Nationalist ghouls at the Border won’t stop me moving back home
An alliance with the Tories, his friendship with Alex Salmond and fears for Britain’s future. As George Galloway (and his VERY young family!) settle in Scotland, an extraordinary encounter with the maverick determined to shake up Holyrood
THERE are few politicians it is harder to imagine being rendered speechless than George Galloway. But, as he rolled down his car window for a closer look at the ‘ghouls’ on the Scottish Border waving banners, screaming at him and his family last month, no words came.
‘It was just alien to me,’ he says. ‘Dumbfounding.’
‘They were screaming, “Get the eff out of Scotland”, and I had to explain to my children, who imagine themselves to be Scottish even though born in England, five of them, why these people could talk to me in this way and could say that. It was horrifying.’
All the more so, perhaps, in view of the reason for Galloway’s visit. The Londonbased firebrand, who turned 66 last weekend, was looking to up sticks and resettle in his native land. He was here to find a house. This rabble was the welcoming committee.
Coronavirus and the fear of visitors from England spreading it in Scotland was the ostensible excuse for those contorted faces and poisonous banners. The real reason, Galloway concluded, was hatred and what he describes as the ‘ugliness which ineluctably flows from the Nationalist mindset’.
He did not remain speechless for long. Within days a new political movement was born, Alliance for Unity, with the socialist firebrand at its head. His number two? Jamie Blackett, a mild-mannered, Eton-educated Tory who, as a Coldstream Guard, served in Basra during the Iraq War, a conflict about which Galloway has had much to say. The pair seem to get along famously. ‘There are worse things than Tories,’ he says. ‘Blairites are worse than Tories; Nationalists are worse than Tories.’
Indeed, for the foreseeable future, Galloway has decided Nationalists are worst of all.
His fundamental political imperative of the moment is to stop them.
The strategy for halting their progress may sound strikingly similar to that which has already paid dividends for the Nationalist movement: put the politics of Left, Right and Centre to one side and focus on the core constitutional objective.
HENCE the Alliance for Unity plea to the big three Unionist parties: forget about battling each other in the 2021 Scottish parliamentary election, for you will only split the vote. Agree instead to unite behind one Unionist candidate.
‘I need to stress this,’ says Galloway. ‘[Alliance for Unity] are not standing in any constituencies at all. On the contrary, we are asking and actively seeking to broker the big three not to stand against each other but to make way for each other so that the best placed Unionist candidate either defends a seat unopposed by the others or contests a seat unopposed by the others.
‘If that policy is followed – and I certainly haven’t given up on that – then the Unionist parties will do far better in the 2021 election than they did in the past two.’
It is the second part of the strategy which may raise wry smiles among those who see something Sinatra-esque in Galloway’s propensity for comebacks.
For it is the ‘List’ vote that Alliance for Unity is really targeting – and Galloway himself is number one on his party’s list for South Scotland. He is a former MP for Glasgow Kelvin, for Bethnal Green and Bow, and for Bradford West. Is he now destined for Holyrood? If the grand plan gains any traction at all in the south of Scotland, then count on it.
‘The second part of our strategy is that all the parties should combine under one banner called the Alliance for Unity in the List vote,’ he says. ‘If those two things were followed, our statisticians show there would be 88 pro-Britain MSPs out of 129. Then I could get back to my other work.’
It is there that some may scoff. Isn’t elected office something of a compulsion for this journeyman politician who, since losing his Bradford seat in 2015, stood for London mayor in 2016, for Manchester Gorton in the 2017 general election and for West Bromwich East in the 2019 one – all unsuccessfully? Indeed, might cynics suggest that a berth for George Galloway in the Scottish parliament is the whole point of the exercise?
For a moment I wonder if he is too outraged even to respond. ‘You don’t know,’ he says quietly. ‘You can’t know how wrong that is.’
Then, somewhat louder: ‘The last place in the world that I want to see out my political days is sitting on the Ikea furniture in Holyrood and you will see if we succeed just how wrong that criticism is. That’s really all I can say about that.’
This feels a shame. Can he really not be persuaded to share any more thoughts on the Scottish parliament?
‘It looks and functions far more like the East Kilbride town council than a parliament and anyone who imagines I have any need of being in it is, frankly, absurdly wrong.
‘Do I need to be any better known? Do I need money? I earn ten Holyrood MSPs’ salaries. Do I need fame? Do I need more people to ask for a selfie with me? These are ridiculous criticisms.
‘Most members of the Scottish parliament wouldn’t be recognised in their own street.’
Just to be clear, though, he is bidding to join them?
‘Well, of course, I am standing for election, so I could hardly say otherwise, but it’s really not about me. I have more productive things to do than to be slogging it out with people whose names I don’t know and nobody else knows.’
As we talk, Galloway is again in transit from England to the country of his birth – and, with him
‘Do I need fame? Do I need more people to ask for a selfie with me?’
in the car this time, an extra passenger, daughter Òban Amaria, born on August 8, his third child by fourth wife Gayatri.
The house-hunting is over. They have found a commodious property in the south-west of Scotland and, says Galloway, his elderly mother will be joining them there. Why the move? ‘It’s partly that you get a hell of a house for your money in south west Scotland compared to London and two of my children live most of the time in Manchester, so I’m within easier striking distance of them now. Also, my mother is 85 and living on her own, so we’re going to bring her to live with us.’
The Scottish political fray to which he returns could hardly be further removed from the one in which he served as a Glasgow MP for 18 years.
He talks wistfully of the ‘big beasts’ of Scottish Labour – his party until his expulsion in 2003 for his stance on the Iraq war – of Donald Dewar, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown.
Who are the big beasts today? Certainly not Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard who, in Galloway’s estimation, suffers from ‘record low recognition’. It is for this very reason, he says, that Labour should cooperate with the Alliance for Unity. ‘There is every possibility that Labour could suffer its most cataclysmic result in the Holyrood elections ever.
Labour actually has more to gain from my plan than any of the other parties.’ If Galloway’s olive branch to his former party is intriguing, it is the sudden matey-ness with the Conservatives which really astonishes. How is he finding it, then, making nice with lifelong political foes to save the Union?
‘Well, first of all, you should never say never in politics. The whole of my life has taught me that.
‘If you’d told me 20 years ago that I’d be harnessed as close as can be to a major in the British Army who was patrolling the streets of Belfast and Basra then I would have said that was exceedingly unlikely, but that is what’s now happened.’
Part of his reasoning is he never really disliked Tories as people anyway: ‘Of course I have serious political differences with the Conservative Party. That doesn’t need to be personal and, for me, it never has been personal. The late and great Alan Clark, for example, was one of my closest friends in parliament and a regular dining companion.’
The other part of his reasoning is simply that the occasion demands it. ‘This is an existential crisis,’ he says. ‘There will be little left to argue about – Left, Right, Centre – if the country breaks up. Britain will literally cease to exist.’
Thus, a belief more fundamental than the socialist politics he has espoused all his life impels this comeback. ‘I believe in Britain. I believe it’s a great country. I’ve driven 250 miles in it today and marvelled at how green and pleasant a land it is.
‘I believe in the country whole and undivided and it would, for me, be the ultimate tragedy for a small island of English-speaking people with all that common history to be severed and partitioned.’
LEfT and Right, then, are welcome in the Alliance. Ditto Brexiteers like Galloway and Remainers like his deputy, Blackett. The same goes, in fact, for people on opposite sides of practically every political issue you can name. All that matters is the independence question.
The strategy is hardly new. Galloway notes that, when he first entered politics, the Nationalists were the ones in the brogues and tweeds. Today the independence movement includes the ‘feral, vile, rabble’ he encountered on the Scottish Border. Is there really anything besides the belief in independence which unites such disparate groups?
The conversation moves on to Alex Salmond, the figurehead of the SNP for most of Galloway’s Westminster years, and the curious happenstance that both have TV shows on RT, the highly controversial Russian channel bankrolled by the Kremlin.
With no current parliamentary berths, both politicians have cultivated media platforms, both have fallen out with their parties, both are old hands at political comebacks and, it is just possible, both could be sitting in Holyrood after May. Aren’t they two peas in a pod?
GALLOWAY says: ‘I haven’t seen Alex Salmond since his trial, but the last time I saw him we talked about his travails. I, of course, profoundly disagree with him but he was one of the aforementioned big beasts.
‘I don’t respect the current leadership of the SNP at all. I think they’re altogether smaller – and, if Alex Salmond does stand for Holyrood, I’m working on the assumption we’ll both be elected.’
Do the two of them rub shoulders at RT dos?
‘We don’t see each other in that context,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where he makes his show. He has a small audience and I have a vast one. So I don’t regard myself as in any kind of ally or even competitor relationship with him.
‘But I do think he was dealt an injustice and I’m glad he was cleared. I don’t believe he was guilty and the jury agreed.’
But soulmates on opposite sides of the constitutional divide? Not so, says Galloway.
‘I’ve had much more in common with another grandee of the SNP, Jim Sillars, whom I have admired – more than admired – had great affection for since the 1970s.’
Might he not, like Mr Sillars, ease himself into a more backseat role?
‘With five children under 14 I can’t afford to retire,’ he says, chuckling. ‘I’ll have to keep the Alliance for Unity going because, if we fail, then be sure there will be another referendum of some kind along in a minute because that’s the only reason the SNP exists.’
Besides, he says, there is a revitalising element to all this fatherhood. ‘It’s fantastic. It keeps you young.’
The other day, he tells me, his young son consulted the Guinness Book of Records to see if he could find any other dads who had scored a hat trick in a seven-a-side football match on his 66th birthday. Of course, there were none. In years to come, the youngster will surely learn more about his father’s passion, his grit – indeed, his indefatigability.
In the meantime, Scotland’s ‘Ikea parliament’ might care to brace itself.