The abomination of Britain's Gorton and Denton by-election

The UK is having one of its regular by-elections, this time in Gorton and Denton, a constituency in Manchester.  The constituency was new at the 2024 election, and at the time was won by Labour's Andrew Gwynne with 50.8% of the vote, with Reform a distant second on 14.1%. Gwynne had been an MP for a previous constituency since 2005.  He was suspended from the Labour Party for a series of Whatsapp messages ranging from joking about hoping a constituent dies, retweeting "sexualised comments" about deputy Angela Rayner, and claiming an American psychologist's name was "too militaristic and too Jewish", he subsequently resigned from Parliament due to ill health.

Gorton and Denton has a relatively low income nationally, with a significant (27%) Asian ethnic minority population, mostly Pakistani, but 57% are white Europeans. A slight majority voted for leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.

The campaign has been dominated by the Greens and Reform. The Greens claiming to be the party of the poor and for the Pakistani and Bengali population. Its campaign video depicts Keir Starmer and Narendra Modi, explicitly designed to stir up anti-Indian bigotry, as well as depicting Foreign Secretary David Lammy alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stir up anti-Israel bigotry.  Reform's reaction to this is to call for a hardline against illegal immigration.  Labour looks well behind, and the Conservatives are nearly irrelevant.  The Greens say they are fighting the hate of Reform and racism, but Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph sees the Greens as pandering to racist hate even moreso and calls for this all to stop.

From Allister Heath in the Daily Telegraph:

We should start by calling out the Greens for what they have become: a hateful, despicable, extremist party that has identified an entrepreneurial opportunity in weaponising tribalism, division, stagnant living standards, misinformation and envy. Their behaviour in Gorton and Denton has been abominable.

Following a playbook pioneered by far-Left parties worldwide, the Greens, now led by Zack Polanski, are targeting a red-green coalition of white, woke “progressives” and the reactionary subset of the Muslim electorate. These two groups may appear culturally incompatible, but they can be united not just by their support for socialism but also their often virulent Israelophobia, an atavistic prejudice that the Greens unashamedly pander to....

The Green candidate in Gorton and Denton was photographed wearing a keffiyeh, symbol of Palestinianism, has accused Reform of Islamophobia and racism, and has fronted a video in Urdu featuring Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi meeting Labour politicians, as if these were self-evident provocations and proof of a grand betrayal....

It’s a scandal. Extreme tribalism of the sort promoted by the Greens is incompatible with a democratic culture that requires a strong sense of commonality, a belief in a peoplehood that transcends differences of ideology, race, religion or class. It requires a neutral, single-tier rule of law, where citizens are treated as individuals, not as members of a group. Democracy isn’t just about tallying votes, and handing power to the winner. It is about debate, trying to change people’s minds, feedback mechanisms and punishing or rewarding politicians who fail or succeed.

None of this is possible in a world in which voters vote along religious or ethnic lines, and where the best that can be hoped for is peaceful coexistence and Northern Ireland-style or Lebanese confessionalist power-sharing. Under that scenario, democracy becomes a mere game of arithmetic, of demographic superiority. Outcomes are pre-determined, governed by community leaders.

This may not trouble the Greens: they have reinvented themselves as a vehicle for a new Left that combines Marxism-Leninism, Third Worldism, critical theory, and other radical anti-Western and anti-bourgeois philosophies. They detest private property and family values.

They support quasi-open borders and are soft on crime. They are infected by every Left-wing pathology of the past 200 years, every intellectual error. They have imbued the poison of “anti-colonial” Soviet propaganda, of woke writers such as Derrida, of fanatics such as Edward Said.

Britain used to be a beacon among nations, a country uniquely hostile to extremist parties. The British Union of Fascists never won a single council seat. The Communist Party of Great Britain only seized a couple of parliamentary seats in the 1930s and 1940s. The National Front never made it to Westminster. Militant grabbed Liverpool City Council but was kicked out of Labour by Neil Kinnock. The British National Party won councillors and MEPs, but just 1.9pc of the vote in 2010.

Our record mixes world-class success with catastrophic failure. Some groups have integrated extraordinarily well, and children of immigrants often do better at school and in the labour and housing market than the white British. There has been a surge in mixed-marriages.

At the same time, we have suffered the rise of Islamism, separatism and intra-minority tensions, fuelled by race-obsessed woke policies that denigrate Britishness. We use incorrect metrics: materialistic markers of achievement, rather than ideology. Numerous Islamists are well educated; doctors have been stuck off for anti-Semitism. Many British Jews, whose synagogues offer prayers to the Royal Family weekly, are having to reconsider their future in Britain.

The Panglossians, who believe that tensions will diminish spontaneously; that sectarian voting will wane as it did in England and Scotland by the 1970s; that secularism will dissolve all differences; that Islamism is overblown; that today’s minorities will rapidly become latter-day Huguenots or Irish immigrants, indistinguishable from the rest of the population in all but surname, are delusional.

In addition to slashing immigration, we will need to be more muscular. We will need to crack down pitilessly on extremism, including in some mosques or in local areas where prejudice is rife. We will need to learn from Singapore and other well-managed multicultural states. We cannot allow our country to fragment. Regardless of race or religion, we must all be British.

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?