Why I’m voting Brexit in the European elections – George Galloway

I was “trending” on Twitter in the UK for two whole days over the simple act of declaring where my vote will go in the European elections on May 23, which now look inevitable in Britain. There was a huge reaction elsewhere too.

Mind you, it was a controversial call.

I have spent a lifetime on the left, joining the Labour Party at 13 and spending nearly 30 years in parliament as a left-wing MP. And I’m voting for Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party. How come?

Ontology is important to me. I made a documentary for RT called the Patriot Game, which looked at the history of the far right in Britain, the history of fascism. The left-wing predilection to call everyone to the right of you a “racist” or even a “fascist” is not just juvenile, cretinous, but totally counter-productive, driving the subject of your insults irredeemably beyond your political grasp.

Farage is not a fascist, he’s a populist, more Huey Long than Hermann Goering. He’s against the automatic right of free movement of EU labor, to be sure, but the EU is the whitest trading bloc in the world. The EU labor which has come to Britain is overwhelmingly white, European, just like the majority of us. So the charge of racism doesn’t add up either, not least because he wants to prefer Commonwealth immigration where the British economy requires it and the Commonwealth is overwhelmingly black.

In the many conversations I have had with him on and off air, he has never betrayed a sliver of racist thinking and my antenna is sharp. I have represented more black and minority ethnic voters in parliament than any MP in history, and in three great cities. My wife is Indonesian and I have four mixed-race children. I have spent my life fighting for freedom around the world and defending it at home. I know what fascism is and Nigel Farage is no fascist.

In any case, being opposed to mass immigration is not (necessarily) racist. There is nothing left-wing about mass immigration. Poor people having to abandon their families and countries to find better-paid work is not a left-wing thing. Poor countries losing their youngest, fittest, and best workers to richer countries is not a left-wing thing. And workers in the richer countries seeing their labor supply multiplying instinctively know that more labor supply means less wages for them. Everybody knows this really – only Trotskyites and globalized capitalists really believe in “open borders” – but there is a narcissism in the small difference in how it is expressed, and Farage has often fallen foul of that. But he has broken decisively with UKIP, the increasingly far-right outfit he once led, precisely on the basis of their hate-speech against immigrants, Muslims and foreigners in general.

Much of the outrage against my voting intentions comes from people who voted for Tony Blair in 2005 when he was dripping in blood from the invasion of Iraq – an act which would lead to the death of a million Iraqis – now THAT is racism! Farage, incidentally, opposed the war on Iraq, and Libya, and Syria – unlike the great majority of Labour MPs.

When taxed by this paradox, my critics say that voting for Blair in 2005 was a tactical vote to keep the Tories out. So, let us turn to my own intended tactical vote for Nigel Farage on May 23.

More than three-quarters of the Labour Party’s candidates in this election openly reject the result of the Brexit referendum, demanding a re-run of the vote. Almost all of them are supporters of Mr Tony Blair. Almost all of them are opponents of the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. One of them (thinking she would not be standing in Euro-elections again) recently said she was “only just” Labour anymore. Their lead candidate, the inaptly named Lord Adonis, live on radio last week said he hoped that Brexit supporters would not vote Labour. As a student of Labour history, I can tell you that this is the first recorded example of any candidate for a major party asking 17.4 million people not to vote for his party – even though five million of them are Labour voters.

Brexit is being stolen from the voters who won it, in front of their eyes, by establishment politicians of all parties. A real anger in the country has arisen at this grand larceny. This anger now has but one focus, the Brexit Party. The Remain camp can choose between Labour, Conservative, Liberal, Democrat, Green and the breakaway Change UK. It is a perfect dichotomy.

If the Remain side wins these elections, the theft of Brexit will be complete with all the consequences which will follow. If the Brexit side wins a sweeping victory – as I believe (and the polls indicate) – that it will, then the juggernaut of betrayal will have to come to a shuddering halt. Not least because both main parties will know that, if it doesn’t, Nigel Farage will keep on trucking right up to and including a general election. Neither I nor they want that.

So I’ll be voting for Brexit, nothing more but nothing less on May 23. The surprise is that anyone thought I would or even could do otherwise...

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