I'm going to introduce to you a former
member of the Labor Party. He left the
Labor Party
over he founded the respect party in
Bradford and served as the chair of the
respect party since
2012. He has served as John's election
agency in 2012 during the historic
bi-election victory west taking a safe
for over four decades. A lifelong
activist for Palestine.
Please
[Applause]
welcome Mr. doesn't understand. So I
hope most of you do understand English.
So I will uh speak in English if you
will forgive me. First of all, I'd like
to thank you all for uh uh inviting us
here to Halifax. I know many colleagues
and friends from Halifax have been
asking for a couple of years now to ask
Mr. George Galloway to come and uh um
speak to people in Halifax. Uh we've
been really really busy in Bradford over
the last few years. We made many many
changes there. So, it's taken us a
little time, but it's never too late.
So, thank you very much for inviting us
here. Thank you fresh hair the um
business for hosting us today um uh
yourself and the rum for um making
contact and organizing this event here
today. Uh so thank you very much. I
think you all know him but from the age
of 13 a man who has worked for his
principles who stood for his principles
often when he was only the the only one
in parliament and it doesn't it takes a
lot of guts to stand up to be the only
one to have one point of view when the
majority have a separate point of view
but he's the man who's never been afraid
of telling the truth is a man who's
never been afraid of being the only one
and if you've seen him on question time
if you've seen him at the American
Senate I don't know some of you pretty
young Maybe maybe you haven't seen him.
He's a man who has worked all his life
for Kashmir and the rights of the
Kashmiri people. He has a man who has
worked all his life for the Palestinian
cause, often at personal detriment. He
was recently attacked by a Zionist in
London because he made comments uh about
uh making Bradford an Israel free zone.
We don't believe in Israel because it's
a Zionist state. We'll never accept uh
Israel as a state because the land
belongs to the Palestinian people. It
gives me great pleasure general. Give
him a warm alif
[Applause]
welcome elders, brothers and sisters,
comrades and friends.
Thank you for that very fine
introduction. Ashad and I have traveled
not just all these years but many
thousands of
miles on our convoys to break the siege
on Gaza over and over again. So, we know
each other's driving habits, eating
habits, sleeping habits, usually in the
back of a of a car. Uh, and he is really
one of my oldest and closest comrades.
And his introduction is what I'm going
to begin with. I do have some things to
say about Halifax specifically and some
announcements you may think important to
make uh towards the end of my remarks.
But I want to pick up where he left off.
First of all, at this table, although we
all look very young, is 100 years of
Labor Party membership. Come on.
I make that
point
because you will hear from people in the
Labor Party in
Halifax that we are something other but
actually we are the real Labor Party.
100 years we stood for the values of
Labor.
The people who are other are the people
who have hijacked the Labor Party and
flown it to
destruction. And that's a theme I'm
going to develop through the course of
my remarks, but it's the theme for which
we stand. The reason new labor, as Mr.
Blair renamed it hate us is because we
are the ghost of labor's past. We are
haunting them. Every time they look at
us, listen to
us, they hear a faint echo of what they
used to be. We say the things they used
to say. We believe in the things they
used to believe in. We stand up for the
people they were formed to represent but
have now abandoned if not
betrayed. I'm laboring this point if
you'll forgive the pun because of
certain announcements that I'm going to
make later in my address.
Asha talked about
the seinal
moment of the Iraq
war from which quite frankly there is no
going
back. Our rulers have made the world a
terrifyingly more dangerous
place. They killed a million people.
Imagine. Just imagine what a million
dead people would look like. piled one
on top of the other in the center of
Halifax, an Everest of dead people and
labor is
co-responsible for doing
it. As Shakespeare put it in
McBTH, all the perfumes of
Arabia could not expune that damn spot.
that stay will be on Labor forever
more. Not least
because Mr.
Blair two weeks ago donated
£105,000 in blood money to the Labor
election campaign.
Ed Milliband went to visit him in one of
his seven mansions, the one of Edgeware
in London to pledge his ongoing
loyalty to Blair. And Blair gave him a
check for
£105,000 1,000 for every Labor candidate
in a marginal seat in a target
seat. Who knows? Maybe this will receive
that £1,000 blood money. I don't know
how hard up Ed Milliband is, but he
cannot be so hard up that he has to take
this blood soaked money. So the point
I'm making is not only have Labor not
disavowed Blair and Straw and the other
war criminals, they're still in bed with
them, still dining with them, still
taking their money.
But worse than that, having made the
world a terrifyingly more dangerous
place, having set extremism rampant
across the world, including in our own
country, having killed a million
people, they want to blame the Muslims
for the consequences.
Yesterday, Theresa May, the home
secretary, made a speech so
chilly that he has set shock
waves moving throughout the Muslim
community in Britain now 2.7 million
strong, up 1 million in the last decade
alone.
Theresa
May's
chilling remarks
yesterday in which amongst other things
she announced that the government will
take power to close mosques.
Imagine if they
believe that what's happening in a
mosque, what's being said,
the is not to their
liking even though it's spoken in
another language in a religious
place. They are giving themselves the
power to issue a mosque closure notice
which will mean that that mosque will be
closed thereafter.
In her
remarks, she aduced a whole range of
problems that she wanted to lay at the
feet of
Muslims.
Grooming by evil, predatory men of young
girls and boys, children is somehow a
Muslim
problem. But you can't be a Muslim
groomer.
That's a contradiction in terms and in
any case that well-known Muslim Sir
Jimmy
Sabal that well-known Muslim Sir Smith
those well-known Muslims in the British
cabinet, British government, British
Parliament that the police are
investigating right now, were they
Christians or were they just
rumors? Were they just evil white men?
Of course they were. Nobody would dream
of running on the front page of the
times as the times did just a week or so
ago crisis of Muslim grooming to be
addressed by the government. Imagine the
words Muslim and grooming together in
the same
headline.
Extremism. Sure there is
extremism. Radicalization. Sure there is
radicalization.
Not because of
anything the mi or the mama the imam is
saying on a Friday but because the
Muslims can turn on the TV and watch the
news. Last summer in
Gaza,
2,136
Palestinians behind barred wire with
nowhere to run, nowhere to hide were
massacred with the support of the
British government which supported
Israel throughout this
massacre. And 500 of those were
children. Many of them very small
children at that. How radical do they
think you feel when you watch that on
the
news? You see, they think that nobody
here cares about what happens in Gaza or
Jerusalem. Well, actually millions care
and all the Muslims care and they're
very angry about the role that our
country has been playing in the
world. But that's being laid not at the
door of those committing these acts and
producing the anger, but the angry
people. And if they hear a
whisper of political
protest or any demand that Britain
changes its policy towards the Muslim
world, bang, you'll get a mosque closure
notice. She mentioned the Trojan horse,
which I described on the day that it
appeared as a Trojan
hoax. And this very week in par last
week in parliament the select committee
declared it to be a hoax wholly without
foundation an invention a forgery a hoax
but that didn't stop Theresa May
mentioning it in her speech yesterday.
grooming, extremism, Trojan horse
infiltration, one crime after another
being laid at the door of the
Muslims. What did I Cooper, her labor
opposite number say about Theresa May's
speech in Labor federal home
secretary? She said that Theresa May had
not gone far enough.
We have a Dutch
auction, a reverse auction where they're
competing with each other as to who can
be the most
vile. The meanest to the Muslims and to
the immigrants as they call them, most
of whom Allah immigrants and were born
here just look different to Evette
Cooper and Theresa Bay and
UK in its rise and rise has driven both
of these mainstream parties. Arshad was
polite when he said you couldn't slip a
cigarette paper between these two
parties on the big issues of war, civil
liberties, religious freedom and so on.
I call them two cheeks of the same
backside and that's what I believe they
have
become. Now I joined the Labor Party as
Ashad said at 13 years of age and I was
a member of it for 36 years. I was the
youngest ever everything. I was the
youngest ever constituency labor party
secretary at the age of 18. I was the
youngest ever full-time organizer of the
Labor Party. at the age of 21. I was the
youngest ever chairman of the whole
Labor Party in Scotland at the age of
26. This is not the Labor Party that I
joined. This is not the Labor Party in
which I worked. We worked for the 100
years that cumulatively we were in
it. So we just we had that choice as
Arsha described it.
we could shut up. And if I had done
so, I'd still be in a safe labor seat in
Glasgow. I might be in the shadow
cabinet. Maybe I'd be running for
leader. If Ed Milliban falls off his
horse in just 50 or 45 days time, but I
could not shut up.
We could
have changed our line as many did. Many
of the people in the leading ranks of
New Labor were once way to the left of
me and they tiptoed across the stage
because the prevailing wind had changed
in order to advance
themselves. If I had
not at the age of
19 become an activist, super activist on
behalf of the Palestinian people, if I
had backed Israel when I was 19 instead
of backing Palestine when I was 19, I
have no doubt at all I would have been
on the front bench or in the cabinet
when Labor was in power. But I could not
do so. My conscience would not allow me
to do so. And neither could it allow me
to either remain silent on this
metamorphosis from a butterfly into a
slug that began when Mr. Blair took over
the Labor Party in
1994. Neither, because so much moves me,
could I simply leave politics. It's been
my life as it was my parents' life as it
was their parents' life. I cannot walk
away from these great burning
issues. So we were forced to try to
refound a real Labor party to try to
compete against the Labor Party that had
been taken away from us. Either we
defeat them or at least our very
existence makes them have to be more
careful in their apostasy in their level
of betrayal. They have to know that
there's somebody else that is real labor
who might take their votes and therefore
we stop them in their trajectory as far
and as far to the right as they can
possibly go. And it
worked. I defeated them in
2005 in Tower Hamlets in Bethno Green
and B. A rock solid labor seat as good
for respect. We were only one year old
and we defeated them. We did it again
even more spectacularly in Bradford West
in
2012. Inshallah on the 7th of May will
give them an even bigger beating.
But that's not
enough. I'm 60 years
old. We need to bring forward new
leaders. We need not one MP, but more
MPs. We need not just the 25 or so
counselors that we have elected over the
last 10 years. We need 250
2,500 counselors if we're going to
fulfill our mission. So if God spares me
in the next 5 years, I want to dedicate
that period to bringing forward this new
group of leaders who will continue this
mission. Maybe the Labor Party will
suffer a cataclysmic defeat on May the
7th. I hope not because that will be bad
for the working people in Britain. But
if they do, the Labor Party will begin
to fall apart and any number of
different scenarios may
become possible and we want to be in
there in the mix. If Ed Milliban is
depending on one vote in parliament and
that vote is
me, I'll give him my support at a price.
And you've already got some idea of the
kind of price that I would require
before I could sustain his government in
power. Imagine if we had two, if we had
three, we had four or five. our chances
of holding a balance of power in what
will almost certainly be a
hung would be very greatly enhanced. So
let me turn to Halifax.
I wanted to come here because what I saw
happening here over the last period and
especially over the last few
days was so
corrupt was such an affront to what
Labor is supposed to stand
for that I felt that a new Bradford
could exist here in
Halifax. What happened? Maybe some of
you were involved. I don't
know. In an act of ethnic
cleansing, ethnic cleansing, a Labor
party
acts 135 of its own
members on the eve of the selection of a
parliamentary
candidate. Almost all of them were
Asians.
But an Asian member is the equal of any
other member in law and in
morals. Can you
imagine? Let let me be clear. The
Bradford West Labor Party is entirely
controlled by Pakistanis.
Can you imagine if the branch of West
Labor Party had
asked 135 white members the night before
they chose a parliamentary candidate,
never mind the Trojan horse that have
the special branch in MI5 and MI6 moving
in to the city. There have been front
pages in the Sun, the Daily Mail that
have been the first item on the news. an
act of ethnic cleansing carried out by
Pakistani Labor Party members in
Bradford West. And that's exactly what
happened
here with scarcely a whisper in the
national media, which proves that the
mainstream media and the Labor
leadership don't give a toss about Asian
people here in Halifax. They're
disposable, dispensable. They want your
votes. They want your knuckles on the
campaign trail. But don't dream of
imagining that you can be a member of
parliament when they have someone else
in mind. But who did they have in
mind? Well, I don't know this person.
Here's what I know
about Holly Walker hyphen Lynch. I'm
always suspicious when there's a hybrid
in this. Don't know about
you. I know that she's 28 years old. I
know that she looks
14. I know that in the picture I saw of
her, it was Jolly Hockey
sticks. And I know that her only
credential for being a member of
parliament is that she already works for
one. But that's precisely the problem
that the Labor Party has. When I was
elected almost 30 years
ago, I was a former I I left school when
I was 16. I never went to university. I
just paid the tax for Tony Blair to go
to university and all the rest of them
before they kicked the ladder away from
my children and their children.
I worked in a factory making tires for
Michelin when I I was a sponsored member
of parliament sponsored by the transport
and general workers union which I joined
on Christmas Eve 1973 and remain a
member today in its new form unite.
All around
me were former miners, former
engineering workers, former bus drivers,
truck drivers, dock workers, working
people, real labor people. There was
more than 100 of us. My first
parliamentary action was a Philly buster
to stop Margaret Thatcher's private uh
dock scheme at uh Lois Loft. I
think it was a Philly bustler that
lasted the entire night. I myself spoke
for hours. We were only allowed to speak
about environmental matter. So I became
an expert on the breeding habits of the
Brent goose and the ringtailed
plumber. I've never seen a Brent goose
or a ringtail plumber, but by God I
spoke for hours on
it. how it needed certain type of
grass, how the salinity in the water was
so vital, how you disturb the nest, the
bird's breeding habits would be gravely
imperelled and so on. But my point is as
I spoke and my friends spoke throughout
the entire night, I was surrounded by
doctors and miners and engineering
workers, people that had made things,
done things, made things work, fixed
things. Now the Labor MPs, almost
without exception, including the leader,
have never done a day's real work in
their lives.
They go to the best
universities. They come out and they get
a job working in an MP's office. Then
they themselves become an MP. Then they
become a leader or a shadow minister
without ever having had any real contact
with the outside world.
I may be wrong about this young woman,
but she strikes me as exactly that
identicate kind of new labor
candidate with nothing in common with
the Asian population here and nothing in
common with the white workers
here who don't have double ball names,
who don't work for
NEPs. And so it struck
me, we could do something here. We could
make a breakthrough
here. And even if we didn't, we deliver,
if the ladies will forgive me, a good
kick up the ass of new
labor. And that's what they need. And we
can do it
here. Any votes we get here are votes we
take from them.
Any success we have here, we win from
there. And I'll tell you what, if we
did, if we do, they'll think twice
before doing again what they did the
last time. That's what happened in Beth
Green. Una King, now Lady King, she
voted for the Iraq war, went on TV
speaking for the Iraq war, even though
90% of her constituents were against the
Iraq war. Why? because she thought the
people in Tar Hamlets had no choice but
to reelect her. What are they going to
do? Vote Tori? No. You've seen Beth
Green and
B? So, she thought she could do exactly
what she liked and she'd get back in
anyway. And we showed her another
thing. And we can do the same here in
Halifax. We need to do the same thing
here in Halifax because if we don't, why
should they change? If they can get away
with treating you with contempt, why
should they stop treating you with
contempt? If you don't respect
yourselves, why should anybody else
respect you? This is a key lesson, not
just in politics, but in life.
So I'm here to tell you we are going to
stand in the parliamentary election in
[Music]
Halifax. And our candidate is a labor
counselor who couldn't take this new
labor malarkey any longer. She's my
labor counselor in Mar where I live in
Bradford W. And she's counselor Asma
J. Talk to you in a minute, but we're
also going to stand in the council wards
here. I don't know how many will be able
to stand. Two, three, four.
And we want you to bring forward the
council
candidates. Ashett will be in charge of
that operation. He's the man to deal
with. Get your CVs in, express your
interest through him. He'll sit down
with you, interview you, see if you've
got any skeletons in your
cupboard, see what kind of capacities
you have. So we are going to run on May
the 7th for parliament in Halifax and in
several wards for the local council and
those local council candidates will be
amongst you or your friends that get to
hear about this project. I think it's
the right thing to do. I I'm certain
that
when
Holly Walker Lynch
hyphen gets to know about it, she'll be
very worried about it. Indeed, I'm
certain that when the regional office,
what's his name again? Kiran. K. Yeah.
Yeah. When this Kiran I keep hearing,
I've never seen him. It's like the the
the unicorn I keep hearing about, but
I've never set eyes on him. when he gets
to hear about it, trust me, he'll be
very worried
indeed and we believe that we have real
chances of success. So if Ashard will
permit me, I'll pass now the microphone
non-existent microphone
uh to councelor Asma who's an
outstanding figure, an outstanding labor
figure, an outstanding Yorkshire figure,
a lawyer, solicitor, human rights
lawyer, a person of real substance who
has worked all her life at the cold face
of life representing ing working people
in their many problems. Please give a
warm welcome to what I hope will be the
next member of parliament for Halifax,
Councelor
Asma. Thank you.
Um, you probably will have to shut me up
because I don't need a
microphone. Anyway, just to give a
little bit of my background, I think I
know quite a lot of people in Harry
because I have done a lot of work with
communities in Halifax. My family is in
Halifax. We've got businesses in
Halifax. But I'm from a working class
background. Classic example. My father
came in the
1960s, bought a corner shop and for 50
years has run that corner shop in the
heart of man. So when I was asked by the
Labor group party labor group in uh 2011
literally begged to come on board um I
beat the uh sitting councelor Liv Dem
Mr. Kim Khan by 3,000 votes that is a
leading
majority as soon as I entered politics
though I realized that my own people
that's the Labor party the Labor group
were not all happy. There was a lot of
jealousy, there was a lot of competition
and there was a lot of
dealing and backstabbing within the
party. So my very first main issue was
the issue of the money and back. I don't
know whether anybody has heard about
that. I stood in rain in July with the
constituents who voted me. very next
day, no other labor council turned up.
Not even my European Labor Council
meetings, his scrutiny meetings. And I
questioned the portfolio orders. I
questioned the deputy leader. I And as
soon as I heard my questions, it was
we've got to get rid of her because I
was questioning their ability. I was
questioning their competency and I was
questioning uh their thought uh view.
And so I realized that they took me off
the scrutiny panel. They took me off the
scrutiny committee for children services
because I was asking questions of the
portfolio holders councelor Raf and
those questions weren't being answered
to my
liking. The other thing they did not
like was the following that I had. And
because I'm a local uh lawyer in
Manville, people pop in to my office on
a daily basis. 10.