Gorgeous George Galloway

Speaking truth to power

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

5/21/05

http://zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/galloway.htm

With a round face and somewhat squashed nose accented by piercing blue eyes, George Galloway looks something like an ex-pug, and in fact, that’s what he is. He’s also an ex-factory worker whose favorite clubs are Dundee United and Celtic. His Glaswegian accent is distinctly lower middle class. Looking at him, it’s easy to believe he could have once been a yob at the footy matches, getting in punchups in the pubs and shouting insults at the Pakis. (For North Americans, think of the guys who show up at football games half-naked in the snow, painted in the team colors, shout, "USA! Fuck, yea!" and who are usually on their seventh beer by the half-time show).

For those who have no idea what a "Glaswegian" (pronounced Glaz-wee-gee-an) might be, it’s an inhabitant of the Scots city of Glasgow (rhymes with "has cow," which is what Norm Coleman is doing right now). You know. Like a resident of Halifax is known as a Haligonian.

Anyway, it’s the Glaswegian accent. To American ears it sounded posh, tony. People thought of Scotty, or the stereotype of the Scotsman of fierce integrity, with bristling eyebrows and blazing blue eyes. William Rivers Pitt remarked that the Senate committee must have felt like they were being lectured by Sean Connery. The video is here.

Back home, he is somewhat less admired by the British press, with which he has done battle for over ten years. The Scotsman, Scotland’s national newspaper, sniffs that he has "somehow positioned himself as one of the working class." The Christian Science Monitor accused him of raking hundreds of thousands of dollars in the oil-for-food scam from the very children of Iraq he purported to be championing, a claim that wound up with the CSM losing a case of libel and having to apologize publicly to Galloway, to their readers, and pay Galloway three hundred thousand quid in damages. The Daily Telegraph is locked in a similar battle with him over similar charges, and puts up an average of three articles a day attacking him.

He ran as a pro-free Iraq, antiwar candidate against an incumbent who was black, Jewish, female, and who supported Tony Blair’s war in Iraq. So extremist Moslems issued death threats against... Galloway. Figure that. He does have a knack for pissing off the right people.

He also has remarkable charisma, and appears to have the sort of personal integrity and courage that his performance in front of the Homeland Security Senate Committee suggested.

Born in Dundee in 1954, he got into party politics at the age of 15, belying the notion that he might ever have been just a yob. By the time he was 18, he was party secretary in Dundee, and by the time he turned 27, he was party chairman for all of Scotland.

A year after that he became the General Secretary of Britain’s prestigious "War on Want" a major charity advocating poverty relief in Britain and abroad. As early as 1961, they were warning of the dangers of mounting debt on the third world, and first attacked the move to privatize water in the 1980s. They have a solid track record of spotting dangers to common people ten years before anyone else does.

It was then that the first scandal erupted. Galloway was accused of misallocating £21,000 (about $150,000 in 2005 dollars) for "a lavish lifestyle" of travel and entertainment. Setting a pattern that was to continue, he was exonerated by an independent auditor’s report, although he did voluntarily refund £1,720 that he didn’t have proper accounting controls for.

This thing of making accusations against him which independent auditors or judges end up dismissing has continued ever since. He's accused of wrongdoing and gets acquitted. The only thing he's owned up to is extramarital flings. Sounds like a certain American politician, doesn't he? His first marriage (of 20 years) ended in 1999, and his second wife, a Palestinian professor whom he married in 2000, is filing for divorce, charging serial infidelity. He himself admits he did not show her "the proper respect."

In 1987 he ran for the Parliamentary seat in Glasgow as the Labour candidate and won. In a fiercely nationalistic riding which normally went for the Scottish Democratic Party. Labour, while not exactly seen as lickspittles to the crown, were regarded as "those Englishmen."

He was reelected, and then later, awarded a safer riding (it’s fairly common for party members to switch districts, a practice frowned on in America as "carpetbagging"). There, his fortunes rose alongside those of the Labor Party.

His politics were sharply leftist, although he had no use for the Trotskyites. About 1974, he took up the Palestinian cause, effectively enough so that he was able to convince the town of Dundee to fly the Palestinian flag over city hall and twin with the city of Nablus. He opposed the Gulf War, and after a trip to Iraq in 1991 to observe the effects of sanctions, fought against them "body and soul." He regarded the fall of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe, not because he liked the regime ("that would be making a rod for my own back" he said) but because the resultant power vacuum led to the Gulf War, and the vile American imperialism we see in the region today.

His enemies continued to throw mud. The Groucho Club, which had blackballed him, is suspected of placing an ad in the Labour Party newsletter alleging that he had never attended any of the party’s regular meetings. The charge was untrue, as Galloway was happy to prove.

However, his flamboyant style (he was nicknamed "Gorgeous George") got him the attention of Britain’s notoriously sleazy and aggressive tabloids, which in turn focused his not-inconsiderable scorn and contempt upon them. The tabs routinely smear anyone who pisses them off, and George was pissing all over them. He tends to kick right wing ass, and make enemies in all the right places. Call him a Scottish Clinton.

With his background in War on Want, it was perhaps inevitable that he would come to deeply oppose the sanctions on Iraq. This put him at odds with the party leadership, and when Blair carefully placed his testicles in Putsch’s coat pocket and signed on to attack Iraq, the rift was complete.

Galloway publicly called the two leaders "a pack of wolves," a stance which led to his being thrown out of the Labour Party in 2003. In an effort to make sure he didn’t return to Parliament, the party gerrymandered his district out of existence. Aligning with his former foes among the Trotskyites, he formed the RESPECT the Unity Coalition, and in the May 2005 election, ran for Parliament in a working-class section of east London. The incumbent, Oona King, had won by 10,000 votes in the previous election, was well-liked, and the seat was regarded as a "Safe" Labour seat.

Galloway won by 857 votes. The Daily Telegraph, one of his more vicious detractors, has played up the fact that questions have been raised about improper voting and double counting of votes, but somehow forgot to mention that most of the questions were raised by Galloway himself.

Galloway has a talent for attracting STUPID enemies.

Take the Christian Science Monitor. The once-respected newspaper ran a series of stories claiming that Galloway had raked hundreds of thousands of dollars off the oil-for-food scam with Iraq. Galloway sued, and won £300,000, and the judge ordered the paper to issue public apologies to both Galloway and their own readership. The documents that the CSM used for their stories, supposedly from the 1991-2 era, were clumsy forgeries cobbled together in 2003 by the American puppet regime in Iraq. Some of them even signed it. These were even more obvious forgeries than the TANG memos that brought down Dan Rather.

Or take Norm Coleman, arguably the most abject fool in the Senate. When he called Galloway to testify before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, he planned to confront Galloway with his evidence of theft and bribery on Galloway’s part. The outraged committee was intent on showing that those who opposed America’s attack on Iraq were profiting from the Saddam regime.

Unfortunately for Coleman, three problems came up. First, there was a report issued by the State Department that showed that over half the diverted funds from oil-for-food went, not to Galloway or Jacques Chirac or the Russians, but to American companies with the knowledge and connivance of both the Clinton and Putsch administrations.

Second, the documents Coleman had were copies of the very same forgeries that cost CSM so dearly. Ooops.

Third, of course, was that someone forgot to warn the dimbulb Senator of just what he was facing by letting Galloway have his say.

The link above provides the video for the Galloway appearance before the committee. I have a copy on my own website, along with the transcript.

Don’t bother looking for it at the web page for the Homeland Security Committee. It isn’t there. All the other proceedings of that session are, but Galloway’s speech is not.

Nor is it in the media very much. AP and the trash tabs in Britain tried claiming Galloway did not respond to questions but merely ranted about the war instead. Don’t believe them.

And keep an eye on Galloway. He’s only 51, and unless he gets killed in a small plane accident or boffs the wrong bimbo, he’s going to a a major voice for quite some time to come – on both sides of the Atlantic.