Housing Benefit Cuts for the Scroungers. : Fri Mar 30, 2012 10:38 am  

Mintball wrote:

Whitechapel is just a 20-minute walk from here, so we were near enough to appreciate the full joys of Galloway's campaign there - and then the local annoyance with his subsequent antics pretending to be a cat licking cream out of Rula Lenska's hands while wearing a red leotard.

He was so determined to appeal to the more fundamentalist Muslim voters down the road that he suddenly started making announcements about how bad abortion was and how LGBT rights were not actually far less important than the Middle East.

Of course, his Trot backers were helping with all this too - including suddenly deciding that they were going to start holding pickets outside a strip club that had been around for years and was not in the Muslim area of Whitechapel.

Galloway is little more than a Trot puppet who is entirely prepared to play with the rights of women and LGBT people to win the votes of religious fundamentalists.

That doesn't win an iota of respect from me. And that is not dependent on how other politicians behave.

Chist, if I'd have known you were in the Whitechapel locale, I'd have come and stayed in your spare bedroom and gone out canvassing for him....Left out of the tube to the Blind Beggar then across the road to the White Horse...Those were the days...Mind, he wants to leave them strip joints alone...Loose change in a pint pot down Bethnal Green...Those were the days.

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:11 am  

Say what you like about him, they were out in force all week campaigning. I work at the uni' in that constituency and the only loud speakers I heard today, or even all week, have been for him.

He's done his research too. When he announced his campaign he hit all the right emotional local politics buttons for me. I don't live in that constituency anymore, not that I'd vote for someone who's as infantile as thinking opposing one thing means giving oxygen to their genocidal and dictatorial enemies anyway, but I can see how he would appeal to local Labour stock. He got a huge local muslim turnout and pushed hard for it, but one of the issues they used to get that vote was don't vote for who your community leaders tell you to - you end up with people who are good at giving out taxi licences to their mate's brothers and nothing else.

Galloway went past me in his shouty wagon on Tuesday and I had the great pleasure of both holding up traffic and giving him the finger at the same time.

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:02 pm  

Keith wrote:

Not really bothered about Galloway, but can't help wondering if this signals good times to come for other opportunists such as the BNP.

Hopefully not, but the councils in these areas don't help. I look after three clients in Bradford at the moment, two are new build social housing and one is conversions of flats back to houses, also social housing. All three are being built in predominantly Asian areas and will be occupied by the Asian community. Speaking to some of the lads (and managers) who are working on them who are local to the area, there seems to be a lot of resentment that very little money is allocated to areas that are mainly white social housing areas, in fact one lad who lives on a large council estate said they are in desperate need of even basic repairs but there is no money for routine maintenance. This is the sort of thing the BNP will latch on to and gain support by playing the race card and could end in an election success as the white community feel they are being left behind.

There may well be the need for housing in the areas where they are situated, but spreading money out to cover all areas would help ease any feelings of 'us and them'

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:27 pm  

Irrespective of my views on Galloway the result is pleasing in that it's showing the first stage of people's rejection of mainstream political parties. Hopefully the UK is finally getting the idea. Vote them all out and have Parliament full of independent MPs. That's Big Society!

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 2:14 pm  

Mintball wrote:

Galloway is an opportunistic, unprincipled, ultra-leftist. That's all been known for years. In the BBC report online, he's also quoted as this being a massive vote against the previous governments warmongering. So he's probably also been going around doing his 'I'm almost a Muslim' routine - which, in the past, has included u-turns on equality issues for women and LGBT people.

But the scale of the vote suggests that this win is beyond that and that there is at least also an element of Labour's inability to re-connect with its historic supporters and offer any sort of meaningful alternative to the orthodoxy (in the main political parties) of neo-liberal economic policies.

Pretty much exactly what I thought word for word.

Re: Housing Benefit Cuts for the Scroungers. : Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:01 pm  

WIZEB wrote:

Chist, if I'd have known you were in the Whitechapel locale, I'd have come and stayed in your spare bedroom and gone out canvassing for him....Left out of the tube to the Blind Beggar then across the road to the White Horse...Those were the days...Mind, he wants to leave them strip joints alone...Loose change in a pint pot down Bethnal Green...Those were the days.

So you'd have happily worked alongside Respect's resident anti-Semites, who also got involved in Bradford? Or just turned a blind eye to that?

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:04 pm  

It shows just how little Labour have learned, especially after Galloway had beaten Oona King in 2005. To lose one safe seat to Galloway is misfortune, to lose two safe seats to the man is sheer incompetence.

The May local elections will be a watershed moment for Miliband

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:04 pm  

BTW, here's some more detail on Galloway's campaign. In essence, disgusting.

BTW, here's some more detail on Galloway's campaign. In essence, disgusting.

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:32 pm  

Mintball wrote: BTW, here's some more detail on Galloway's campaign. In essence, disgusting. If they're playing the sectarian card, they've missed an important point: are Muslims so predicated to voting for rabid Catholics? When's the Pope's official visit to Islamabad?

Mintball wrote: BTW, here's some more detail on Galloway's campaign. In essence, disgusting. If they're playing the sectarian card, they've missed an important point: are Muslims so predicated to voting for rabid Catholics? When's the Pope's official visit to Islamabad?

Re: George Galloway wins Bradford West : Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:00 pm  

Bradford has long been a lost cause in terms of the failed multiculturism experiment......Galloway's election win and the pandering to the extreme, anti-British Muslim vote which was scarily apparent, has just sent that area to an even lower level in the eyes of the rest of the UK.

Personally, I thought the 'Bradford Spring' victory speech was almost inflammatory in its tone.....In the era of racial sensitivity that we now live, Galloway is no more welcome in British politics than Nick Griffin is.