The gall of Galloway, exploiting ire

IN the small hours of Friday, George Galloway took to the stage in West Yorkshire and declared the "Bradford Spring" - an "uprising" of ordinary people against the political establishment. As ever with Galloway, those who knew anything about him were impressed mostly by his shamelessness.

This was the man who, as the Arab Spring got under way in Syria, continued to express his admiration for the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a man of "reforming zeal" possessed of "a vision of Syria as a genuinely independent Arab country".

None of that had mattered to most of those who voted in the Bradford West by-election. If solidarity with oppressed Muslims abroad was part of the Galloway appeal, such fellow feeling did not extend to the people of Homs. As it did not to those taking such risks for democracy in Iran - a country for whose state propaganda outfit, Press TV, Galloway has in his time done much service.

So what did matter? Why have Bradfordians wound up with the slate-voiced pussy of the Big Brother house as their member of parliament? Asked on radio about his victory and her party's defeat, Labour's Harriet Harman referred several times to the "particular problems" of the constituency but declined to specify what they were. It seems to me, however, that such circumspection is unnecessary.

Galloway, expelled by Labour in 2003, would not have stood in Bradford West had it not contained a very substantial Muslim population. In the general election of 2005, he fought and won the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow. The Muslim population there was about 40 per cent and he won with 36 per cent of the vote. In 2010 he stood in Poplar, East London, where the Muslim community represents more than 33 per cent. There was no collapse in the Tory vote and Mr Galloway came third with 17 per cent.

He passed on the previous by-elections in this parliament, standing only in Scotland last May, where his party, Respect, achieved a vote of 3 per cent (the Muslim population of Glasgow is about 3 per cent, but most will have voted for other parties). Then along comes Bradford West, about 38 per cent Muslim, according to the 2001 census.

So Galloway is a specialist targeter of British Muslim votes. The idea spread by his Respect colleagues that his main attraction was his anti-austerity stance doesn't bear even cursory examination. Indeed, in Bradford some of his appeal was couched in sectional and religious language unprecedented in the past 60 years of British politics. One of his leaflets began thus: "God knows who is a Muslim. And he knows who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for."

Galloway claims to lead the decent, pious life: "I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidate in this election can say that truthfully."

While readers pick themselves up off the floor, I should add that those who have followed Galloway for years will smile at the omission of adultery from the list of vices he abjures. I should just add that almost no Galloway event or pronouncement is now complete without several invocations of Allah in some form.

But the Labour candidate, Imran Hussain, was also a Muslim. What he couldn't do, however, was what Galloway is so good at - rousing popular anger at the Establishment (of which Labour is inevitably part) and playing on a sense of grievance and victimhood that is particular to some Muslim communities.

The reason Iraq, for instance, evokes a response but Galloway's backing for the killers of Muslims in Syria does not, is because it fits a narrative of Muslims being oppressed by outsiders. It creates an internal community solidarity that would otherwise be eroded by the modern condition of Britain.

Some of this may explain why Ken Livingstone has managed to have a run-in with some of London's Jews. Not only has he been oddly insensitive to the Jewish community but at the same time he has courted Muslim opinion with a creepy assiduity. This culminated in his speech to the Finsbury Park mosque two weeks ago in which he promised to "educate the mass of Londoners" in the teachings of Islam. Speaking about Mohammed's last sermon, he said: "I want to spend the next four years making sure that every non-Muslim in London knows and understands (its) words."

It may be that Livingstone has, unnoticed, made similar promises to Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Methodists, Mormons, Scientologists and others about their prophets and gurus. But we doubts it, My Precious, don't we, because we knows there are no voteses in it.

Galloway's victory shows something else too that has nothing to do with communalism. As Labour leader Ed Miliband pointed out, only four in 10 Bradford voters chose the three main parties. When something else plausible and exciting comes along, (even if it is only a dictator-loving retread demagogue), many voters would like to flirt with it.

And that's why we have back in parliament a man whose first tweet after the election read: "Long live Iraq. Long live Palestine, free, Arab, dignified." Uninterested in domestic concerns, Galloway is probably the first Arab nationalist to be elected to the British parliament.