Bradford West, Tower Hamlets, and George Galloway

Galloway is fond of threatening lawsuits against anyone who describes him as an anti-Semite. It would be a full-time job to catalog Galloway’s hatred of the West and contempt for anyone who gets in his way, but his style can be fairly judged by his claim in March, made on his show on Iranian Press TV, that Zionists were behind the Ukrainian revolution in order to help the Nazis come to power so that Ukrainian Jews would move to Israel and “settle” the Palestinians.

If that doesn’t make any sense to you, it just shows that you’re not thinking on Galloway’s level. That’s a blessing, because it’s a level that includes a record of supporting Syria’s Assad regime, which he’s described as “the last bastion of Arab dignity.” Obvious ironies of ascribing dignity to Assad aside, Galloway poses in Bradford West as a defender of Muslims. It appears to make no difference to anyone concerned that the Syrian regime is Alawite, and that it’s working hand in glove with the Iranians – who aren’t Arabs – to kill Arab Sunni Muslims.

But details aren’t Galloway’s strong point. His pose is that he’s a world figure, and that Bradford West is lucky to have a big man standing up for it in Parliament, just as Muslims around the world somehow benefit from his outsized aura. Regrettably, the bit about him being a world figure isn’t entirely wrong, even if it elides the difference between being famous and being infamous. The rest of his claims are so much tosh. His record of attendance in Parliament is dire, and he has no connection to Bradford – he’s described representing it as “98% tedium.”

Both Galloway and Bradford have had long and not entirely happy careers. Galloway has moved from constituency to constituency, been kicked out of the Labour Party, and migrated from the pro-Soviet authoritarian left to Zionist-hating authoritarian progressivism. Bradford, for its part, has seen some of Britain’s worst ethnic riots, and has endured a long slide from the era when it was the home of the world-leading wool mills that, as they declined, imported their workers from Kashmir. Today, the Bradford West constituency is over 50 percent Muslim. Bradford built its core when it was rich, so it doesn’t look like a post-industrial wasteland, but statistically, it’s one of the worst-off places in Britain. The city and the man, unfortunately, were made for each other.

But as the eminent historian of Italy, Denis Mack Smith, once commented, Benito Mussolini could only have fooled so many people with his strutting sawdust caesar act for so long in an era when the Italian public was politically unsophisticated. It was his style that mattered to them, not his substance. Something of the sort is also true in Bradford, where there are lots of unemployed young men yearning for respect – not coincidentally, the name of Galloway’s party – and even more women who are used to being ignored, or to far worse than that. Until it all went wrong, Mussolini, too, got a lot of mileage out of pretending to be the vindicator of the oppressed.

But as the reality of Galloway’s promise of service to his constituents becomes clearer, he’s falling back on clever forms of abuse. One of his appeals in this campaign has been that his Labour opponent, Naz Shah, is lying about her escape from a forced Islamic marriage at age 15: Galloway claims she was 16, and therefore that the entire business was, as he would almost certainly not put it, kosher. On its surface, the point of this argument is to appeal to the Muslim men of Bradford – especially the young unemployed ones who constitute much of his core support. But it’s actually more subtle than that, as I found when I visited Bradford.

Subtlety isn’t a word you associate with Galloway, or with these sorts of affairs in Britain. Earlier this month, Lutfur Rahman’s second term as Britain’s first democratically elected Muslim mayor ended when a High Court judge voided the 2014 election and banned him from standing again. Rahman was found guilty of all manner of corrupt electoral practices; staying true to type, he tried to pervert the course of justice before the High Court with equal energy.

Rahman ran Tower Hamlets, a depressed borough in East London, as his own personal fiefdom and for the benefit of fellow Bangladeshi Muslims. Like Galloway, he was expelled from the Labour Party; like Galloway, he charged anyone who had the temerity to question him with being an Islamophobe. Unlike Galloway, he kept the support of the Guardian until the very end: for many on the left, the slightest accusation of prejudice carries far more weight than the grossest stink of corruption.

It’s in this light that we should see Ed Miliband’s claim in late April, in an interview with Muslim News, to say that he will outlaw “Islamophobia” if he becomes Prime Minister. Bradford West is bad. Tower Hamlets was worse. But though they are embarrassments and blots on the landscape, they are – or so one might think — only two towns. Britain can stand them, if it must, though it would be wiser not to.

What it cannot stand would be a ban on so-called “Islamophobia,” which, as the Rahman affair shows, would be used by thugs like Rahman, fools like the Guardian, and political strivers like Miliband to quash (and potentially imprison) anyone who has the temerity to discuss corruption, ill treatment of women, forced marriage, sexual abuse of children (the subject of a recent scandal in Yorkshire), Islamist infiltration of schools (ditto, Birmingham), radicalization, terrorism, or any other evil in which any Muslim in Britain or anywhere else is involved.

What is worse is that politicians only say things like this if they think it will win them votes. I dread the day when mainstream politicians in Britain think they can win by appealing to the political prejudices of the narrowest possible kind of Islam and the progressive left, and Miliband, at least, appears to believe that day is near. Bradford is exceptional, but as Miliband’s statement implies, it’s a matter of degree, not of kind: this is not just a matter of two cities.

And, frankly, my visit to Bradford didn’t fill me with a lot of optimism. That’s not because of the Tory candidate, George Grant, whom I followed around for a day: he’s done his very best in a seat that is not only close to impossible to win, but where the risk to life and limb is real. The night before I arrived, Grant’s car – festooned with his campaign signs – had been sideswiped by a hit and run driver. Maybe it was an accident; maybe it wasn’t.

Bradford feels bad because the dynamics of the campaign look even worse on the inside than they do on the outside. The left is inclined to see the race as a contest between evil, sexist Galloway, and virtuous, abused Shah, who will naturally have the support of all women and right-thinking men. If only it were so simple.

Now, I’m not here to defend Galloway in any way at all. But, first, he won in 2012 in part because he led a rebellion against a Labour Party that had long taken Bradford’s Muslim vote for granted. In this respect – and this respect alone — he is a bit like the SNP in Scotland, and UKIP in a number of English constituencies, both of which have made headway against an entrenched but fossilized Labour Party.

In Bradford, a Labour victory would likely come because Kashmiri community leaders – a profoundly misleading term in this context – had reasserted their authority against the young rebels who voted for Galloway. It’s hard to see the tribal delivery of bloc votes for Labour as a big victory for individual freedom.

Second, because in talking with voters, I found quite a few women who were voting Tory because they had equal contempt for Galloway’s emphasis on Gaza at the expense of education and for what they described as Shah’s infidelity. All of them agreed with Galloway on Gaza; they just thought local schools mattered more.

They also agreed with him that Shah was in the wrong: as one of them put it, as though this was a novel idea in the West, “Muslim women aren’t supposed to commit adultery.” In short, the left’s view that Shah, as the wronged and liberated woman, will naturally have the support of women and good-thinking men couldn’t be more wrong: the women won’t necessarily support, and the men aren’t necessarily good-thinking.

So Galloway isn’t simply appealing to patriarchal men; he’s bidding for the female vote, which is by no means the cure-all imagined by the left. Much the same system of values was at work in a later conversation we had with an educated woman who we met outside her house, playing cricket with her son: personally undecided between Galloway and the Tory, her comment was that she needed to ask her husband who they would be voting for.

Bear in mind that I was talking with the most outspoken, educated, Tory-leaning, and modern Muslim women in the constituency, and the scale of the issue is clear. It goes very far beyond politics, and though a Galloway victory – still the single most likely outcome – would be bad news, a Labour victory wouldn’t be much better. A Tory victory, on the other hand, would be the result of an electoral fluke: It’s unlikely to reflect any real change in the underlying political balance, much less to be the result of social or cultural change.

Of course, elections do matter, and maybe a Conservative victory would really crack the ice below the political level. But I doubt it, and in any case, it’s not the job of an MP to fix his constituents. Moreover, in Tower Hamlets, it took the High Court to break even the political ice, and there is no guarantee it won’t re-freeze quickly. And if Miliband has his way, it will be Rahman’s and Galloway’s opponents who will be on trial in the High Court in the future.

But by that point, Galloway might no longer be an MP. That would indeed be a gain – not because it would say a lot about the political, ideological, or social dynamics of Bradford, but precisely because Galloway’s greatest failing is that he’s not delivered the goods. While that’s a view of politics pregnant with corruption, it does at least reflect the sense that an MP is supposed to do things for his constituents, not just for himself. And that conception of politics, and especially the idea of rotation in power that it implies, is a step away from traditional tribalism.

Bradford looks bad in a lot of ways. But people are always more perceptive than you realize, and there is something in Bradford to build on, just as there now is in Tower Hamlets. The question is whether either of the major parties will try, or whether the Tories continue nationally to put all their chips into short-term bets on marginal constituencies, and Labour locally falls back into a lazy reliance on Bradford West’s bloc votes. If they do, it’s hard to see how the slight opening created by Galloway’s weakness will translate into any kind of real change in Bradford at all.

Ted R. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations in The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.