My Problem With Galloway 

Photograph Source: UK Parliament – CC BY 3.0

A golem is a figure from Jewish folklore. An entity fashioned from dirt and mud, endowed with a life force by some sinister mystic or magician and set into motion toward an evil and interminable end.  Generally speaking – as a modern and rational human being – one probably shouldn’t believe in golems and yet, having said that, how else could one possibly explain the existence of George fucking Galloway?

For the Galloway is surely a creature fashioned from dirt and mud, endowed with a lifeforce of grotesque and fang-toothed malevolence that has somehow managed to concentrate every atavistic aspect of the prehensile, decaying Stalinist left.   

For instance.  The spirit of those old trade-union leaders of Victorian times, who made tub-thumping speeches demanding women know their place and remain shackled to the kitchen sink – who saw women entering the work force as a threat to the wages and position of the working-class male labouring in factory or pit – is very much alive in the ghastly Galloway. Only here it bubbles up into the realm of sexual politics where the issue of autonomy of labour crosses over into the autonomy of bodies.  

The Galloway in this day and age – in all his rotund, tumescent glory – addressed a whole generation of modern women in order to uplift them, to explain to them in rather terrifying detail how, if they’d first had sex with a male partner, then their bodily autonomy was thereby relinquished.  ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion’, opined ‘gorgeous’ Geroge with a roguish chuckle. 

As a hard-lining man of stern Catholic bent, the Galloway in this guise was defending another Very Important Man, Julian Assange, who had allegedly penetrated without a condom a woman while she was sleeping, and penetrated (again without a condom) another woman; both women having made their consent to sex dependent on the fact that he first use protection.  

But such trifling trivialities were obviously obsolete to a man of George Galloway’s erect, upright bearing – the hay that all these liberal, harpy feminists were making against Very Important Men on the left Fighting the Good Fight – could only ever be conceived as a CIA conspiracy designed to bring this or that Very Important Man down. Or perhaps it was all just political correctness gone mad.  

It usually is.

But the balm to any justification for fucking women without their permission or – as all those pesky feminists have it – rape … is more-often-than-not the venerable vision of a puritanical, god-fearing family where a man goes out into the world and achieves significant things, bolstered by a woman who is passive in her acquiescence and support.  Such a combination, quite naturally, leads to a collection of wholesome, happy and morally intact children (a vision the Galloway very much cherishes).

But what about those wholesome, happy and morally intact children?  The only way we will make sure they are born in the first place is if we ensure those crazy, feministic pro-abortion laws are … ermm … well … aborted.  And the Galloway, quite naturally, is a big fan of the anti-abortion movement.  Not for the first time, our left-wing ‘firebrand’ tilts neatly to the right.  

Yes, clearly a given woman has some level of autonomy, but at the same time, a complex of cells inside her body overrides that, as it knits itself into something so much more … fundamental (ist).  In fact, that same foetus is calling out to you right now.  You only have to draw closer and really listen. ‘Help’, (the complex of cells buried deep in the uterus cries out).  ‘Stop these radical feminists from murdering me! I want to live. Please let me live!  And … while you are at it, would you make sure to bomb Gaza a little more?  Seriously. I’m telling you. They are all HAMAS!’

I’m kidding, of course.  I’m joshing.   But while you and I may disagree with a vanilla, white-bread, Christianised view of what family life should be – whatever else you cannot attack the moral commitment of the Galloway for cleaving to such a view; after all, the Galloway in question (three times divorced, currently onto his fourth wife) harkens back to a more traditional epoch. He understands that modern life and its lack of religiosity has led to a decay in social standards – the erosion of the institution of marriage and the nuclear family.  

And that’s not right-wing, by the way.  In fact, it’s totally to the left. It’s just that the solidity and matter-of-factness of the old school trade union bureaucracy and Communist Parties of yore has been overwhelmed by a deluge of post-modern and fashionably academic tropes unleashed by a privileged and effete generation who care more about their i-phones and their Ubers – their metropolitanism and their metro-sexuality – than the good old-fashioned solidarity which comes from a time when men were simply men and women were women.

And the Galloway – as a noble, resilient last breath of good ol’ fashioned gulag inspired ‘communism’ (much like Canute holding back the tide) – will not bow to these ephemeral standards, standards that hold no connection to the material and biological realities of our lives.  This Galloway insists that we must cling to the traditional family of old, he refuses to teach his children that ‘gay relationships are exactly the same and as normal as a mum, a dad and kids.’    

And that’s mighty noble, in my book.  And before you say anything, the implication that gay people are in some way abnormal doesn’t imply any type of hatred on the Galloway’s part.  Not in the slightest.  I mean, he even has gay friends!  (actually, that last bit is somewhat of an embellishment on my part, but I am sure he does)

In the same vein, ‘gorgeous’ George’s views on trans people are, so to say, predictable. When asked to comment on the issue, the Galloway once again reverts to the language of religion; ‘God creates everything in pairs’, he says, delineating the absolute opposition between the conception of male and female.

Elsewhere, he bolsters such a nuanced analysis by explaining that ‘men cannot be women however they dress up’ and the problem with today’s schools is that they are teaching ‘young children that there are 99 genders’.   One take’s his point, of course. He is more traditional.  And it’s nice to feel some traditions are being honoured.  Just as with the homophobes of old, the issue of the corruption of children becomes a nodal point by which Bible-thumping prejudice can be channelled into the idiom of the moral crusade. We should all salute the Galloway for that.

In reality, however, it is impossible not to feel some level of sympathy; you can only imagine how frightening the modern world must appear to someone of the Galloway’s political persuasion (somewhere between Stalinist apparatchik and Brown-Shirt thug).  All these me-too feminists, trans activists, and pro-gay protestors constantly raising their voices, creating such a kerfuffle – to the Galloway they sound petulant, entitled and shrill, and would be better off staying in their boxes.  This Galloway is very much your elderly grandfather or grandmother – screaming at you to turn that rap-music or heavy-metal down ‘BECAUSE IT ISNT REALLY MUSIC AT ALL, IT’S JUST NOISE!!!!’

Perhaps it is inevitable, therefore, that the Galloway in question, on hearing the melody of freedom, recoiling in horror at a new generation finding ways of weaving their personalities and potentials into fuller and richer forms of self-expression – would take comfort – not just in his own sanctimonious sense of religiosity – but also in those forces and figures who are prepared to impose a more black and white and morally wholesome template on the populations they ‘uplift’.  All those trans people and their ilk bleating about ‘99 genders’ have about as much autonomy and significance as all those Ukrainians supposedly fighting for their lives at the hands of a ‘brutal’ Russian occupation; the former are merely the dupes of identity politics, while the latter are simply the ‘proxies’ of NATO and western imperialism.

And that is why we need people like Putin (he doesn’t hold much truck with these trans people and their ’99 genders’, by the way) – we need to think in terms of leaders and states rather than populations and mass movements.   And, for all his faults, the Galloway understand this.   After all, history is made by Very Important Men just like him. And that is why the Galloway himself has had considerable political success over the years.  It is true that some might call his electoral strategies rather opportunistic – for he is somewhat mercurial in terms of the districts and regions in the UK he has chosen to inflict himself upon. 

In 2005, for instance, the Galloway won an electoral victory in the London district of Bethnal Green and Bow standing as an independent and defeating the Blairite labour candidate Oona King (even though, like most places he has campaigned in – he had not lived there and had scant knowledge of the people who did).   

And yet, in this context, he did indeed play a genuinely important role.  He fought on an anti-war platform against right-wing Labour who were determined to continue bombing Iraq as part of their ongoing campaign of imperialist mass-murder.  In retrospect, however, the more telling aspect was not the fact of his spectacular and unexpected victory against the odds (which even this cynic celebrated) but the swiftness with which it petered away into nothing.  The Galloway was unceremoniously despatched at the ballot box after only a first term.

The current writer happened to work in the Bethnal Green district at the time of the Galloway’s election and its aftermath.  My job was to help students with their English.  The majority of these were older men – Bangladeshi Muslims in the main – who’d had no formal education in the English language, and yet had lived in London for the most of their lives.  What I remember from that period is that while those men and some women in my classroom were quite positive about the Galloway, they also thought him something of a publicity junkie and a canny operator to wit.  

They appreciated his anti-war stance, of course, but on everyday, bread and butter issues, it was difficult to get an appointment with him as a local MP.  For the Galloway was nearly always primed for something bigger, something better; most memorably, in the week that the Muslim community in Bethnal Green and Bow were hosting a series of important festivals and meals to celebrate the day of Eid al-Adha, and where they hoped their local MP might make an appearance to represent them – the Galloway in question instead chose to spend the time representing himself on a more flamboyant and national stage – that of Celebrity Big Brother where he was reportedly paid £60,000 for the privilege of dressing up in a leotard and meowing like a cat.   

I am sure it wasn’t only about the cash. No doubts, the Galloway believed his own personal brand of charisma, his heightened speechmaking would light up a whole new generation in political terms.  But the slick and savvy upper-middle-class producers of Big Brother … how can I put this?  … well, they really saw him coming. Or to say the same, they hoisted him on his own leotard.  They were able to solicit a performance from ‘gorgeous’ George which seemed both sentimental and rigid – ranting and out-of-touch and yet simultaneously simpering and absurd.  

He was seen to bully some of the younger contestants while couching such nastiness in the refrain of a campaign against a lack of moral standards that would eventually reach a surreal and puritanical crescendo as when he berated glamour model Jodie Marsh (someone who had previously got her tits out on camera and, therefore, deserves to burn in hell) as ‘the devil’, before promising to fight her and all her ‘works’.  

For some reason, the Galloway didn’t win the competition.  

Another significant victory for the Galloway occurred when, in 2012, he was swept to victory in Bradford West in a landslide win.  Again, he appealed to the Muslim community there, a sizable majority, on the basis of the very real discrimination Muslims are subject to in their day-to-day lives and the wars unleashed against Muslim majority countries abroad.  Or to say the same, he appealed to them in terms of important and legitimate grievances and injustices which he, the Galloway, would provide a voice to redress.    

And yet, a similar pattern emerged.  He was ejected from political power after a first term.  The Galloway didn’t help his own cause – that much is true.  He accused his political opponent of 2015, Naz Shah, of having lied about her age when she was forced into marriage; his campaign against her rested on the ‘fact’ that she had been 16 rather than 15 when she had to suffer such a horrific ordeal (the issue of rape and subjugation more generally, you see, wasn’t what appalled the Galloway, it was the ‘discrepancy’ of age to which he took umbrage).  But, as we are already aware, the Galloway’s understanding of all these new-fangled, ‘post-modernistic’ notions of something called ‘consent’ was always a little hazy.  It’s okay, though, he is from a more redoubtable generation.   That’s just how things were in the seventies.

Or perhaps medieval times.  

Once more, however, the underlying thread in the Galloway’s election loss was the feeling he was something of an opportunist; that, having won his seat, there was the widespread sense was that he simply wasn’t available, wasn’t putting himself at the service of the people in an ordinary and everyday capacity.  His public profile, his celebrity, was forever paramount.  The practise of spending years and even decades living in the same place, away from the spotlight, laboriously working to address the everyday and banal concerns that we, as human beings, all have; gradually acclimatising himself to the emotional weather of a given community was never going to be something which suited the Galloway – as an individual of significant historical import. As the Galloway himself would himself reflect, ‘I like elections more than I like serving’.  

And when one considers the Galloway in this capacity, his international politics make a great deal more sense.  The people – the majority of all people – are not Very Important Men.  They are not like the Galloway or Assange or Putin.   They are not capable of determining their own fate in quite the same way.  And they are certainly not the prime-movers of history. And for that reason, it is hardly a coincidence that the Galloway has found spiritual solace with a whole host of ‘moral’ leaders from the charming Saddam Hussein – whose ‘courage … strength …[and]…. indefatigability’ the ‘gorgeous’ one whole-heartedly saluted – to Vladamir Putin, whom the Galloway regularly blows loving kisses toward, not least of which when describing just how Russia was ‘lying on the floor drunk, bleeding with its pockets picked. In 21 years, Putin has completely transformed Russia.’  

One of the ‘anti-imperialist’ dictators whom the Galloway developed a particularly poignant penchant for was the human tooth-brush cum genocidal tyrant Bashar al-Assad. Like a good deal of commentators on the western left who didn’t care to make themselves au fait with the actual trajectory of Syrian history following the popular uprising in 2011the Gallowaysubscribed to the same limited and black-and-white vision; Assad (for all his faults) represented a secular form of Arab nationalism which was fundamentally progressive and the hundreds of thousands of his own citizenry he murdered – those who had risen up against him – were merely the excretions of a Western sponsored ISIS terrorism.   

And yet, having endured the most brutal tyranny in the shape of a gangster dynasty for over 50 years and having been plunged into fourteen years of civil war whereby so many more were either murdered by the regime or tortured and left to rot in its dungeons, late last year Syrians finally managed to extricate themselves from the yoke of the Assad family and its ghastly, ghoulish predations. It moves me to think about it even now.  The scenes of Syrian prisoners being released after decades of hellish captivity were one of the wonderful bright-spots in a year which had otherwise seen the election of Trump in the US, Starmer in the UK, and most awfully of all, the ongoing genocide of Palestinians at the hand of the Israeli state.

But the Galloway really didn’t see things this way.  His response to the Syrians as a majority ejecting their befouling dictator from their lands and lives was perhaps one of the most potent exercises of hubris and stupidity ever committed to the historical record.  The Galloway used his popular platform to announce that the ‘Arabs are a lost cause’ and he (their great defender) was no longer prepared to fight ‘for them’.   

Every word uttered here, I think, provides a lesson.  It provides a lesson in the type of contempt these Stalinist figures on the dying left have for a genuinely socialist conception of politics and history, the type of contempt they have for ordinary people and their struggles and possibilities of historical transformation from below.   

When I think of the Galloway today, I am reminded – somewhat paradoxically – of the example of Malcolm X.  A man who died young but was an old soul, someone both wise and kind.  But he didn’t start off as Malcolm X, of course.  Back in the day, he was a street hustler known as Detroit Red.    But what he came to realise, during a period of incarceration, was that his philosophy of individualism – of the pimp and the hustler – nurtured on the street, raised up in terms of violence and the calculating and amoral pursuit of one’s own ends at the ruthless expense of every other – was not a philosophy of radicalism or resistance or true self-determination at  all. 

Instead, in all its shape and contours, it reflected to a tee the forms of the white elite that he despised, an elite which not only supressed black people domestically but created institutions like the CIA that operated on a global scale to rule and control vast sections of the world according to the dictates of ruthless economic individualism and an almost unlimited appetite for violence.  For Detroit Red to become Malcolm X, this was a necessary epiphany.   

But it’s a progression, an evolution, that the Galloway will never know.   How close his ‘anti-imperialism’ is to the Western strains of imperialism it purports to be struggling against, this is something the Galloway and his ilk will remain forever oblivious to.    As Putin continues to pulverize Ukraine in the hope of re-establishing the Russian empire of old, the Galloway can only interpret such measures as those stemming from a great leader – ‘a giant amongst pygmies’ – providing a staunch ‘anti-imperialist’ resistance to Western power.  

Assad’s regime has been overthrown by vast numbers of ordinary people who have known only persecution and horror at the dictator’s hands – but again, the majority of ordinary human lives, glimpsed through the Galloway’s ‘anti-imperialist’ lens, are vague and indefinite, and lack substance.  What really counts is that another Very Important Man and Significant Historical Figure has been toppled.  And by whom?    An Arab population that the Galloway has spent his life fighting for.  How they have disappointed him!  How low they have rendered themselves in his eyes.  The Arabs, on mass, have become for the Galloway a ‘lost cause’. Which is terrifying in itself – one can only wonder how they will fight on without their great patron’s support.   

But is not the Galloway’s self-righteous fury at the removal of Assad over and against his own ‘anti-imperialist’ agenda – isn’t such behaviour redolent of a more fusty and archaic colonial mentality from bygone centuries?  Think about all those Christian missionaries who went to ‘deepest, darkest Africa’ against the backdrop of the slave trade and colonisation; those whites who sought to ‘uplift’ and ‘improve’ the blacks in and through the Good Book and the holy word.  

And how often were these god-fearing and respectable figures left dejected by the fact that the ‘savages’ themselves – ‘wild and untamed’ – simply wouldn’t accept their presence and views, and proved ‘unable’ to raise themselves to the standards which white Christian civilization required?    Why, on many an occasion, the colonial ‘beneficiaries’ of ‘Christian civilization’ even resisted, and with no small decree of fury.    

Likewise, the Galloway’s own fury that the Syrian population has, on its own terms, overthrown his man in Damascus bears all the hallmarks of the same type of missionary zeal.  The ‘savages’ whom he has spent a lifetime ‘educating and uplifting’ have refused to heed the word of their great white saviour; ergo the Arabs qua Arabs – as a racial group per-se – are now irrevocably dammed as a ‘lost cause’.   Isn’t it about time we recognise just how neatly such ‘anti-imperialism’ dovetails with the reflexive and instinctive sense of racist superiority carried by the imperial projects of yore? 

The repulsiveness of the Galloway is not simply due to the fact that he happens to be Andrew Tate’s grandmother.  It is due to the fact that the Galloway is anything but gorgeous.  He is grotesque.   And we need to stop buying into him.

Tony McKenna’s journalism has been featured by Al Jazeera, Salon, The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, New Internationalist, The Progressive, New Statesman and New Humanist. His books include Art, Literature and Culture from a Marxist Perspective (Macmillan), The Dictator, the Revolution, the Machine: A Political Account of Joseph Stalin (Sussex Academic Press), Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art  (Zero Books), The War Against Marxism: Reification and Revolution (Bloomsbury) and The Face of the Waters (Vulpine). He can be reached on twitter at @MckennaTony