English election with Indian tadka

“A book’s between its covers
Love’s between two lovers
It’s not a noun, it can’t be defined
It’s not static in either’s heart or mind.”
From The Kaleji Analogy by Bachchoo

Last fortnight the UK declared the results of a byelection which, if fancy permits, can be seen to have some ingredients of the sub-continental democratic process. Why this, admittedly tenuous, comparison? Let me count the ways: in Uttar Pradesh in March both the incumbent party and the Congress were defeated by a party that was reputedly discredited.
The constituency of West Bradford in Yorkshire doesn’t have the significance to the UK that Uttar Pradesh’s choices have to India.
It is an unusual constituency and last fortnight it did not vote for the candidates of the Conservatives or their partners in the Westminster Coalition, the Liberal Democrats. They also defeated the Labour candidate despite Bradford being a solid Labour constituency since 1974. It has only had, for a brief period in the Eighties, an MP from another party when it elected a Labour MP who defected in a national split to the Social Democratic Party which splintered from Labour. Crossing the floor is not
prohibited in the UK and doesn’t de facto lead to a byelection.
The only real and considerable shock was therefore to the Labour Party which lost by a margin of 10,000 votes to a maverick party called “Respect” and its candidate George Galloway.
Respect is not really a political party in any democratic or conventional sense of the word. It’s a vehicle for electoral protest. It doesn’t want to and couldn’t run a government. Mr Galloway formed it in 2003 after being expelled from the Labour Party when he advocated dissent in the British armed forces serving in Iraq. He had previously been filmed in Baghdad praising and congratulating Saddam Hussein.
He has been as a young man a Labour MP from Glasgow and always supported the shifting Left of the party, a moveable ideological feast. He opposed both Iraq wars and was an outspoken critic of the Labour leadership which supported the first one and, under Tony Blair, undertook with the US the second.
Once out of the Labour Party, Mr Galloway formed Respect and stood against a Labour candidate in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency of London’s East End. Mr Galloway was riding the bandwagon of being a friend and supporter of Saddam Hussein and an opponent of the war against Iraq. This particular area of London is very largely Bangladeshi and the Respect party of the time, to whose rallies I went as an observer, was nothing but a large crowd of Bangladeshis with a controlling fringe of white activists from the Socialist Worker’s Party, a Trotskyist groupuscule that can only lose deposits by contesting any British election on its own.
The Iraq war issue seemed then to be the only one that this Bangladeshi community wanted to vote on. They saw Saddam and the Iraqis as co-religionists. Mr Galloway even began to claim that he had converted to Islam. It would be beneath any parliamentary candidate to make even implied remarks about the religion or racial origins of an opponent, but during that dirty election campaign I picked up the implication that Oona Tamsyn King, of half-black and half-Jewish ethnicity, was somehow pro-Zionist. She was certainly a supporter of Tony Blair, but the underhand slur would have, in that community, swung a considerable number of votes against her.
The next time Mr Galloway stood at the 2010 general election in the neighbouring constituency of Poplar he was relegated to third place.
Respect then fielded a candidate in 2011 for the Scottish Parliament and lost there, too.
Respect is more a bandwagon of carpetbaggers who look for constituencies with the immediate single issue that may sway the vote. In the last week of March 2012, Mr Galloway stood on an anti-Iraq war ticket in Bradford. The Iraq war is over and there are no British troops there. He was relying on a long-held antagonism fuelled by religion in this “votebank” — a term not familiar to British psephologists.
British troops are still in Afghanistan and Britain did assist the Libyan rebellion militarily. Respect has no policies beyond vague rhetoric and abuse on the economy, education, the National Health Service or anything else.
Instead Mr Galloway’s electoral team challenged the Labour candidate Imran Hussain on the grounds of who was a better Muslim, he or Mr Galloway, alleging that Mr Hussain frequented pubs. Mr Galloway’s claim that he doesn’t and has never touched alcohol and is, therefore, a better Muslim remains unsubstantiated and there doesn’t seem to be any practical way of proving it. Not that it should be of interest to any electorate anywhere.
Except perhaps in Bradford.
To admit the truth about this election and its result would be to recognise that a vast majority of the 18,000 voters who gave Mr Galloway his victory are Muslims from Mirpur in Pakistani Kashmir. Very many of them will be second and third generation Mirpuris who may never have been there, but retain a connection with Pakistan and an attachment to an international Islamicist ideology. Nowhere else in Britain is there a “religious votebank”.
It was not always so. Traditionally, since their settlement in Britain through the Sixties and Seventies, subcontinental immigrants have supported the Labour Party. The support for a party that was by and large meritocratic and attempted a balance between governing a capitalist country and representing its shrinking working class seemed natural.
Conservative commentators, delighted by Labour’s Bradford defeat, have been crowing about the result. One Conservative MP John Redwood wrote in his blog: “Congratulations to George Galloway. The old fashioned virtues of beliefs, passion and consistency have powered Mr Galloway to an amazing victory.”
Mr Redwood may be right about Mr Galloway’s passion and consistency of anti-war beliefs but he should also realise that this vote is not a triumph for British democracy but an indication that there are constituencies in Britain which are radically alienated from it.