And we all know who won that one.
The Dragon in this case is the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Jess Phillips. Phillips trades on her friendship with the late Jo Cox, yet she encourages the attitudes that led to the actions of Thomas Mair. Like Anne Marie Morris, Phillips deserves the treatment that was meted out to Peter Griffiths when he was the MP for Smethwick, which is not the greatest of distances from Yardley, between 1964 and 1966.
The George in the first case was of course the Patron Saint of Egypt, Palestine and Lebanon, who was adopted from them by the Crusaders. (I shall come back, on St George's Day, to the strange notion that merely because there is a legend about him, then he must be a legendary figure. He is not.) It would seem fitting, then, that in this case the George should be Nadeem Ahmed's friend and comrade, and mine.
George Galloway would then match Roy Jenkins, whom he removed from the House of Commons, in having represented all three of the United Kingdom's largest cities: Glasgow, London and Birmingham. Indeed, he would exceed that record, by having also sat for a fourth city, Bradford.
But Phillips could take heart that to have lost one's seat in the House of Commons to Galloway is to be guaranteed a seat in the House of Lords. For not only did Jenkins take the ermine, as would of course have happened anyway, but so did Oona King. Her only qualification for it was that she had been defeated by the politician most unmentionable by the British Establishment.
Galloway once promised live on air to accept a peerage if I did. But we shall see about that. In the meantime, onwards to Birmingham Yardley. That was a Conservative seat from 1979 to 1992, and on several previous occasions. It was was held by a Liberal Democrat from 2005 to 2015. And it acquired a large Labour majority only this year, only because of the Leader whom the MP hates, and only by the efforts of the activists whom she is now having expelled from the Labour Party.
George and you both in the hung Parliament, him for Birmingham Yardley and you for North West Durham. "Marvellous."
ReplyDeleteGeorge can represent the people more ably than the taciturn politically inept who currently invest the corridors of power
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