No Respect

George Galloway's pro-family record is a bit ropey, but as a pro-life, pro-worker and anti-war figure he has been outstanding. True to his Catholic roots, he has never been a Marxist, for all that he was a Campaign Group member (is Austin Mitchell a Marxist?). And he has voted against all EU integration since he became an MP.

Yet on last night's Question Time, he called for a referendum on whether Britain is "a European country" or an American satellite. Well, she is a European country simply as a matter of fact, like Norway or Switzerland. That has nothing to do with the EU. Galloway must be going soft on the EU because he sees it as somehow a bulwark against American hegemony.

He should try telling that to the Euston Manifesto Group, nothing if not honest about the fact that the Eurofederalist aspiration includes, and has always included, overall American control. Or to the Henry Jackson Society, nothing if not honest about the fact that submission to global American hegemony includes, and has always included, submission to the Eurofederalist project within and under it.

Galloway's formation of Respect took him into league with Stalinists (the Communist Party of Britain), Trotskyists (the Socialist Workers' Party, most of whose members have never done a day's work in their lives, not least because people tend to leave it on leaving university) and Islamists (the Muslim Association of Britain).

So perhaps it is no wonder that he is suddenly so sympathetic towards being legislated for by a body which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report, routinely containing, and always subject (if at all) to the rubber stamp of, Stalinists, Trotskyists, neo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura, people who believe the Provisional Army Council of the IRA to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland, and a rising tide of neoconservatives (Trotskyists gone Fascist, who have stolen other people's parties because that is just what they do), the last soon to be joined by their ever-dependable Islamist allies (from, in this case, the resurgent Caliphate of Turkey).

By associating either with Trotskyists or with Islamists, Galloway is placing himself at only one degree's remove from the neoconservatives, the disciples of Max Shachtman who cheered or cheer on the Islamists in 1980s Afghanistan, 1990s Bosnia, and today's Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Kosovo, as well as making life a million times easier for them in Iraq, and threatening to do the same in Syria. What is actually Galloway's or Respect's position on, say, the black-shirted, Holocaust-denying, heroin-trafficking, neocon-backed Kosovo "Liberation" Army?

Whereas there is no doubt about ours.