On the Radar

With friends like these…

‘We waited a long time for a Labour government,’ writes The Guardian’s Gary Younge sadly. ‘Many of us – not a majority of the country but approaching a majority of Labour voters – feel we are still waiting.’

He goes on: ‘If you care about the future of the Labour party, representative democracy, the fate of Iraq, or the lives of Iraqis, not to mention British and American soldiers, don’t vote Labour.’ Instead, Younge urges the electorate to back the Respect coalition or the Green party.

Like anyone else, Younge is, of course, perfectly entitled to call instead for a change. Having revealed, however, that he has not voted Labour since 1992, his claims to care about the party ring rather hollow.

And who exactly are Respect, upon whom Younge seems keen for us to lavish our votes? Its leading light is George Galloway. His new book reveals the former Labour MP’s relationship with Iraq to be even more complicated than some of the press’ more lurid allegations: ‘Over time I came to love Iraq like a man loves a woman. For nearly ten years whenever I heard the word Iraq in the conversation of a passer-by or on radio or television, I would turn around as if someone had called my name.’And he offers a fascinating deconstruction of his party’s name: ‘Respect. It’s a young word. It’s a black word. It’s the first postmodern name for an electoral political movement; most are one or other arrangement of the words The Something, and Party. With respect, we’re different.’ Well, quite.

Different it may be, but already Respect has been engaging in those favourite pastimes of the far left: the split and schism. Just a few months into the coalition’s life, one of its founders, Younge’s fellow Guardian journalist George Monbiot, has nosily resigned over Respect’s decision to run candidates against the Greens.

Rather wisely, the Greens rebuffed Galloway’s generous offer to merge themselves with Respect. No matter, though, because Galloway has managed to get the Communist party of Britain on board (not to be confused with the Communist party of Great Britain, which has refused to come into line).

The Greens’ unwillingness to join Galloway’s gang leaves Respect dominated by the Socialist Workers’ party (even their website is, in fact, owned by an SWP activist). Its London mayoral candidate, for instance, is Lindsey German, the convenor of the Stop the War coalition, who recently stepped down as editor of the SWP’s Socialist Review magazine.

In between waging class war and fighting imperialism, Ms German leads a rather touching crusade on behalf of the Routemaster bus. ‘They’re trying to get rid of them on the grounds that they’re not suitable for disabled people and not as environmentally friendly as they should be,’ she wails in her ‘vision for London’.

And from Routemasters we pass rather effortlessly to sharia law. Another of Respect’s big supporters is the Muslim Association of Britain. Not to be confused with the Muslim Council of Britain, the mainstream voice of Britain’s Muslims, MAB was a leading force in the Stop the War Coalition. Its former president, Anas Altikriti, heads the Respect list in Yorkshire and the Humber.

But as Nick Cohen has reported in the Observer, MAB is ‘a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants a religious tyranny to enforce Islamic law. The association believes the punishment for Muslims who abandon their faith should be death and that Israel should be abolished.’ No wonder that Ms German says she’ll continue to defend gay rights, but she won’t have them become a ‘shibboleth’ for Respect.

At Progress’ Westminster seminar ‘all trust up’, Polly Toynbee and Tessa Jowell tussled over the role of the press and the question of government regulation. Jowell draws a line between regulation of broadcasters (which should strive for impartiality) and the print media (which, she claims, most people recognise offer opinion rather than straight news).There is, however, quite a leap between accepting this proposition and the culture secretary’s claim that while most people believe what they pick up from television and radio, they don’t necessarily do the same for the press. Yes, it probably is the case that large numbers of people trust Newsnight more than the Sun, but, as Toynbee argues, it simply beggars belief to suggest that attitudes are not formed by, and our national discourse not perverted by, the daily diet of visceral anti-Europeanism, harangues against minorities and asylum-seeker bashing which our ‘popular’ press serves up.

Robert Kilroy-Silk’s decision to stand for the UK Independence party prompts a disturbing thought: maybe the hard left in Liverpool were right about one thing – namely, their desire to get rid of him when he was Labour MP for Knowsley in the 1980s.

As we all know, Kilroy-Silk entertained the amusing notion that he could continue to pen his attacks on ‘despotic, barbarous, corrupt suicide bomber’ Arabs, and ‘peasants, priests and pixies’ (the Irish) for the Sunday Express, while presenting his daytime TV show on the BBC. The one thing more extraordinary than this was his defence when the scandal broke: the paper had accidentally run one of his old columns in place of the offering he had intended.

But then again, what became of Kilroy-Silk’s arch enemy, that hero of the Militant Tendency, Derek Hatton? Like Kilroy-Silk, he, too, has become a media motormouth with a penchant for the finer things in life. Maybe these two icons of 1980s Merseyside politics had more in common than either they, or we, realised?