The by-election victory of George Galloway has aroused euphoria in sections of the social democratic left (to the left of Labour of course) and islamophobia amongst some sections of the capitalist right. Overall however the real victor has been the capitalist system.

Already myths are being created and nobody can match Gorgeous George himself on that. In his victory speech he intoned:

By the grace of God, we have won the most sensational victory in British political history.

Leaving aside the lack of God on the electoral register if there was ever going to be a protest vote landslide then the last week in March 2012 was not a bad time to have one. It was only sensational in the scale of victory of a party that had very little real organisation on the ground.

Roots of Respect’s Win

The national press ignored the by-election as boring. After all it was a guaranteed Labour win since they had held the seat for 38 years and being in opposition, ten points ahead in the polls, they should have held it. Plenty of locals however piled into the betting shops to place their money on Galloway as they already understood what was happening on the ground (at 33-1 it was an expensive day for the bookies who rapidly tried to cut the odds). If we examine the context the actual outcome was not quite so dramatic as Galloway is making out.

After all we have now had four years of deepening crisis since the speculative bubble burst in 2008. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition have presided over not only a draconian austerity programme (only 12% of which has so far been implemented according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies) in which they have cut pensioners tax relief, the 50p tax band for the very rich (which includes a majority of the Cabinet), working tax credit for families whilst increasing fuel duty and introducing a tax on hot takeaway food (the so-called “pastie tax”). The additional plans to part privatise the National Health Service which they promised not to touch, their failure to tackle the banks and the bonus culture and their incompetent handling of the tanker drivers’ dispute have all added to their unpopularity. To most working class people a set of out of touch public school toffs looks like, well, a set of out of touch public school toffs.

In the past a protest against the big parties favours the Lib Dems but as they are now part of the problem they are now facing electoral meltdown. They could not even win enough votes to retain their deposit in Bradford West. Compared with the last General Election result, the Tories lost an even bigger percentage of their overall vote than Labour.

The Labour Disaster

But when there is the scent of class war in the electoral circus the chief beneficiary has historically been the Labour Party. This has not happened. The one true statement in the victory bluster of Galloway has been his point that New Labour has ceased to be the electoral consolation for the working class voter. As the Guardian put it

Galloway claimed the path to his victory went back to:

the path of treason by Tony Blair in 1994 [... that has taken Labour] so far away from its traditional supporters that people feel neglected and betrayed.

He added that Blair remained revered inside the modern Labour Party,

swanning around making millions, instead of facing trial in the Hague for war crimes. The big political parties have had a very salutary lesson, and I hope they take note.

However in a seat like Bradford West the Labour Party does not usually have to campaign at all. It is one of the poorest constituencies in Britain with 30% living in sub-standard rented accommodation. It has, for example, one of the lowest rates central heating installations in the country. For Labour all they had to do was take the white working class vote for granted and stitch up a deal with the Kashmiri elders who hitherto have dominated the Muslim community in Bradford and the job was done.

What went wrong for Labour in Bradford was that these two factors no longer worked. Contrary to racist myth the Asians, let alone the Muslims, do not dominate in Bradford West. According to the 2001 census (the 2011 census does not seem to give the figure) about 40% of the constituency are of Asian origin, of which about 2% identify themselves as Sikhs and Hindus. 39.5% of the population designate themselves as Christian. So nominal Christians outnumber Muslims in Bradford West (and are about equal to all Asian origin voters). However as these were mainly white working class they have long been deserting the ballot box.

Back in 1950 84% of the population of the UK voted in General Elections (this was the post war high) but in the last three General Elections the average was close to 62% (the highest was actually 2010 at 65%). Thatcher long ago realised that a lot of workers don’t vote and there is no point a Tory appealing to them (although populist measures like the right to buy your council house were a master stroke in winning votes especially in the South East of England). For the big two parties “Middle England” became the only place to pitch your electoral appeal. Blair understood this well and he had an advantage. He could ape Thatcher and still expect the working class to vote Labour as they had nowhere else to go. The result is that as the working class has increasingly felt disenfranchised it has deserted the ballot box in its hundreds of thousands. Bradford West was no exception to this pattern. Compared to the General Election 17,000 voters stayed away. According to some of those who have had access to the counts in various wards Labour was picking up as little as 40 votes in places where the white working class predominated. The key factor here was not who voted but who did not vote.

But the overall massive majority achieved by Galloway was down to courting the Muslim vote. Galloway’s sycophancy to Saddam Hussein whom he once saluted for his “courage” and “indefatigability” is well-known but as Saddam is dead the more cogent issue is his long and well stated opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. All opinion polls suggest that 70% of the UK population still oppose these wars. If Galloway had stuck simply to an honest anti-war campaign you could at least say he had some principles. But he didn’t. He used the issue to strengthen his appeal to communalism. To those who had seen Galloway operate in Bow in 2005 it was no surprise to see him go to ridiculous lengths in Bradford West to play the Islamist card. His team issued a letter to the constituents of Bradford West stating the following

God knows who is a Muslim. And he knows who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for:
I, George Galloway, do not drink alcohol and never have. Ask yourself if you believe the other candidates in this election can say that truthfully.
I, George Galloway, have fought for the Muslims at home and abroad, all my life. And paid a price for it. I believe the other candidates in this election cannot say so truthfully.

His Labour opponent was a Muslim but as deputy leader of the council he had helped to implement lots of the austerity cuts and he remained almost anonymous throughout the campaign. Galloway on the other hand was assisted by the former Labour agent in the constituency (Naweed Hussain, a Punjabi and therefore not part of the Kashmiri crew who had sidelined him) who directed a campaign at the young via the internet and mobile phone networks. It was this campaign especially amongst young Muslims which decided the size of Galloway’s majority.

The Reactions

And the reactions? The right wing political press (see Brendan O’Neil [ex-Revolutionary Communist Party] in the Telegraph and Melanie Phillips [ex-Guardianista liberal] in the Mail have been quick to trash any suggestion by Galloway that this is the beginning of a new left wing electoral movement as it is based on the support of Muslims. Phillips in particular is using the issue to whip up more islamophobia by insisting that is based on “fundamentalism”. As Galloway has literally embraced the most reactionary religious leaders in Bradford (who favour such progressive issues as female genital mutilation) they have plenty of material for their nasty little agendas. What they fail to face up to is the massive alienation of the electorate from the establishment they defend.

And on the other side we have congratulations coming from the likes of Tony Mulhearn the Socialist Party (Militant) candidate for Mayor of Liverpool and both the SWP and Counterfire making overtures to rebuild a left electoral alliance on the same platform as Galloway. Here is Callinicos in Socialist Worker [7 April]

A radical and revolutionary left that plans to have a future has to start by acknowledging the achievement of Galloway and Respect. They have re-opened an electoral space to the left of Labour. We now have all to work together to ensure that this great second chance isn’t wasted.

And those renegades from the SWP, Counterfire agree. They think the Bradford West by-election result heralds “the possibility of a new left” which can create “a mass movement” based on “a principled defence of Britain’s Muslims” and opposition to austerity. Like Respect they do not talk of anti-capitalism let alone socialism. In fact they share the same mixture of Keynesian policies to mitigate the worst aspects of the capitalist crisis and identification of the anti-war campaign as a Muslim campaign. Even in their own terms they are neither principled nor credible.

A Triumph for the System

But the real victor was the capitalist system itself. Nowhere was this better understood than in the bosses paper the Financial Times. When Galloway announced to the press that,

This is the Bradford Spring just like the Cairo Spring,

he went on to stress that it was a peaceful version of the Arab Spring. The Financial Times has run several comments and editorials since the 2008 bubble burst. Every single one has breathed a sigh of relief that the dispossessed and exploited have not responded more directly to the austerity programmes of the ruling class. They greeted Galloway’s victory with relief.

When riots swept austerity Britain last year, few big cities escaped their flames. Yet Bradford, once a pressure cooker of social unrest, stayed quiet. The city’s voters have now staged their protest by electing the maverick independent, George Galloway, in the Bradford West by-election.

The Bradford result may suggest that Britain’s Muslim community, its young people and unemployed, feel excluded from a political debate that has little to do with their daily lives. Yet it is still encouraging that four years into recession, and amid severe budget cuts, the protest is being made in the ballot box. Nationally, unemployment is still high and the economic outlook remains grim. Yet since last year’s riots, there has been no sustained groundswell of protest.

So just when the system is increasingly rejected by the young and the working class we get two cheers for Respect from the ruling class. Social democracy everywhere saved capitalism throughout its crises in the Twentieth century and they have not gone away. The new social democrats of today dream of no more than recreating a Labour Party which will return to its working class roots. This is as far as their “socialism” goes.

They repeat the great lie that socialism is simply the state redressing the balance of capitalist exploitation with a little bit of redistribution here and there. For them all we need to do is elect “honest socialists” to the capitalist Parliament. All these “leaders” then need to do is alter the legal framework to give workers back something of what has been taken from them. But this is a travesty. Socialism is not capitalism with a “nanny state”. Socialism is an entirely different way of producing the wealth of society in which we produce for our own use and not for the profit of the capitalist class. It cannot come about by passively asking some leader to implement it and it certainly cannot arrive via a cross on a ballot paper. “Citizenship” under socialism is not about voting for anyone to rule. Socialism can only be actively created by the mass of the population taking the decisions themselves through direct delegatory democracy in which delegates can be recalled instantly. It is about every human being participating in the important decisions in life – about what we produce and how we produce it.

This has nothing in common with the parliamentary agendas of the capitalist left. It has nothing in common with playing electoral games or trying to win the “Muslim” or even “working class” vote. It is about a new way of looking at the world, a new consciousness. And this can only be forged in a revolution. As Marx wrote

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men [and women – CWO] on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.

This may yet be some way off but it will come all the quicker if workers are not sucked into the utopian idea that voting can change anything. Galloway’s victory in Bradford West was a triumph for the system. It will change nothing.