Thatcher week and then some

It's been huge in the UK.  Paeans on one side, hatred on the other.  So much to read, but today's bits are

- City AM editor Alastair Heath on how the left are wrong that Thatcher's policies led to the banking crisis and as an acolyte of Hayek, she would have disapproved of the protection from moral hazard presented by the pre-crisis regulatory and monetary policy environment (and the post-crisis bailouts).

- People are organising "Thatcher death parties" which, of course, she would say is their fundamental right.  Reminding us all that to even discuss such a thing for a dead leader in the former Soviet bloc would be to risk   the secret police having one, for you, without so much laughter.  She might have wondered if they think their children and grandchildren would be proud of them, and who else they would hold such a party for, but finally that it says more of them than of her.  Highlighted is one Romany Blythe, a drama teacher who is organising a death party saying "people danced when Hitler died" and who proudly flies the red flag.

Think the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust might invite this vapid empty head to meet some people who can tell her what Hitler was like.  She's prove beyond doubt that Thatcher's biggest mistake was not to privatise education.

- The Adam Smith Institute take on current popular UK leftwing pinup Owen Jones on "something called facts", which as a child of communist parents Jones finds get in the way of a good bashing of capitalism.

Meanwhile...

Here is the intellectual depth of most of the hatred of Thatcher

Meanwhile, George Galloway, sympathiser of Saddam Hussein, supporter of "accepting" the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who said the Syrian people are "lucky" to have Bashar Assad as their leader (and who calls out Western intervention wherever he finds it, but is curiously silent about Russia's intervention in Syria, has done one better.

He now sympathises with North Korea with its "innocent and pristine" culture.... of locking up children as political prisoners for the sins of their family.   Of course he still trots out the North Korean line that the USA started the Korean War, a piece of propaganda disproved by the opening of the Soviet archives and even more recently by a few Chinese academic pronouncements.

- Christine Lagarde and the IMF warn against what monetary policy retard Russel Norman is proposing.  Money printing is creating a timebomb (City AM) warning it will be hard to reverse these policies when it is needed without there being a profound market reaction (i.e. bursting bubble)

West Bradford shames itself

I don't need to say much about George Galloway, he is one of the most repulsive politicians in Britain today.  As Christopher Hitchens once said "the man's search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends".  He has been a sycophant of Saddam Hussein, Bashar Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  He misses the Soviet Union - the stale stinking behemoth of blood stained lies, oppression, imperialism and terror.  He supported the Islamist terrorists who festered in Iraq after the Western invasion, he supports Hamas, he said the Syrian people are lucky to be ruled by Bashar Assad.  On top of it all, this Dundee Catholic fifth columnist lies - blatantly - denying that for which there is video evidence.  He blames 9/11 on US foreign policy.  He claims to not support the Iranian system, yet said explicitly he supported the campaign of Ahmadinejad on Iranian TV.  His direct relationship with the Hussein regime was demonstrated with evidence, but he continues to deny it.

So how did such an odious creature get elected in a low profile Bradford West by-election?  Simple.

He has a high public profile (he appeared in Celebrity Big Brother in 2006).  He spent money and time in the constituency spreading his latest brand, of being a teetotaller who has always supported Muslims, who opposed the war in Iraq, opposes Western forces in Afghanistan, supports Palestinian militancy and opposes Western intervention in the Middle East.  He played to the tribalist, anti-Western bigotry of many ethnic Pakistani voters in the constituency.  He benefited from a week of appalling mismanagement by the government, and the continued ineptness of Labour leader Ed Miliband.  It was a protest vote, apparently driven also by Galloway targeting young Pakistani voters who otherwise may not have voted.  It has been alleged that some of his supporters voted for him as a rebellious action, for his shenanigans with Celebrity Big Brother were looked down upon by some of his Islamic support base.

Bear in mind also that turnout was low (25% or so down on the general election), and it was meant to be a safe Labour seat, which motivates less supporters for major parties to bother voting.

Yet while much analysis will focus on why the major parties, especially Labour, did so badly, the real menacing implication is that a man who has long provided succour to Islamists and dictators, can command such overwhelming support.  Was there not sufficient media scrutiny of Galloway?  If there had been much more, would his campaign have been harmed (and is it not for the other parties to do that?)?  Or do his voters agree with him - that Iran doesn't have such a bad President, that Syrians are lucky to be ruled by Assad, that criticism of Syria is because of the "good things" Assad does, that Saddam Hussein deserved to be saluted for courage and indefatigability, that Hamas is a force for good, that Islamists who shot dead 58 people at a Catholic Cathedral in Baghdad were to be supported, or the ones who bombed 48 people at a restaurant, or who let off a bomb killing 54 Shia on a pilgrimage, etc?

George Galloway has always done well out of politics, he has connected himself to whoever he can who opposes open, free, liberal Western democratic capitalist societies, and embraced variously Marxist, Soviet, Islamist, Ba'athist dictatorships.  He says one thing on the broadcast outlets of his favoured dictatorships and another in the West.

So it's about time that proper efforts are taken now to hold this friend of thugs to account, to reject his evasion and deception, and expose him once again.  However, although I hope most of his supporters are naive young voters who see him as a high profile protest against the mainstream parties (and their parents), I fear more than a few embrace an agenda that is anti-British, anti-Western, sympathetic to Islamism and believers of the rampant conspiracy theory ridden nonsense that passes for "theories" in some parts of the world.  Is anyone confronting this?

The man's search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends

You see, George Galloway is a sycophant for the Assad regime when he visits it, then denies it when he returns.  Ask yourself why the so-called peace movement of the left is rather quiet about Syria, and seek out whether the real reason is because it prefers the fact that Assad's regime has never been Western backed, always been anti-Israeli, was allied to Saddam Hussein, provides succour for Hezbollah and Hamas, occupied Lebanon without a peep of protest from the "peace" movement and has a Russian military base just to prove how anti-Western it is:





 Christopher Hitchens tells it like it is as he also calls it the "so-called anti-war movement".