Galloway - Plays the Sectarian Card Once Again

"I’ll tell you what would happen when an independent Scotland proved to be a chimera. Scots would turn inwards, turn on the English and turn on each other. First they would come for the ‘unionists’ as they describe people like me. We would become a ‘fifth column’. Soon other scapegoats would have to be found. Catholic schools, judging by the cyber-nats-speak, would have to succumb. Then it might be the immigrants, brown as well as white who would be ‘taking our jobs’, ‘our houses’, ‘marrying our women’ and the rest. We would become an embittered people, the very opposite of the Scottish internationalist we have been for so long"  George Galloway, Red Molluca, 19th May, 2013

Sound familiar? The same shit spouted on Twitter by my bother Ian Smart in his disasterous Twitter foray barely a week ago. I am just waiting for Jack McConnell to directly join in: He is supportive enough to re-tweet their musings.

Because it is no co-incidence that these old chums spout the same smear. Their evidence-free and baseless assertions come from failed generation of Scottish Labour activists who, having delivered near nothing - but managing to enrich themselves in the process - will now spend their later years attacking all things nationalist. The irony is though, nationalism was a horse they themselves were happy to ride, until the good people of Scotland clocked they could do better than be led by these self-serving poseures, who only played the card to gain them some tactical leverage in their internal battles within the Labour Party. Self-determination for them always meant to be on their terms and within parameters of the British labour movement.

This more than anything else explains their later day extreme unionism, so extreme that even the Better Together campaign has all but disowned them: I do wish though Better Together would just do this in quite unequivocal terms. Tell them this is just unacceptable. Slap them down, so as the rest of us can have a sensible debate on Scotland future, uncontaminated by these sad and time-warped sectarians. How about it, Alastair?

Because as I said in my last blog about my brother, this stuff really is the gutter. The politics of Enoch Powell: Stir up a sectional fear for a cheap headline and narrow political gain, not remotely thinking through the potential implications and consequences of your spoutings.

Galloway's latest article is written under the pretext of defending Nigel Farage's right to free speech, following the over-zelous harassment of him by members of the Radical Independence Conference last week in Edinburgh. Now you can view this incident in a number of ways, and certainly I can think of better ways of combating UKIP in Scotland than confronting its leader having a quite pint in a Royal Mile pub. But Galloway don't just make that point, but rather goes into altogether murkier territory, which amounts to a smear on the entire national movement in Scotland.

We are told "cybernats" - and I presume I am one - are " the mirror image of the Faragists"  But he get worse.....

"It was once said that anti-semitism was the socialism of fools. So too is the idea that Scotland broken from the rest of this small, island of English- speaking people will somehow lead to some kind of progressive beacon of hope for the world"

So a man who has spent a lifetime dodging the unsupported smear that he is himself anti-semitic, equates supporters of independence, and the left leaning ones in particular, as being little better than anti-semites. Just how low can you go George?

I am kind of aware Galloway's stock in Scotland is now about as low as Farage's - that 2% of the vote in Glasgow in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections took some doing. But I am also aware that beyond Scotland, near universally amongst people who have never worked with him, he retains a significant cult following. So for their benefit, it might be useful to end with a simple list:

Parties in Scotland who support Scottish Independence

The Scottish National Party
The Scottish Green Party
The Scottish Socialist Party
The Socialist Workers Party
The International Socialist Group
Solidarity
The Scottish Republican Socialist Party

Parties in Scotland Who Oppose Scottish Independence

The Scottish Labour Party
The Scottish Liberal Democrats
The Scottish Conservative Party
UKIP
The British National Party
The Scottish Defence League
The Orange Order

Figure that out..........

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We've Earned The Right To Be Free

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Ian Smart, My Brother

My brother Ian Smart is not a racist. He is worse than that. 

A racist is normally someone with a grievance, who out of ignorance, and fueled by urban and media myths, wrongly blames ethic minorities who have absolutely nothing to do with whatever their problem might be. My brother Ian has few problems, is rather well healed, well educated and mixes amongst the very highest echelons of the Scottish establishment. So when he asserts that there will be some sort of pogrom against the Polish and Pakistani communities (and presumably others) in a post independence Scotland, he is not doing this out of ignorance or prejudice, but out of political calculation. The calculation that if he asserts it loudly and often enough Scotland's ethnic communities and others can be scared into voting No.

This is called playing the race card. It is one of the most dangerous things an individual can do in any context, and of course normally done by politicians of the far right. But for a Labour blogger to do it in Scotland, where there is a hard worked for  and commendable cross-party and cross-society consensus against racial prejudice, and inject it into the highly charge debate on independence is despicable.

No better that Enoch Powell in 1968: Allow fair non racial immigration into the UK and there will be “rivers of blood” he predicted, with no evidence and no basis in reality as events have proven. Vote for Independence in 2014 and my brother predicts something similar for Scotland.

And what has been the reaction of the Scottish Labour establishment to the gratuitous playing of the race card by one of their own? At best silence, and in the case of old chum Jack McConnell supportive. Because sadly, Ian, the leading Labour blogger in Scotland and a regular TV pundit on this basis, is an outrider for more than a few of them.

Apologise and retire. All the advice I can offer.

And Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell, Johan and co please note.

A Postscript: This is my first blog post here for near on a year, My last one below is on a similar theme. A response to George Galloway playing the Green Card in a near identical context. Same time warped and unsupported bullshit from a washed out "lefty" And hear that silence from the Laborites on both occasions.

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George Galloway - Sectarian

For the second time in three weeks George Galloway has used his column in The Daily Record to attack independence. No problem with that, if that is what he chooses to speak on.  But he is wholly wrong, and miles out of kilter with the vast majority of Scottish socialists, including most of those who campaigned for him in last year's Scottish Parliament elections.

He came, he lost, he learned nothing.

But in today's column, Galloway does more than attack independence. As in his previous Record column, he deliberately introduces the politics of religious sectarianism to advance his case, something no one else in the Unionist camp has done.

Galloway writes that, (in an independent Scotland), "who knows who the finger of ­suspicion would be pointed at? Maybe Scottish Roman Catholics from Irish immigrant stock, with their peculiar ways, names and schools. Why not? It's happened before, Comrade Canavan, hasn't it?"
 
And it gets worse. In an otherwise predictable attack on independence supporting Brian Souter, Galloway writes;

"I share neither faith nor political values with him"

Political values, OK. But what has his faith got to do with anything? And to be clear, they are both Christians - they DO share the same faith. What Galloway is blatantly saying here is that he is a Catholic and Brian Souter is a Protestant. And this is something George Galloway, "socialist", consciously brings up in a newspaper column read primarily by West of Scotland working class people in 2012.

Quite appalling

And appalling too that the Daily Record prints this, even  pays Galloway to write it.

What is going on here?

And will there be an rebuke for the NO Campaign? Will any Scottish journalists raise this matter? Will the Daily Record do the decent thing and drop immediately this sectarian as a columnist

I thought we no platformed fascists and racists in this country?

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George Galloway's Sectarian Disgrace

George Galloway's article in the Daily Record on Monday, 14th May can be summed up in one word - "shameful"

But it requires a more detailed response.

As the master debater, Galloway opens his article by setting up a straw man to knock down, citing unarmed nationalists who attacked him in less than civil terms following an anti-independence interview he gave to the Sunday Mail. So what does Galloway do to temper the debate? Responds with comments which are amongst the most disgraceful yet calculated by a politician this century.

Now let me be absolutely clear: Galloway has every right to comment on and participate in the independence debate. As he points out, he is as Scottish as any of us and has a long standing involvement in political discourse in Scotland and elsewhere. But it is this experience, and indeed detailed understanding of Scotland's political history, that make his comments in his Daily Record article so shameful and insidious.

Because Galloway is an intelligent man, yet he quite deliberately plays the sectarian card. A card no one else has used, and no one else - unionist or nationalist - would be as irresponsible or desperate as to introduce into Scotland in 2012.

Supporters of Scotland's independence are used to being called "separatists" by our opponents. And whilst a pejorative term, fair game in the rough and tumble of political discourse. But in writing in the first sentence of his Daily Record article that he was "arguing the case against the 'partition' of this small island" he took things beyond the pale. Because partition means only one thing in the context of the British Isles, as George well knows. And whilst his article does ask a number of legitimate questions of the case for Independence, throughout it is laced, and quite deliberately so, with the language of sectarianism and related smears.

Let me remind readers of what Galloway then goes on to say in his Record article:

"The idea that if you don't believe in Scotland as a mist-shrouded obscurantist Brigadoon, you're not Scottish at all is a recipe for deep division, akin to that which scarred post-independence Ireland."

So, in case you missed his "partition" smear, Galloway quite explicitly introduces Ireland and with it The Troubles.

He then gets even worse by suggesting a "hidden agenda" by his critics, stating, "perhaps it's not where I live now, but where my grandparents came from, that scunners these separatist bigots?"

Now to explain, Galloway's Grandparents were Irish Catholics. I need to explain, because few folks know or care, despite Galloway continuous attempts to remind certain people, when playing to particular galleries. But what Galloway says here, in a mainstream national newspaper, is a quite disgraceful, and simply a slur backed up by nothing other than his own bigoted paranoia and populist opportunism: It suits his script, so why let a lack of evidence get in the way?

But he does not even end there. Just in case anyone might have missed that one. He concludes by stating if things went wrong in an Independent Scotland, "The bravehearts, further embittered, would turn on someone, anyone.....Maybe the immigrants, the asylum seekers, maybe even an earlier generation of immigrants from Catholic Ireland (again, like me)"
 
Now I directly ask. What is Galloway doing here? ( And what is the Daily Record doing publishing?): Over one third of Scots are descended from Irish Catholics, many of whom vote SNP. This is not just a smear against Scotland's largest political party, it is dangerous tribalism all of us in Scotland, from all parties, and on all sides of the constitutional debate, have been working real hard to bring to an end

But here on 14 May 2012, George Galloway, member of Parliament for Bradford West, former MP for a Glasgow Hillhead, a former Chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland , a current "proud" member of the trade union Unite, and a campaigner for a secular, democratic and free Palestine, is quite consciously introducing the politics of sectarianism into the debate on Scotland's constitutional future.

In condemning the unnamed straw men from the nationalist camp, Galloway ends by, throwing down a challenge to Alex Salmond: " If he was a truly national leader rather than merely a schism-master, would slap this kind of nonsense down, but he dare not."

But if Galloway had even been remotely following the debate in Scotland that has been coming to a head since his self imposed exile a decade ago, he would know, (if he cared to find out) that Alex Salmond and the entire SNP leadership has consistently done this and continues to.  Alex Salmond does not need a lecture on bigotry from a sectarian who sat on his hands whilst it raged in the Scottish Labour Party of the 1980s he chaired. And in May 2011 Salmond's SNP won 69 seats and 45% of the vote, and all available evidence shows no religious bias whatsover in terms of where the party drew its support from. Can Galloway credibly say the same about the paltry 3.3% of votes he polled in Glasgow on that same day?

But I'd like end by throwing Galloway's challenge to Salmond back to the pro-union parties in Scotland, who he now seem so keen to team up with. Will they unequivocally condemn Galloway's sectarian intervention into Scotland's constitutional debate? With they tell him he is not at all welcome if this is to be the tenor of his contribution?. Will they tell him modern day Scots - unionists and nationalists - have left his dated and vile sectarian baggage behind us?

I think they will. And Scotland will be a better place for it.

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FREE SYRIA NOW!

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THE PEOPLES' REPUBLIC OF BONNIE SCOTLAND

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