Um again mentioned about TIP and the
health uh national health service uh let
me just remind everyone that 22nd of
March these loopers are available 22nd
of March we're holding a meeting about
the NHS and TIP. So please do attend
that if you can.
Now our final speaker doesn't require an
introduction but he was uh described by
the late and great Tony Ben as one of
the finest socialists, internationalists
and democrats of his generation. Please
give a warm welcome to the inhibitable
George
Galloway. Brothers and sisters, comrades
and
friends, thanks for that uh kind
introduction. And both Bob Crow and Tony
Ben have featured heavily already in the
course of this evening. And you'll have
to forgive me for I intend to draw on
both of those authorities in the course
of my speech.
Also, if you want to know what I think
or what I'm
doing, don't watch the BBC.
Don't watch any of the mainstream
outfits. Don't read any of the
mainstream newspapers if you want to
know what I actually think I'm doing. My
wife and I have a weekly television show
on RT Russia today. Paul's been on it.
Eddie will be on it
soon. Every Thursday
evening, I host a worldwide phone
television show on Press
TV. Twice a month, I present a
television program on Almyadin
television which broadcasts from
Beirut. I write a column for the
American Herald Tribune.
My wife is Dutch,
Indonesian. Three of my children are
mixed race. I'm mentioning all of these
things for the obvious
purpose of pointing out the complete
absurdity of characterizing
caricatururing our position in this
debate as somehow being a position of
little
Englanders. apart from the fact I'm half
Irish and half
Scottish or pretending that our stand is
somehow about nationalism. Nobody could
be less nationalistic than me, more
internationalist than me.
I intervened heavily in the Scottish
independence
referendum arguing the case against
nationalism. The idea that Tony
Ben was a nationalist or Bob Crow was a
nationalist that Paul Embry is a
nationalist is absolutely absurd.
Now there are some people who will be
voting in the same way as us who are no
doubt nationalists. Some of them
even justifying the term little
Englander. On the other hand, Tony
Blair's voting to
remain. So's Peter Mandles. So is
Goldman
Sachs. So is David Cameron. George
Osborne. So don't talk to me about
strange bed fellows if you're on the
left. This is a binary
choice. You have to vote one way or the
other in or out. Leave or remain. And so
there will always be as there was in the
Scottish referendum.
I didn't link arms with, line up with,
stand shoulderto-shoulder with the
Scottish Conservative Party. They just
happen to be voting the same way as
me and of course the majority of the
Scottish
people. I want to echo a point that Paul
made that I haven't heard. Somehow we're
amongst those who are against I must say
it's a particularly peculiar insult to
throw at me because for many years they
kept saying I was only interested in
immigrants. I am myself an immigrant
twice
over. My grandparents in their bare feet
on a cattle boat from Ireland.
me from Scotland to England and for 35
years to
London. We're not against immigration.
Still less can we accept the conflation
of the question of migration and the
question of refugees.
Every country has the right to
decide how much immigration and from
where it is prepared to accept or ought
to ought to.
But every country has an absolute
obligation to treat humanely those who
are refugees. Especially when it's your
country that's doing the bombing and
making the wars that are producing for
refugees in the first
place. There is nothing leftwing about
mass immigration.
Mass
immigration decapitates the
countries from which the immigrant is
leaving depriving them. You take many
examples. The health system for
example all these doctors that have
migrated here to work in the health
system are by definition no longer
working in the health system in their
own countries. And the same is true in
many
professions. Equally, mass immigration
in a capitalist society must, as a
matter of simple logic, drive down wages
and conditions for those of all colors,
all ethnicities, all pathways into our
country who are already living and
working here.
So unless you take the view and only a
very few on the very far left take the
view that there should be
unlimited uncontrolled
immigration. Then you have to accept
that what we have now is the most racist
immigration rules that we have ever had
in this country. It's effectively a
whites only immigration policy. 550
million people from the European Union.
The overwhelming majority of the white
are entitled to come here at the drop of
a hat with as many members of their
family as they wish. was people from the
British Commonwealth who speak our
language, whose family members were
already here before we joined the EU
have to climb through hoops of fire even
to get a visa to come and attend their
grandson's wedding or come and attend
their grandmother's funeral. I know that
very well because for almost 30 years I
sat in the British Parliament trying to
get visas for people from Jamaica, from
India, Pakistan, from
Bangladesh, from Ghana, Nigeria, all
these countries were English, if you'll
forgive the pun, is the lingua frana who
fought alongside us in the Second World
War with whom we had the closest
possible relations for most of history
entirely. exploitative by us of them had
the door slammed in their face when we
joined the European Union and for the
last 40 years or more have endured
discrimination against them in the
immigration system. people to whom we
owe a debt of
reparation for having stolen all their
things, including in the case of Africa,
even stealing them and transporting them
as slaves to other parts of our
empire. So, this is not about
immigration except in this regard.
One of the reasons I'm supporting
leaving the European Union is so that
the people of Commonwealth extraction
here in this country can get a fair deal
and their families can get a fair deal
out of the immigration system that will
develop. The third chivalith has been
dealt with by both Paul and Eddie. I add
to it only this the idea that we should
stay in this
anti-democratic unreformable impermeable
organization because it represents some
kind of
civilizing mission here in Britain that
if it wasn't for them we wouldn't have
this or that betrays two things. First
of all, a complete lack of confidence in
our own people. A complete lack of
awareness of the things we achieved
before we ever joined the European
Union. The Clean Air Act, for example,
the 60th anniversary of which is about
to come. The first Clean Air Act on the
European continent. gay rights, women's
rights, equal pay
legislation. We had many great
achievements. They talk about the period
from 1973. I'll tell you, sadly, I'm old
enough to remember it and young enough
that I wasn't being used by
substances. The 60s was the best time
that this country ever had. We achieved
huge things under a Labor government in
the 1960s before we ever joined the
European Union. Britain has elected 11
Labor governments. And it's a strange
time now that we've got for the first
time an explicitly socialist left-wing
leader of the Labor Party to be saying
that if we don't have the European
Union, nothing good will be able to be
delivered to us. It's a
nonsense. It betrays a total lack of
confidence in our own people. Of course,
we've got a Tory government now, but
only 24% of the people voted for them.
The only reason we've got a Tory
government now is because we've got a
twisted, unfair, unjust electoral system
through which they
exercise rather small parliamentary
majority. We do have a Tory government,
but at least we can vote them
out as we have done 11 times before. But
we can, as the others have said, never
vote out those who have the power in the
European Union. It is so designed that
that is simply
impossible. But it
also
completely
overstates the intentions of the
European Union as a civilizing
organization.
Some people in the labor movement have
to wake up to the fact that Jack
Dellores is dead and
Deloreism if he deserves it is equally
dead. There was a brief period after the
fall of the Soviet Union and its
satellite countries in which under the
laws some small changes were affected
which did civilize things like the labor
market, maternity rights, working time
directives and so on. But as my
colleagues have said, that all was long
ago
slaughtered. And the Lisbon treaty, the
constitutional treaty, actually makes
most of these things untenable, if not
actually
impossible. We've got a Labour leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to nationalize
those utilities that were stolen from us
under Thatcherism. It's illegal. Forget
about it. We stay in the EU. It cannot
be
done. Our steel industry just went down
the Swany
River. As it happens, we've got a
government that doesn't care tuppets
about that. But if Jeremy Corbyn and
John McDonald were running Britain, they
wouldn't have been able to intervene to
save our steel industry. The only way,
and I mean this literally, the only way
that we can be a manufacturing
industrial country again is if we leave
the European Union. Because you cannot
reindustrialize through public ownership
and public intervention in the economy
as long as you remain in the EU. And
it's abundantly clear that British
capitalism no longer has the
wherewithal, more importantly has no
will whatsoever to rebuild our
industrial strength as an as an economic
manufacturing power.
This
whole setup in the European Union was
deliberately designed as Eddie said so
that German industry would dominate the
European mainland but also us and
British finance capital
utilizing American capital, American
banks based here in
London would take care of the financial
services. Well, I don't know about you,
I'm not prepared to go into that good
night as a
postindustrial country. Not least
because the financial services as we
found in
2008 is not just smoke and
mirrors. It is actually fraudulent. And
if the chickens came home to roost on
that fraudulent finance capitalism, we
would have no economy left at all.
So the idea that we can't do it
ourselves, that we had no history before
we joined the European Union, and that
the European Union is on a civilizing
mission here, blunting the edges of
capitalism and right-wing conservative
governments are both completely untrue
as propositions.
And the point has been made by my
colleagues very
well that if you believe in democracy,
you can't want to stay in the European
Union. The European Union tells you what
you can and cannot do even though you
did not elect it and cannot remove it.
The deficit, for example, you're not
allowed under the rules of the European
Union to run a deficit on your current
account of more than 3%. What's leftwing
about that? that is actually making
illegal the work of John Maynard Kanes
who influenced the conduct of social
democratic governments and even
nonsocial democratic governments in many
countries through most of the last half
century and more. The idea of the
government priming the pumps, the
government spending to kickstart the
economy when it slows down cannot be
achieved if your deficit must be
3%. You would need twice, three times,
four times that to get us out of the
slump that we are currently in. Equally,
the EU makes it
illegal to have a level of debt to GDP
of more than
60%. Well, ours is actually 84%
already.
Greece, as a result of the
EU's jack boot, to which I shall come in
a minute, has a level of debt of 150%
But you're only actually allowed to have
60%. And you must, if you have more than
a debt level of 60% to GDP, you must
reduce it by 5%
perom. Now, how do you reduce it? You
can only reduce it by savagely cutting
public services, throwing millions of
people out of work, which is exactly
what has happened. Not just in Greece,
by the way, but in Spain, in Portugal,
in Ireland, and other countries
also. And so horrific is the situation
in Greece that half of the children in
the country are now living officially in
poverty. Their children unable to be
properly
nourished. A third of the budget of the
health service has had to be
cut and they're still going to
default. They have to default. The debt
was unpayable before. It's equally
unpayable now. Ask anyone in Ireland, by
the way. I don't know if there are any
Irish people here about what the costs
of the EU reconstruction of their
economy were. But when Greece defaults,
it's going to send yet another political
earthquake right across the Euro zone,
just at a time when the Euro zone is
seeking closer and closer political
integration. And we have opted out of
that, but will be absolutely affected by
it. They keep telling us that it's a big
market of ours. Well, that market is
about to be very severely jolted when
Greece defaults, as it certainly will in
the course of this
year. So, for all these
reasons, it's vital that anybody on the
left shakes themselves free of this
illusion that there's anything socialist
about that.
There only one point I pick up not in
disagreement with Paul but to clarify
something. There has not been peace in
Europe since the formation of the
European Union. The European countries
have by and large not fought each other
but they've been going around the world
fighting other people almost on an
annual basis.
In the course of the history of the EU,
France drowned Algeria and Vietnam in
blood. I'm not even going to count the
number of wars and invasions and
occupations we ourselves have been
involved in. German capital
rapidly accelerated the break up of the
former Yugoslavia as an act of
deliberate
policy and left the former
Yugoslavia running in blood.
the
Ukraine. There's a war raging there
directly as a result of EU stroke NATO
policy of belligerance towards Russia.
So there's nothing peaceful about the EU
or most of the most powerful EU
countries uh within it.
So anybody on the left has to
re-examine that which over the last few
years they have perhaps allowed
themselves to slip into the belief that
somehow this is a progressive
organization. It isn't and it can never
be. That's the crucial thing. We can
vote the tries out here. We can't vote
to change the European Union. the
bureaucracy in Brussels, the Council of
Ministers of 28 countries, 18 of them
right-wing countries, right-wing
governments with even farright elements
within their governments are never
going to opt for the progressive things
that people in the labor movement and on
the left here in Britain want to see.
The idea that you could persuade 28
countries soon by the way to be added to
by
others with actually even more
right-wing
politics. The idea that Turkey, for
example, should be admitted into the EU
even though they are, you'll see this on
this week's spot neck by the way.
They're taking over opposition
newspapers by force and turning them
overnight, literally overnight, into
pro- regime newspapers. They're at war
with
25% of their own population, the Kurdish
minority within Turkey.
They're assisting ISIS and al-Qaeda in
both Syria and I believe Iraq. They are
trying to drag us into a war, a wider,
bigger
war against Russia and others. Yet David
Cameron wants to bring them into the
European Union, a country where
arbitrary arrest and torture,
disappearance and murder is the norm
rather than the exception. So it's 28
now. It will soon be more than 28. And
therein lies the problem. If we stay, we
are at the mercy of any two of those
countries. Any two of them can outvote
us. And now it's majority voting on
almost everything. The days when you
could go and exercise a veto are almost
entirely gone. The idea that any two I
mean I I'm not picking on Romania. I'm
the only person in this room that's got
a book published in Romanian and I even
speak some of you language. I love
Romanians. But the idea that Romania and
Bulgaria can tell us who should come
into our country, who can be allowed to
leave our country, what our deficit
should be, what our rate of debt should
be, what we should do with our railway
industry, what we should do with our
steel industry is self
evidently ridiculous.
Now Tony
Ben,
my
father, political, ideological father,
if he were alive, would be standing here
instead of me as the main speaker at
this rally. Eddie would have been
replaced by the late Bob Crow.
This
is a left progressive
internationalist campaign to leave the
European Union. And I say to those
thousands and many thousands who are
watching on Facebook and on Periscope
Live right now, I say to them, don't
fall for the lies. Don't be confused
about who's on a platform with whom.
It's not about that. It's much more
important than that. I believe that
Britain will not only not be leaving
Europe if we leave the EU. We'll be
rejoining the world. We'll be rejoining
the Commonwealth. will be trading freely
and openly with Brazil, with Russia,
with India, with China, with South
Africa, with all the emerging rising
economies in the world. And we'll be
getting out of a fading, failing, flawed
Euro project that we should never have
joined in the first place. Thanks very
much indeed.
Thank you very coach.