You Are the Mob

Ben Wildsmith

Watching the political establishment’s shock at George Galloway’s election in Rochdale was revelatory of its detachment from life as we live it.

Rishi Sunak rushed out to his lectern to warn us we are sliding into mob rule.

Now first off, Rishi, the only lectern-issued warning we’re after from you is that we’re having a general election. Your mandate-free cuckooing of Downing Street disqualifies you from lecturing us on democracy. Stop it, it’s silly.

Additionally, your first act as Prime Minister was to reappoint the bomb-throwing bigot fluffer, Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. You weren’t so worried about inflaming mobs then, were you?

Your political output since clambering out of Boris Johnson’s codpiece has consisted solely of hare-brained deportation schemes pandering to the paranoid, racist imaginings of potential Reform UK voters.

If dogs were uniquely able to detect the frequency of dilettante tech-bros harnessing xenophobia to distract from their personal incompetence, Pets at Home would sell you as a whistle.

Violent multitude

It’s not his cultivated mob we’re supposed to be frightened of though, is it? Aside from some passing mentions of the ‘far right’, Sunak’s violent multitude is the same as Braverman’s: people who oppose Israeli action in Gaza.

Sir Keir Starmer, as we have come to expect, agreed with the Prime Minister’s intervention. For a brief moment last week, he allowed Labour policy on Gaza to diverge slightly from the official government line; so slightly, in fact, that the government allowed it to pass into law in the Commons.

Until that point neither Labour nor the Conservatives was prepared to back an immediate ceasefire, despite polls indicating that 66% of the public were in favour, not only of a halt in fighting but that Israel should enter into negotiations with Hamas.

So, how exactly is a majority view to find political expression if both parties in a de facto two-party state refuse to reflect it? If people opt for peaceful demonstrations, they can expect to be condemned as ‘hate marchers’.

Now, it seems, the election of an MP to advance the case is somehow evidence of antidemocratic intentions.

Questionable company

There is plenty to find distasteful about George Galloway. From the minimising of rape accusations against Julian Assange, to his dismissal of independence for Scotland and Wales, he has outraged many on the left for years.

He is vain, a self-publicist and a man who keeps highly questionable company.

Anybody who saw his performance in the US Congressional hearings on the Iraq war, however, will not doubt the sincerity of his position on foreign affairs. In standing virtually alone against that illegal catastrophe which claimed the lives of 300 000 Iraqi civilians at a conservative estimate, he earned credibility that has endured.

If Galloway is an opportunist, then it is Labour who have gifted him an opportunity. Its failure to run a candidate in Rochdale should be ringing alarms as to its fitness to govern the country.

Its original candidate, Azhar Ali, was a Starmer loyalist. When newspapers reported his antisemitic remarks, he was initially backed to remain in place. Only when further remarks were reported did Starmer withdraw support.

Contrast this with the treatment of Andy McDonald MP, who is from the left of the party. He was immediately suspended after hoping in October that, ‘…Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty.’

Mr Ali opined that Israel, ‘deliberately took the security off, they allowed… that massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want.’

Moral position

Anybody watching the suffering of Gazans, particularly if they have access to Al Jazeera’s footage from within the strip, will form a certain moral position, one way or the other. The response of the UK parliament has been confused, contradictory, evasive, and dishonest.

Put simply, if 66% of people in a democracy oppose the government’s position, the opposition has an obligation to reflect that view. George Galloway arrives in parliament next week because, if nothing else, he knows how to do politics.

Venal self-interest is hardly new amongst the political class. The job of a politician is to wed the desires of the public to his or her own fortunes.

Neither Sunak nor Starmer has the political skill to persuade. Sunak relies on distraction, Starmer on repression. If they do not learn, then independent candidates will become a potent force across the UK and the two-party system will tremble.

Plaid Cymru, the Green Party, and the SNP should be on alert.

In these circumstances, the ball can squirt out of the back of the scrum in a host of constituencies.

Galloway, Nigel Farage, and even Lee Anderson will be waiting to scoop it up if radical Britain doesn’t up its game.

Flags & Bones by Ben Wildsmith is available to order from Cambria Books