Friday, May 13, 2005

Galloway: pantomime villain

Oh bloody hell! Ok, it was fun for a while but now it's getting silly. Knowing I'm not exactly Galloway's biggest fan, lenin popped into the comments boxes on an earlier post about the election result and kindly reminds me I forgot to mention the Respect victory in Bethnal Green.

Now, I had intended to respond with a thoughtful, balanced piece (or at least, I was going to try) using lots of groovy pol sci/sociology of religion concepts and talk about charisma, broad churches, sects and sh1t like that but I can't be bothered 'cos this is just getting ridiculous.

A sense of proportion is called for, methinks - and one area in which it's needed most is this business of "communal" politics.

Now, I dare say Galloway won Bethnal Green in street-brawling fashion with dirty tricks and a stoop to the politics of identity - although I shouldn't say so, because I wasn't there - but those of you who seem to think that this is in some way unprecedented don't seem to have asked yourselves: where, exactly, do you imagine that Galloway learned the street-fighting methods he used to such devastating effect in the election? Some people really need to get out more. Or, I should say, out of London more because the answer to the preceding question is...the Scottish Labour Party of course, where the hell do you think?

Galloway was the youngest ever chairman-thingy of the Scottish party - and you simply cannot get on in the Labour Party up here if you don't do a bit of communal politics. Here we have corruption, dodgy accounting, dirty tricks and the politics of the tribe that would put Tony Soprano to shame.

And there's some of you going on as if you're supposed to commit suicide or something if you didn't vote Labour. I mean, really!

He's behiiiiiiiiind yooooooooou!

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