Recently in Election 2005 Category

As expected, the blogosphere is up in arms about George Galloway's winning the Bethnal Green & Bow seat. I've made it clear in the past that I don't think he's a good MP or a good representative for the people he now (supposedly) represents. But I admit to being mystified by the accusations levelled at him since the election.

Galloway has been accused of introducing communal politics to this election. However, it seems that the first person to explicitly play the race card was Jeremy Paxman, who after introducing Galloway asked him:

Mr Galloway, are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in Parliament?

Like, what on earth has that got to do with anything? The Muslims did not want Galloway; they wanted rid of Oona King because of her pro-war stance. They would doubtless have done the same even if the incumbent had been a white man.

They may well also have been sick of being taken for granted by the Labour party as an "in-the-bag" ethnic minority constituency. Oona King may well have been a decent MP in other areas and was known for intemperate expressions of support for Palestinians, but Blair didn't go to war in Palestine.

People have failed to grasp the concept of the Ummah: that Muslims are one body, and that when one part is hurt, the rest feels the pain. This does not mean that we are obliged to commit treacherous acts in support of Muslims in other countries. It means that we are obliged to do what we can to prevent it. We have not had a guarantee from Blair that British troops will not be sent in support of future American adventures in Muslim countries, notably Iran and Syria. Unlike some people on the left, we don't trust America to deliver democracy, or anything else, unless it suits them. We (and certainly I) do not believe that the possibility of some long-term benefit justifies an operation carrying certain harm (depleted uranium, bombings of innocent civilian activity, more people dragged off to faraway concentration camps, the usual indignities of military occupation).

David Gillies at Power Pundit was even more intemperate:

Very bad news. Disgusting hard-line Marxist Islamofascist Saddam-lover George Galloway has narrowly beaten Black, Jewish, pro-war Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, entirely due to the presence of a large group of unassimilated and radicalised Bangladeshi Muslims in that constituency. Apparently this group is just fine with its co-religionists living under tyranny. Now as an MP, Galloway enjoys substantial protection from any investigation of the kickbacks he took from Oil for Food etc. Just sickening. We never used to do ghettoes in Britain. Something needs to be done about this.

Like, where have you been? That part of east London has been a ghetto for probably well over a century. Before the Bangladeshis were there, the main ethnic population was Jewish. The Brick Lane mosque was a synagogue before, and before that it was a Huguenot chapel. And don't forget the Afro-Carribeans of Brixton, the Portuguese of Stockwell, the Arabs of Finsbury Park, Shepherds' Bush and North Kensington, the Nigerians of Peckham, the Somalis of Woolwich, the middle-class Jews of Golders Green, the Koreans of New Malden. London has always done ghettoes.

Melanie Phillips' diary offers up pretty much the same nonsensical guff. She alleges that "Oliver Kamm has previously described Galloway's Respect party, which is a Socialist Workers' Party/radical Islamist front, as a fascist party which shares with the BNP -- despite the latter's hatred of Muslims -- the same espousal of fascism, antisemitism, totalitarianism and political violence". The bandying around of the term "fascist" has become standard, and I wonder how long it takes before "Godwin's law" comes into force against this lazy use of an extreme insult. I worked with Respect in the run-up to last year's election (I don't anymore). I never met a single fascist.

I left (without telling anyone, and without even being asked about it by them) after they failed to win a single seat in last year's local and European elections. I came to the conclusion that it was useless, and that the alliance was bound to fall apart due to the diametrically opposed views of its two main participants on just about every issue except the Iraq war. I was unimpressed by George Galloway's threatening tone, in which, for example, he said he had told Muslims that they would be putting bullets in Palestinians' backs by voting Labour. Islamic scholars have used the same comparisons in order to persuade Muslims to stop selling and drinking Coke - without much success, at least in London.

It's fatuous to compare Respect with the BNP. Respect does not have the known criminal element that the BNP does (and I'm talking about their senior members, not their hangers-on in east London). I'm sure Phillips knows about what BNP members have been caught on camera saying - I'm not talking about being realistic about immigration, but about machine-gunning people outside mosques on Friday, about the grooming of white girls for sex in order to "spread Islam", that sort of thing. I'm also sure she knows about the appalling record of BNP councillors in the few places they have been elected. (Then again, if their clueless councillors had said anything they would probably be dangerous.)

Phillips calls Oona King "despicable" on the basis of her comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto and of saying of America, "It's a fing fed-up power man, it's a fundamentalist Christian power if we're not careful. It's terrifying". The language is obviously inappropriate, but in the light of the fundamentalists who have close links with the Bush administration, the observation isn't. She then alleges that "the Muslim community ... has signed itself up to dangerous political and religious extremism as embodied by the Respect coalition". To heighten the fear factor, she notes that the community "is numerous in that constituency" and "votes en bloc". Shock horror - a community has enough people in one constituency to get someone into Parliament! And given that a majority of the constituency's population is Muslim and that Galloway got just under 36% of the vote, it hardly shows the community voting en bloc.

Once again she brings in the BNP, alleging that "the odious extremism at the other end of the spectrum, in the shape of the BNP vote elsewhere, has also strengthened", but it got 192,850 votes, which is 0.7% of the vote, and they received that percentage of the vote in London also. It is insignificant, but the fact that their share of the vote is higher in the Yorkshire and Humberside region may well have something to do with their stoking up trouble. Phillips suggests that Muslims' voting for Galloway is "a symptom of the tide of irrationality and hatred which has overwhelmed our mainstream culture". But the vote doesn't come out of mainstream British culture; it comes out of one disaffected religious minority. It might be asked at this point why they didn't vote for the Muslim Lib Dem or Tory candidates, to which I'd have to reply "I don't know". Ethnic minorities tend not to vote Tory, and one also has to find out what reputation these two candidates have in the community.

It seems that there is a vast section of the community who can't live with the fact that the Muslim population in one constituency rejected the mainstream political parties and voted for someone they considered "their man" (even if he wasn't). I'm sure they would take the same attitude even if the candidate had been an important figure in the Muslim community well-known for his services to society. I don't have much time for Galloway anymore and it's a shame that they relied on Respect to secure a representative in Parliament, rather than do this themselves, although I'm glad Galloway says he intends to make way for a representative from within that community at the next election. None of this justifies the attitude of Phillips and certain other commentators. Galloway won the election fair and square (he did not, as far as is known, resort to postal-vote fraud) because of a community's discontent, and they have brought an irrelevant race issue into it. A lot of people are dissatisfied with the red/blue/yellow political arrangements in this country, and at least one community has shown that they are unwilling to shoe-horn themselves into one party or another. If that makes us unassimilated and radical, so be it.

It's been a hectic couple of days; I voted on the way to a job which came up late; another job came up for today in the middle of that job which itself finished well after 11pm last night. So there was no question of staying up all night to see the results come in. I'm pleased the Tories didn't win; I'm not surprised that Labour did win, although I'm disappointed that they lost so much to the Tories and that the Lib Dems didn't gain much. This post will, I expect, be written briefly as I really want to go to bed.

(1) Nobody should be surprised that Michael Howard is stepping down. That is standard practice for a Tory leader after he (or she, although no woman has ever actually been in this position) loses an election. This is what happened to John Major and William Hague, and I have heard that Edward Heath made enemies by not standing down immediately after losing the 1974 election.

(2) I'm so glad Howard is all but history. "I want the next Conservative leader to have much more time than I had to prepare our party for government," the BBC reports him as saying. Fact is, Howard lost because he (particularly) and his party are so unattractive. If the Tories had presented a viable alternative to Bliar and the gang, he could easily have won. As it is, their main thrust was immigration, and to push this issue they hired Lynton Crosby, whose main tactics are called the "wedge" (pushing divisive issues) and the "dog whistle", addressing slogans to different groups in their "own language". Are people going to vote for a party which calls them dogs? 'Nuff said. Michael Howard sucks. He sucked as Home Secretary, and he would still suck as PM. They should get him out of the Parliamentary party sharpish.

And by the way, how long are they going to recycle people who were ministers under Thatcher? I've heard the name Malcolm Rifkind mentioned as a potential leadership candidate. How long is it going to be before the Tory party starts to look like it came out of the Eastern bloc?

(3) The Northern Ireland results are depressing to say the least. The "moderate" parties (Ulster Unionist Party and Social Democratic & Labour Party) have been reduced to the benefit of the extremist Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein. Gerry Adams promises to represent not just the Republicans of West Belfast but everyone there, including those who didn't vote for him. How can he represent them if he refuses to take his seat in Parliament? (Sinn Fein MPs do this because to take their seats would require an oath of allegiance to the Queen. For some reason they don't like the Tony Benn approach.) As for the DUP, I saw Ian Paisley on the news shouting (Paisley always shouts) that there won't be a united Ireland today, tomorrow or any other day. Given the huge proportion of northern Ireland's population who voted Sinn Fein, I'd say he shouldn't count his chickens before they hatch (even though these days there's not much to choose between the two countries).

By the way, Trimble is actually not much of a moderate. I remember the 1996 Orange march crisis in which Trimble (a member of the Orange order himself) was directly involved with the campaign to allow Orangemen to march through places where the residents did not want it. They pretty much beseiged one Catholic neighbourhood in 1996 until the state gave in.

(4) Galloway. I am actually surprised that he won and that none of the other Muslim campaigns against high-profile Labour MPs succeeded. Harry at Harry's Place writes, "it was truly a horrible feeling to walk from Cable Street, with all that resonates from that address, to a polling station where people were voting on communal lines". But all that has happened here is that the Muslim community often has different issues from other working-class people (indeed, not all of them are working class), and that is particularly so here. This result demonstrates to all the parties that they cannot simply take any community's vote for granted even if most of them traditionally vote for them. It also demonstrates how concerned Muslims are for our fellow believes in other parts of the world; we certainly don't want our taxes spent on bombing Muslim countries.

Even if this was a "communal" campaign, at the end of the day there are more than a million Muslims in the UK and I fail to see why we are not entitled to a representative. After all, what was the Labour party founded for other than to represent the Labour movement? That's a community, isn't it? And once it found it couldn't represent average working people, it moved on. As I said before, I don't think Galloway is a good representative - apart from not being Muslim, he's not even local. Then again, plenty of Labour MPs (and Tories) are not local to the seats they represent. Geraint Davies, former Labour MP for Croydon Central, is from Ceredigion county in Wales. Tony Blair has no hint of a north-eastern accent, and Margaret Thatcher (whose Parliamentary seat was for Finchley in north London) was from Lincolnshire. The bitterness which followed the "parachuting" of Shaun Woodward (who defected from the Tory party) into a working-class constituency in the north-west is well-known. I strongly suspect that the massive reduction in the Labour vote has a lot to do with the war in Iraq, but the Galloway result shows what happens when you take a community's support for granted.

There's a whole load of new reports about possible election fraud:

In Bethnal Green and Bow, the Guardian reports that dozens of electors are registered at properties in Brick Lane which are in fact either business addresses or places where they lived years ago. This includes an address owned by Abdus Salique, "a local businessman and Labour supporter who recently hosted a lunch for the party's candidate, Oona King, and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone". "But when the Guardian visited the premises, a businessman who rents an office in the building said that none of those named lived there." (Here's another report on the same issue from the Evening Standard's This Is London site.)

In Bradford, the BBC reports that one Jamshed Khan has been arrested in a postal-vote fraud investigation. Khan is a councillor in a marginal Labour ward.

Meanwhile, in Bedfordshire, it appears that certain Tories are up to one of their old tricks - "granny farming", which is getting little old ladies to allow you to cast proxy votes on their behalf. (This also sometimes involves "the tipp-ex trick", namely offering help in procuring postal votes, and then whiting out "postal" and writing "proxy" in its place - so they end up without a vote.) In this case, it's a 77-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease who lives in a nursing home.

Brother Atif Imtiaz at Bradford Muslim reported a few days ago that one of the elders in Birmingham whose name appeared at the bottom of a letter in the Guardian on 12th April telling Muslims to vote Labour in fact had nothing to do with it and has distanced himself from it. I asked Atif what his source was, and he told me that the Pir had written a letter to the Daily Jang to make clear his distance from the "Labour letter", which was published in part on the front page of the Daily Jang.

I had prepared an article on yesterday's fiasco at Central Mosque in London in which, it seems, former members of al-Muhajiroun disrupted a presentation by the Muslim Council of Britain and assaulted Iqbal Sacranie. I actually deleted that article, but after being requested by sister Aicha, I've decided to write another, insha Allah. Today, the papers are reporting a similar performance in east London, in which George Galloway was attacked and Oona King's car vandalised. The culprits are said to be the same or similar people.

These people appear to have been members of the so-called Saviour Sect, which itself appears to be the regrouping of members of al-Muhajiroun which was disbanded by its founder, Omar Bakri Muhammad, earlier this year. The group has a higher profile than its membership would merit, due to its high-profile stunts, posters stuck over public property (a writer in Q-News a few years ago called them morons, and suggested that they put their posters inside the bins rather than on them), and the continual invites Omar Bakri got to air his views in the media.

That group staged an earlier stunt at Central Mosque in which flour and eggs were thrown over the Lib Dem mayoral candidate Susan Kramer a few years ago. But ruining somebody's clothes is a whole different story from actually assaulting somebody. Of course, Sacranie is entitled to retaliate - if not in this world then in the Next. I should add that a lot of Muslims have a low opinion of Sacranie and his council. Several of them are known to be of one particular ethnicity - the Memons of Gujarat. But nobody else has seen fit to attack them physically.

The so-called Saviour Sect's website has all the stamps of al-Muhajiroun, right down to the slogans. Ironically, it appears to be al-Muhajiroun without what may come to be seen as Omar Bakri's moderating influence. The old slogans, which they used to stick on lamp-posts and other public furniture on such places as London Road in Croydon, are still there: "Vote today, Hellfire tomorrow". They have a whole list of so-called munaafiqeen (hypocrites or dissemblers): the MCB (they say the M stands for Mushrik, meaning pagan, instead of Muslim), the Muslim Association, MPAC UK, Islamic Society of Britain, al-Muntada, the "fake Salafis", Respect ("Kaafir hypocrites"), CAIR and numerous other associations. Stop Political Terror, a Muslim group which campaigns against excesses in anti-terror enforcement, are described as "very close to becoming Munaafiqeen". Some of these people are in the forefront of campaigning for the rights of Muslims and against anti-Muslim violence; some, indeed, are regularly accused of being extremists.

Might I also add that the very name reflects their poor command of English - "Saviour Sect" should read "Saved Sect" (in Arabic, al-Firqat an-Najiya) and refers to the group of Muslims whose beliefs are correct. This is only one of a number of tiny groups which claim this title and consign the entire rest of the Muslim community to Hellfire - the others include groups identified as "fake Salafis" in the list I just mentioned.

I'd also voice my doubts that these are members of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Hizb-ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) are a political party, and while banned by several dictatorships in the Arab world, they are legal in the UK. If they really were involved in terrorism, they could easily have been banned when their activities became known in the mid-1990s during the campus controversies. The activist youths left along with Omar Bakri to join al-Muhajiroun; the pseudo-intellectuals are the people left in HT. I've met a few of them and they are often obnoxious, but they don't go in for these types of stunts or attacks.

Opposition to voting has long been a key plank of all of these groups' ideologies, although it's reported that HT has softened its stance lately. The stance is based solely on interpretations they themselves support, such as the notion that voting carries an implicit bay'ah (allegiance) towards the British state or monarch (as a lifelong British citizen, I've never been asked about my allegiance). Among the slogans we've seen since the recent wars began are "don't stop the war - except by Islamic politics", rightfully dismissed by the community since "Islamic politics" are not available to us right now. We have to use what is there. A lot of Muslims have in the past not voted, either here or in other countries, because they saw candidates and parties who were as bad as each other; Shaikh Hamza Yusuf remarked in his speech to ISNA that, until last November's presidential election, he had never seen any such election as important, and an article posted at the marriage-oriented site Zawaj.com called the 2000 Bush-Gore election a contest between "president Bad" and "president Wicked". And even in this election, some Muslims will be influenced by issues like taxes and education rather than the war in Iraq - after all, the last Tory government went to war in Iraq as well.

This year, the voting campaigns are targeted at constituencies, rather than encouraging Muslims to vote for individuals in their constituencies rather than for parties, since after all, our system works seat-by-seat rather than on a whole-country basis. I think a Labour victory would be preferable (let's face it, a Lib Dem victory is not on the cards, although I could be wrong), but a few bloody noses and a reduced majority, getting rid of the marginal "Blair's babes", would be no bad thing.

On my trip up to London yesterday, I picked up a copy of the Camden New Journal which is one of those papers you find in boxes free for anyone to take. It also probably gets posted through the door of anyone living in Camden borough, which also includes a large chunk of central London. In it there's a piece in which local candidates for the three main parties are invited to give good reasons for voting for them.

The local Labour candidate is Glenda Jackson, the former actress. This extract's a hoot.

Please don't reject the Labour Party because of its current leader. The Party is more than an individual. It's the courage of Neil Kinnock, the integrity of John Smith, the intellect of Robin Cook, the strength of John Prescott and the social passion of Gordon Brown. Ours is a party of enduring value and these are why a vote for Labour won't be wasted.

Of the five men mentioned, one has been dead for more than ten years (late leader John Smith), one is no longer an MP but is a European Commissioner (Kinnock), one resigned from the cabinet because of his disagreement with the Iraq war, but even before that is said to have considered the first Labour government's so-called ethical foreign policy a millstone (Robin Cook), and one whose "strength" was demonstrated to someone who threw an egg at him (Prescott).

I just saw the Tories' party election broadcast for the first time, and I was unimpressed, to say the least. Actually, immigration didn't play as much of a part in it as it did in Howard's speech the other day - it was mentioned by just one of the actors, I mean contributors, not including Howard. The broadcast had a guitar-driven rock backing track, which I was going to say might be an appeal to younger voters, but would probably appeal nowadays to anyone under 50; but in any case, it seems a departure for them.

It consisted of a series of people explaining why they "choose" the Conservative party. (The word Tory, which they are trying to move away from, didn't appear.) They included one black man, who appeared to be African rather than Carribean, and several women. They cannot seem to make Howard even remotely appealing; he sounds upper-class even as he talks about how his values are those of the British people (a common feature of American right-wing upper-class conservatives who brag about how "humble" they are). He told us how his father (a Romanian Jewish immigrant) said Britain was the best country in the world - yeah right, and his family couldn't even go by their real name.

And hardly any of the contributors gave a clue as to what the Tories' actual policies would be. They talked about more police on the beat (so there'll be less crime - not rocket science is it?), without saying how they'd fund it. Cleaner hospitals, and doctors allowed to make their own decisions (so does that mean getting rid of the managers the Tories brought in last time they were in power?). The footballer talking about frontline services, without mentioning what exactly.

The handwritten slogans which can be seen on Tory posters (like "it's not racist to impose limits on immigration", "I mean, how hard is it to keep a hospital clean?") were spoken by the contributors, which casts doubt over the whole exercise. Perhaps they really were thought up by them, or perhaps they were thought up by Lynton Crosby and given in the script to the contributors. Of course, if that bit is scripted, then the same can be said for the whole "why I choose the Conservative party" performance.

All in all, this doesn't bring me an inch closer to voting Tory than I was before I saw it. The darkness in Howard's face and his voice is quite apparent - is he really the best leader they can come up with? This broadcast's lack of focus on immigration almost seems deceptive, given the nauseating anti-gypsy rabble-rousing going on elsewhere. This broadcast has a lot of posturing, and next to nothing on the party's actual policies.