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Galloway returns to Parliament in sensational win in Bradford West - Labour/Coalition smashed

Balbi said:
And, i'd say, they simply got their campaign strategy wrong - played it as a safe seat, rather than a marginal. Viewed Tories as the big threat, dismissed the independent. My local Tories got hammered five years ago because they viewed Labour as a threat - the Lib Dems monstered the council elections, got four years in power and then got turfed out for Tories last year. Wrong strategy means you lose, regardless.
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How much difference does it make, though? This kind of strategy talk always strikes me as if it treats the majority of people as rather stupid. What kind of strategy would have worked better, and why?
 
By assuming that people who voted for you locally, against a different slate of candidates - fighting a standard leaflet, door knock, occasional public meeting and photo op campaign - will vote for you again in very different circumstances, you are treating the majority of people as rather stupid. Labour did that. They believed themselves to be relatively comfortable.

Galloway worked harder, used the demographics better in the right areas, hit the issues bang on the nose, and tagged all three major parties with Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn't assume he'd got votes in the bag already.
 
butchersapron said:
Seems to me that his victory can in large part be put down to local issues - resentment at the labour councils stitch ups in favour of their preferred networks in resource allocation or licensing or whatever - GG mobilised anger at that rather than any wider anti-war stuff. Anti-war stuff would gain him a level of residual support, but not to this level, not to 50% of the vote.
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Local issues like the sort of stuff mentioned here?

Walking around Bradford West last week, it was clear many of those planning to vote for Galloway were jumping ship from Labour. No wonder the Conservative candidate – a local businesswoman, Jackie Whiteley – told the Guardian she was happy Galloway was in the race. She hopes he will take Labour votes. He's already nabbed their staff. One of Galloway's campaign managers, Naweed Hussain, switched sides 10 days ago, despite having done the same job for Singh over three general elections. He was fed up, he said, with Labour "bypassing democracy" in the seat it has held since 1974.

Singh is Sikh, having won over all colours and creeds in the multicultural constituency. But to succeed in the Bradford Labour party these days, said Hussein, you needed roots tracing back to Mirpur, a poor area of Kashmir, where around 70% of Bradford Pakistanis hail from. "Bradree" is a word you hear whispered a lot in Bradford at the moment. Loosely meaning "family", this Urdu word denotes a hierarchical system of clan politics where leaders are chosen on their connections, rather than their talents.

As Galloway sees it, Bradree has resulted in "second- and third-rate politicians particularly but not exclusively from the Labour party being elected to the city council on the basis not of ability, not of ideas, not on records of experience but on whether their father came from the same village as someone else's father 50 or 60 years ago". He gained a big cheer at one hustings when he said Bradree "has led to a situation where this city is slowly sinking and where mediocrities are running around the corridors of power and scratching each others backs and feeding each other doughnuts".

The new Labour candidate in Bradford West, criminal defence barrister Imran Hussain, 34, was born in the city to a family from Mirpur and viewed as a shoo-in for the Labour candidacy after serving as deputy council leader. Out canvassing in the Allerton ward, Hussain dismissed all talk of Bradreeism. "The concept that this election is stitched up is not true," he said. "My values are based around equality, justice and fairness, not where I am from."

He rejected claims made on the doorstep by one young constituent, 23-year-old Mahmoona Begum, who said she was voting Respect because "Labour in Bradford look after their own. I want someone who can sort out this city's schools – we're 145th out of 155 in the league tables – rather than someone who will spend his time sorting out restaurant and taxi licences for his friends."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/...lloway-bradford-west-byelection?newsfeed=true
 
butchersapron said:
GG now relegated to third largest swing after Hughes and Winnie Ewing (SNP) 38% swing from labour in 1967.
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Did anyone hear that total wanker Keith Vaz..on the radio this morning..what a fucking tool..
describing GG victory as being "not representitive of where the labour party vote is at"..
and all said in the best Mayfare accent you ever heard...
There living in cloud cockoo land...
 
butchersapron said:
Seems to me that his victory can in large part be put down to local issues - resentment at the labour councils stitch ups in favour of their preferred networks in resource allocation or licensing or whatever - GG mobilised anger at that rather than any wider anti-war stuff. Anti-war stuff would gain him a level of residual support, but not to this level, not to 50% of the vote.
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Don't think that would count for the high turnout, young voters etc, I think a lot could be said for his activism and reams of yootube rants and of course 'the grace of God' not forgetting the the grace of God or the grace of God Uk's first Islamic MP George Galloway
 
Balbi said:
By assuming that people who voted for you locally, against a different slate of candidates - fighting a standard leaflet, door knock, occasional public meeting and photo op campaign - will vote for you again in very different circumstances, you are treating the majority of people as rather stupid. Labour did that. They believed themselves to be relatively comfortable.

Galloway worked harder, used the demographics better in the right areas, hit the issues bang on the nose, and tagged all three major parties with Iraq and Afghanistan. He didn't assume he'd got votes in the bag already.
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Yes, fair enough. 'Why didn't you vote for our donkey? It had a red rosette and everything.' Yes, that is treating people as rather stupid.
 
butchersapron said:
Absolutely, but that wasn't - as far as i can tell from here - the mobilising issue. There's clear lessons here in what were the mobilising issues and how they were worked despite the seats demographic anomalies - lessons that undermine the oh no we must vote labour and work to get a labour victory whilst working to change labour bollocks so prevalent since may 2010.
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I'd be interested in hearing more about the campaign and what issues really did mobilise people. But by-elections have a dynamic of their own. Part of Galloway's own rhetoric is directed to Labour ("vote Respect and show Labour what they should be doing" stuff). I don't see how it's a scaleable model.
 
IC3D said:
Don't think that would count for the high turnout, young voters etc, I think a lot could be said for his activism and reams of yootube rants and of course 'the grace of God' not forgetting the the grace of God or the grace of God Uk's first Islamic MP George Galloway
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I think local issues are pretty much always the key to hight turnout, esp in by-elections.
 
Meltingpot said:
For those who like him (and I for one loved the way he stuck it to those American senators, which was probably his high point); how much constituency work will he do this time round though? That was a large part of his problem last time in London, he just wasn't there when the daily grind of an MP needed doing.
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Quite:

At the other end of the table George Galloway, the only MP for the far-left Respect party, is rated the worst-value MP. He turned up for only one in twenty votes, far fewer than any other MP, yet claimed £136,000 in expenses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/5105863/Best-and-worst-value-MPs-revealed.html
 
articul8 said:
I'd be interested in hearing more about the campaign and what issues really did mobilise people. But by-elections have a dynamic of their own. Part of Galloway's own rhetoric is directed to Labour ("vote Respect and show Labour what they should be doing" stuff). I don't see how it's a scaleable model.
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Is that you Harriet? Of course you wouldn't because you are exactly the sort of person whose been coming out with oh no we must vote labour and work to get a labour victory whilst working to change labour bollocks.
 
Mitre10 said:
Quite:

At the other end of the table George Galloway, the only MP for the far-left Respect party, is rated the worst-value MP. He turned up for only one in twenty votes, far fewer than any other MP, yet claimed £136,000 in expenses.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/5105863/Best-and-worst-value-MPs-revealed.html
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voting in parliamentary divisions (that the government have almost been guaranteed to win) is only one, comparatively small part of an MPs job tho
 
belboid said:
voting in parliamentary divisions (that the government have almost been guaranteed to win) is only one, comparatively small part of an MPs job tho
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Indeed, and one MP is rarely in a position to do anything via a vote -though i believe GG fucked one vote up - PTA? Or something
 
How much did he use the 'communalist' approach to his victory? his election flyer read like a religious sermon with added eastern politics, no mention about domestic poverty, cuts, etc,

bet the SWP are smarting now though, having left Wespect...
 
treelover said:
How much did he use the 'communalist' approach to his victory? his election flyer read like a religious sermon with added eastern politics, no mention about domestic poverty, cuts, etc,

bet the SWP are smarting now though, having left Wespect...
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Was that confirmed as actually being his election flyer yet?
 
butchersapron said:
Is that you Harriet? Of course you wouldn't because you are exactly the sort of person whose been coming out with oh no we must vote labour and work to get a labour victory whilst working to change labour bollocks.
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How is this qualitatively different from him beating Oona King in Bethnal Green? Yes it's an upset. But it doesn't suggest that we're about to see Labour implode.
 
articul8 said:
How is this qualitatively different from him beating Oona King in Bethnal Green? Yes it's an upset. But it doesn't suggest that we're about to see Labour implode.
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Who said that it did?

No, maybe you're right - maybe there are no lessons here for those in labour and none for those seeking to oppose the cuts and so on from outside labour. None at all.
 
articul8 said:
OK, how is it a scaleable model
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How is what a scaleable model exactly? Attacking labour on a local class issues? Attacking labour on how they operate locally and nationally? Attacking labour on the people who now run them and whose interests they reflect to the detriment of the wider population? That sort of model?
 
I'm not saying there are no lessons. But I don't see that it follows that TUSC or whatever are going to follow it up more broadly
 
butchersapron said:
How is what a scaleable model exactly? Attacking labour on a local class issues? Attacking labour on how they operate locally and nationally? Attacking labour on the people who now run them and whose interests they reflect to the detriment of the wider population? That sort of model?
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You can do all those things - and it might have some effect. But unless you're in a position to mobilise some alternative then a Labour vote is still going to be the only way of punishing the Tories and LDs for those in England. Now, how does GGs win make this more likely outside of areas with similar demographics?
 
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