I tell you this, I’m saying this to religious people in the room, anybody who believes that there is a Day of Judgement, anybody who believes that they must face their maker one day and account for what they did and didn’t do, and I am one of those believers, I say to you this, there is no-one who can face their maker and explain satisfactorily what they were doing when all this crime was being committed, they were going to the ballot box and putting an X beside the name of New Labour which is dripping in the blood of all these crimes…
–George Galloway speaking to a meeting of Preston Respect, April 24, 2007
I ask Galloway – who has branded the three main parties as “Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and a half” – whether he would call for a vote for Labour to keep the Conservatives out, and am genuinely surprised by the firebrand MP’s response. “We definitely want the Tories to be defeated, so for the most part that would mean that we ask people to vote Labour.” It was understandable that Respect backed Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in last year’s election for London Mayor. But would Respect really ask people to vote for an arch New Labourite who voted for the war? “Most of them are arch New Labourites who backed the war, so we wouldn’t be able to have that as a hard and fast rule. It’s unlikely that the worst of the war criminals would attract our support, but we wouldn’t be able to use who voted for the war entirely as a yardstick.”
–George Galloway in an interview with Salman Shaheen of The Third Estate, October 13, 2009
(Hat tip: Socialist Unity)