Galloway to speak at Marxism posted by Richard Seymour

Given all that has happened, this is certainly worth plugging:

Labels: george galloway, labour, marxism, marxism 2012, respect, socialism, swp

Of media bubbles, comfort zones and twitstorms posted by Richard Seymour

You know, I like Mehdi Hasan, or those bits of him which can be read.  He makes the right enemies, opposes Islamophobia, is antiwar and is far more critical of both Obama and the Labour leadership than most in his position are willing to be.  I also notice when he RTs my stuff on Twitter, and glow a little inside.  (Oh, save your sanctimony, I need the approval.)  But then this: a big whatthefuck sandwich.

In effect, I would argue, the article faces in two directions simultaneously.  Formally, it is addressed to British Muslims, a wake-up call, an appeal to get their skates on and join in more in wider political issues.  Substantively, it is addressed to a wider audience, as an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable and aberrant behaviour of Muslim voters in Bradford West.  It says, Muslims are obsessed with foreign affairs, and thus appear to be foreign; they care only about war and don't join in the wider arguments about inequality or the NHS; they respond only to that which specifically affects Muslims as Muslims, the least expansive kind of identity politics, and in effect isolate themselves from wider British public life.  Acknowledging the chilling effects of so-called anti-terrorism legislation on political activism by Muslims, it nonetheless blames them for inhabiting an "antiwar comfort-zone" and exhorts them to abandon it.

Addressing Bradford specifically, the article insists that Muslims weren't enthused by the anti-austerity message of Respect, and only knew that its candidate George Galloway was antiwar and pro-Muslim.  The authority for this piece of information is a local Labour student.  So there you have it: the degeneration in our parliamenary democracy, the fragility of mountainous Labour majorities (demonstrated well beyond Bradford West), the collapse in coalition parties' support, the polarisation and volatility of politics in the age of austerity... all of this can be set aside, for the main cause of the result in Bradford West is a political pathology among British Muslims.

Okay.  This isn't the worst example of its kind.  Given the source, it is a disappointment, but you come to expect this from pundits.  And most of the British punditocracy just did not get it about Bradford West; never mind foresight, twenty-twenty hindsight would have been nice.  They were left trying to cobble together ersatz explanations from an impoverished analytical language that rarely knows how to ascribe political and tactical intelligence to voters.  Watch them at work on the television: the same old dull, leaden psephological cliches from the same dull, leaden pollsters and pundits which we've been hearing for forty years to no avail: voters are becoming less tribal, more like consumers, sick of party politics they gravitate toward single-issue campaigns, except for Muslims who vote en bloc along tribal lines etc etc.  So, Hasan's piece hardly stood out. 

However.  If you follow me on Twitter, you might already know that I took some of this up with Hasan.  I asserted that the article was filled with unfounded, unfair and patronising generalizations about British Muslims that would do nothing but feed into the stereotypes which Hasan usually opposes, and I challenged him to back up his assertions.  This generated a terrifically rancorous twitstorm.  What struck me is that those defending the piece, including Hasan, have one argument, and one argument only: he is a British Muslim and is thus perfectly placed to make the kind of judgement calls that he made in this article.  That is the only defence offered, the only defence available.  Variations on the theme were offered: you, ghetto leftist, shouldn't attack someone with Hasan's record; you, provocateur, have stepped over the line this time; you, non-Muslim, have no basis for disputing Hasan's arguments; how many Muslims have you met, known or been related to anyway?  I will spare you the various tiresome interjections along the lines that "guys, this is booooring, please stop".  As if they don't know what Twitter is; as if they don't know how to scroll past lines of text.

In essence, the defence rested on an appeal to authority.  In fact, for it to be coherent, for it to sustain the sorts of arguments made by Hasan without external support, it really has to be an appeal to omniscience.  So, now, I have to explain that an argument stands or falls on its merits, on the proofs that can be assembled for it, not on the merits of the person making it?  I doubt it.  I doubt that a simple logical fallacy is responsible for such a streak of emetic twaddle.  I assume that, to defend it on such sycophantic and illogical lines, either you have to be sympathetic to the thesis in the first place, hence grateful that a person of suitable authority gave voice to it, or you must have a conception of political etiquette (cf. 'coalition-building') in which one doesn't publicly criticise luminaries, or at least not too strenuously, and always 'constructively', ie on favourable terms.  Talk about comfort-zones. 

Labels: bradford, george galloway, islam, islamophobia, liberals, media, muslims, twitstorm, twitter

Guess who's coming to vote? posted by Richard Seymour

BBC to Galloway: will you represent Muslims or the white working class? Labour to press: we have a problem with incorrigibly reactionary Muslims voting for left-wing Catholics, or with the incorrigibly reactionary white working class who won't vote for a Muslim candidate. Salma Yaqoob:

The fact that Respect won in every ward in the constituency, and won by a massive 10,000 majority, testifies that that disillusionment goes way beyond the Muslim community. In the predominately white, middle-class ward of Clayton approximately 900 votes were cast for Respect compared to 40 for Labour.

Labels: capitalist ideology, george galloway, islam, labour, muslims, respect, social democracy, white working class

Galloway wins posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anti-cuts, anticapitalism, austerity, ed miliband, george galloway, new labour, socialism, socialist strategy, tories, working class

The shade of Labourism posted by Richard Seymour

We on the Left are in a bad shape. We face massive spending cuts and job losses, and an accompanying war on the remaining strongholds of organised labour. We face a far right on the move, not just in this country but across Europe. A constant drumbeat of more or less explicit attacks on Europe's Muslim minority has now been punctuated by the small, cowardly decision by Swiss voters to ban the construction of minarets on the grounds that such buildings constitute a surreptitious Islamic 'colonisation' (this in a country with only four minarets). The far right are in ascendant, and they are abetted by a media and political class opportunistically using their language and validating their politics of resentment. More on that in a future post, but for the moment, consider John Denham's latest remarks. We have beatings, we have cemetery desecrations, we have attempts to march on local mosques. Our ability to meet such challenges is not negligible, but responses have proven to be patchy and fragmented. Organisationally, the left is atomised into some local strongholds in communities, unions, councils, etc. What is ailing us? I am not pedling any voluntarist illusions here - we can't just will mass resistance into being - but we do have to think about what our strategy is for overcoming our limitations.

For the last decade or so, much of the far left at any rate has shared a perspective that there needed to be a drastic realignment on the left, and that the window for this was provided by disaffection with New Labour's right-wing rule. This disaffection has been real enough. It is so severe that the Labour Party saw an unprecedented collapse in membership to below 1918 levels, and lost several heartland seats with previously mountainous majorities. The question would then be whether those former Labour Party members could be provided with a more radical home, and whether the party's angered ex-voters could be given a realistic alternative in the voting booths. It was not realistic to expect such a constituency to immediately break with reformism which, after all, is not a programme but a default disposition. Everyone feels its gravitational pull, especially during periods in which the left is weak. And while political disillusionment was manifest, and particularly evident in street politics, a sudden upsurge in labour militancy could not be counted on as a talisman.

There had been, and continues to be, a general decline in union density, as the working class has been reconstituted, and new sectors of the economy emerged that kept themselves more or less union-free. In addition, workers have become far more mobile. We hear a lot about immigration statistics, but rarely about the other aspects of this story: mass emigration from the UK, and mass migration within the UK's borders. For, in addition to the 427,000 workers who emigrated from the UK in 2008, over 100,000 workers migrated in and out of the North-West alone in 2005-6. 163,000 workers moved into London that year, but 243,000 moved out. This sort of turnover on an annual basis means that models of trade unionism elaborated on the basis of a relatively more static workforce are increasingly difficult to sustain. Days lost to strike action were at an all time low when New Labour were elected, and the number continued to decline for the remainder of the millenium. Traditions of militant trade unionism, 'DIY reformism', that enabled a powerful response to both Labour and Tory attacks in the late Sixties and early Seventies, no longer existed. And given New Labour's abject abasement before every passing millionaire with a friendly wink, it was necessary to fight for the most basic ideas, the class politics, that could articulate demands for a militant response to employers and the government. So, what was sought was a kind of organisation that could relate to the street campaigns (around Jubilee 2000 or the arms trade, for example), plant some feet gingerly in the unions, serenade disappointed Labour members and voters, and articulate popular grievances in socialist language. It was to meet that challenge that the SSP and the Socialist Alliance, and then Respect, were formed. The present remainders of those initiatives constitute most of the fragmentary footholds I mentioned earlier.

Those socialists who were sceptical of such a venture from the start, though, could appeal to a certain bowdlerised version of 20th Century politics. For over 100 years not a single other party has been able to seriously challenge the Labour Party for the loyalty and support of working class people either in terms of votes, members or union funding. No attempt to construct a mass socialist party to challenge Labour has been successful. Think of some of the attempts. The British Socialist Party, founded in 1911 as an explicitly marxist alternative to Labour, did contribute to the building of an initially strong Communist Party following the Russian Revolution. However, the Communist Party more or less abandoned the idea of an independent road to socialism in the early 1950s, with its British Road to Socialism programme, which stressed that socialism could be achieved through the existing parliamentary institutions. In practise, this meant supporting the Labour Party, and by the 1980s it meant supporting the Kinnockite right-wing and its attacks on the left, and adapting/capitulating to the 'New Times' brought about by Thatcherism. The ILP made gains in the 1930s as Ramsay MacDonald led Labour into the National Government, but was squeezed in the postwar period and eventually folded into a pressure group within Labour by the 1970s. A number of very small far left parties stood against Labour in the late 1970s, including the WRP and SWP, and got derisory votes. Arthur Scargill's SLP, launched when just about everyone in the labour movement was swinging behind Blair and Brown to get the Tories out, has rarely received more than derisory votes. Other challenges prior to the present decade are perhaps too recherche and nugatory to mention. Until the millenium, such challenges experienced diminishing returns.

They could go even further. Not only have socialists been unable to successfully challenge Labour for the support of the working class, but about a third of workers have always voted for the right - a higher proportion than in much of the continent. Perhaps, you might argue, the British working class is much too conservative to embrace anything other than a party of gradualist social reform, a party that has never seriously sought to challenge the capitalist framework within which it seeks to deliver such reforms. Given such a diagnosis, it would make sense for left-wing workers to embrace labourism not necessarily out of conviction, but from a belief that the only a broad front including reforming liberals and right-wing social democrats could provide the appropriate vehicle for advancing the interests of workers. Only, that is, a party like the Labour Party. At the very least, they could say, such efforts were premature, undertaken initially before there was the first sign of a real crisis in the Labour Party. It was all very well to attract Labour left-wingers like Liz Davies and Mike Marqusee (before rapidly losing them, ahem-hem, cough cough, moving along). But, so it was argued, that hardly amounted to a substantial split, certainly not enough to base a new party on.

The example of Respect did briefly answer those arguments to some extent. Its founders correctly anticipated that the antiwar movement would, despite the Labour leadership's ironclad grip on the party apparatus, feed into a crisis in the party. The self-defeating decision to expel George Galloway followed from that crisis. It was also obvious that a substantial segment of trade unionists were questioning their funding of and affiliation to a party that repeatedly treated them with contempt. In the same year that Respect was formed, the RMT was kicked out of the Labour Party for allowing its branches to affiliate to other political parties, notably the Scottish Socialist Party. There was, then, an opportunity to win the argument for democratising the political fund and opening it up to more radical competitors. An organisation with a parliamentary presence and some strong local performances under its belt could feasibly win the support of the most militant workers and gain enough funding to build a lasting political machine (though it was unlikely that such a party/coalition would have taken the form of Respect).

But it was a narrow window of opportunity. The coalition was still too small, unstable and ramshackle and ultimately fell apart over a mixture of substantial strategic disagreements and old-fashioned sectariana that has long dogged socialists who have for too long acted in relative isolation. We made utter prats of ourselves, and I exclude no one from that criticism. Part of the problem is that there was not enough of a crisis in Labour. The biggest mass movement in British politics had certainly caused the Blairites some real headaches, but it didn't register on the conference floor. This says a lot about the enervation of any resources of resistance that remained in Labour after years of top-down control and 'restructuring' by the party's Whigs. And the fact that only one MP defected - and then after being forced out - is a warning not to underestimate how seemingly natural the Labour Party has been, no matter how right-wing, as a vehicle for those wishing to deliver reforms.

We now have a left that is Beyond the Fragments, a 'plural' left that may have more organisations than individual members, certainly not capable for the time being of recomposing itself in a new organisation to challenge the Labour Party for its base. In fact, the current state of affairs makes it very difficult for us to resist the coming Tory onslaught. Moreover, absent a movement to relate to, it is not clear that such an organisation would fare even as well as its immediate predecessors. Even so, given that New Labour is not about to reconstitute itself as a party of even old-fashioned right-wing social democracy, given that the Blairites are not relinquishing control but steadily tightening it, it would be prudent not to bet on a revival of the Labour left, (and, if it needs to be said, an entryist strategy would simply be suicidal at this point). If anything, the crisis of Labourism has new chapters awaiting elaboration. And unity on the left, if not immediately achievable in the sense described above, is surely a state to aim for in the interim.

Labels: george galloway, labour, new labour, respect, socialism, socialist alliance, ssp, stop the war coalition, tories, trade unions, working class

On Press TV posted by Richard Seymour

Press TV has broadcast my interview with George Galloway. You can watch the whole video here. This is the edited version:

Labels: christopher hitchens, george galloway, pro-war 'left', the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder

East End balls. posted by Richard Seymour

We need a new phrase to describe the subterfuge by which a reporter has drinks with a source, is fed some bollocks, prints it, discovers its bollocks, and then - with the magic of words - shows that he was right all along. In such a category, after all, does this story fall. Those of you who are following the Respect saga a little too closely for your own good will know that the East London Advertiser recently ran a story claiming that four Respect councillors who had resigned the whip were in coalition talks with the Liberal Democrats. The liberals are a sad bunch of sacks at the best of times, but they've got a nasty reputation in Tower Hamlets. This week's Advertiser prints Oliur Rahman's rebuttal, which kills the story: "We've had discussions with Lib Dems and Labour about how to work together effectively in the council," said Cllr Rahman. "But we are not going into coalition with any party." However, the reporter's spin, which is absolutely false, is that Rahman's denial amounts to an admission that there were coalition talks under way. Councillors from different parties meet for talks all the time, and we have had this before when New Labour tried to attack Respect last year, by claiming that we were in cahoots with the Tories. The truth was that we had met with the Tories, but also with every other represented party, including the Labour Party! It comes with the territory. So why are some people pretending that this 'story' is anything other than crud? Everyone in Tower Hamlets politics knows who Ted Jeory, the esteemed Advertiser reporter, has drinks with, and they both work for a well-known local MP. Let's get this straight: we are not going into a coalition with the bloody liberals. There were never any coalition talks. The people who are putting this story out have not a shred of evidence, and they are using the Advertiser as a mouthpiece for one side of a political dispute.

Labels: bollocks, east london advertiser, george galloway

Watch Galloway posted by Richard Seymour

If you aren't watching it, go ahead and view his speech here. The speaker is attempting to shut Galloway up, while the Tory who made the complaint in the first place has crept up on the bench behind Galloway to heckle more loudly.

Update: you can watch the whole thing here, thanks to Spidered News and the Couchtripper.

Labels: george galloway

Oily cretins (latest attack on Galloway) posted by Richard Seymour

You remember, I think, some years ago there was a libellous story in the Telegraph. The newspaper, still then under the control of the now convicted felon Conrad Black, ran a story about documents purporting to show that George Galloway was in the pay of Saddam Hussein. Galloway was awarded £150,000 in compensation for the defamatory claims, and also full legal costs, amounting to over £1.5m. Justice Eady defined the claims in the newspaper's coverage as containing four basic claims that any ordinary reader would take away:

a) Mr Galloway had been in the pay of Saddam Hussein, secretly receiving sums of the order of £375,000 a year;

b) He diverted monies from the oil-for-food programme, thus depriving Iraqi people, whose interest he had claimed to represent, of food and medicines;

c) He probably used the Mariam Appeal as a front for personal enrichment;

d) What he had done was tantamount to treason.

This was libellous, and these remain defamatory claims to make. However. Immediately upon hearing of the allegations, a pro-war hard-right Tory MP named Andrew Robathan wrote to the Committee on Standards and Privileges to demand that an inquiry be made into them, reminding them as he did that he had fought in the Gulf War. Subsequently a prolonged inquiry was held into this matter, and the Committee has now concluded that George Galloway will be suspended for 18 days from the House of Commons for "damaging the reputation of the House".

This may seem curious. After all, the Commissioners accept Eady's definition of the libellous claims, and the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards either acknowledges that George Galloway did not personally benefit from "moneys derived from the former Iraqi regime", or accepts that George Galloway did make many declarations of interest over Iraq, eleven times. Further, he finds no instance in which monies from the appeal were improperly spent. There is no suggestion that George Galloway attempted to deceive anyone about his involvement in the Appeal or his interest in the matter. The Commissioner does not believe that George Galloway's views or advocacy were a result of receiving money from Saddam Hussein, because he doesn't accept that George Galloway's views changed or that he received money from Saddam Hussein. The complaint made by Andrew Robathan is clearly unsubstantiated: this should have concluded the matter. So, what gives?

Well, here's a clue: the majority of the Committee voted for the war on Iraq. Two of its members are former chairs of the Labour Friends of Israel. One of them, Kevin Barron MP, played a pivotal role in the witch-hunt of miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in 1990. Seasoned red-baiters and warmongers, then, and they had to find him responsible for something. Here is the basis of the suspension: he called into question the motives of the inquiry and therefore brought the House of Commons into disrepute. That is to say, because he dared to suggest that a committee of ten members of parliament might have a political motive, he is suspended. This is pathetic.

Now, the committee did make other complaints, which Galloway disputes, but they say these would have resulted merely in a request for an apology. Namely, they say, George Galloway: didn't use his parliamentary resources in a "reasonable" fashion by using them to help the Appeal (this is stretching the definition of what is "reasonable", but those are the breaks with a bunch of pro-sanctions, pro-war MPs); didn't cooperate with the inquiry and tried to conceal "the true source of Iraqi funding" from them (in fact, the claim that Galloway didn't cooperate is belied by the record of transactions which is available on the website of the committee, in which the Commissioner notes as late as November 2006 that he was very content with Galloway's cooperation); wasn't quite forthcoming enough about declaring his interests (despite the fact that he did discuss it in the House of Commons numerous times, widely advertised the appeal, held meetings in the house, and consequently was satirically known as 'the MP for Baghdad Central'); did not register the Appeal in the Miscellaneous Category (although as they concede, he was not directed to do so when he consulted the previous Commissioner in 1999). This ragbag of petty complaints is the sum of a great effort made over several years to try and impugn the reputation of an antiwar MP.

Added to it are several bizarre implications, which occur throughout the deliberations, but not in the recommendations. At one point, the Commissioner raised a 'suggestion' that had been made to him that Elaine Galloway, George Galloway's former spouse, received £13,000 in payments from the appeal. The Commissioner then claimed to have 'forgotten' who 'suggested' this to him. This allegation of criminal behaviour rests on the person of Ms E Laing, who received payments from the appeal: the implication was that Ms E Laing could be made to look like 'Elaine'. But, as the Commissioner acknowledges, George Galloway tracked down Ms E Laing and passed on the details to him, and so there is no mystery about who Ms E Laing is and what the sum was paid for (secretarial work), and who paid it (Stuart Halford, since she has his personal assistant). So, this smear was introduced into the proceedings and instead of being removed or clarified, was deemed 'peripheral'. Additionally, a photocopy of a purported "minute" of a meeting between Galloway and Hussein in 2002 was introduced at the last minute, having landed on the commissioner's desk some hours before a meeting with Galloway. It was without any explanation as to its specific provenance or how it remained secret until then. It purports to show Galloway suggesting that some of his work on behalf of the Mariam Appeal might be financed by "an oil-related mechanism". The only possible explanation as to its provenance, provided by Ms Alda Barry, was stricken from the record. She explained that it would have been a tape recording. However, since Galloway supplied the Commissioner with the evidence that there had not and could not have been such a tape recording, a letter of apology was sent by the Commissioner on 17th April 2007 to George Galloway, in which he apologised for having tried to prove that such a tape existed. His report nevertheless left open the 'possibility' of such a tape. We are told that it comes from 'intelligence' and that the commissioners "take the view that the alleged record of the meeting between Mr Galloway and Saddam Hussein in August 2002 is authentic", even though they acknowledge that it has not been "substantiated". Similarly, the Committee members decide, citing only one of the experts who looked at the Telegraph's documents (while ignoring the existence of other forged documents), that on balance they think they're probably not forgeries: whether they are forgeries or not, the information contained in them is certainly untrue, as the Commissioner also concedes. They breach their own standards, too, by insisting on including claims made by utterly discredited witnesses, including one "Tony" Zureikat, whose evidence supposedly supports the claims in the 'minute', but who manages to get the time of the meeting wrong by at least six months (he is vague: it happened in Christimas time or New Year, according to him).

Given that the nature of the evidence they adduce is so flimsy, and so disreputable, the Committee's decisions are naturally sparse. You might have thought that a Committee that was confident in its various assumptions would be a bit more harsh than asking for an apology for not having registered the appeal in Miscellaneous and so on. You might have thought that the basis of a suspension from the House of Commons for bringing it into disrepute would be somewhat stronger than that George Galloway said mean things about the committee's motives. Instead, they have produced a great many conclusions, which proceed from ommissions and distortions, and as such the best that they could do with it was trump up some sort of headline-grabbing charge. How pathetic, and how risible. If the Commissioners don't realise that they have brought themselves into disrepute with this disingenuous charade, this can only further confirm the impermeability of the Westminster village to the real world.

Labels: anti-war, george galloway, mariam appeal, new labour

Latest attack on Galloway: dying before the newsprint cools. posted by Richard Seymour

This is one report, and this is the Charities Commission's latest on the Mariam Appeal. The Times explains that Galloway "may have known" about Iraq "funding" the Mariam Appeal. A Charities Commission source explains that "This information was acquired on a confidential basis from a number of sources." These sources appear to have made themselves available during the Commission's fact-finding visits to the UN's Independent Inquiry Committee and to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs-Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations. In other words, it retreads material used in the failed Senate attempt to smear Galloway in 2005. What it does not include is any interview with George Galloway himself, and the reason they gave for not having interviewed him during the gathering of data and writing of the report is that during the first inquiry four years ago they were unable to find a mutually convenient date for an interview.

This third Charities Commission report was ordered by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who is who is a member of the cabinet, sits on the privy council, has a life peerage, is the highest legal authority in the country, and owes all of these positions to Tony Blair. Having suppressed an inquiry into corrupt Saudi arms deals, he is now up to his neck in sleaze, as it has been revealed that he cancelled the inquiry on the basis of known "government complicity" in the corrupt deals. Additionally, the Times report helpfully explains that British diplomats were busy visiting Tariq Aziz in custody to try and get him to assist the Charities Commission's inquiry. British diplomats working for the Charities Commission? On a case that, in its worst possible light, is dwarved by the dealings of both British and American multinationals siphoning of funds from the oil-for-food programme? Yes, it's apparently that important to the British state. The timing of the release is also rather interesting. Initially, the Commission had said that it would release the report on 4th May. Yet it was delayed for a month, with no explanation given as to why.

In its most damning light, this report finds that Fawaz Zureikat engaged in rent-seeking behaviour with the Iraqi state, and consciously decided to contribute some of the profits from the surcharges he obtained to the Mariam Appeal. The Commission estimates that about half of the money Zureikat gave to the Appeal originated from his transactions under the 'oil for food' programme. In one transactionis alleged to have received $740,000 as a commission, and subsequently donated $34,000 to the Mariam Appeal. In bold type, the report states that "The Commission concluded that at least $376,000 donated by Mr Zureikat to the Appeal resulted from contracts made under the Programme." (Not 'surcharges' here, not improper sources, but contracts - the arrangement of information gives the impression, repeated in reports, that all of the funds donated by Zureikat were obtained improperly from surcharges). Well, then, Mr Zureikat, if they have this evidence on him (its sources are not divulged) ought surely to be charged and tried? Yet he continues to travel freely in the US and Iraq, and continues to do oil business in Iraq under the occupation, and in the US. This strongly suggests that any evidence they have to support claims of illicit rent-seeking activity is so poor that it wouldn't make it through a court.

At any rate, this would not impugn Galloway and the Mariam Appeal unless he or other commissioners knew of the 'improper' basis of the donations. There is, as is made perfectly clear no evidence to support this claim. The best that they can say is that they are "concerned" that Galloway "may" have known of the provenance of a fraction of the donations. This flimsy insinuation is made even more ridiculous by the catch-22 they've locked into the report: on the one hand, it is said that he should have been 'extremely vigilant' in the handling of any receipt given that they insist his organisation was a charity (a retrospective finding that Galloway has always disputed); on the other, they insist that he may have known in any case - that is, he should have shown extreme vigilance about something that he 'may' have known. This looks strongly like an effort to cover all bases and 'sex up' some rather shaky findings. This, and the way the enquiry was conducted, should lead to some serious questions being put to its authors.

The 150th British soldier died in Iraq yesterday, in a war undertaken by a government that is up to its neck in scandal and corruption. It has, from the outset, sought to vilify the antiwar movement, usually by slandering its most vocal spokespeople. As is reasonably well-known, several phoney documents have been leaked to smear Galloway: he has received more money in libel compensation than the Mariam Appeal ever received from Fawaz Zureikat. One such concocted document was presented as part of the evidence provided by Norm Coleman and Carl Levin in the failed Senate hearings. At that hearing, too, a number of 'confidential' sources and claims emanating from individuals held in secret US captivity (where they apply miniature shock and awe tactics to extract implausible confessions) were presented. I doubt that this story will have much traction, but it is interesting to observe an unpopular, weak and nasty government on its last legs desperately seeking a patsy.

Labels: antiwar, george galloway, iraq, mariam appeal, respect, sanctions

The Guardian on evil Galloway and seraphic King posted by Richard Seymour

They will simply never get over the saintly Oona King having been evicted from Bethnal Green & Bow. Guardian Unliterate today has a special interview with la principessa on the "difficulties of multiculturalism". It contains the following:

King had another uncomfortable experience of racial divisiveness during the 2005 general election, in which she famously lost her seat to the Respect candidate, George Galloway. In that bitter campaign, she claims her Jewish background was invoked by her rivals in an attempt to turn Muslim voters against her. Not much melting pot tolerance there.

This, in case you miss it, is supposed to be one of the harsh lessons King learns about multiculturalism. She also supports Margaret Hodge in her recent pandering to BNP propaganda. Now, I suppose it's only typical of someone like Oona King to repeat slanders that have long-since been despatched. I remember her blathering during the campaign about how she hoped it didn't get too dirty, then libelling Galloway and losing her court case, and then repeating the libel. I expect we'll hear the one about the evil Muslims attacking an elderly Jewish man next. This particular smear about 'anti-semitism' usually involves reference to a bunch of kids throwing eggs and stones at mourners at a war memorial service. Oona King, who was there, immediately tried to claim that it was an attack on her and later alleged that Respect was whipping up anti-semitism against her. The trouble is that a prominent witness to the event, a Guardian columnist who was also there, threw cold water all over King's theory. On the other hand, Oona King was caught in the act of placing the 'race card' herself. One doesn't expect a careerist like King to throw away her key excuses for losing the election, not while she still hopes to be a future candidate. However, it is rather odd that The Guardian simply takes her smear at face value, repeats it, and gives it a little nod.

Anyway, the piece mentions that King has been writing her memoirs since 2005, and they're coming out in September. She must have had writer's block. I have obtained a sneak preview, describing her troubles in April 2005: "I'm totally totally optimistic about people, but it was only when George Galloway stabbed his lit cigar into the eyes of a baby and laughed 'Wait til my friend Saddam hears about this!' that I realised that he was the wrong candidate to lord it over my loyal and devoted subjects. I had seen his supporters lurking around petrol stations and siphoning sanction-busting oil into BP dispensers, but I turned the other cheek. When people of all races and creeds and colours used to come to my surgery and say 'we love you, Oona, but we're so terribly poor and scared of the Evil Baron Galloway', I was heart-broken. I gave them money from my own pocket, whatever community they were from, and said unto them 'have no fear of him, he's only a very flawed and very wicked man'. But they let me down. I never never would have honestly thought that anyone could have honestly been so honestly despicable..."

Labels: 2005 election, george galloway, guardian unliterate, oona king, respect