Jez He Can?

As expected, George Galloway's campaign for London Mayor is concentrating heavily on the 25,000 or so votes in the families of taxi drivers hit by Uber, fanning out to everyone who feels that London just wouldn't be London without the black hackney carriages. That is a very good place to start.

Even Breitbart seems to be warming to a man whom much of the Right regards as a lovable old rogue, and who is in fact a personal friend of Nigel Farage's. No UKIP candidate against him? After all, he has already sewn up one of its most obvious constituencies. And why would UKIP even want the London Mayorality?

Sadiq Khan looks likely to be the Labour nominee, and it looks as if Syed Kamall will be entering the Conservative fray. They had both better get their acts together on the transport issue. And we all know that only a Muslim can beat George Galloway. He has never lost to anyone who was not a Muslim.

The Muslim whom he defeated at Bradford West in 2012, Imran Hussain, is now the Labour MP for Bradford East, and has nominated Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader.

I am a Burnham supporter, but Corbyn is the first person ever to contest the Leadership of either party with a record of having voted against both the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. First elected on the same day as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he is still younger than his detractors' heroine, Hillary Clinton.

Did he invite "terrorists and war criminals" to Parliament? They were already there. Members of the IRA's Provisional Army Council do not take their seats, but they use the facilities, and they have staff of their own choosing in the place. People who participated in planning and directing the invasion of Iraq are still all over the Palace of Westminster.

Far from being a Hezbollah stooge, Corbyn was a teller for the Noes in last year's division on going to war alongside Hezbollah, as this country now is, even while we pretend that we are not.

We never pretended that we were not at war alongside Stalin. To this day in the South, there are Tory councils that maintain streets named after him. Is Hezbollah, or its Lebanese Christian allies, or Iran, or Assad, worse than Stalin was? Or they worse than Saudi Arabia is? We are openly at war for and on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Opposed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Why does no one ever question the company kept, whether in the past or very much in the present, by Conservative or UKIP politicians, or even by sufficiently Murdoch-friendly Labour ones?

As for having Corbyn in the race, it is not as if he is going to win, although it would be good to see him last one round longer than Liz Kendall in the voting process, and that cannot be ruled out as a realistic possibility.

Has she anything to say that is of comparable interest to his view on austerity (which are shared by every noted economist who has expressed a view on it, and a lot of them have), on wars, on Trident, on civil liberties, on TTIP, on the EU's neoliberalism and militarism, on Chagos, or on the caste-based discrimination that the Government wishes to re-legalise in this country, the scandalous basis on which the Conservative Party retained at least one seat?

Was Tony Blair wrong to have John Prescott, Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, Margaret Beckett, Clare Short and Gavin Strang in his 1997 Cabinet? Why, then, is it outrageous to have Corbyn in the 2015 Leadership Election? And from Blairites' own point of view, how good would any other Leader be, who could not out-argue Jeremy Corbyn?