LONDON, 13 May 2003 — George Galloway’s taste for power suits and tumescent cigars always seemed at odds with his left-wing politics, with his voluble championship of the underdog. But outraging conventional opinion is the raison d’etre of this headline-grabbing Scottish Labour MP: He takes particular pleasure in confounding expectations of what someone like himself ought to be.
At times, the provocative Galloway has managed to alienate even those who share his socialist beliefs and fervent pro-Arab sympathies. What, many wondered, was he thinking of when he let himself be filmed praising the murderous Saddam Hussein to his face for his “courage and indefatigability?” When the Daily Telegraph claimed to have found “evidence” in the gutted Baghdad Foreign Ministry that Galloway was actually in the pay of the Iraqi dictator, the paper was probably only confirming what a section of the British public already half-suspected. Not for nothing has he enjoyed the sardonic soubriquet “the MP for Baghdad Central.”
In some measure, George Galloway may be the author of his own misfortunes. But last week it began to seem as if his present unenviable predicament might require an altogether less straightforward explanation. For the sinister fact is that the maverick MP suddenly finds himself under concerted attack on just about every front. Reviled by much of the British press, he has now been suspended by the Labour Party; he is under investigation because he described George Bush and Tony Blair as “wolves,” and because he urged British soldiers in Iraq to disobey what he considered to be illegal orders: The charge is that Galloway has “brought the Labour Party into disrepute.” In addition, his activities in connection with his so-called Mariam Fund for Iraq are to be scrutinized by the charity commission; he also faces an inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards about whether he properly registered all his interests relating to his campaign to stop sanctions against Iraq.
Galloway has declared his intention to sue the Telegraph — though the Telegraph’s sanctimonious high Tory editor Charles Moore maintains that the paper has yet to be contacted by Galloway’s legal representatives. Yet in any event, after this avalanche of adverse publicity, the MP’s chances of ever receiving a fair trial have been greatly prejudiced, if not completely undermined. Even before his own party moved against him, the normally cocksure Galloway had become uncharacteristically defensive. With pardonable hyperbole, he remarked that his reputation was being “carpet-bombed.” Last week, the metaphorical carpet-bombing intensified.
It must be said that the original source of Galloway’s troubles, the Telegraph’s discovery of “incriminating” documents, was an amazing piece of serendipity. How could it be that a file of papers detailing Galloway’s allegedly dishonorable conduct had somehow survived when so much else in the devastated Baghdad Foreign Ministry had been destroyed? There are shades here of the celebrated terrorist’s passport which was so conveniently found amid the rubble of the World Trade Center and which just happened to have survived intact when so much else had been burned to a cinder. It is, moreover, odd, to say the least, that material embarrassing to Galloway has been so quickly turned up — even as the systematic search for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction drags on and on, with British and American politicians regularly cautioning the world to be patient.
In short, all the signs are that Galloway is the victim of organized vilification by the Intelligence Services — just as was the British miners’ leader, the Communist Arthur Scargill, during the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. At that time, those services appear to have gone to great lengths to portray Scargill as the “enemy within,” insinuating, among other things, that he was being bank-rolled by the Libyan leader Col. Qaddafi. Indeed, the Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade — who as the Daily Mirror’s then editor published material calculated to destroy Scargill’s credibility — this week acknowledged that he was an unwitting party to an anti-Scargill smear campaign by the British establishment.
The whole point of such black propaganda, of course, is that it is the primary charge that sticks in the public mind; the damage is instant; attempts to undo the damage are vastly time-consuming and in the end practically irrelevant.
That the powers that be have especial reason for wishing to discredit anti-war critics like George Galloway is sufficiently plain. Consider that the dispatching of British troops to Iraq was based on the official assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes. Many doubting MPs only endorsed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq because they were endlessly assured that the British government had overwhelming evidence to this effect, and now, in the absence of the discovery of those weapons, a lot of awkward questions are inevitably being asked.
Little wonder, perhaps, that the intelligence services have decided to mount pre-emptive action against anti-war dissidents. By subjecting George Galloway to the propaganda equivalent of “shock and awe,” they no doubt mean to send critics of the military action against Iraq an unmistakable message: Keep your opinions to yourself — or else. At the same time, their aim may well be to create the impression that people who protested against the war were lining up alongside an out-and-out traitor, and that, however well-meaning, they were essentially gullible and misguided.
Aside from anything else, the Galloway affair has served as a huge public distraction. Instead of focusing attention on the problematic outcome of the war, many British newspapers have been retailing tawdry details about the MP’s exotic life-style, implying that he has enriched himself by groveling at the feet of one of the nastiest dictators of modern times. What is especially repugnant, though, is that Galloway is being pilloried by the Labour Party for exercising his democratic right to free speech, and for articulating views widely held both in and outside Britain. After all, did not Tony Blair and his “on-message” minions insist that it was in the name of democracy and free speech that British soldiers were fighting in Iraq?
Next month happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of that wintry conscience of the British Left, George Orwell, who coined the invaluable term “double-think” to describe the linguistic duplicities of realpolitik. In Blair’s Britain, Orwellian double-think threatens to become the very stuff of political discourse.
