lib Dem Brian Paddick and The Times. No surprises there. But Crosby also lists apparently ‘Labour’ commentators. “This isn’t just my view,” he writes. “See what others, including Labour activists, are now saying about Ken Livingstone’s hypocrisy.”

The Labour members he lists are Atul Hatwal, Jonathan Roberts, and Dan Hodges (who is quoted supporting Andrew Gilligan, who, like Hodges and Boris Johnson, is paid by the Telegraph).

It is time to call this what it is: Labour members undermining the Labour campaign for the mayor of London by doing and saying things the Tories want them to do.

They are acting as agents of the Tories’ line and the Tories’ strategy by throwing hand-grenades around our own trenches, rather than targeting the opposition.

Describing these figures as Labour activists is a insult to the hard work of the thousands of volunteers who have brought bread and butter issues such as transport fares up the agenda. And I’ll sort out a VIP ticket to my ward’s next canvassing session for any proven sighting of Dan Hodges on the doorstep.

None of these people have shown any interest in Labour winning this election. When the polls have shown the election to be on a knife-edge, they stay eerily silent. And then we see them pile in behind a newly negative and unpleasant Tory campaign. Self-describing tribalists like Hodges know too that when you’re close to an election, you can only pick your side. They have picked theirs: that of the Tory mayor.

Whilst Labour and its members are piling everything into this campaign, some people prefer to indulge themselves and their egos.

We only have to read the introduction of Crosby’s email to see the Tories’ vulnerability in this election. He is worried that his main election argument has gone into a tailspin. “Today, the national media are focusing on what disclosure means for the future direction of British politics and others are saying that it is a sideshow – just politicians spatting,” he says, adding that “These claims may serve Ken Livingstone’s purpose…”

He should be worried – his strategy has veered off into a different debate: whether total disclosure is healthy for British public life. He and Johnson have poisoned the well. Many commentators are urging for the debate to move on.

Even Tory ex-minister John Redwood now says the tax debate is “crowding out the more important matters of what Ken or Boris would do to the Council Tax, the policing, and the transport of London,” he argues.

Johnson’s campaign is trying to divert Londoners’ attention from understanding that they will be £1,000 or more better off with Labour’s Ken Livingstone, through the reduction of fares and other key pledges – or, put another way, they will be £1,000 or more worse off with Johnson and the Conservatives.

If we can get this message out, then Ken will win. In a cynical attempt to deceive the electorate, the Tories have made a song and dance distraction.

Crosby’s strategy can be taken down. Real Labour activists will be doing just this in the coming weeks. Those few Labour members who continue to snipe must accept that they are simply the Tories’ useful idiots.

This article first appeared at Next Generation Labour.

Tax is a Distraction in London Mayoral Race

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blogging, Boris Johnson, education, Galloway, green party, Ken Livingstone, Labour Party, LGBT, London, Media, OCCUPY, Police, Progress, RMT, strikes, Students, Tower Hamlets, Trade Unions, transport

by Ken Livingstone from Guardian CiF

The London mayoral election is that most unusual thing in politics – the chance for voters in tough times to make themselves better off, by £1,000, or more. Fear that this message may get through leaves the Conservative party with only one strategy: distraction. It is the tactic of the right everywhere.

While people are facing the most difficult economic times they have ever experienced, the Conservative campaign in London has sought to make the issue about the candidates’ tax arrangements. This space existed because of the relentless drive to personalise politics, a trend that has accelerated in recent years. It is an Americanisation of British political discourse that is challenged even by Conservatives who want politicians to address what the voters care about.

As the campaign moves on from this distraction, for one of the very rare occasions in my life I agree with John Redwood, who writes: “The media fascination with the exchanges between Boris and Ken over personal tax and income is crowding out the more important matters of what Ken or Boris would do to the council tax, the policing, and the transport of London.”

None of this is surprising – in London, the Conservatives have absolutely nothing positive to say at all. Ask yourself if you know what Boris Johnson is even offering.

British politics appears to be at a log-jam. The Conservatives are facing a period of sustained unpopularity. The main driver of this is the budget for millionaires and the disastrous decisions taken by David Cameron and George Osborne over the economy. The country is run by a government with no mandate for its brutal onslaught on the NHS and the public finances.

Last Friday 72,600 London households had tax credits taken away. Overall 118,805 of the capital’s households lost out in all of Friday’s changes – at least 250,000 Londoners were affected. Still the government maintains the attack.

The majority are left feeling voiceless. They know Labour will get their vote in three years’ time to form a new government – but what to do now?

London Labour’s programme for the voiceless majority gives a chance of real change. Through our fares cut the average London farepayer will be £1,000 better off over four years: a real improvement in living standards when times are tough. We will do it through using the annual surplus, not touching either the underspent investment budget or affecting existing services.

An energy co-op and a programme to insulate London homes will cut household bills, making people £150 or more better off. A non-profit lettings agency will cut out rip-off fees for tenants. The government has an intense phobia of young people but I will restore education maintenance allowance of £30 a week for young people who want to stay in education; and through a programme of loans and grants we will start work to reduce childcare costs.

That is the scale of difference an elected mayor can make and why that system is likely to spread to other parts of the country.

To get this change London needs to build movements: of farepayers; of the young robbed through the EMA cuts and student fees hikes; of older Londoners treated with contempt through winter fuel allowance cuts and a pensions grab.

In pursuit of this we have mobilised activists as never before. On 10 April , hundreds will gather at stations across London to campaign to slash fares. Next weekend our supporters will talk to 10 neighbours each about how they will be £1,000 better off. We are the first to have an online supporter community, YourKen.org. The strategy of the right in the face of this is very simple – diversion, over the past few days, through a peripheral focus on personal finances.

Elections in the nations, regions and localities of Britain give people the chance to vote for an alternative that protects them to the maximum possible extent against difficult economic conditions and an uncaring Conservative establishment. London now has that chance, too.

Mehdi Hasan Gets It Wrong on Bradford

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By-election results, Galloway, Respect

One of the most interesting aspects of George Galloway’s by-election victory in Bradford last week has been the wholesale gnashing of teeth on the part of the London-based commentariat, who, in the process of trying and failing miserably to get to grips with the result and its whys and wherefores, have endured paroxysms of agony. From the asinine and embarrassing TV interviews conducted with Galloway in the immediate aftermath by Sky’s Adam Boulton and Channel 4’s Cathy Neuman, to a plethora of newspaper columns and blogs ranging from the absurd ramblings of perennial Blairite stooge, the unearthly John Rentoul writing in the Independent, to the excreta of the ever-rabid Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail, the subtext implicit in the reaction of the nation’s most prominent TV anchors and newspaper columnists, bag carriers for the right wing consensus that dominates the mainstream media, is that, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, the people of Bradford West, in voting for Respect, have lost the confidence of the government and therefore the government should dissolve them and appoint another one.

The virulent dislike of George Galloway by each of the aforementioned, and various others, has dripped from every syllable of every word spoken to and written about him since the election. But no one should be under any illusion. This hatred runs deeper than Galloway the man. It extends to his politics and the constituency he represents – downtrodden and demonised communities that dare raise their heads to challenge the status quo on its own terms and win. Within this group politicised Muslims come in for special treatment.

But this wholesale fear and hatred of the declassed and downtrodden in society is nothing new. In fact, it is a common thread running back throughout history, wherein elites and their vocal lackeys have met any stirring of society’s ‘lower orders’ with unmitigated vitriol and condemnation. Whether it was Edmund Burke excoriating the French masses for daring to rise up and make a revolution in 1789 with his warning that “the tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny”; or whether it was the hatred of the elites towards the Petroleuses of the Paris Commune or the Chartists in this country, not to mention the abject horror which greeted the Russian Revolution, the Establishment and its bag carriers in the media have never failed to meet the politicisation and/or rebellion of the poor and alienated in society with anything other than revulsion.

Only last year we had the near universal outpouring of shock and indignation over the riots, mirrored in prison sentences that left no doubt who makes the laws and in whose interests they are made. Now, with Galloway successful in providing a political and democratic conduit through which the same demographic can register its refusal to remain ignored and unrepresented on the margins of society, you would think he’d just committed a heinous crime.

How many other politicians can you think of whose success at the polls would be met with the avalanche of negative column inches that his has these past few days? Sectarian, demagogue, self-serving, maverick, opportunist, populist, dangerous, divisive, dishonest, suspicious, colourful – these are the adjectives that have been attached to him in the immediate aftermath of one the most emphatic by-election results in electoral history.

This of course won’t come as a surprise to those on the left. But when the vitriol emanates from commentator who is identified as being part of the left, the broad left that is, alarm bells should start ringing.

Mehdi Hasan is political editor of the New Statesman magazine, a publication which consistently succeeds in making left wing politics and progressive ideas sound about as exciting as non league football in January. Regardless, Mehdi, recipient of the Oxbridge education required of the nation’s most prized opinion formers, has been able to establish himself as one of the select few voices of the left deemed acceptable by the mainstream – in other words completely non-threatening and politically benign. But to judge by his analysis of Galloway’s by-election victory, it is hard to resist the conclusion that he’s spent too many editions as a guest on Question Time sitting next to the aforementioned right wing hack, Melanie Phillips.

For example, in a blog piece that appeared on the NS website on March 30, he writes

“I am no fan of Galloway or his sectarian, far-left, self-serving politics…”

But worse is the piece he wrote for the Guardian, which appeared a couple of days later. In it he vents his anger this time not at George Galloway but the Muslims who voted for him.

“…why is it that most British Muslims get so excited and aroused by foreign affairs, yet seem so bored by and uninterested in domestic politics and the economy?

From the march against the Iraq war in 2003 to the demonstrations against the Danish cartoons in 2006 and the protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2009, British Muslims have shown themselves perfectly willing to take to the streets to make their voices heard. But how many times have they, individually or collectively, joined rallies over issues that affect our daily lives: from the reforms of the NHS to the future of local schools; from the lack of social housing to rising energy bills and train fares?”

This essentialising of an entire community in two paragraphs, hectoring them for in his view failing to integrate in a manner satisfactory to his own Oxbridge- polished sensibilities, is usually the narrative of the right.

Further on in the same piece, he writes

“Muslims do not lack for opponents or antagonists; those who want to portray us as foreign, alien, un-British, are growing in number. We should not be handing them a club with which to beat us. In fact, the best way of overcoming Islamophobia and suspicion is for British Muslims to broaden, not narrow, our political horizons, to get involved in our local communities, to show our fellow citizens that we care not just about events in Palestine and Pakistan, but Portsmouth and Paisley too.

How can Muslims complain about our rights, our freedoms, our collective future, if we aren’t engaged in the political process across the board as active British citizens? We have an obligation, as Britons and as Muslims, to fully participate in local and national debates and not to stand idly by.”

Writing here as a Muslim, while blaming the victims of Islamophobia for Islamophobia, Hasan manages to combine moral cowardice with contempt towards his less domesticated co-religionists for their, erm, backward antiwar politics? His inability to understand that Bradford West was a by-election in which austerity stood front and centre alongside Britain’s participation in a dozen years of brutal and ever more costly wars in the Middle East, with Galloway making the all important link between the two, is a withering indictment of his political degeneration.

In time honoured fashion, he leaves the best till last.

“We have allowed ourselves to be defined only by foreign policy and, in particular, by events in the Middle East for far too long.”

Yes, Mehdi, how inconvenient that you find yourself spending more and more time between appetizer and dessert at the dinner parties you frequent in North London lamenting the inability of Muslims to just ‘get over it’ and learn to ‘know their place’.

Fortunately the overwhelming majority within the Muslim community of Bradford West, along with the thousands of non-Muslims who voted Respect last week, know better. Indeed, in inverse proportion to the horrified reaction of a reactionary media, whose ranks it has to be said Mehdi Hasan comes close to joining with his own shoddy analysis, the people of Bradford West have succeeded in putting to the sword the idea that there is no alternative.