George Galloway’s stunning electoral
triumph in the Bradford by-election has shaken the petrified world of
English politics. It was unexpected, and for that reason the Respect
campaign was treated by much of the media (Helen Pidd of the
Guardian being an honorable exception) as a loony fringe show. A BBC
toady, an obviously partisan compere on a local TV election
show, who tried to mock and insult Galloway, should be made to eat
his excremental words. The Bradford seat, a Labor fiefdom since 1973,
was considered safe and the Labor leader, Ed Miliband, had been
planning a celebratory visit to the city till the news seeped through
at 2 am. He is now once again focused on his own future. Labor has
paid the price for its failure to act as an opposition, having
imagined that all it had to do was wait and the prize would come its
way. Scottish politics should have forced a rethink. Perhaps the
latest development in English politics now will, though I doubt it.
Galloway has effectively urinated on all three parties. The Lib Dems
and Tories explain their decline by the fact that too many people
voted!

Thousands of young people infected with
apathy, contempt, despair and a disgust with mainstream politics were
dynamized by the Respect campaign. Galloway is tireless on these
occasions. Nobody else in the political field comes even close to
competing with him – not simply because he is an effective orator,
though this skill should not be underestimated. It comes almost as a
shock these days to a generation used to the bland untruths that are
mouthed every day by government and opposition politicians. It was
the political content of the campaign that galvanized the youth:
Respect campaigners and their candidate stressed the disasters of
Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war
criminal, and that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan
without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labor
party for the austerity measures targeting the less well off, the
poor and the infirm, and the new privatizations of education, health
and the Post Office. It was all this that gave him a majority of
10,000.

How did we get here? Following the
collapse of communism in 1991, Edmund Burke’s notion that “In
all societies, consisting of different classes, certain classes must
necessarily be uppermost,” and that “The apostles of
equality only change and pervert the natural order of things,”
became the commonsense wisdom of the age. Money corrupted politics,
and big money corrupted it absolutely. Throughout the heartlands of
capital, we witnessed the emergence of effective coalitions: as ever,
the Republicans and Democrats in the United States; New Labor and
Tories in the vassal state of Britain; socialists and conservatives
in France; the German coalitions of one variety or another, with the
greens differentiating themselves largely as ultra-Atlanticists; and
the Scandinavian center-right and center-left with few differences,
competing in cravenness before the empire. In virtually every case
the two- or three-party system morphed into an effective national
government. A new market extremism came into play. The entry of
capital into the most hallowed domains of social provision was
regarded as a necessary reform. Private financial initiatives that
punished the public sector became the norm and countries (such as
France and Germany) that were seen as not proceeding fast enough in
the direction of the neoliberal paradise were regularly denounced in
the Economist and the Financial Times.

To question this turn, to defend the
public sector, to argue in favor of state ownership of utilities or
to challenge the fire sale of public housing was to be regarded as a
dinosaur.

British politics has been governed by
the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher during the locust
decades of the 80s and 90s, since New Labor accepted the basic tenets
of Thatcherism (its model was the New Democrats’ embrace of
Reaganism). Those were the roots of the extreme center, which
encompasses both center-left and center-right and exercises power,
promoting austerity measures that privilege the wealthy, and backing
wars and occupations abroad. President Obama is far from isolated
within the Euro-American political sphere. New movements are now
springing up at home, challenging political orthodoxies without
offering one of their own. They’re little more than a scream for
help.

Respect is different. It puts forward a
leftist social-democratic program that challenges the status quo and
is loud in its condemnation of imperial misdeeds. In other words, it
is not frightened by politics. Its triumph in Bradford should force
some to rethink their passivity and others to realize that there are
ways in which the Occupiers of yesteryear can help to break the
political impasse.

-The Guardian