The Daily Record - George Galloway

Socialism would wither and die in independent Scotland

2012-05-28T06:25:35Z

FOR the best part of 20 years I sat in parliament with Dennis Canavan, the then-bearded Leviathan on the left-wing Labour benches.

The same religion, the same politics, the same football team. I co-founded Scotland United with him, to campaign for a powerful parliament for Scotland, upon which we were both denounced by Donald Dewar as "collaborators" (with the SNP).

When New Labour treated him shamefully, describing him as "just not good enough" to be in the Scottish Parliament, I stood by him, backing his election as an Independent MSP.

Last week on Scottish TV, he described me as his 'erstwhile comrade' because he has thrown in his lot with the SNP.

It was the shape of things to come and a measure of the divisiveness of nationalism in this small country. Brother will be turned against brother, families will be separated, motives will be questioned, and scars will never heal.

It is the wrong course for our country as each passing day makes more clear.

A numpty tweeted last night in relation to my views on Ireland: "So, it's OK for Ireland to be independent, but not Scotland. Twisted logic".

I replied: "But it is OK, Scotland can be independent if it chooses (unlike Ireland). So why don't you have a referendum, now, to find out?"

The SNP have been offering independence to us since the 30s, an offer unsubscribed to by the great majority. They could have a referendum now to settle the question, but instead plan one in 800 days, maybe.

The Irish did vote for unity and independence nearly 100 years ago, and their choice was drowned in blood and Scottish settler terror.

There are no settlers in Scotland. If we want independence, not a shot will be fired to stop it. Scotland is not a colony of England as Ireland was (indeed many English think we're colonising them). Rather Scotland and England colonised the world.

Bigger numpties like to make a similar point in relation to my views on Palestine. But Palestine has been wiped off the map. Its people driven out as refugees. Scottish separatism treated on its own merits just doesn't stack up.

Despite the convert Canavan, Scotland would be less socialist, not more. The only way it could compete with the permanently right-wing England it would leave behind, would be a race to the bottom in wages, public services, corporation tax, income tax and so on.

That's why Canavan's new found "comrades" such as Stagecoach boss Brian Soutar and other provincial Scots business figures are on his side.

And when things get worse in our country as a result, in time we'd look around for someone to blame.

Who knows who the finger of suspicion would be pointed at? Maybe Scottish Roman Catholics from Irish immigrant stock, with their peculiar ways, names and schools. Why not? It's happened before, Comrade Canavan, hasn't it? I am not a "Unionist", I don't think they'd accept me into that club.

I'm a socialist, or if you like, a Labourist. I have nothing in common with Brian Soutar, beyond the accident of birth of entering this world in the same parish.

I share neither faith nor political values with him, in fact I hate everything he stands for.

A bus driver in Newcastle, Liverpool or Blackburn, with whom I may share the same language, culture and outlook, is not a foreigner to me - it is Soutar who is the foreigner to me.

The fact that many other Scottish socialists of our vintage have betrayed the jersey is not a reason for losing faith in the team, or for joining our bitter rivals whose creed is division, nation against nation, whose plan can only mean partition and the weakening of working people on both sides of a wholly unnecessary border.

Canavan and I were once supporters of a multi-national, multi-faith socialist country called Yugoslavia.

Our mutual enemies put a lot of time and money into fanning the flames of separatism, encouraging sectarianism, ethnic and religious hatred. Nobody reading this, least of all him, needs any reminder of how all that worked out.

Blitz spirit lives on

2012-05-28T05:49:30Z

THERE is an occupation I support. That's the one that occurred at the hole in the ground where the heart of Bradford city centre used to be.

The Tory council dug the hole in return for a non-binding, no-penalty clause that Westfield, the mega shopping mall people, would fill it in.

New Labour have presided over seven long years, in which the city centre resembles Clydebank after the Blitz, and have done nothing about it.

Now the people have moved to take it over.

There are tents springing up, braziers blazing, chicken tikka on the makeshift grills, guitars, footballs, shisha pipes, an alfresco university, litter details, banners and art. New leaders are emerging.

It feels like the early days of the UCS, not least when I told them on Saturday, as the great Jimmy Reid famously did: "There'll be no bevvying... the whole world is watching!" (Easier to enforce in Bradford than Clydebank in the early 70s).

Scots author and journalist - and my best pal - Ron McKay helped them over the wall.

He strode towards me in an Occupy Guy Fawkes-type mask.

He nearly fooled me. Until, from behind the mask, I heard the familiar Springburn roar at a potentially errant youth: "Whoa..you? Put that f****** Carlsberg back in your bag".

Olympian Carlos is solid gold

2012-05-28T05:48:14Z

I ORGANISED a meeting at the weekend featuring Olympic medal winner John Carlos.

Forty four years ago Carlos and fellow winners Tommie Smith and Peter Norman staged a protest against racism, bigotry and discrimination in America from the victors rostrum in Mexico City.

Carlos and Smith held up their black-gloved, clenched fists as the stars and stripes was raised and God bless America blared out across the world in the first international live televised Olympics.

You'd have had to be alive then to imagine the impact this had, particularly in an America where Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had just been martyred for their support of black rights.

Carlos is one of the most charismatic men I have ever met, a truly beautiful human being. His book, The John Carlos Story, is solid gold too.

Sky is the limit for the left's war on austerity

2012-05-21T06:30:17Z

THE first flight I ever took was Aer Lingus, in the 60s, to Dublin.

As was the latest, at the weekend, to appear on the state broadcaster with a desperate housewife (not my own, I assure you, who is in any case an anthropologist, a writer, an activist, not a housewife and far from desperate).

The housewife in question was Bree van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), fresh as a daisy at 49 from filming the last episode of the hit TV series I have followed from the start.

And having given birth to her only two children, twin girls, at the age of 44, when in her words she had "given up", squeezing in the filming, almost between contractions, such was the demand for the show.

Turns out Marcia, below - a domestic goddess as flame-haired temptress Bree - is no housewife either, hardly able to boil an egg, though her character was Nigella Lawson with attitude.

A trained psychologist, with her style and grace she took the Irish audience by storm, including us, and her husband is a good egg too, congratulating me on my biting attacks over the years on George W Bush.

Aer Lingus, like most airlines, have gone downhill since the 60s. Air travel then was like a journey in a white table-clothed Pullman compared with the cattle-truck experience of today.

Willie Walsh, who wrecked British Airways, earlier wrecked the now privatised Irish flag-carrier, and the scars are still visible. Especially the understaffing.

On my 45-minute flight (virtually empty) the (expensive) coffee was served as we were coming in to land in Dublin and had to be collected in again barely sipped.

Bizarrely (almost certainly not a throwback to earlier, more innocent Irish days), we were asked by the Aer Lingus check-in woman in Manchester if we were married before she would issue our boarding passes.

Ireland is going downhill fast too, sunk in bitter controversy over the economic collapse of the former Celtic Tiger - caused by the bankers and corrupt governance by the "nationalist" party Fianna Fáil. But at least Ireland gets to vote on the solutions (albeit again and again until they come up with the "right" answer).

Coming soon they have a referendum on the eurozone "Stability Treaty", which binds them in by law and forever to the voodoo economics of their masters (and ours).

Just like here, all the mainstream parties are on the same page on these things, and for a YES vote. The

underfunded NO campaign consists of Sinn Fein and the fine collection of socialists in the Irish parliament. No prizes for guessing where I stand, or that I believe we are going to win.

All over Europe the turn to the left is under way, in the "Bradford Spring", in Greece, France, even in Holland, where the Respect equivalent are actually in front in the opinion polls and may form the next government, having started life as a hardy, worthy but dull outfit of Maoists. Mao! In Holland!

Our own "nationalist" government used to urge us to lie down with the Celtic Tigers of course.

Vote SNP, they used to say, and we too could be like Ireland. Or even Iceland, where the former prime minister has been before the courts and popular anger is erupting over the ash-strewn, formerly booming economic miracle, a small capitalist statelet now resembling Pompeii after the last days had gone. A smoking ruin.

BT were once a source of national pride too but since privatisation, outsourcing of jobs and massive redundancies are beginning to look something like Ryanair.

I'm a "VIP Platinum" customer of O2. Last month they threatened me with disconnection over an "unpaid" bill for £37 (which turned out to have been paid amid a larger bill), and this month again over £78 (which included the formerly paid "unpaid" bill).

My son-in-law phoned up to pay on Saturday but they couldn't accept the money on account of the fact that "Mr Galloway is a VIP Platinum customer and, er, the VIP Platinum section don't work on Saturdays".

"And if he'd been Joe Soap, you could accept the money?" asked my son-in-law.

"Yes," said the far from bashful O2 official, all the way from Bombay.

Megrahi innocent

2012-05-21T05:52:40Z

SO, al-Megrahi wasn't kidding after all. The patsy, fitted up and left to rot for the Lockerbie massacre, was only a pawn in their game.

Even his release was riddled with perfidy, north and south of the Border, and involving both New Labour and the SNP, Jack Straw and Tony Blair (Colonel Gaddafi's close friend and adviser, according to the dictator's son), Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill.

More than a year since the collection of British and American stooges and rampant Islamist extremists were bombed by us into power in Tripoli, we still don't know the truth about Libyan involvement in the greatest crime in Scottish history. That's because the truth is inconvenient.

Megrahi was an innocent man, and Libya, whatever other crimes they were responsible for, were pure dead innocent of this one.

Facebook is just fantasy

2012-05-21T05:23:16Z

FACEBOOK is the most valuable company on Earth. Doesn't that speak volumes?

It doesn't do anything or make anything. It can't be touched or, in my experience, even be reached.

In fact it doesn't in any real sense exist, being merely an ethereal experience.

Its founder made $20billion last week.

An economic system based on pushing speculative numbers around on computer screens, talking to each other usually about rubbish and rarely with anything to show for it, running up unpayable debts and printing non-existent money to keep it all going is surely doomed.

Unfortunately, that's the system we live under.

I'm scunnered by bigots of the Brigadoon brigade

2012-05-14T06:30:29Z

IN an interview published in the Sunday Mail yesterday, I was arguing the case against the partition of this small island of English speakers.

Predictably, the piece brought a rush of abuse from the anonymous internet bravehearts who lurk in the undergrowth, waiting for apostates from the "White Heather Club" school of political science to stone.

In fact not a few of them (even on a Sunday morning) had clearly started on the cream sherry.

Many departed from the premise that anyone who could be elected to the House of Commons six times in four constituencies in two countries and be, well, quite prominent in politics, actually was clearly an idiot.

Merely to say so in language as colourful as the tartan was sufficient to defeat their views.

You can be the judge of that, dear readers. These critics didn't bother me. I've faced worse.

What was more troubling, because it prefigured what a separate Scotland might be like, was what can only be described as a virulent hatred of English people and a belief they are the source of Scotland's troubles - and getting shot of them is the solution.

Several stated that I am "practically English now" and therefore had no right to a view anyway. "Butt out" was their war cry.

Unluckily for them, I am not easily intimidated. I'm not going away.

I will be having my say.

And not just because I am as Scottish as they are.

The idea that if you don't believe in Scotland as a mist-shrouded obscurantist Brigadoon, you're not Scottish at all is a recipe for deep division, akin to that which scarred post-independence Ireland.

Alex Salmond, if he was a truly national leader rather than merely a schism-master, would slap this kind of nonsense down, but he dare not.

These are his soldiers, and like Wellington's at Waterloo, they should at least half frighten him.

But they don't.

I was born and brought up in Scotland and lived there for half my life. That makes me Scottish, right?

I was an elected politician in Scotland's greatest city for many years. That surely gives me a right to a political view on my country's future, no?

Unless there's a hidden agenda here and that it's not where I live now, but where my grandparents came from, that scunners these separatist bigots?

Anyway, I will speak and publish and if damned, well, at least I will have given it my best shot.

I think partitioning a small country in a small, increasingly volatile world would be bad for Scotland and bad for England, too.

England would be a permanently right wing, low tax, low public spending economy.

Anyone who thinks that wouldn't be bad for Scotland clearly doesn't understand capitalist economics.

Such an England would hoover up Scottish capitalism like a Dyson.

Why on earth would anyone with big earning power not relocate to England under those circumstances? Why would any business stay in a high tax, big spend Scotland when, at the stroke of moving to Berwick, they would be many quids in?

And if Scotland joined right wing England in a race to the bottom on tax and spend, what would be in it for you in independence?

If we had wanted to live under Thatcherism, we needn't have told her to stick her poll tax up her a*** and rise up against her.

I say quids in but of course a separate Scotland might have joined the Euro.

Do I really need to say any more on that? Have you SEEN the news from the Eurozone?

And if we'd stayed with the pound, what would actually be "independent" about that?

The Bank of England would HAVE to set the interest rate - you can't have two rates on the same currency in a country joined at the hip, at least geographically speaking.

So, the economic climate would be designed in the City of London and with the English economy in mind, not ours.

Scotland's already disastrous economic position would be worsened for sure, and what would happen then?

Let me speculate.

The bravehearts, further embittered, would turn on someone, anyone.

The English, in abstract, maybe even in person.

The "unionists" (like me) who have somehow poisoned the Brigadoon independence well.

Maybe the immigrants, the asylum seekers, maybe even an earlier generation of immigrants from Catholic Ireland (again, like me). Of course I may be wrong. Maybe the Scots would slide down the toilet without nursing their wrath to keep it warm.

But when I lived in Scotland I must say, I always thought us aye ready to blame somebody else for our ills.

After all, wha's like us? Gey few?

Then it didn't matter so much. We were a small nation in a bigger
multinational, multicultural social democracy, in part secured by well over 50 social democratic Scottish members of Parliament.

In Brigadoon, we'd be on our own and social democracy would be a thing of the past.

The lurkers might just emerge from the undergrowth.

Maybe, maybe not.

Does anyone want to take the risk?

Egypt will rise as beating heart of the Arab world

2012-05-14T05:56:43Z

I'm in Cairo for a couple of days, where one of my friends may well be elected as the president of Egypt by the end of the month.

Even now, that sentence, though I wrote it, is hard for me to believe.

Until just a few weeks ago, I was banned from Egypt.The idea that anyone could be president there whose name wasn't Mubarak was fanciful.

And that there would be anything which could be called an election, wow... So now I'm sitting on a balcony looking down on the Nile and inthe distance I can see the majestic pyramids.

I can see that all the important Arabs are here, too, in what was once the beating heart of the Arab world and will, I predict, be so once again.

It's not a Brad old life

2012-05-14T05:05:33Z

I'm in Egypt on the lookout for investment for Bradford, the city where I've quite a personal stake myself now.

For the football club Bradford City (near bottom in the old fourth division - the only way is up!) and for the iconic Odeon building left to simply rot and crumble in the city centre.

And for the future of a city where half of the people are under 25 years old and more of them are unemployed than practically anywhere else in the whole country.

It's a big job, but I'd rather be doing it than anything else in the whole world.

Wish me luck if you're going to wave me goodbye.

It's time to seize initiative and stop sleekit Salmond

2012-05-07T06:25:33Z

LABOUR saved Glasgow - its Stalingrad. Like the Garscadden by-election, in which I worked in another lifetime as a party organiser in 1978, this may be the turning of the tide against separatism in Scotland.

In this battle I am with my old party, as I have made clear many times.

So-called independence for Scotland would be bad for us and disastrous for working people in England.

A permanently right-wing England (which would still control our currency, unless we joined the Euro) could not possibly benefit the Scots. Yet that would be the result of taking Scottish seats out of Westminster.

I declare an interest. My first duty now is to fight for an overwhelmingly poor northern English city abandoned to its fate by the capitalism which once made it great.

In 1903 Bradford was the second city in England, with more millionaires per head of population than anywhere in the whole world.

A century on, it is sinking into the abyss.

The mills and workshops, which once whistled and sang with the clatter of manufacturing, are now, not yuppy flats like in Manchester, but derelict.

The city doesn't even have the money to turn them into museums.

I could, of course, be writing about Glasgow, or many other parts of 'post-industrial' Britain.

And that's my point. The unemployed people in Bradford speak the same language as those in Bathgate.

They eat the same food, watch the same television, read the same things and follow the same sports.

If they are in work they do so for the same companies and join, I hope, the same unions.

They are not foreigners to you. The oldest among them fought in the same war as the oldest among you, for a time alone, to save the world from fascism.

After Stalingrad came Kursk. The forthcoming referendum on partition is our Kursk. It's high time Scottish Labour seized the initiative.

Let battle begin. Of course it helped that Alex Salmond was revealed as the sleekit conniving twister I always said he was - nicer in public than in private.

But it was private and confidential alright. His dirty dealings with Rupert Murdoch. Little did we know the 'quid pro quo' for the gutter-Sun's support for the SNP was Salmond's firm lobbying for the Dirty Digger's ownership of BSkyB.

I reviewed the newspapers for Sky last Saturday. As happens surprisingly often, I was with a female Murdoch print journalist as my fellow reviewer.

Naturally there was yet another Murdoch scandal on the front pages, involving David Cameron, George Osborne and William Hague.

Sky News, which is not under Murdoch's control, has played this story with a straight bat. The print journos, who are under his control are, well, embarrassing. Check it out on YouTube.

The deluded who think Salmond and the SNP represent some of kind of socialism take note.

The likes of Tony Blair, Cameron, Nick Clegg and Salmond are all creatures of their age (which may be coming to an end) without principles scruples or shame.

They could all easily have been in the same party and stand for the same thing. Nothing.

Different cheeks, same backside.

Ready to race to the rescue

2012-05-07T05:54:00Z

I AM predicting that Rupert Murdoch will be divesting himself of his newspaper titles in Britain.

But don't expect a management buyout because some of them could be otherwise occupied, handing out books and sewing mailbags.

Yesterday his Sunday Times published its Rich List of sports people.

Becks was first, worth about £160 million, but the man holding the number five position may be unknown to most.

He's loosely described as a motor racer, although he retired in 1991 and had only one unsuccessful year in F1.

He's Johnny Dumfries, aka the Marquess of Bute.

He didn't make his wealth behind the wheel, he inherited it in 1993 from his old man. The legacy was £144 million and he's now worth a meagre £110 million. So Johnny's pips have really squeaked!

Never mind old chap, Gideon Osborne is coming to your rescue.

Respect is surely due

2012-05-07T05:52:43Z

WE fairly kicked backsides last week.

In just over 50 days, Respect has arrived in Bradford, won a landslide parliamentary by-election victory, won five rock-solid seats on the city council, gutted the leader, come second in three other seats and held the balance of power on that council.

A group of extremist Muslims, led by Anjem Choudary, the poppy burner, were burning green and red Respect rosettes in Bradford, claiming that democracy is forbidden for Muslims and telling me to go home - the last time that was shouted at me was in Airdrie.

The same day the Liberal Democrats were declaring we were the extremists.

In fact, we are the antidote to these extremists. We have shown democracy is not only not forbidden, but that it can work, that a people united cannot easily be defeated.

While they sow separatism, isolation, even violence, we seek the fruits of those universal values - justice, equality, peace and amity between the people and the faiths. You decide.

Film star treatment

2012-05-07T05:45:29Z

I WAS on Question Time with Labour's Yvette Cooper recently.

She's blasting the backdoor service where wealthy passengers can jump the queues at Heathrow if they fork out £1800.

If the only way to avoid them, she says, is to spend an extra grand then Britain's reputation is in shreds.

There is another way - win a crucial by-election in an English city.

On a visit to Lebanon I was given VIP treatment, a seat and passengers cheered and clapped as if I was a film star.

Sons set on Murdoch's empire of The Sun

2012-04-30T14:00:00Z

NOT since Fredo has a Godfather had a weaker vessel for a son than James Murdoch.

Rupert's genes sure haven't fitted properly, yet James was still placed in a position where he has effectively made it impossible for his father to continue in the British media market.

That's why the family business virtually exploded their British operation last week before the Leveson Inquiry.

The cherished goal of gaining 100 per cent ownership of Sky went up in smoke with the Milly Dowler revelations. The downmarket newspapers in the group are increasingly not worth the grief they are causing shareholders in the States.

They have burned their bridges with New Labour, to whom they were cheek to cheek close - Tony Blair, clad in white, actually got into the River Jordan up to his waist to assist in the baptism of Murdoch's latest child.

It was a kind of secret ceremony, although every British journalist and broadcaster knows it, they just didn't tell you.

Emails would surely show the disgustingly intimate relations between the Gordon Browns and the Murdochs and their factotums.

Pyjama parties at Chequers were just the half of it. Blair at least knew that Rupe followed the Bob Monkhouse school: "Once you can fake the sincerity - the rest is easy".

Brown thought it was all for real, as can be seen in his injured indignation now that Murdoch has testified under oath how he really felt about him.

The family threw in their lot with the Cameroons, David Cameron and co.

The guttersnipes who do their bidding, and are sometimes called journalists, threw out the old and brought in the new with gusto.

Good became bad, truth became falsehood. While two legs New Labour-style had been more than a decade in vogue, four-legged Tory rats were now the coming thing.

It was compact, almost satanic, in its simple badness. Murdoch now describes Brown as being "unbalanced".

He must have been to have believed these rodents gave a damn about him and his family in the first place.

Then the wind changed and the Cameroons became embarrassed to be seen with their uncouth colonial cousin.

Having hired one of Murdoch's butlers, Andy Coulson, as his No10 communications director, the British Cabinet slowly began to see the waters of the phone hacking scandal rise around them.

Naturally, they let Coulson walk the plank but with each arrest and the prospect of devastating trials to come, the Murdochs have become fatally toxic for any British politician.

It's terminal.

Thus the family laid the gunpowder trail out at Leveson last week and lit the touchpaper.

The Profumo scandal, which destroyed the last plutocratic Tory cabinet almost 50 years ago, will have nothing on the revenge of the uncouth colonial cousins. A case of "wish me f*** as you wave me goodbye".

The women around Murdoch seem altogether more capable than the men.

His daughter Elizabeth is big in TV without ever having hacked anyone's phone or email. And crouching tiger hidden dragon wife Wendi proved she's worth 10 men when she banjoed the custard pie assailant in the House of Commons.

If I were Rupe, I'd give the keys of the company to the females.

He has another two young girls growing up and into the jobs.

Boy Lachlan was a failure, James is a failure. But keep it in the family.

His choice of Rebekah Wade as company majordomo surely proves it.

Jeremy Hunt will, I predict, be run to ground and his red coat won't save him from being torn to pieces, his blood smeared across the foreheads of his pursuers.

But what of slippery Salmond? Has he been gaffed by James Murdoch's flood of emails? Many of us had wondered why the Sun suddenly switched to support the separatists at the last Holyrood election.

It seemed so out of character for such a rabid right-wing rag, with Eck strutting as a Socialist and all. Now we know.

It was a pact of which Faust would have been proud. As the emails put it "we (News International) will ensure more favourable coverage of Alex Salmond and the quid pro quo will be that the First Minister will intervene with Hunt at the appropriate time".

Salmond says that he got into bed with the devil to safeguard low-paid Scottish jobs in a call centre, not a consideration that hinders his pledge to scrap the nuclear weapons-related jobs at Faslane, or in the Royal Navy shipyards for that matter.

Weir off to chippie

2012-04-30T05:07:30Z

They could have hired a famous face, such as Gordon Ramsay, but Lotto millionaires Colin and Christine Weir have chosen as their personal chef a cook who used to work in a Largs care home.

The couple won £161million and have been spreading around portions of their wealth.

Among the recipients of their largesse has been Largs' Viking fish and chip shop, twice a week, in the shape of two fish suppers.

They appear to be a well-adjusted couple and - as someone who can comment as he has lost more than a stone on the campaign trail - well-padded.

Hopefully, Wendy McGregor, the new chef catering to their whims, can work in a few salads.