More losers than winners

Speaking of losers, I was disappointed to see that R.U. Seerius, of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, went down to defeat in Erewash. Still, he did manage to get 287 votes, which was more than one half of one percent of the total. Good show.

“left-wing Labour MP Oona King” Hardly, she is an arch Blairite and firmly on the right of her party. Good riddence. (pity that George the loony got in though)

George Galloway material:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7665
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F70955DA-D1AA-41DF-AC4D-40001BCE0403.htm

Hmm

Yeah, I’ve never been able to figure out what the hell he could have been thinking when he decided to forge those receipts showing he’d been paid off by Saddam.

Galloway’s crime (at least as far as lending discredit to the anti-war movement), was in being obsequious to Saddam Hussein. The left lambasted Rumsfeld for shaking Saddam’s hand years before, but Galloway did anti-war people no favours by publicly complimenting Hussein on his many great qualities. Politicians often have to meet and even work with Very Bad People, but they don’t have to tell them how nice their cologne is.

So is Bethnal Green and Bow now renamed Saddam City?

What was so ‘left-wing’ about Oona King? I must have missed something. King was as Blairite as they come, as a brief search on Public Whip reveals. Is there some kind of unconscious racism happening here (‘black = radical’), or is this part of the pro-war left’s campaign against the equally odious Galloway?

BG&B was very much a Germany vs Argentina moment as far as I was concerned. Shame they couldn’t both lose.

Jeebus abb1, must you troll in almost every thread here?

/snark

abb1- You misunderstand me. Apparently because you didn’t see the comments on this post from the other day:

https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/05/janice-rogers-brown-revisited/

See comments #8 and 21,

my bad.

Abb1

According to media reports, following his “Sir, we salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability”, Galloway then went on to present Saddam Hussein with a pennant from Palestinian youth and to inform Hussein that the people he had visited in Palestine were naming their children after him. He then ended his oration with the words: “We are with you.”

While the first and last parts could conceivably have been addressed not to Saddam but to the Iraqi populace, the bit about Palestinians naming their kids after him could only be complimentary to Saddam. Galloway, described it as a mere ‘salient fact’, but only someone who wished to build up the person they were speaking to would say it in this context. If I had to meet Robert Mogabe, I wouldn’t tell him that I once read a letter to the editor extolling his wondrous leadership.

Here’s a Johann Hari (war supporter from the Independent) article outlining some of Galloway’s great oratory triumphs, including saying that the day the Soviet Union feel was the worst of his life, and Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds was merely part of ‘a civil war’ that ‘involved massive violence on both sides’. (Sorry, don’t know how to embed a link – can anyone tell me how?)http://www.progressives.org.uk/magazine/default.asp?action=magazine&articleid=882

On a side note (at least re the war), Galloway is anti-abortion, which would seem to be a bit of a bad fit with Respect’s supposedly leftist policies.

They’re now bigger than Plaid Cymru.

But a distant fourth place everywhere they stand so who cares? In any case, I personally think that they should win somewhere. If five percent of Britons are fascists, then there ought to be a fascist MP, I find myself saying with my democracy head on. If nothing else, it would stop the major parties from trying to court the fascist vote.

Despite my distaste and distrust for George, a really high profile toppling like this may be a very good thing for Labour as a whole and Gordon Brown in particular.

Ah, I didn’t see it. Thanks, Barry. However, I certainly do do some trolling once in a while, there’s no sense in denying. Trolling can be fun.

Oh, I know, I know. Personally, I reserve most of my trolling for Slashdot. (which is no longer nearly as much fun to troll as it used to be. I blame the .cx registry.)

The depressed turnout in Bethnal Green & Bow — 51%, the lowest I’ve seen for any constituency — is as significant as Gorgeous George’s victory.

That said, much of the most prominent anti-Galloway commentary comes from people who have their own, um, loyalities, such as Nick ‘Chalibi’s Palibi’ Cohen.

I’m surprised no-one mentioned Reg Keys’ speech at Sedgefield, which ought to have been the TV highlight, rather than the Paxo-Galloway ego-jousting. You simply don’t get that in American elections.

Hmm, Kenneth Baer, guest-blogging at Talking Points Memo, calls him “the far-far-far left, Islamist candidate George Galloway”. Even if he were pro-Saddam, how does that translate to Islamist?

Anyway, Galloway sounds like a loon, but I don’t think that excuses Paxman’s interview technique. I’ve heard no indication that Galloway is a racist, and even if he were, “Are you happy you knocked a black woman out of Parliament?” is no way to start an interview if you actually want it to continue.

“Even if he were pro-Saddam, how does that translate to Islamist?”, asks or enquires KCinDC.

It doesn’t, in itself. But his Respect party is an anti-war coalition of very-leftistes and Islamic persons and it has become conventional to slur it as Islamiste. (I don’t follow fringe politics closely enough to have an opinion of my own.)

Ken Baer’s post also includes organizing sister-city relationship with Nablus as an apparently self-evidently evil thing to do.

Ritual deploring is something to avoid, especially on command.

What a gigantic gulf between the British system and our increasingly monarchical one: Tony Blair has to stand right there and listen to vote totals for the ‘Tony Blair Must Go Party’ and stand within five feet of a woman wearing an enormous hat reading ‘LIAR’. And take in the ringing applause for the candidate whose son was killed in Iraq.

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free, middle-aged schoolteachers with the wrong bumper sticker on their car are physically hustled out of taxpaper-funded, public meetings at which our President takes scripted questions from carefully screened supporters.

But his Respect party is an anti-war coalition of very-leftistes and Islamic persons and it has become conventional to slur it as Islamiste.

If the Islamic persons involved aren’t primarily the sort of theocratic types who get called “Islamist” this strikes me as objectionable. Not all Muslims are Islamists, true?

Matt Weiner: Well, these aren’t my opinions. The New Statesman says:

“The worst result of the night – from Beth- nal Green and Bow, as Respect, an alliance between the intellectually bankrupt Marxist-Leninists of the Socialist Workers Party and Islamic fundamentalists, propels its leader, a man who “saluted” Iraqi fascism, to victory. Let’s not mince words. George Galloway’s defeat of Oona King is a disaster for the democratic left. As the campaign was fought on communalist lines, it is a disaster for multiracial London as well.”

How theocratic Galloway’s partners are I have no idea. Does anyone actually know anything about this, or are we stuck with slurology?

Paxman has jumped the shark.

Re Galloway, can any of his supporters (or non-detractors) recall an occasion when he captured an audience or united people behind him by speaking positively about something? He’s the type of angryman poltico who needs an enemy, needs to be shouting at something.

Regarding what he’ll do for the community, I’m not sure that I’ve got all the facts straight (I’ve heard it second hand from a trustworthy source, but haven’t verified the details), but the following is generally correct:
Apparently, MPs are alloted a certain amount of money for a parliamentary secretary. According to a friend who worked on the Labour campaign, Oona King went without a secretary, instead using that money to pay housing officers who cranked through 20,000 housing complaints and issues a year for her constituency.

Is Galloway, who lives like a pasha and thrives on conflict and camera lenses, going to sacrifice a parliamentary secretary for housing officers? Unlikely. Is he going to get his hands dirty with the little stuff that a poverty-filled area like this needs? Unlikely.

He feeds on anger and outrage, and that got him elected. But anger isn’t going to look at 20,000 housing complaints a year.

Is whatever Galloway said about Saddam any worse than what Bush says about Putin?

If we allow for the ordinary b.s. quotient in political dealings of all types, I would suggest this takes us back to the underlying policies, where GG compares well to GB.

Rule of Thumb: believe nothing in The New Republic concerning the Middle East.

For someone who (allegedly) completed a doctorate in politics at Oxford, Kenneth Baer is a remarkably rubbish commentator: his comments on Rochdale, for instance, are a sad little snipe at Howard Dean, apparently ignoring the fact that it was Cyril Smith’s old haunting ground, and basically on loan from the Lib Dems for the past decade.

AFAICT, Galloway was pretty much loved by his constituents in Kelvin, but didn’t do all that much actual work for them in the sense of housing complaints and parking tickets. They liked him (and reelected him with ever-increasing majorities) because he was a gobby socialist politician, and up in that bit of Glesgae they like their socialists short and mouthy. In my opinion, being a “good constituency MP” is wildly over-rated; it is entirely possible for people to vote for a politician on the grounds of their politics, rather than as a stopgap for having a crap council (and indeed, Tower Hamlets isn’t a crap council; I’d rather live a year in TH than a month in Lambeth).

KCinDC –

Galloway had that bit during the campaign where he talked about the 100,000 people who have died in Iraq, and how many of them have darker skins than King. Having brought race into it himself, it seems like fair game to me.

In any case, having watched the interview myself, I can’t believe how poorly he handled the question. Where did he ever get the reputation for being media-savvy?

He should have said it was on Labour, not him, that they had so few black, female MPs.

I’m surprised that so many see this result as anything but a damn good result for the Labour Party. Think about it:

a) The Tories have proved that even with a weakened Labour Party (after 8 years in office, mind) led a relatively unpopular leader, they have made almost no real electoral ground. Their minor gains in the South are hardly the stuff of a real comeback. As Norman Tebbit (of all people) said today, they have not anything like enough to prepare to win the next election. Bear in mind that the Labour majority is OVERALL, not just over the Tories.

Notably, the Tories failed to take almost any of their targets outside the South East, suggesting that the seismic shift of 97 in places like Edgbaston are more permanent.

b) The Lib Dems capitalised on left wing disaffection with Iraq, occasionally with remarkable results (Leeds NW, Manc Withington), but where do they go from here? They have alienated their more centre-soft right support, illustrated by their total failure to ‘decapitate’ any but one of their Tory targets. With Blair – the focus of the Iraq ire – gone next election, who’s betting that this ‘new era of 3 party politics’ won’t even last one term?

c) The Labour Party suffered from their own voters primarily on Iraq. There is some evidence that immigration may have spoken to South Eastern voters, but on the whole, as Labour preside over improving public services and a healthy economy, Tory pot shots at their record failed to hit the target. And with Brown ready to step into Blair’s shoes, the damage done by Iraq could soon be a distant memory (I’m not suggesting this is right or just, just that it’s likely).

Personally, I’m delighted that the Labour Party have a majority of this size, particularly with the re-election of so many committed Labour rebels. The more contentious issues surrounding identity cards and the right to jury trial are dead in the water IMHO. Blair would be a fool to push his ‘radical’ agenda: he will only risk tarnishing his legacy further and proving that old maxim about all political careers ending in
failure. And it will be fascinating seeing him having to grapple with the beast he’s never bothered to address: the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Meanwhile, Brown must be rubbing his hands with glee…

dsquared, I have just the one incident (which it will take forever to find) and a general impression given by the piece about it. But anyway, if you think “being a good constituency MP” isn’t important (unless Oona King was, in which case it is) then your previous comments on Galloway (i.e. that he wasn’t a good constituency MP) aren’t relevant.

(Etc., in agreement with Matthew.)

I do feel rather strongly about your cavalier dismissal of a) Galloway and b) “good constituency MPs”, and while that may be mainly, now, because I badly need one (not just because of a crap council, but because of a crap National Assembly), it is also because of earlier encounters and experiences. I accept that if I had a lot more money and/or full private health insurance and a car (etc.) or if I got the kind of NHS treatment I got when I lived in London, I might think differently. But I doubt it. My first MP was the Tory who held a Welsh seat for years because he was a good constituency MP. You may well think we Welsh dwarves like our MPs nasty, brutish and short, like us, whether they’re socialist or not (I think I’d better stop before I get thrown off this place for saying what I feel like saying)

yup, there he goes. Sucks to be Oliver Kamm, apparently.

peter, try ‘Blood and Treasure’.

Jayanne,

If I understand you correctly, you fall into the area cited by (who’d have thunk it?) John Lennon, when he said, ‘There’s not enough of a gap between the two main parties, but a lot of people live in that gap.’ That is, the difference between the parties might not seem like much to some of us, but they’re pretty damn big to the people affected by the policy differences therein.

Whether you’re Labour, Tory or Lib Dem, policies really do matter, and those who dismiss the differences between parties (and the value of constituency MPs) are:
a) being facetious, and/or
b) flaunting their privilege – ie rejoicing in the fact that their lives are going to pretty damn fine no matter who’s in charge.

“According to a friend who worked on the Labour campaign, Oona King went without a secretary, instead using that money to pay housing officers who cranked through 20,000 housing complaints and issues a year for her constituency.”

I suggest you think through that claim more carefully. I don’t know what a parliamentary secretary is paid, but an MP only gets £57k a year (this one paid his entire staff £75k in 2003-4), and I don’t think you’re going to get all that many competent housing officers for the price of a secretary (we’re not talking filing clerks here). In order to get through 20,000 complaints a year, between them they’d have to deal with at least 80 complaints per working day.

Let’s just say that I think there’s a teeny bit of exaggeration going on here.

“So far, all I’ve been able to come across anti-leftist leftists like Oliver Kamm and Harry’s Place, on the one hand, and neo-Leninist websites, on the other hand.” – Peter

Harry’s Place is not anti-Leftist although Oliver Kamm is another matter. Paul Anderson’s ‘Gauche’ blog (libsoc.blogspot.com)is one of my favourite l/w blogs, another good one is Chris Brooke’s ‘The Virtual Stoa’ (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html) then there’s ‘Socialism in an Age of Waiting’ (http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/), although that one might be described as far-left and you might think of them as anti-leftist leftists. Same goes for Norman Geras’s ‘Normblog’ (normblog.typepad.com), but both are well worth reading. ‘Shot by Both Sides’ (http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/) is also entertaining, even if the blogger does support the (boo hiss) Liberal Democrats.

oniongravy: one poll suggests only 33% of Labour ‘defectors’ to the LDs cited Iraq as a major motivating factor. OK, it’s a lot, and it’s only a poll, but it might well be indicative. Issues like top-up fees and, well, all manner of things might be behind a shift in the vote, especially among, say, liberal-minded students who have no long-term commitment to the Labour Party but have no time for the hard left. I have no doubt that the LDs will continue to make minor election-on-election gains, the real problem is that every single bloody election they’ll claim “it’s a new era of three-party politics” (1997, 2001, anyone?) when they’ll still be eluded by the kind of really significant breakthrough moment that will actually give that motto some substance.

Nick, Baer’s “sad little snipe” apparently so impressed Kevin Drum that it’s now in the sidebar at Washington Monthly.