Communalism And The Far Left Front Defeated

In a Bradford constituency where 40 per cent of the electorate is Pakistani Muslim, a Bradfordian Muslim of Pakistani extraction has been massively defeated by a Dundonian Catholic of Irish extraction. If anything, a candidate who, although not himself a Muslim, is far closer to the universalist and egalitarian core of Islam, has defeated the brazen nominee of the baradari system, the means whereby the ancestors of today’s Pakistanis kept the caste system going after they had converted to Islam. What has happened at Bradford West has been a victory, by the choice of Pakistani-descended British Muslims, for inclusive, ideological and interest-based British politics over the baradari-based politics of Pakistan.

In any case, even if every Muslim in Bradford West had voted for George Galloway, then he still could not have won 56 per cent of the vote, and that on an eight-way split and with a 50 per cent turnout, leading to a majority of 10 thousand due to a whopping 36 per cent swing. The extremely mixed University Ward gave him 85 per cent of its vote. People will say that he made much of Kashmir, but what if he did? In certain constituencies in London and Greater Manchester, all the political parties require their respective candidates to support Israel, and that State is presuming to dictate the outcome of the London mayoral election. What was the view of his baradari opponent on Kashmir?

As for the claims that Respect is the first overtly communalist and sectarian party in mainland British politics since the Liverpool Protestant Party or whatever, and that communalism and sectarianism are historically alien to the British Left, I honestly do not know which is funnier, these people’s obvious failure ever to set foot outside secular or occasionally observant Jewish London, or their failure to recognise that as in itself a communal and sectarian interest, whether expressed through the Communist Party of old and the Trotskyist groupuscules, or through the New Labour that those things have gone on to become, at least within that and certain other communal and sectarian milieux. They supported the Islamist dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Galloway opposed it. They supported taking out the bulwark against Islamism in Iraq. Galloway opposed it. They support the Islamist dismemberment of Russia. Galloway opposes it. They support the Islamist dismemberment of China. Galloway opposes it. They support taking out the bulwark against Islamism in Syria. Galloway opposes it.

He may have been mixing with some of the wrong crowd in recent years, but George Galloway is a pro-life Catholic who was never a member of the Campaign Group or even of the Tribune Group. He is an outspoken opponent of Scottish separatism, and of the only European Union that is ever going to exist. His anti-Blairite Labour views on the great socio-economic issues of the present moment are in line both with public opinion and with the position of the Leader of the Labour Party. His victory over a Blairite candidate, insofar as he held any political opinion rather than being a mere cog in a machine, constitutes a vindication and endorsement of the Labour Leader over his enemies, of this Miliband over the other one.

This is hardly a Labour loss at all. Galloway says that he wants a Labour Government, and he will vote with Ed Miliband’s Labour against the neo-Blairism of the Coalition. The Blairite remnant within the Labour Party is the real loser here: Labour has not lost a by-election to either Coalition party, but it has, insofar as it has, to Galloway and Respect.

This morning, on the Today programme, which never accepted that Oona King was no longer an MP and which persistently treated her as one until she was raised to the peerage, the Blairite Broadcasting Corporation shocked Salma Yaqoob, a hardened political activist, into near-silence by resurrecting the old blood libel against Galloway with regard to attacks on British troops.

The complete collapse of the Liberal Democrats was entirely predictable and universally predicted, but it is no less significant for that. Although a tiny local Far Right faction put up a candidate, it is telling both that he received a derisory vote on such a high turnout by by-election standards, and that he was not a member of the BNP. The BNP’s Strasbourg seat in Yorkshire is clearly doomed, and with it doubtless also the one in the North West, also based heavily in the ex-industrial Pennines. It is necessary to note UKIP’s persistent inability to return anyone to Westminster even now that the Greens have managed it and Respect has managed it twice. That, moreover, is before the UKIP Leadership passes to Neil Hamilton.

However, the biggest story of all here is the catastrophe for the Conservative Party, which, if it is ever again to form a majority government, desperately needs to win seats in Yorkshire (as well as Wales, the North West, and Scotland and the North East on a really good day), and this one was not without its leafy suburbs. But then, it is the Conservative Party that really is the fully functioning British political vehicle of the Far Left, of Islamism, and of South Asian communalism.

The entire Socialist Workers’ Party faction of Respect in Tower Hamlets not long ago defected to the Conservative Party after having fallen out with the Islamists. Johanna Kaschke, a longstanding Respect and Communist Party figure, left the Labour Party in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, and ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become a well-connected activist. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

David Cameron’s vehicles toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under his party. His “Quality of Life Commission” (don’t laugh, it’s real) then proposed giving the power to decide these things to “local community leaders”. What else will those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys’ interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places will flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation forever.

With some fanfare, the Conservative Party recently welcomed John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January 2010, and which continues to be named as Marek’s party, despite his having become an enthusiastic Conservative, on the list of former MPs who continue to hold House of Commons passes.

Will David Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek’s fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales?

Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru. Rehman Chishti, now a rising star as MP for Gillingham and Rainham, was Francis Maude’s Labour opponent in 2005 while working for Benazir Bhutto, whom he assisted from 1991 until her assassination in 2007 in her leadership of a party the motto of which includes both “Islam is our Faith” and “Socialism is our Economy”; he was still doing that job when he defected to the Conservative Party in 2006 and became an aide to Maude as its Chairman. And so on, and on, and on.

They obviously find the 1980s Radical Right’s company as congenial as they find each other’s, with David Cameron and 80 per cent of his party’s MPs as members of Conservative Friends of Israel, which is not even a front for the thoroughly racist Israeli Government, since that would require some degree of secrecy, or at least of discretion, about the treasonable nature of the relationship. Liam Fox has had to resign as Secretary of State for, of all things, Defence because the Israeli Far Right and its nominally American fellow-travellers had, treasonably, been running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and through its subsidiary fake charity, now deregistered. Blue is the new Red-Brown.

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