Galloway has contradicted himself on independence
26 Mar 2011
heraldscotland.com
I HAVE always admired George Galloway’s rhetoric and agreed with much of his political stance – his performance before the US Senate in 2005 was a work of art.
Unfortunately, Mr Galloway’s recent rediscovery of affection or his native land smacks of political opportunism (“Galloway prefers a Labour victory at Holyrood”, The Herald, March 25). Mr Galloway, who is a Unionist, but is critical of lack of Scottish comment about the budget in advance, said UK Government ministers who still held the purse strings and still commanded the heights of the political economy of Scotland didn’t hear it either.
He is further quoted as saying there was no mandate in Scotland for the Westminster coalition’s cuts and that the cuts should be made not in the services of already-impoverished people, but in the waste of war and tax avoidance. Admirably, Mr Galloway is against nuclear weapons, war and poverty. However the obvious fact that the only way Scotland will divest itself of all that Mr Galloway ostensibly deplores is through independence. How does he reconcile this contradiction?
Bill McLean,
Dunfermline.
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I wouldn't normally post a letters page contribution, but there's a good amount of truth in this one. Obviously the editor wants to promote antipathy towards GG though.
Galloway launches campaign on vow to fight cuts
Lucy Christie
7 Apr 2011
heraldscotland.com
MAVERICK former MP George Galloway launched his election campaign last night on a pledge to fight cuts and a promise that “nothing will ever be the same” at Holyrood if he wins his seat.
Mr Galloway told supporters at the People’s Palace in Glasgow – where he is standing for the poll on May 5, as the lead candidate of the George Galloway Coalition Against Cuts – not to elect “the same donkeys”. He dismissed the Coalition Government, the SNP-led Scottish Government and Labour-run Glasgow City Council as “different cheeks of the same backside” and added: “We have something very different to say. We’re coming together because we think Glasgow deserves better.”
Mr Galloway is running alongside college lecturer Angela McCormick and local government worker Brian Smith who are members of Solidarity. He said: “If we get elected to the Scottish Parliament, nothing will ever be the same again, and that’s a promise.” The former Glasgow Hillhead MP pledged to vote against cuts to public spending in Scotland. He would support trade unions and young people who are fighting the cuts, and refuse any coalition with parties implementing them. He called for the mass demonstration in London on March 26 to be followed by co-ordinated trade union action, including strikes.
Mr Galloway added: “I’m not saying if we get in we’ll be able to build houses for people who need them or fill in the potholes. But what I can promise is this, if we get elected everyone in Scotland, Britain, America, Canada, Australia, the Arab world, everybody will know that there’s a fight going on in Glasgow. If you elect the same donkeys to the Scottish Parliament, don’t expect them to do anything other than put their faces in their nosebags and enjoy themselves as they have enjoyed the past.”
Iain Gray is a liability, says Galloway
(UKPA) – 1 hour ago
George Galloway has said the SNP will win the Scottish election "quite comfortably". Speaking at the manifesto launch in Glasgow for George Galloway Coalition Against Cuts, he said Labour had thrown away its early lead and that its biggest electoral liability was leader Iain Gray.
The ex-Labour MP said: "The Labour Party, who had this election apparently in their hands, have contrived to lose it - lose it with their dull and negative campaign and lose it with the monkey on their back that's called Iain Gray." Referring to earlier party figures, he added: "I don't know how that party of Willie Ross, and Bruce Millan, and Donald Dewar shrunk to the extent that it became the party of Iain Gray."
Mr Galloway said Labour's current situation will mean "the SNP are going to win and, at the current rate of acceleration, win quite comfortably". He said his coalition was the party which stood for "real Labour values" and urged Glasgow voters not to "waste" their second vote on Labour which is expected to have a strong showing in the Glasgow constituencies. He added: "No less than 25% of SNP voters are against Scottish independence. So am I but I know why those 25% are voting SNP. It's because the SNP seem more like Labour than Labour. It's perverse, I know, but the SNP has come to seem like a more sincere repository of Labour values."
Mr Galloway reciprocated the hand of political friendship offered by independent Lothians candidate Margo MacDonald, who offered to work with him at her own manifesto launch last week. Mr Galloway conceded that he may have been "too harsh" on some of the MSPs in the chamber. Aside from praising Mrs MacDonald and Alex Salmond, who he described as "like watching Jim Baxter strolling through a pub team", it was clear he held very few other MSPs in high regard.
He added: "If Alex Salmond fell under a bus, and I very much hope that he doesn't, the SNP will be in a very serious difficulty in replacing him."
George Galloway foresees SNP win but vows to 'noise up' Holyrood
20 April 2011
scotsman.com
POVERTY in Glasgow ensured that what was once "the second city of the empire" now had worse health outcomes than overseas territories which have been ravaged by war, George Galloway declared yesterday as he launched his manifesto to become an MSP.
The former Glasgow Hillhead MP returned to his former seat to launch his manifesto with a pledge to oppose all government cuts, reintroduce student grants and retrieve £100 million of cash "stolen" by the Con-Lib Dem coalition to pay for improved services in Glasgow.
Noting statistics which show that men in the most deprived parts of the city can expect to die aged 53.9 years, he compared it to the life expectancy in the war-torn Palestinian city of Gaza, where men are likely to live for 70 years. Condemning the state of public services in the city, he claimed there are "potholes that a Chilean miner could climb down". He added: "The level of deprivation in this city is a national scandal and a national disgrace." He said that, if elected, he would campaign to end the council tax. "We would be for scrapping the council tax and having a system which is directly related to the ability to pay, so that the more you earn the more you pay," he said.
Other commitments in Mr Galloway's Respect manifesto include backing for a new grant for students "paid for by taking the money from the rich elite through progressive taxation".The politician said he would also back the full retention of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, which pays students a sum to stay on at college.
Insisting he would "noise up" Holyrood if elected in May, he appealed to Labour and SNP voters in particular to back him on the regional list vote, saying that around 11,500 votes throughout the city would be enough to win him a seat.
In a typically outspoken press conference, he claimed that Labour was now heading for almost certain defeat on 5 May, as a consequence of what he described as their "dull and negative" campaign. He added: "The situation we appear to be finding is that the SNP is going to win and win very comfortably."
Mr Galloway said that, as a consequence, his chances of holding sway over any post-election negotiations were receding. However, he said that he and fellow independent Margo MacDonald would seek to "metaphorically hold hands" in pursuing initiatives from the back-benches. He said he had also agreed to tone down his attacks on the standard of MSPs, as a result of contacts with Ms MacDonald. "Margo has persuaded me that the standard of MSPs is not so universally low as I had been making out," he said.
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"potholes that a Chilean miner could climb down" - he's not wrong!
Scottish critics shouldn't write off George Galloway If the Respect candidate is chosen as a Glasgow list MSP, he will be a force to be reckoned with at Holyrood
Kevin McKenna
guardian.co.uk,
22 April 2011
The sun was out for George Galloway this week as he campaigned vigorously in Buchanan Street, Glasgow's main shopping thoroughfare. And so too were a few hundred of his fellow citizens. Karen Millen and Hugo Boss could wait for a while, for here they were witnessing a rare thing: a Scottish politician who could speak without notes for 15 minutes, and whom they all recognised. Galloway on a soapbox and with a megaphone in his hand can be irresistible and the handful of curious passers-by had swelled to a throng by the time he had finished a rodomontade which excoriated Labour and the Conservatives for neglecting his city. "The life expectancy of people in parts of this city is 10 years worse than in Kabul," he bellowed. "The people who purport to represent you have let you down. But if you send me to Holyrood I will make you proud of me."
It was the usual mixture of braggadocio and grandiloquence we have come to expect from a politician who was born on the edge but probably found it too comfortable. Several of the seeming vast army of psephologists and political academics – the only industry that has grown in Scotland since Holyrood came into being – dismiss Galloway. He is an incurable self-publicist, they howl and cannot be taken seriously, especially after his antics in a leotard with Rula Lenska on Big Brother. More people though, still remember what they were doing when they saw Galloway eviscerate a three-man senate sub-committee in Washington in 2005. They had been sent to hang him but suffered their very own TV execution when this chippy Scot destroyed the defence of US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Galloway reckons he needs around 12,000 second preference votes on May 5 to make it into Holyrood as a Glasgow list candidate. It would be foolish to write him off or dismiss him as a political force. Few remember now that Galloway was chairman of the Scottish Labour party at 27. A few years later he was taking Hillhead from the redoubtable Roy Jenkins. His victory in Bethnal Green for his new Respect party in 2005 was simply astonishing. His expulsion from the Labour party came after he had condemned Tony Blair for Iraq one too many times. Yet just a few years previously the late John Smith would have made him minister for youth in his first cabinet. But Smith's death and the accession of Blair meant Galloway's marriage to the party would soon be over.
There are even some, like the Daily Telegraph's formidable Scottish editor, Alan Cochrane, who, while despising Galloway's politics, have stated they would welcome his presence in parliament. The Holyrood debating chamber can be a sterile and soulless place when there is business to be discussed. As a succession of civic Scotland's finest rise to speak, blinking and stuttering their way through a prepared address, you wonder how they ever got elected. Of what few articulate and genuinely bright MSPs there have been in post-devolution Scotland, the SNP has had the vast majority. A characteristic of the last nationalist administration is how easily their cabinet stars lord it over Labour's hapless and inarticulate front bench.
If Galloway gets in they will have to start printing tickets for the occasion that he first takes on Alex Salmond in debate. Each of them was a lion in debate at Westminster and the prospect of them locking horns at Holyrood is a spicy one. If Iain Gray, Labour's increasingly vulnerable Scottish leader, had even half of Galloway's recognition factor he would be Scotland's first minister after May 5.
An insistent press photographer is trying to persuade Galloway's campaign manager to pose beside the statue of Donald Dewar that stands atop Buchanan Street. Wisely, he resists the snapper's entreaties, for surely that would hint at hubris. George Galloway could have led his party too but no statue of his would ever remain vandal-proof for more than a week.
George Galloway seeks a platform to speak for working people
Andrew Whitaker
27 April 2011
scotsman.com
GEORGE Galloway boasts that "the sun shines on the righteous" as he takes to the streets of Glasgow on a baking hot afternoon during his daily soap box routine in the city centre.
The Scotsman spent an afternoon on the campaign trail with one of Scotland's most controversial politicians just days before the colourful figure, who achieved notoriety for impersonating a cat on Big Brother, announced he is to become a father for the third time at 56.
Dressed in a dark grey suit and perched on his soapbox, the man who famously lavished praise on Saddam Hussein, is addressing shoppers in Glasgow's Buchanan Street. The sharp tongue which was once used to confront a hostile US senate committee is now being employed in the quest for a seat in the Scottish Parliament when the country goes to the polls on 5 May. But how would the politician adjust to life at Holyrood, with the parliament's strict rules on limiting speaking time and complex committee structure?
Unsurprisingly the Dundee-born socialist warns that he'll rebel against Holyrood rules even if it means being "put out into the street" by the parliamentary authorities. Mr Galloway, who spent 23 years at Westminster, also vows that he will stay out of Holyrood's committee structure and would use the Scottish Parliament as a "platform" for his left-wing brand of politics.
He said: "I myself would not serve on the committees. I'm not going in there to be involved in committees. I want to use the floor of the parliament, the plenary sessions and First Minister's questions as a platform for the people of Glasgow and working people generally." There's also a warning for SNP leader Alex Salmond who Mr Galloway says he will "confront and polemicise against" at every possible opportunity if the former Glasgow MP is elected to Holyrood on 5 May.
Despite Mr Galloway's self-confessed "celebrity status", the controversial Respect Party politician doesn't appear to be taking his election to Holyrood for granted as he tells The Scotsman that he's not "wildly optimistic" about being elected to the parliament. But the reaction from Glasgow shoppers to two soap box speeches from Mr Galloway in one afternoon offers some hope. An elderly woman, a self-confessed life-long Labour voter tells Mr Galloway he's "marvellous", while a man waving a Palestinian flag and wearing a Celtic shirt shouts his approval during the would-be Glasgow MSP's routine.
That's the closest Mr Galloway comes to facing any heckling all afternoon, as he claims some Glaswegians have a lower life expectancy than people living in the Palestinian territory of Gaza.
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The Scotsman is basically the Scottish equivalent of the Daily Telegraph. It's not usually as patheticaly tabloid as this though...
The SNP have won two previously safe Labour seats in Lanarkshre (near Glasgow). This is great news.
GG is on the panel on BBC1 scotland as the results come in, so if anyone has Sky or Virgin you can watch it. Sadly my capture card is now knackered so I can't record it.
The Scottish Labour leader, Iain Gray, got back in on a majority of only 151 votes over the SNP candidate... this is a real moment of change for Scotland.
Iain Martin, the Daily Mail columnist, has posted on Twitter some speculation about the results in Scotland. He's a former editor of the Scotsman, and normally well worth reading.
Extraordinary. Hearing well-informed predictions of SNP at 58 seats, Lab 40, Tories 14, Greens 8, LDs 7, Margo 1 and Galloway 1 #sp11 ...
have you heard when they're expecting the galloway result?
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he's not wrong!
