By Sacha Ismail
In a letter to the Respect Coalition national committee, George Galloway declares that “relations between leading figures in Respect are at an all-time low”, that the group’s membership “has not grown... in some areas it has gone into a steep decline”, and that it could easily face “oblivion” within the next year. What’s going on?
Under Galloway’s characteristic style, two main issues emerge. Firstly, he wants Respect to be much more purely an electoral machine (!), with less emphasis on all this nonsense about trade unions (“Organising for Fighting Unions”) and, even worse, gay liberation (the Respect intervention at Pride) And secondly, he wants greater control over the machine, with fewer SWP members as staff and a new National Organiser position alongside the National Secretary, SWPer John Rees.
Galloway has already announced — whether following an internal discussion or off the top of his head — that at the next election he will stand for Poplar and Canning Town, where Respect got 16.9% in 2005, against Labour’s 40%. Meanwhile, he faces an 18-day suspension from Parliament in October.
Perhaps Galloway is thinking about other career moves? To consistent revolutionary socialists, the SWP’s politics are pathetic: but to Galloway, they must seem like a left-wing embarrassment and roadblock to his plans for self-promotion.
Let him have his career in business, hack journalism, or whatever. We can only hope that any attempts he makes to break up Respect jolt the committed and good-hearted socialists that remain in the SWP into wondering how on earth they got into an alliance with this sleazebag.
Saddam’s gold revisited
By Martin Thomas
As mentioned above, George Galloway is facing an 18-day suspension from Parliament, due to start on 8 October, after a report by the House of Commons “committee on standards and privileges”.
Newspaper accounts of this report on Galloway’s financial links with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq gave Galloway a very soft ride.
Read the full report, however, and you will see that it went into the issue of the documents published by the Daily Telegraph in 2003, allegedly showing financial links between Galloway and Saddam Hussein’s regime.
It found that “Unlike Mr Galloway (who was offered the opportunity to examine the Telegraph documents), we have ourselves seen them in their totality and with the files in which they were found. We have little doubt, based on the evidence we have received, including the forensic evidence, that those documents which are relevant to our inquiry are authentic. We note that, in his evidence to us, Mr Galloway did not explicitly rule out this possibility either...”
Galloway has traded on the idea that the success of his libel case against the Telegraph shows the documents to be forgeries, but the committee notes that “neither the authenticity nor the veracity of the documents was an issue in Mr Galloway’s successful libel action against the Telegraph... The Telegraph... had at one stage indicated to the court its wish to prove the authenticity of the documents.... the judge ruled against the paper on the grounds that the authenticity of the documents was in his view not relevant to the qualified privilege and fair comment defences raised by the paper in the proceedings”.
The committee also reports that Galloway “told the Commissioner that he regularly met the Iraqi Chargé d’Affaires in London to keep him informed of his proposed plans and accepted that these might be described as a working programme... We were struck by the way a coherent and credible story emerges from the key documents, whose authenticity we accept, and conclude that they accurately describe aspects of Mr Galloway’s involvement in securing Iraqi funding for the Mariam Appeal. This reinforces our view, in the light of our conclusions on authenticity, that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to presume that what the documents say is true.”
The committee also “take the view that the alleged record of the meeting between Mr Galloway and Saddam Hussein in August 2002 is authentic”, i.e. “that some of his activities in support of the Iraqi regime may have been financed through an oil-related mechanism”.
Why on earth is none of this even marginally an issue in the conflict between Galloway and the SWP?
Galloway vs MP
Galloway’s announcement that he will be standing against New Labour minister Jim Fitzpatrick in Poplar and Canning Town at the next general election was made in characteristic style. In his Talksport Radio address (yes), Galloway put it like this:
“It’s going to be a battle of the Scots in the East End of London. Me standing in the tradition of Keir Hardie, him standing in the tradition of Ramsay MacDonald, the betrayer of everything Labour stands for. It’s going to be a very interesting contest.”
Keir Hardie, for all his religious and political confusion, was a class-conscious socialist militant. What would he have made of an ex-Labour politician like Galloway, who does not even rise to the level of middle-class liberalism? In any case, Galloway’s announcement continues on his website in even more interesting way, denouncing Jim Fitzpatrick’s voting record on a series of issues: for ID cards, for foundation hospitals, for top-up fees, for the Iraq war — and for equal gay rights.
So why has Fitzpatrick’s support for gay rights been included as one bad thing among man? No doubt this would play well among more conservative Muslims and Christians in Poplar and Canning Town — the people who Galloway no doubt sees as his base.
Yvonne Ridley vs the Iranian workers
“Knowing the truth is the right of all human beings, but the media today is the number one means used by the authorities to keep control,” commented Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in July, as the Iranian state launched the “Press TV” satellite channel in order to “break the global media stranglehold of western outlets”. Press TV will no doubt be part of the apparatus by which Ahmedinejad’s regime controls the media when it launches further crack downs on dissident publications and stations.
So far, so bad. But why should we be particularly bothered?
One of Press TV’s presenters is leading Respect member Yvonne Ridley. While Ridley’s softness on the Islamic Republic, and the SWP’s willingness to put up with and even echo it, are well known, this — becoming a direct mouthpiece for the Iranian state — is a new and appalling development. Again it has not been mentioned in the rows currently engulfing Respect.
