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- George Galloway
George Galloway has done it again. The man who beat Oona King in Bethnal Green at the 2005 General Election has won a spectacular by-election victory in Bradford West. As well as knocking back Labour’s attempt to keep the seat – vacated by sitting Labour MP Marsha Singh on health grounds – Galloway’s challenge also left the Tories and Lib-Dems reeling as their vote melted away.
What accounts for Galloway’s success? Is Respect set for a resurgence? Are the major political parties finished?
•ELN’s election analysis follows shortly.
George Galloway’s victory speech
Speaking at the Count, after the result had been declared, George Galloway MP departed from the convention of thanking the Returning Officer. Instead, he reminded the Returning Officer that he had outstanding issues with him and thanked the Returning Officer’s staff for their work running the election. He thanked the police for keeping order which had allowed electors to cast their votes in safety. He thanked the other candidates (not for anything in particular) and wished them well on other occasions.
Galloway said that this was the most sensational result in British by-election history: he declared it a “Bradford Spring”. It was a “Bradford Spring” in the sense that it was an uprising among thousands of people, especially among young people, many of whom had not been involved in the political process before. He said that the mammoth vote, and the mammoth majority was a rejection of all three major political parties.
Galloway went on to say that he cared nothing for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and wished them political perdition. He said he did, however, care about the Labour Party, of which he had been a member for many years, having also been a Labour MP. Through this result, he said, he appealed to the Labour Party to turn away and break decisively from the path of treason set for them by Tony Blair. They must stop taking their supporters for granted. They must stop imagining that working and the poor people have no option but to vote Labour if they oppose the Tories and their Coalition partners.
Galloway also said that Labour must stop its support for illegal and costly foreign wars. He said that this was because they must realise that one reason for Labour’s decisive defeat that night was because the public doesn’t believe that Labour has attoned for being part of an occupation of other countries and drowning its people in blood.
Galloway called on the Labour Party to be a Labour Party again and to recreate the Labour coalition they used to be and of which he had once been part. That, he said, was the way to defeat the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
Galloway thanked his team. He said that Respect would not go away. They would fight to win the Council elections in May, in Bradford and elsewhere. Respect, he said, was there to stay in Bradford, because the people of Bradford deserved respect and needed someone to fight for them.
Finally George Galloway dedicated his victory to Abu-Bakr Rauf, a Respect campaigner who had died during the campaign and who, Galloway promised, would never be forgotten.
•See our report of George Galloway’s interview with Sky News immediately after the declaration of the election result on http://www.eastlondonnews.com/first-reactions-george-galloway.
•See our report of Labour and Tory interviews with Sky News immediately after the declaration of the election result on http://www.eastlondonnews.com/first-reactions-the-others.
