With Respect

It’s said that as a boy you asked your grandfather, ‘How come the British had an empire on which the sun never set?’ And he said, ‘Because God couldn’t trust them in the dark.’

That was my Irish grandfather. I don’t know if he was the originator of that statement – I suspect not – but I believed as a child that he was and I thought it was wonderfully profound and witty.

Can you tell us about your family background?

I was born in Dundee. My maternal grandparents were Irish immigrants who arrived in Glasgow, like many, many thousands of others, and then walked to the east coast to work in the jute and flax industries. I must be the only person whose great-great-grandmother emigrated from America to Scotland. Somehow she decided to leave New York and come and live here with five other people in a one-roomed house. ‘Send us your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free,’ said the sign in Dundee… 

Was your family political?

Very much. My grandparents, all four, and my parents were activists in the Labour Party.

And were they religious?

My grandparents were devoutly Catholic, and my mother was a practising Catholic; but my father not at all, I should say.

Do you still think of yourself as a Catholic?

I certainly am a believer in God. I don’t go to church but they say, ‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,’ and undoubtedly culturally that’s what I am.

I am a Labour man. I believe in Labour values. I have been all my life in the mainstream of the labour movement. The problem is that the mainstream (if you like) shifted, while I stayed exactly where I was

Has that helped to form your political values?

Sure. I believe that Jesus Christ was a great revolutionary whose message is evergreen. That message is, number one, that we are all one human family, we’re all God’s children, that we’re all therefore responsible for how the other lives, in the sense that it’s not acceptable to be comfortable yourself and not to care about your neighbour – whether your neighbour is literally next door or on the other side of the world. 

And, number two, that we’re merely passing through this life and we’ll be judged upon it by God and we’ll answer for how we’ve lived.

Do you believe in an afterlife? 

I do indeed.

How do you hope that God will judge you?

My defence – and it would have to be a defence, because I’m expecting some difficult questions – is that I have been a sinner, I have made mistakes but I have tried my best to use whatever attributes he gave me for the greater good of humankind, which I believe is the purpose of life on this earth.

Who are your political heroes? I’ve read that [the former president of the National Union of Mineworkers] Arthur Scargill is one of them. 

I’m not sure that I’ve ever said Arthur Scargill was a political hero of mine. If I did say it, it was a misstatement – he is not. But that is not to say he did not have a heroic period, and I certainly supported the [1984–85] miners’ strike with all my heart. 

But I am a Labour man. I believe in Labour values. I’m not a communist or a Trotskyist or a Leninist, and have never been. I have been all my life in the mainstream of the labour movement. The problem is that the mainstream (if you like) shifted. I was once not nearly as left-wing as a number of people now in Tony Blair’s Cabinet, some of whom were communists, some Trotskyists,¹See newstatesman.com. who regarded me as rather moderate. The difference is that I stayed exactly where I was while they tiptoed across the stage hoping that the rest of us wouldn’t notice.

What particular values are most important to you?

I cannot accept the levels of inequality that exist in our own country and, even more markedly, across the world. In the words of Mary Brooksbank, the Dundee jute worker who wrote in the 1930s: 

Oh dear me, the world’s ill divided.
Them that work the hardest
Are the least provided.

And that’s how I see the country and the world still today, 75 years after she wrote that. You can read an autocue and earn half a million pounds a year or you can spend your entire day with a water pot on your head in Africa walking seven miles to and from a well in order to get dirty water to keep your family alive – though not for very long. And that I simply can’t accept. I’m not saying that everyone can ever be, will ever be, entirely equal; but it’s the task of politicians and reformers to try to even out the grotesque inequalities that exist in the world.

I am not rich, but I have never believed in sackcloth and ashes. I paraphrase General William Booth’s comment: Why should the Devil have all the best suits?

Secondly, I cannot accept the domination by the strong of the weak. I didn’t accept it when I was a child in the playground and I don’t accept it as an adult in the political world. I don’t accept that just because someone is strong they have the right to occupy, bully or colonise people who are weaker than them. And when they do it in the name of God, that makes it even more obscene for me. 

That’s exactly what the empires of the 19th and 20th centuries did, of course. They dressed it up in the fine clothes of Christian guidance: ‘We will hold the hand of these natives, civilise them and lead them to the sunny uplands, at which point we’ll hand over their country to them.’ It was all lies. Empire then, like empire now, is to go to other people’s countries and steal their things. And I can’t accept that.

Some will say, ‘It’s all very well George Galloway protesting, “I can’t accept poverty,” but he’s not conspicuously poor himself.’ You’re well known for your penchant for big cigars and your year-round tan… 

Yeah, I never quite understood what’s wrong with having a tan. You get a tan if you’re in the sun.

I think it’s to the credit of someone who is not poor themselves that they spend their life trying to change a situation where the majority in the world are poor. I am not rich. My income is publicly declared and it doesn’t make me rich; but it makes me much richer than most of the people in the world. 

And I could be richer still, believe me. I could be dedicating whatever talents God has given me to business – and if I had, I think I’d be a good deal richer than I am. But I don’t do that. I spend my political life – and my political life is my life – trying to change the situation that prevails in the world. 

But I have never believed in sackcloth and ashes. I paraphrase General [William] Booth’s comment: Why should the Devil have all the best suits?

You have always opposed abortion. That’s unusual for a man of the left.

Yeah, I get a lot of stick from the left for my position on abortion, and not much support from others. You didn’t find [the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children] hurtling into the fray in Bethnal Green & Bow to urge people to support the anti-abortion candidate against the strongly pro-abortion New Labour candidate. I wonder why. 

I mean, I’m angry about that. I have consistently spoken, written and voted on these life issues of abortion and euthanasia. I have a very clear position – I’ve had it all my life, even in the Seventies and Eighties, when (believe me) it was virtually unheard of on the left in Britain for somebody to take the point of view I take on these questions. 

And I take it on moral grounds. I believe that there is no other point at which life could be said to be created than the moment of conception, no other point at which it can be said, ‘Life begins there.’ So, I believe that the unborn child is not a future person but a person, and is therefore entitled to the dignity that all human persons are entitled to. Every life has dignity and the right to protection. Nobody has the right to take another’s life except in very extreme circumstances, and those circumstances are not covered by the slogan ‘A woman’s right to choose’. 

I refuse to make the distinction that others make – there is no difference between a state visiting violence and an armed group visiting violence

How is a belief that every life has dignity compatible with your defence of suicide attacks?

First of all, there is in principle no difference between a suicide attack and a military or paramilitary attack of any other kind. There is no moral difference between someone who kills themselves deliberately in a military attack and someone who risks being killed in a military attack. The moral issue is: Who are the targets of the attack and how just is the war in which that attack is being made? 

I have a very clear position: I am against the targeting of innocent civilians in any attack, whether it is made by a suicide bomber or a normal bomber. Any attack that is designed to kill or maim civilians for any purpose is to be deplored, and I deplore it. And if the war being fought has no moral justification, it must be deplored.

I refuse to make the distinction that others make – there is no difference between a state visiting violence and an armed group visiting violence. I use the words of the late Peter Ustinov: War is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless.

You have just been elected MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, largely (I think it would be fair to say) by the votes of Muslims. There are a lot of disagreements between Islam and the left – over homosexuality, for example, and some aspects of women’s rights. What are the common values that unite your coalition, Respect, and where are the tensions?

The bigger question is a very important one, but let me first deal with a smaller issue. Neither you nor I, with respect, know who voted for me. It was a secret ballot. We can all have our views, but none of us know. I suspect that of the 16,000 or so who voted for me the majority were probably Muslims – but not much more than a narrow majority, because we were active in every part of the constituency and our message appeals, I think, to every part of the community.

As for the bigger question, you rightly identify that Respect is not a party but a coalition, of different left-wing groups, people in no other organisation, religious people of all kinds… I’m not sure if we’ve got any Hindus but we’ve certainly got Sikhs, we’ve got Buddhists, we’ve got Christians, we’ve got Muslims and we’ve got Jews; and all of these people bring their own backgrounds and their own moral-philosophical standpoints to the table. And inevitably everyone rubs off on everyone else. Marxists who never met a religious person before begin to reshape their attitudes when they’re working with someone religious, first to that person and then, on reflection, to what they believe in. And vice versa.

There are some things that could divide us, but we decided that, whilst important, they were not as fundamental to the present political juncture as the things that united us: our opposition to war, our opposition to occupation, our opposition to capitalist globalisation and our opposition to the attacks on people’s civil liberties. 

And so far we have experienced no strain whatsoever – largely, I should tell you, because of the self-restraint of people on our left. They have behaved impeccably, faithful to that concept that where issues that are not so fundamental may divide us, they should be left to the side. No doubt there may be pitfalls ahead, but if we all continue to behave as we’ve behaved so far, I believe they can be negotiated.

I’m definitely not a pacifist. I would go five rounds with most people, and there are some people I’d very much like to go five rounds with. I’d have been the first man at the recruiting office for the Second World War

What is your attitude to war in general?

I’m definitely not a pacifist. I would go five rounds with most people, and there are some people I’d very much like to go five rounds with. I believe that there are just wars; I believe there’s a duty on those fighting such wars to make the case for their justness and to conduct them justly as far as is possible.

I opposed the war in Kosovo. I opposed the war in Afghanistan. I opposed the war in Iraq, as is well known. But if I had been alive, I would have been the first man at the recruiting office for the Second World War, which I believe to have been a just and necessary war. (In fact, we should have fought earlier, in 1936 in Spain – and if we had, the Second World War might never have happened.)

In Iraq, we did get rid of a murderous dictator. Isn’t that justification enough? What if George Bush and Mr Blair had said that that was their aim all along?

Well, of course they couldn’t say that, because they support most of the world’s murderous dictators. The only reason they are advancing that argument now is because all their other arguments have been unmasked as lies. They – and the system they support – are responsible for dictatorship in the world, including that of Saddam Hussein. 

When people like me were marching in protest against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, they were building him up and selling him weapons – indeed, through the export credits guarantee scheme, at the expense of British taxpayers: when Saddam didn’t pay for the weapons, we paid for them. And the idea that you can build up a dictator and then murder a million of his people to punish them for having a dictator is so morally grotesque it’s amazing that they can advance it without blushing.

The reality is that everything you do in political life has to be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. The benefit for Iraq of getting rid of a dictator has to be balanced against the cost of getting rid of him. Now, according to the Johns Hopkins University and the Lancet, 100,000 people were killed in the invasion and the first part of the occupation of Iraq (not including [the assault on] Fallujah and those who have died since [the report]);²In fact, the first peer-reviewed study, published on 29 October 2004, estimated the number of excess deaths caused, directly or indirectly, by the invasion and occupation of Iraq at 98,000. The second study, published on 11 October 2006, was to increase that figure to almost 655,000. and, according to the United Nations, a million people were killed by the sanctions that preceded the war.³See eg news.cornell.edu/stories. However, such figures have been strongly disputed. That’s a gigantic mass grave. It’s not one you’ll find Michael Buerk and his camera crew turning up at, and when I was trying to draw attention to it, nobody wanted to know; but it’s certainly the biggest mass grave in Iraq.

Secondly, the argument that Saddam’s dictatorship was qualitatively different from others was true only during the period when he was our best friend. He committed real and serious crimes against the people of Iraq, the people of Iran and the people of Kuwait, but virtually all of these were committed during the time he was our ally. If you believe Amnesty International, the number of politically-related deaths in Iraq after 1991 was in the region of 200 a year. That simply doesn’t compare with the death toll created by us by sanctions and war.

Thirdly, you have to balance it against the cost of the war to Iraq and the region as a whole. Islamist fundamentalism has been vastly empowered by the actions of Bush and Blair. Islamic extremism and alienation from the West have been fantastically amplified. Nobody could seriously dispute that. There was no al-Qa’ida in Iraq before, but there is now. In fact, new al-Qa’idas are germinating all over Iraq and all over the Middle East and beyond. All over the Muslim world, our action has created new levels of toxicity in people’s feelings towards the West. 

In countries like America and Britain, a very large number of people now don’t believe a word their government tells them, even when it is telling them the truth

And then you calibrate the cost to the international legal and political system involved in the subversion of the United Nations: bugging its Secretary General, attempting to bully and blackmail the Security Council into voting for war and then, having failed to do so, declaring war anyway. It was a major disfigurement of the international system. 

And, lastly, you have to calibrate the cost of the destruction of people’s faith in their own governments in countries like America and Britain, where a very large number of people now don’t believe a word their government tells them, even when it is telling them the truth. If there had been a referendum on the European constitution in Britain, Tony Blair would have lost it even if it was the best constitution ever written, because nobody’s prepared to buy anything that he is selling any more.

So, if there was a balance sheet and getting rid of Saddam was on one side of the ledger and all of this was on the other side, you’d have to conclude that the operation was bankrupt.

What is your opinion now of Mr Blair, as a person and as a political leader?

I hold him in absolute contempt on both counts. I think the interests of the people of this country have been gravely damaged by him and his bizarre ‘special relationship’ with George W Bush.

You’re probably tired of clarifying this, but what did you mean when in 1994 you said to Saddam, ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability’?

You’ll have to forgive me. I am tired of clarifying it, so I’m not going to again. It’s on the record a thousand times. It’s on the record in the Senate hearing,⁴youtube.com it’s on the record in the libel case,⁵In 2004, he won substantial damages from both the Christian Science Monitor and the Daily Telegraph over articles published the previous year that claimed he had received money from Saddam Hussein’s regime. it’s on the record in my book.⁶I’m Not the Only One (Penguin, 2005)

You represent it as hypocrisy that we first supported Saddam and then turned on him. Is it not legitimate to have a change of heart? If what the West did in the Eighties was deplorable, isn’t it proper that the West should now clean up the mess?

If you want to start cleaning up the mess, there are bigger messes – and that then raises the question of who has the right to decide which messes must be cleaned up, and in what order. And that cannot possibly be a decision that is given to governments on the basis of how powerful they are. If there’s going to be any international legality, it can only be the international community that decides, on the basis that either the situation has reached such a critical point that it’s infecting other countries around it or that there is a level of internal repression so horrific that the community has to intervene to stop it.

Neither of those things applied to Iraq. On the contrary, despite all the efforts to subvert the UN, the Security Council would not accept that the best way to deal with its dictator was to invade and occupy the country. The rest of the world said, ‘Insofar as there are problems with Iraq, the remedy you are proposing will make matters worse.’ And subsequent events have absolutely vindicated that view.

But there are legitimate reservations about the UN, aren’t there? It is dominated by vested interests, and not just US ones. France and Russia had their own reasons for opposing an invasion of Iraq – just as China would oppose any attempt to liberate Burma.

Israel has invaded more countries than any other country in the Middle East. It continues to occupy other people’s countries but gets not punished but rewarded with endless flows of American aid

Well, you have your list and others will have theirs. But what we can’t have is Mr Bush saying (as he has done, publicly): ‘God told me to strike Afghanistan and I did. God told me to intervene in Iraq and I did. And God told me to intervene in the Israel-Palestine dispute and I’m going to.’⁷See eg theguardian.com/world. This is absurd. You cannot possibly run a world in this way, with somebody who speaks in tongues deciding which countries are going to be invaded and which are not – and, at the same time as invading some countries because they are doing certain things, supporting others that are doing exactly the same things.

Such as Uzbekistan?

Uzbekistan is the most recent example, but Israel is the biggest example. Israel has flouted more UN resolutions than all other countries in the world put together. It possesses weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and the warheads to deliver them. It has invaded more countries than any other country in the Middle East. It continues to occupy other people’s countries but gets not punished but rewarded with endless flows of American economic and military aid.

You cannot say that we’re going to punish this country for that but are going to reward that country for exactly the same thing with cherries on top. That discredits completely any idea that you are intervening justly in a situation.

In a polemic against you, the journalist Christopher Hitchens quotes you saying that it was the worst day of your entire life when the Soviet Union fell.⁸See washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard. Is that true?

It’s slightly paraphrased, but it’s a fair representation, insofar as it goes, of my view that the unipolar world we now have is a complete disaster. The absence of any equilibrium is down to the fact that the United States is the sole superpower – indeed, hyperpower – and so the world is dangerously unbalanced.

Don’t you think the US had a right to respond to the attacks of ‘9/11’?

Afghanistan didn’t attack America.

Well, al-Qa’ida was based there –

Well, the IRA attacked Britain, many times, but Britain did not have either the right or the stupidity to send the Royal Air Force to bomb the Republic of Ireland, where the IRA was based.

Now, why were al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan? Who sent them to Afghanistan? Who paid for them to go to Afghanistan? Who gave them the weapons that they had in Afghanistan? We did. Not me – on the day before Kabul fell to what were then known as the mujahidin, I told Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons: ‘You have opened the gates to the barbarians, and a long, dark night will now descend upon the people of Afghanistan.’⁹We could find no record of this in Hansard.

And she had no answer, because she and [Ronald] Reagan, and before him [Jimmy] Carter and [his national security adviser, Zbigniew] Brzezinski, they were the people who sent al-Qa’ida to Afghanistan.¹⁰See eg outlookindia.com/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen. Brzezinski’s written about it. So, we then kill tens of thousands of Afghans because on their soil is operating a terrorist group which we sent there? Where’s the justice in that?

The idea that I’m anti-American is absurd. I have no animus at all towards the people of America. On the contrary, I admire very many things about them – but I hate their economic and political system

No Afghan was on board those aeroplanes on ‘9/11’. Afghanistan, the poorest, most ragged country in the world, never did any harm to the US. In fact, Taliban officials were in America just months before, negotiating with the US to allow them passage across their land for an oil and gas pipeline. But for the most powerful countries in the world to then savagely bombard the poorest people on earth for something they never did is morally reprehensible.

It often seems as if, as far as the left is concerned, the US can do no right. If the US is for it, then we’re against it. How do you respond to that?

The idea that I’m anti-American is absurd. I have no animus at all towards the people of America. On the contrary, I admire very many things about them – but I hate their economic and political system. 

And, frankly, since the end of the Second World War they haven’t done anything right. They did a lot right in the Second World War – admittedly late, and they’ve claimed rather more credit than they’re actually entitled to, but they did help save the world from Fascism and they did leave many thousands of their sons in our graveyards as a result. And if I had been alive, I would have been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with them.

But since then their government has not done anything right. On the contrary, it has done a huge amount of wrong all over the world. From Vietnam to southern Africa to the Middle East to Latin America, the Americans have committed blunder after blunder, crime after crime.

In May, most people agree, you made mincemeat of the chair of a US Senate hearing with a robust style which, I guess, is very much the product of Britain’s adversarial politics. Do you think that in practice our system of democracy is superior to the US version?

No, actually I think that their democracy is superior to ours. The US has a constitution; we do not. The US has a legislature that is separate from the executive and we do not. They have rights of freedom of information that we do not. 

However, the US media make very poor use of those rights, and their current crop of politicians is of a particularly low calibre. Until that day, people were openly talking of [Senator Norman] Coleman as the next Republican nominee for President, but I don’t think he ended that day as a presidential hopeful and I don’t think his soufflé will rise again. So, maybe I performed them a service.

It is unusual for someone not of Arab origin to be as committed as you are to the Palestinian cause. How did that come about?

It was entirely by chance. I had never met an Arab or a Muslim when a Palestinian student leader came to my door in 1975, when I was 21, at a time when you could have fitted all the British supporters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation into one small room. And in two hours he persuaded me that a really historic injustice had been perpetrated. I studied the subject, so far as it was possible to do so in the limited English literature at the time, and I threw myself into the cause – and because so few people were involved, I quickly became ‘prominent’. Two years later, I went to visit the refugee camps in Lebanon, including Sabra and Shatila,¹¹The camps where in 1982 an estimated 1,700 Palestinian refugees were massacred by Phalangist militiamen while the Israeli army stood by and I absorbed myself in this injustice and sought to change it.

It depends how you define success. If you define it in terms of progress up the greasy pole, clearly I’ve been a total failure

I think that what happened to the Palestinians is one of the most unjust things in modern history – and moreover (though it wouldn’t change my feelings were it otherwise) the resolution of this question is absolutely central to the peace and security of the world. This is not a far-off corner of darkest Ecuador: this conflict is in the very heart of human society, at the crossroads of the great religions, in a strategically vital part of the world, and therefore it is a matter of importance even to those who are not (as I am) touched in their hearts by the injustice of it. The need to resolve it ought to be occupying the minds of politicians everywhere – but it isn’t.

Enoch Powell once said that all political careers end in failure –

Well, as mine has been a failure from start to finish, it won’t make any difference to me.

Do you consider yourself a political failure?

It depends how you define success. If you define it in terms of progress up the greasy pole, clearly I’ve been a total failure. I can only say that it could have been no other way. If the price of advancement was to say things I didn’t believe, or not to say things I did believe in, that is certainly not a price I would ever have contemplated paying.

But I have been five times elected to the House of Commons, almost always in the teeth of unremitting media hostility; and I’m proud about that. I am proud that I can draw significant audiences. I’m proud that I have built up the anti-war movement in Britain and I have built up Respect. I am proud that in the Arab world and the Muslim world I have many supporters. These are clearly not failures.

The media often describe you as a maverick, and a lot of people recognise that you are one of the most powerful political orators in the country. Rhetoric is a dangerous weapon. Who do you feel accountable to for how you use it?

Well, the dictionary definition of ‘maverick’ is ‘an unbranded beast’. I don’t mind that. But insofar as it’s commonly used to denote someone who is erratic and unpredictable, I utterly reject it. In fact, my political views are entirely consistent. 

Insofar as I am an orator, I have been born with attributes like anyone else – some can play football, some can do mathematics, some can speak. Who I am accountable to is, in the first place, the people who have elected me – five times – fully cognisant, let me tell you, of everything I’ve ever said in public (since my opponents and the media make sure that they are). I am accountable to my own conscience. And I’m accountable, in the end, to God.

This edit was originally published in the September 2005 issue of Third Way.

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