Full transcript: George Galloway on London Real
0:00 George Galloway: I’m George Galloway and you’re watching London Real, and we go play the he we go
0:07 Brian Rose: welcome back to London Real. I’m your host Brian Rose, and joining me today is Mr George Galloway, who’s a member of the British Parliament for the Respect Party. Welcome.
0:23 George Galloway: Thank you very much, good to be here.
0:27 Brian Rose: It’s really nice to have you here.
0:30 Brian Rose: You know, John F Kennedy was asked once why he went into politics, and his answer was, “It’s where the action is.” And I wanted to know, why did you go into politics?
0:40 George Galloway: Well, they say that politics is show business for ugly people. But as I always say, what would I know about that? It’s not, because it’s show business, though there is an element of show business about it.
0:53 It’s a performing art, no doubt about that. JFK, a childhood hero of mine, I may say, is not wrong when he says it’s where the action is. Though it’s not always action. General Wavell described war as 90% tedium and 10% terrifying excitement, and politics is a bit like that. Certainly parliamentary politics, there’s a lot of tedium.
1:19 I’m amidst the action. So that’s part of the reason also. But the main reason for me is that I am an has have always been driven by the beliefs that I have, the wish to prize those, the wish to see some, all of those one day fulfilled. So not all politicians, I think, could credibly claim this, but I believe I can. That idealism is my principal reason for being in politics.
1:56 You may not agree with my ideals but at least believe I genuinely hold them, is what I say to my adversaries.
2:03 Brian Rose: And when you, I just was thinking of different boys when they grow up. Did you grow up thinking, I want to be a member of Parliament, or get into politics, or it’s not a normal career path?
2:14 George Galloway: Oddly, I did. I’m slightly embarrassed, odd enough.
2:17 I believe you see. I used to, I was able staying with JFK to recite verbatim, I think, most at least of the inaugural address of Kennedy’s first presidency. Kennedy was very important to us because we were Scottish Catholics of Irish background. He was famously the first, the only Catholic President of the United States. His picture adorned the wall of my grandparents, alongside, the pope and Éamon de Valera, the founder of the Irish Republic.
2:57 So Kennedy was important to me, and at that age, so I would be six. I could recite most, maybe all, but certainly most of the inaugural address. I grew up in a political house. I was always the little boy in school who knew who the president of this country, was, or the king of that country, the capital city of this place. Because we talked about politics around the breakfast table all the time.
3:25 It was a highly political house. My father, God rest his soul, was a trade union official. My mother was a labor activist. And because we came from this Irish immigrant background, we carried all that with us, the most important part of which was a hatred of imperialism, of colonialism, of Empire. I always joke, indeed I’ve now got it in the Penguin Book of Quotations.
3:53 It happens to be true that when I came home one day and told my Irish grandfather that the teacher had said that Britain had an Empire so vast that upon it the Sun never set, my grandfather answered, that’s because God would never trust the British in the dark. And I never had cause to doubt him about that. So I grew up in this. So whilst I certainly did not grow up thinking, I want to be an MP. In fact, for most of my youth I would have disdained the very idea as a sellout.
4:27 I certainly grew up believing that I wanted to, and I would have a political life, and I’ve been very, very lucky in that. Apart from a few years when I left school, when I worked in a factory making tires, Michelin tires, Z X radials, making me the only MP in Britain that can make a tire. Most of them can’t even change one. Apart from those few years, I’ve spent the entirety of my life in political work, getting paid for things that I would have done for nothing, in my spare time.
5:05 So I’ve been very lucky in that. So I embarked upon politics at such an early age. I mean, I was working in elections when I was 5, 6, handing out leaflets at school gates, later clambering up lamp posts to hang posters, and so on, from a very, very early age. All my earliest memories revolve around that.
5:23 Brian Rose: Wow, it sounds like a bit like the Kennedy family, where that was the only business everyone went into.
5:29 And it was something you grew up with.
5:31 George Galloway: Yeah. Well, we had some things in common with the Kennedys, but many hundreds of millions of things, not.
5:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, we could spend a whole episode on Joe Kennedy, I’m sure. But very ambitious man.
5:41 You know, I was watching a few videos to get ready for this interview, and I watched one, I think you were having a debate in Bradford with some of the local, you, the people you were running against, and it just struck me that they seem to be playing checkers and you were playing chess, as in that you just seem to be completely different level from where they were, at least politically, or even speaking, or as an orator. And I’m just wondering where does that come from?
6:11 George Galloway: Well, I think you have to have an innate ability to speak, and communicate, and I have that, but the rest is practice.
6:19 It’s the old Jack Nicholson saw when asked, was that a lucky shot? He said, “Yeah, but the amazing thing is the more I practice, the luckier I get.” So the more you talk, the more you speak, the more you write, the more you communicate, campaign, the better at it you get, and I’ve been doing it for a very, very long time, so I ought to be good at it. But I did kiss the Blarney Stone not once but twice, which for those viewers overseas who don’t know what the Blarney stone is.
6:52 It’s a stone in the very far south of Ireland, where the legend is, if you kiss it, you’ll have the gift of the gab, you’ll be a good speaker. So you can’t kiss it now, actually, because people urinate on it, but in those innocent days you could, and I did. And definitely I’ve got the gift of the gab.
7:12 Brian Rose: You have to kiss it upside down.
7:15 George Galloway: Yeah, you hang over it and kiss it.
7:17 Yeah, in fact I was held by my ankles to kiss it.
7:19 Brian Rose: Was this when you were young?
7:21 George Galloway: Picture, there’s a picture to that effect. Yeah, I was a small kid.
7:24 Brian Rose: You know, speaking of videos, I’ve watched you, you know, debating these people in Bradford.
7:29 I’ve seen you in 2005, lambasting, I think it was, the US Senate subcommittee. I’ve seen so many. There’s, as you said to me when I visited your offices near Parliament about 2 weeks ago, you have over 15,000 videos on YouTube,
7:42 George Galloway: not one of which I put there myself, I quickly add.
7:45 Brian Rose: And is that good or bad?
7:47 George Galloway: Well, I wouldn’t want your viewers to think I was some kind of fetishist, putting myself up on YouTube.
7:53 I didn’t put a single one up.
7:55 Brian Rose: So I guess my question is, we get so many different angles of you, and I’ve seen you, you know, recently on the BBC talking about the Falkland Islands, speaking to the Senate subcommittee. It makes me always want to ask you know, who is the real George Galloway?
8:11 George Galloway: Well, I hope what you see is what you get, and that’s the real me. Obviously there’s an element of performance, as I acknowledged, admitted, at the beginning.
8:21 You know, I don’t sit in my living room addressing my family in the way that I address the US Senate. You sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re not on, but I like to think, and I think even my worst enemies would concede, that I’m pretty transparent politically. I’ve always held the views that I hold. I’ve always expressed them. I don’t hide what I believe in, and even if I was the last man standing believing in it, I’d continue to believe in it.
8:53 And there have been many times when it’s felt like I was the last man standing, but what goes around comes around. And I feel kind of vindicated on most of the big things that I believe in. But I don’t make a fetish of politics. I’ve just been writing my newspaper column this morning about Adele, about Bomber Command and the new memorial to them, which has taken more than 60 years to be erected. About the movie Braveheart, but of course there’s a tangential politics in all of the items, apart from the Adel bit, probably.
9:38 But, you know, I I think and talk, and I’m interested in many other things other than politics.
9:44 Brian Rose: You’re a student of history, it seems.
9:46 George Galloway: very much so. I read a lot, and that’s, I should have said, one of the reasons why you can speak, well, if you’ve read a lot and if you have a good memory, and I do. I’m cursed with a very good memory.
9:59 I’m absolutely gutted that this is the last night of the European football championships. I’ve loved practically every minute of practically every game. If I couldn’t watch on television, I listened on radio, and driving back from Bradford in the early hours of the morning, if there had been any game at all between the Denver Colorado Jets and against anybody, I would have listened to it. So I just don’t want you to have the idea that I’m all the time thinking and talking about politics.
10:38 Brian Rose: So you like American football as well?
10:40 George Galloway: Yeah, well, I mean, I probably got the name of the team wrong, but any competitive sport I can watch, even if I don’t fully grasp the rules, which is the case in American football.
10:51 Brian Rose: Did you, you now, you were out of Parliament for, was it a year or two years? How was that for you? Did you miss it?
10:58 Was that a difficult time, or was it a time to do other projects for you?
11:02 George Galloway: Well, I would have said to you that I didn’t miss it. And I would have largely believed that. But it is quite telling that I never drove past the building and I never went near the building. I never would have dreamt of visiting the building as a nonmember.
11:18 And I think subconsciously that is an indication that I did miss it, that I felt somehow that I should be there. and when a good opportunity came up, I didn’t hesitate to throw my hat in the ring. Having said that, now that I’m back, I can easily see all the reasons why I was kind of glad to be away. it’s extraordinarily time-consuming, and the pressure of work is enormous, and I have a lot of other work. Most MPs are just MPs, that’s all they have to do, but I have to make television programs, radio programs, right?
12:01 I have to speak on public platforms all over the place, practically every night. And to do that and be an MP and the father of young children and a husband, and get managed to see the football championships. It’s very, very taxing, and for not very much money at all. And moreover, every penny that you earn hereafter has to be publicly declared for all to see and criticize. So there’s a goldfish bowl issue here too, that I, for 2 years, could tell an inquiring journalist that it was absolutely none of his business how much money I was earning.
12:46 I can no longer do that. But all in all, of course I don’t regret standing. I like elections. I like winning them. I’ve won a lot of them.
12:55 I like the battle, the short sword fighting, that an election definitely provides.
13:01 Brian Rose: Do you like campaigning? Do you like debating? What’s your like, all of it?
13:07 George Galloway: I rarely find anyone to debate with me now.
13:10 The Bradford television exchange that you talked about was the only one of the entire campaign, which they could not avoid. They avoided all the others, because, well, most people don’t want to debate with me. That’s a compliment, but it happens to be true.
13:24 Brian Rose: You know, when you came back in ’05 from that Senate subcommittee hearing, I think you were lauded as, you know, one of the great, you know, British orators, or praised as being, you know, this is this is a representative British politicians.
13:38 And then over the years you are brought up and brought down, and, and, and ridiculed, and then praised, in a way like that. How does that feel, you know, for you?
13:49 George Galloway: Well, you know, I’m a man like you. If you cut me, I bleed like you. Nobody wants to be attacked.
13:55 Nobody wants to be traduced. Above all, nobody wants to be lied about. It’s one thing having someone bitterly attack what you actually have done or actually have said. It’s another thing when it’s distorted, probably deliberately, in order to be attacked, distorted, or even invented. That hurts.
14:19 One has dark nights of the soul. I’m not as confident as I appear to be. The first thing I ask after a speech to the people closest to me, and I mean it, was that all right? And sometimes they say, well, you’ve got 500 people giving you a standing ovation. So what do you think?
14:42 But it doesn’t mean you don’t say it, and neither does it mean you don’t mean it. So yeah, sometimes it hurts, but if you have a deep belief in the correctness of what you’re saying, in doing, and I do have that, then you keep on. And of course when you’re vindicated, sometimes vindication takes a lifetime or several lifetimes. Only in history are people sometimes vindicated, partly because of the age we’re in, and partly because of the speed with which events are moving.
15:19 I’m finding vindication comes along quite quickly. The Iraq War, being a case in point, which in a way was the pivotal issue in my life, made me rich. Not from Saddam Hussein, but from the newspapers that alleged that Saddam Hussein had made me rich.
15:40 Brian Rose: Okay, these are the settlements from the libel suits,
15:44 George Galloway: talking about, yes, the people who made these false allegations have paid out pretty nearly £3 million in damages, because they were lies.
15:55 Brian Rose: But something you saw right away when the talk began of invading Iraq.
16:01 Brian Rose: Is that something that just, you know, popped into your head?
16:06 George Galloway: Well, I knew, I know, first of all, I know a lot about the Middle East, because I’ve been involved in it for a long time. I knew a lot about Iraq, although I had never been there prior to the Gulf War in ’91, and I would have been arrested if I had, because I was a known opponent of the Saddam regime, something that not many of my later accusers could say. But knowing Iraq, knowing the Arab world, knowing the Muslim world more generally, I knew that this would be a total, unmitigated, bloody disaster, and because I, a, had an area of expertise there, and B had the ability to communicate these concerns perhaps better than others, and thirdly had more courage to do so than others, who now queue up to tell me how they wished they’d listened to people like me, in the run-up to the war, but were too, they don’t say cowardly, to do so, at the time.
17:10 There was a critical mass of factors there which propelled me to the front of what became a mass movement. Now, if the Iraq War had been a success, you wouldn’t be interviewing me now, because I would have been a busted flush, as somebody who opposed something that turned out to be good and predicted consequences that turned out to be wrong. I don’t, I think you would have bounced back from that, maybe, but definitely my standing would have been very much diminished, but because I turned out to be right.
17:43 You know, I think it was Shakespeare, it might not have been said: the treason never prospers, for if it prospers none dare call it treason. And the same is true of this. If the Iraq War had turned out the way Bush and Blair said it would, then I wouldn’t have been able to pitch up and talk about it. But now it’s them that hides away, and it’s me that’s vindicated. So I suppose I’m discussing here this concept of vindication comes around much more quickly nowadays than I think historically it did.
18:19 Brian Rose: And you could say the same thing about President Obama. I mean, he was one of the very few people that voted against the war, and you could argue that that helped get elected on the back of it. What are your thoughts on him? I know that’s a very general question.
18:36 George Galloway: Well, I was one of the very first people in Britain to promote him on my radio shows at a time when nobody in Britain had ever heard of him, when few could pronounce his name.
18:48 Even Fox News used to mistakenly call him Osama. I saw him introduced in the US by very important people as Osama by accident in the early days. Yeah. So I knew of him, indeed met him on an anti-war demonstration in Washington. And spent some time talking to him on that demonstration.
19:10 I knew of him also from people in Democratic politics in Chicago, and I knew of him from prominent Palestinian scholars who had taught him all that he needed to know about the reality of the crisis in the Middle East, and in particular the Palestinian question. He sat at the feet, as it were, of some of the most important scholars from that part of the world in the United States. So I knew of them. I promoted him. I loved him.
19:44 I cried on the night that he won on radio, live, with tears running down my cheeks. But he’s been a monumental disappointment, and he has wasted a fantastic opportunity to reshape America. He inherited, after all, an economy that was on the floor, a bankrupt capitalist system where Wall Street beggared Main Street. He inherited a situation where the US was mired in ruinous Foreign Wars, which had made them hated throughout the whole world, and he could have, as President Roosevelt did, say, I’m going to change this paradigm completely.
20:32 We’re going to think of things in an entirely new way. But he did nothing of the kind. In fact, he’s done more of the same in the foreign policy field. He’s dropping more bombs, killing as many people as Bush would have done in the circumstances. He’s threatening as many wars as Bush would have threatened, and he has only one achievement that I can see to his name, and that’s Gravely imperal, not least because of the way he introduced it and the priority he gave it, which is this Obamacare, the health care reform, which is neither a proper reform nor is it popular in the United States, and may very well end up being repealed.
21:24 So there is the possibility, fantastic though it seems, that despite his enormous mandate that he had, that he would have thrown it all away and be a one-term president and visit the world with President Mitt Romney, for God’s sake. I mean, talk about sleepless nights, the idea of this big palooka with his strange views and strange beliefs, running the world and having his finger on the nuclear trigger. That’s what, Obama has delivered us to the brink of.
22:01 I pray to God that does not happen, but the fact that we can even discuss that it might happen is a tribute to the level of the disappointment that Obama has been.
22:11 Brian Rose: Do you think that’s asking too much from the executive power? I mean, do you think the US has certain geopolitical interests that will drive that country forward, because they’re looking after their own interest? That is only so much a president can do.
22:25 George Galloway: Well, if I thought that the United States was following its own interests, I’d be much happier.
22:31 My problem is that those who rule the United States appear, consistently, persistently, to follow a path which is diametrically against their interests, and is one of the reasons why, with all respect to you as an American, I’m also a UK citizen as well, okay. Is also the reason why America is now a fading power and being overtaken by others, both in terms of its hard power and its soft power, perhaps above all its soft power. Because the United States has consistently followed interests which are against those of its own people.
23:11 If you look back, as I was just writing about today in relation to this Bomber Command memorial, in 1945 the United States was a hero, a giant in the world whose assistance in the defeat of fascism had been decisive. There was a saying here in Britain that the Yanks were overpaid, oversexed, and over here, it was a mixture of resentment but admiration. You bestrode the world. Your cultural power was enormous. Everybody wanted to be like America.
23:52 I want to be an American, as the song said. That’s no longer true, and it’s so, far from being true that it ought to make any American sit up and think about how this came about.
24:08 Brian Rose: Do you hate America?
24:10 George Galloway: You’re looking at the only man, I think, who can say that. In the 19th century, his great grandmother immigrated from America to Scotland.
24:22 She may have got on the wrong boat, but that’s what she did, at time when hundreds of thousands of people were sailing in the opposite direction. So I have American blood in me. I have a shelf full of American literature and music. My main sporting heroes are Americans. I love the United States.
24:44 I travel there all the time. I’ve spoken in virtually every state in the Union. I have a weekly New York radio show serving the tri-state area. far from hating the United States, I love it. I want a special relationship with the United States, though, as I used to say, forgive me if this is too rude, I just don’t want a special relationship like the one that Miss Lewinsky had with President Clinton, with the weaker partner always on their knees.
25:18 I want a partnership with the United States, not subservient to the United States, certainly not a United States that behaves in the way that the United States has done for most of the time since 1945. So I laughed almost when you asked me the question, because nothing could be further from the truth.
25:36 Brian Rose: And you talk about that special relationship, and it’s something that I think you know inherently, the US and the UK will always have, because the UK is separated from the continent, and we’re divided by a common language.
25:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, we are. And I think it’s always in the UK’s and the US’s interest to have a divided continent, to a certain extent, because when they unite, both countries seem to have problems. So there always will be some type of inherent special relationship. And by just comparing the two GDPs, is it not reasonable to expect that there will be a certain inequality in that relationship?
26:14 George Galloway: Well, yes, but I mean, you’re probably much richer than me, but you don’t behave in a disgraceful way towards me.
26:21 Or I might be much richer than you, and I would never behave in a disgraceful way towards you. I would never use my superior financial power to force you to act in an undignified manner, and if I did, you could hardly claim to have a special relationship with me. I don’t know if you’re aware that we didn’t stop paying the United States for the Second World War until 2008. So, given that Britain for a time alone stood, and was the only man standing, between the global supremacy of fascist barbarism before either the United States or the USSR entered the war, a bit of special relationship as a result of that, in acknowledgement and recognition of that would have been a nice thing.
27:19 Could have maybe written off our debts, as you wrote off the debts of the former fascist powers, Italy, Japan and Germany, but you didn’t write off ours. We were still paying you until 2008. You’re probably the best creditor. Maybe that’s why we did well, given that if not for us, if not for Mr Churchill, if not for the spirit of the Blitz here in the East End of London, where we are, we’d be conducting this interview in German. Sometimes imagine what the year 1940 would have been like in London.
27:54 That would be, that is, I think that is something to contemplate. So I don’t think that the GDP issue is what counts. I think that the special relationship is based on a shared history. All of us, as your colonial master, overthrown, I’m glad to say, by revolutionary force. I walk past every day the statue of Mr Charles James Fox, the greatest of all British parliamentarians, the only British parliamentarian to support the American Revolution, the only British parliamentarian to support parliamentary man to support the French Revolution.
28:37 So you kicked us out, but we will forever have that historic connection, which lasted all the way through the Second World War. And I already acknowledged the sacrifice of the US when it did enter the war, and the decisive nature of that sacrifice. But we speak the same language, or as, as Oscar Wilde said, we’re divided by a common language. And we have many shared points of culture and so on. So I think we will always have a special relationship.
29:07 Brian Rose: Now, speaking of former colonies, you’ve spoken recently about the Falkland Islands, and I think about the British Empire, and as you said earlier, that the sun never used to set on it at one point, and that’s changed a lot. I was a big fan of the movie The King’s Speech, and that was a time period where I think it was 25% of the world was under some type of British control. And I just watch this. I mean, I’m obviously an American in this country, but I was wondering if you could tell me why is there such a vehement reaction from the British when you talk about sharing control, or giving control back to the Falkland Islands?
29:42 Brian Rose: You know, I’m, what I think of immediately with something like that is 1983, when the American Embassy in Beirut was bombed, and there was over 300 people killed, and Ronald Reagan decided to walk away because he knew that it just wasn’t an intelligent thing to try to hold on to something that they couldn’t. Now, of course, that wasn’t a sovereign entity, whatever the definition of that is. But why does the Falklands draw such a strong reaction?
30:11 George Galloway: Well, that’s a very good comparison that you make, and on, pass on, I’d like to just say that President Reagan considered in 1982, actually not supporting the British reoccupation of the Falklands and the war with Argentina.
30:26 In the end, they decided to back Britain, though not entirely enthusiastically. But the Reagan White House did actually consider whether actually Argentina’s claim was the proper claim to the Falkland Islands. I’m a bit puzzled and bemused also by the vehement of the reaction to my proposal, which I share with my friend. I hope he sees this, Sean Penn, who went to Argentina and said it in the delightful presence of President Kirchner was recently, very recently, okay, and drew such hatred from the British media you can’t imagine.
31:11 So, Sean, if you’re watching, I’m with you on this one, brother.
31:16 Brian Rose: He reminds me of you.
31:17 George Galloway: Oh, he was going to play me in a movie once. That’s another story. He’s a good friend of mine, and a very great man.
31:26 He argued, and I argued that, or rather let me say, I argue because I don’t know where he stands on this. I say we should share the sovereignty of the Falklands. You could argue that Argentina has the right to the sovereignty in total, but it’s complicated. The British actually were there before Argentina existed as a state. Argentina is much nearer to the Falklands than Britain, but it’s still pretty far away.
31:58 And there’s the small matter of 2,300 people who regard themselves as British on the island. So I thought it would be quite a popular idea in Britain to advance the case that we should agree a shared sovereignty with Argentina. The people could continue to live there if they wanted, and they could continue to hold British passports, though none of them, I may say, are so British that they’ve got a passport which entitles them to come and live here. And we could share, more, more importantly, the riches, oil and gas that appear now to abound in the waters around the islands.
32:36 I thought that would be quite a popular solution, but it’s made me public enemy number one all over again. But it doesn’t change my mind. I argue, on entirely PR, pragmatic grounds, that if we don’t share sovereignty with Argentina now, one day we’ll have no sovereignty there at all, and I’m sure about that.
32:58 Brian Rose: You know, you did this issue just come up, or is this?
33:02 George Galloway: It’s the anniversary now.
33:04 It’s the 30th anniversary of the war. Okay. The British sent a prince of the royal blood, William, to South, to patrol around the Falklands and dispatched a new 1 billion pound nuclear submarine with nuclear weapons to the region. So this all hyped everything up, and then of course Argentina now has a very popular nationalist government, Peronist government led by Mrs Kirchner, the world’s most beautiful head of state. Stand by that, absolutely.
33:36 Okay, and so it’s a kind of irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and we ought to try and negotiate our way around it.
33:43 Brian Rose: Okay. You know, you mentioned religion earlier when it came to John F Kennedy, and it’s interesting how you mentioned that he was the only Catholic to hold that office. And we forget how that was such a charged issue, you know, back in the early ’60s, because that was almost unheard of to Americans. I mean, that probably had something to do with many of the lower classes being Catholic, and being the immigrant population being there, but that was a big hurdle to overcome.
34:10 And nowadays we see Obama’s not only his citizenship questioned, we see his religion questioned. And I know that you’ve been questioned in the past about whether you’re a Muslim or not, and I was wondering, is that question in itself when you get asked that, is that a loaded question?
34:30 George Galloway: It is. It’s put as a kind of accusation, and it’s raised about Islam in a way that it could never be raised about other religions. I mean, if I were, quote, unquote, suspected of being a Jew, nobody could run around after me with a microphone saying, are you a Jew?
34:48 Brian Rose: They couldn’t ask you that question. They couldn’t.
34:51 George Galloway: But they do it in relation to Islam, because I’m very close to the Muslim population. I am a champion of the Palestinian cause, most of whom are Muslims, but by no means all. And so on.
35:03 I just always give the same answer, that I believe in God. I’ve always believed in God. I try to live my life, not always successfully, in accordance with the teachings of God, which are revealed, of course, in all three of the monotheistic faiths. And that’s really all you need to know, I say, about my religion. But it is particularly telling, in this age, Islamophobia being stalking everywhere, especially in this country.
35:37 I don’t know what it’s like in yours, I suspect it might also exist in yours. This fear, hatred, loathing of Islam, Muslims, which is a necessary concomitant of being endlessly at war with Muslim countries and demonization of Muslim leaders and culture, you can’t exculpate your own Muslim population from that. If you fill the airwaves with hatred against this Muslim country or that, inevitably that’s going to have a blowback in your own country. So that’s where it comes from.
36:11 Brian Rose: I think it does exist in United States, but I would I would argue that it’s worse. I know that’s a general word in the UK, because I don’t think that here there’s the assimilation process that happens in the US, and if you look at homegrown terrorist attacks, or Islamic extremist attacks in the US, I think there’s been a very, a relatively few number of them that maybe weren’t inspired by some al-Qaeda arm, but as far as locally homegrown, it’s been surprisingly low over the past, you know, 11 years since, since 9/11, but, and I think that’s more because I think once you get to America, everyone seems to be Americans and walks around as America, but here and, and even in your District in Bradford, there seems to be I don’t know there a disconnect there, where people don’t seem to be assimilated into being British, and I was just wondering if you could talk about that.
37:04 George Galloway: Well, it is low in the United States, homegrown terrorism, but it’s also low here, and the fact that your question was framed in a way which implied a greater salience of it in Britain, I acknowledge a greater salience of it in Britain, but it’s still really low. It just had particularly devastating results and very near to here, where we’re sitting, it killed 55 people, maimed several hundred others. I was there. I saw the bodies. I saw the blood.
37:37 It was an act of mass murder, and it was committed by homegrown Islamist extremists. But there haven’t been any others. There have been one or two attempted copycats. There have been lots of plots uncovered, most of which done that not to be plots at all, or where they were plots, the role of the state in the construction of the plot here, and this is also true in the United States, turns out to be very significant indeed. There exists on the fringes of the Muslim Community in Britain, extremist organizations seeking to lure young Muslims, boys in particular, onto the rocks of separatism, violence, extremism, self-emulation, but they’re very small, tiny, and there are resonance amongst the 2 million Muslims in Britain, is very, very small.
38:36 I know that better than anybody in the country, because I’m absorbed wholly in this mil. Um, indeed these very extremists hate me more than the right-wing hate me, because we are their rivals, for the affections of the Muslim population in Britain. We are the people who say to the Muslims, you’re right to be angry, and here’s the best way to be angry, get involved with others who are not Muslims in Democratic politics and change things that way, rather than blow yourself and other people up.
39:09 So there’s an atmosphere about terrorism in this country which is completely disproportionate to the risks. I have a far higher risk of your roof falling in on me right now, than I do of being injured or harmed in any way or ever seeing any terrorist operation in this country. But you’re right, amongst the mass of the 2 million of British Muslims, just like in the mass of Irish people in this country, there is profound alienation at the role of Britain in their world.
39:53 I can assure you, being brought up in an Irish family in the 1950s and 60s, we absolutely identified with the struggle against British imperial rule in Ireland. We didn’t arm ourselves. There was no arm struggle, in fact, at that time came later. But we absolutely identified with the Irish Republican movement, and I have all my life, equally British Muslims identify with the victims of the new imperial rule in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, many other places, and that is highly charged.
40:40 You’re living in a country which is committing crimes against your co-religionists in many parts of the world. That’s a tricky thing to negotiate. If you negotiate it by interning people, changing your laws to make it possible to lock them up without charge, without trial, for ever longer periods of time. If you react by driving such people further away from you, you’re making a profound mistake. There’s a commander of the Metropolitan Police, Commander Bob Lambert, who has a very checkered history, indeed, as an undercover operator in leftwing and Progressive organizations and so on.
41:22 Not my favorite person, but he has emerged in recent years, giving us the benefit of his experience of having worked closely in policing of Muslim communities in Britain, that the things we do and what we say are actually making our problem with the Muslims much much greater than they need to be, by pursuing a policy of stop and search, of criminalization, of inventing ever more draconian new laws. We are actually alienating the very community we say we’re afraid of becoming alienated, and that happened in Ireland also. The British response of mass internment, pulling thousands of people into prison camps without charge, and for years turned into a big university for the Irish Republican movement, and the British state is in danger of making the same mistake in yet.
42:21 Brian Rose: Okay, you know, you mentioned Palestine earlier, and we had one of our listeners and viewers had a question about that, and I think I might as well just ask it. He stated that, this is from Ariel Spakovsky. I think he lives in New York City, and he was talking about Israel, and he stated, Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a true democracy, equal rights for women, gays, Arabs and Muslims. Then he goes on to say Hezbollah and Iran are today supporting Bashar Assad while he massacres his own people, and when I say supporting, I mean they are participating in the fighting.
42:53 Are they still Freedom Fighters?
42:56 George Galloway: Well, there are a number of faults with the thesis which I need to start with: Israel is a democracy for Jews, but it’s not a democracy for the millions of non-Jews, Muslims and Christians who live under their military occupation. It’s not a democracy if you’re an Arab Israeli, because if you belong to or support or want to vote for a political party which challenges the essence of the state, you’re not allowed to, and the political leaders from the so-called Israeli Arab community are scattered around the globe, now, in exile, one of them here in London, as a testament to that.
43:42 Thirdly, there’s nothing very democratic about being the biggest international law breaker in the world. Indeed, Israel is in defiance of more United Nations Security Council resolutions than all the other countries in the entire world put together. Is this mostly nuclear arm-related, nuclear weapons, occupying other people’s countries, refusing to leave them building illegal settlements on occupied territory, transferring population in occupied territory.
44:16 There are, I’ve lost count now, but it’s in three figures, so it’s hundreds of international laws that Israel has been convicted of breaking, and many, many others where the conviction was prevented by the veto of the United States in the Security Council. So if it were not for that veto, that those hundreds would be thousands. So there’s nothing very democratic about that. That’s not to say there is no democracy in Israel. There is.
44:44 I myself have enjoyed it. I have many friends in Israel, amongst whom I move freely and have demonstrated alongside and spoken at public meetings there with, and they have, they’re very valiant and gallant people, but they’re few in number, and you can travel to Israel. I haven’t tried to do so for a long time, but there was a time when I did a lot. Okay. And I used to stand with the women in black and stand with the people opposing the invasion and occupation of Lebanon on pickets, and so on, and they had freedom to do so.
45:21 So I’m not denying that there is more freedom for Jews in Israel than for Muslims in most of the surrounding Arab countries of course now that the Arab Revolution is bringing democracy, albeit in a halting way, to the Middle East that boast that your viewer sent in is no longer true. No thanks to Israel, because of course Israel supported the dictatorships of Jordan of Egypt until the last moment. It’s why the Israeli Embassy was the first to be sacked after the victory of the Egyptian revolution, because the Israeli Security Services in Egypt were very close to and advising on an hourly basis the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, because they wanted stability in the region, and that’s what that guaranteed them.
46:21 They thought so, but again it’s a mistaken idea that by supporting dictatorship you will have stability. You will, for a time, but when the dictator falls, the instability that will follow will be much greater than would have been the case if you’d left the people to decide their own future.
46:40 Brian Rose: Is that what, is that what’s happening in Syria right now?
46:44 George Galloway: Yes, the Syrian dictatorship like all the other Arab dictatorships has to go. The era of dictatorship in the Arab world is coming to an end and must come to an end, an end, and everyone should wish it to come to an end.
46:59 Israel does not wish dictatorship to come to an end except in Syria,
47:03 Brian Rose: because I thought they were happy with the Assad regime in power, because it kept it relatively stable, and they fear the next thing that might happen upon a revolution, cuz it could be more dangerous for them.
47:15 George Galloway: They ought to. Okay, they ought to, but they don’t.
47:18 Brian Rose: Are they actively promoting that revolution?
47:21 George Galloway: Sure, they are.
47:22 The weapons that are crossing the borders of Syria are coming from, coming through a Nexus in which the United States and Israel are vitally involved with, their key allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, these famous friends of Liberty, the unfreed countries in the world.
47:44 Brian Rose: I’m guessing you don’t travel in Saudi Arabia much.
47:48 George Galloway: I have, I currently, I’m not allowed to travel to Qatar. Okay. But I’ve met the king of Saudi Arabia twice.
47:57 But we ought to know, I think all your viewers know, that Saudi Arabia is the unfreed country in the world, yet it’s America’s and Britain’s best friend in the Arab world. So I never listen to people who say they’re against dictatorship. They’re against dictators who don’t follow their orders, who don’t act in their interests. That’s the dictators that they’re against, so I’m in favor of the Arab Revolution, was in favor of it long before its current friends were in favor of it, some places but not others.
48:34 And I believe it will triumph, and democracy will prevail in the Arab countries, and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as a state as we know it. Not for the people who live there, wishing the end of a state is not the same thing as wishing the end of a people. Everyone in your country, apart from a few thousand die-hard Communists, wished to see the end of the Soviet Union. It did not mean they wished to see the end of the Russian people. They wish to see the end of a political system which had formed itself into a state, and that’s what I want to see in relation to Israel.
49:13 Brian Rose: Do you, you a supporter of Jimmy Carter’s book Peace Not Apartheid?
49:17 George Galloway: Yes, I just wish he’d written it when he was president of the United States and in a position to do something about it, except sign books. But yes, I think that President Carter is showing, albeit belatedly, a good deal of courage in the things that he’s saying.
49:31 Brian Rose: Speaking of that, I mean, do you find that it’s necessary for you to be a member of Parliament in order to have the voice that you have, and to make the statements, and to be able to do, you know, the charity work that you’ve done when you know, with the Gaza Strip, etc.
49:45 I mean, do you find that harder to do when you’re not in office, per se?
49:50 George Galloway: It is harder, in fact, but only because of the pressures of time that I talked about earlier. In fact, I was doing more or less everything I’m doing now when I wasn’t in Parliament, and probably doing it better. But I now have this additional burden to shoulder, including the very severe problems that the city of Bradford has economically and socially, and so on. So no, it wasn’t necessary for me to be a member of Parliament, but undoubtedly gives you that extra something, to have those initials after your name, MP.
50:24 And in terms of media profile and so on, it’s probably in British terms higher because I’m an MP.
50:31 Brian Rose: And what is the next 5 years, 10 years, 15 years for you? I mean, you know, will the Respect Party someday control the House of Commons, or is that not realistic?
50:41 George Galloway: No, it’s not realistic with our electoral system. It’s virtually impossible to break through at all.
50:48 I’m the only left of Labor Member of Parliament in England since 1945.
50:53 Brian Rose: Really?
50:53 George Galloway: Yeah, yeah. And I’ve now done it twice in two different places, so that’s a double record, but it’s a dismal record because it means that we’re imprisoned by this prevailing orthodoxy, where there’s an inch between the different parties. Again, at the risk of being rude, two cheeks of the same backside, and if a backside could have three cheeks, that’s what our political system is.
51:20 This is Tory, Labor, Tory, Labor, and Conservative are so close to together as to be the cheeks of the same backside, and we suffer for that. But our influence is definitely growing, and the more we win seats, local council seats as well as parliamentary seats, the more chance we get in media like this to talk about the kind of things we believe in, then the more we’ll have an influence on the situation by forcing others to adopt some of our agenda, and that’s just as good for us. Okay.
51:54 Brian Rose: And in the meantime, what is George Galloway going to be doing in 10 years?
51:59 George Galloway: Well, only God knows, of course, where we’ll be in 10 minutes. But if I’m still alive in 10 years, I’ll still be in politics, and I may even still be in Parliament, but whether in Parliament or not, I’ll still be standing for the things I’ve always stood for.
52:16 Brian Rose: And I want to ask you a very London Real question. If you could make a phone call to the George Galloway from 30 years ago, you know, the 27-year-old, and give him a little advice.
52:28 What would it be, and would you take it?
52:31 George Galloway: Well, I’d give him a lot of personal advice, which it won’t profit me to rehearse with you in front of a camera. I would maybe give him a bit of tactical advice that perhaps you shouldn’t speak quite so strongly, quite so sharply about this or that, or him or her, when you get into the encounter you’re going to get into in a year or two from now. But on the big things, I wouldn’t advise the 27-year-old me to do anything different.
53:06 Just one thing I’d add to that. I told you earlier, I didn’t, I’m one of very few members of Parliament who didn’t go to university. And who went straight from school into the world of work. I think I’d advise this 17-year-old me to go to university, and I certainly would never dream of allowing my children not to go to university, even if I had to drag them there. Because although it worked for me, was fine for me, my life has been great, but it’s a very big risk to take.
53:46 Brian Rose: So anyone young watching this, study and get the degrees, and on that same note, if you want to give advice to someone who you know dreams of holding political office someday, what would you tell them?
53:59 George Galloway: Well, again, to paraphrase President Reagan, I don’t really want to advise someone who dreams of holding political office that ought to be a disqualification of holding political office. But I would tell someone who dreamed of a dreamt of a political life that there can be nothing more important than that, and that they should follow that dream, and that they should follow their conscience.
54:24 That the conscience is the best judge. I firmly believe that people know the difference between right and wrong. I firmly believe that people know when they’re doing right and when they’re doing wrong, the trouble is most people seem able to put their conscience away. I never have been able to, and I hope that anyone who is so contemplating a political life would manage to keep their conscience on their shoulder.
54:54 Brian Rose: Do you do you hate the Press, or do you hate the Murdoch press?
54:58 George Galloway: Well, as a politician, I don’t normally quote Enoch Powell, former Tory grandee, once put it: a politician complaining about the Press is like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea. It’s just there, it has to be traversed. The Murdoch press is fantastically venal conspiracy against the public good. It is a gigantic sore on the face of British politics and British public life. I’m glad to say that after many decades of feeling this way, that it is now currently being extirpated.
55:38 The muks are being run out of town. Rupert Murdoch suddenly looks like the tired, defeated old man that I think he is, and I think that Britain will be the better for it. And if you have any sense, you’ll take his passport and send them back to Australia, where we used to send misant in ages gone by.
55:57 Brian Rose: I mean, do you think, as the Press becomes far, even doing what we’re doing now, where you know it’s a homegrown type of media that people can consume at their own will?
56:08 You know, I don’t have any backers, any sponsors, anyone that I don’t really have an agenda that I need to steer towards. Do you think that by definition is going to make the BBC or Murdoch irrelevant, or a dinosaur?
56:23 George Galloway: Very much so. We, again, this is come about remarkably swiftly. We live in a world where these Barons, media Barons are visibly losing their strength in front of our eyes.
56:35 Fewer and fewer people consume their products, fewer and fewer of those believe what they see and read on and in those products. The proliferation, we, me, we talked earlier about my videos on YouTube. It’s far easier for people to know what I actually believe by just going to YouTube and not having to pass through the prism of billionaire owners of the various media, and the proliferation of media like this for which I commend you is going to set the people free.
57:13 Of course, one will still have to sift through right and wrong. One will have to sift through truth and falsehood, but over the peace one will be able to do it much more easily than to have to find a way through the Labyrinth set up for us by people with agendas and the money to imprison us in them.
57:37 Brian Rose: You know, my last question, I’m going to ask you, is, do, do you worry about your safety or your security?
57:45 George Galloway: No. I mean, I take sensible precautions.
57:48 You know, I don’t walk across the road when the lights are red, the pedestrian light, and equally, I don’t leave my house unprotected or my family unprotected, but I don’t. I’ve lived a great life. I’m ready to die. I can face the Judgment Day, I think, with some pride, and what I’ve done with my life. So I’m not afraid of death.
58:21 And of course I want to live like anyone wants to live, but if somebody wants to kill me, that’s what will happen if God wills it. I think that there’s a lot more talking and threatening done these days, partly through the internet and so on. If I were to threat about every time someone threatens to harm me or kill me, it would be a daily nightmare. So I tell my staff, when they come in and tell me that something’s appeared, don’t even show it to me. I don’t want to know.
58:57 Send it to the police. Nothing ever happens. And You know, I have a lot of friends. I’m really alone. Some of my friends are even as fit looking as you, and I’m sure that they’d put their bodies in the way of anyone who sought to harm me.
59:13 Brian Rose: That’s good. It’s good to have good people around. What sport will you be watching at the Olympics?
59:20 George Galloway: Do you know, I’m not a fan of the Olympics. I shudder at the idea of the public sector borrowing requirement and the public sector deficit that we have being added to by the expenditure of many billions of pounds, so that Bulgarian shot putters and Ukrainian weightlifters.
59:40 Brian Rose: My girlfriend’s Bulgarian.
59:42 George Galloway: Can I mean no disrespect to Bulgarians? I’m a great fan of the greatest of all Bulgarians, Hori Demitro, but that’s another story. See, the space guy in space, no, no. The idea of let me say then, more safely, Ukrainian weightlifters applying their trade at the British public’s expense when we’re bankrupt fills me with horror.
1:00:06 I’ll watch the 100-yard dash, as we used to call it, when Real Money Was Real Money of the 100-meter sprint. I watch the mile, as we used to call it, 1500 M. And that’s probably all I’ll watch. Rest of the time I’ll be shaking my fist at the Olympic Games.
1:00:28 Brian Rose: Well, I must say it was a real pleasure having you on, George.
1:00:33 George Galloway: Perfect, thanks.
1:00:34 Brian Rose: You know, you’re really not the man that I see on YouTube, or necessarily the one that everyone seems to see. So it’s nice to spend an hour with you. Good to get more time. Yeah.
1:00:43 Brian Rose: All right, good. Well, thanks for coming on.
1:00:46 George Galloway: Welcome anytime, Charles, and until then, it’s about the journey. Thanks. Welcome to London.
1:00:53 We come from town and we go play that he sound. Now we go party all night long. Sun is shining, and you know we going to feel good. Come on, everybody, party in I never Hood eat a night, flexing, check out
