It is almost three years since George Galloway shamed the Labour party by storming to victory in the Bradford West byelection with a majority of more than 10,000.
Following the mortifying 36.6% swing to Respect, Labour went through the usual motions of vowing to listen and learn from its mistakes.
Ed Miliband came up in his sackcloth and told a group of Muslim women that his party had “specifically failed in relation to Muslim women and younger members of the Muslim community” in the city. Think tanks produced post-mortems. The Labour party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), led its own investigation, though never published its report.
All of which makes it slightly puzzling that Labour still hasn’t chosen a candidate to go up against Galloway on 7 May. Hustings aren’t even being held until 21 February, when local party members will get to decide on a shortlist whittled down by the NEC. Bradfordians, it seems, cannot be trusted to come up with their own selection of runners and riders after the debacle of the Bradford Spring.
The NEC has insisted on an all-women-shortlist – a decision many local insiders see as a deliberate move to prevent Imran Hussain, who lost so painfully to Galloway in 2012, from getting knocked out by Westminster’s most formidable fighter once again.
Hussain, deputy leader of the council and a member of one of Bradford’s most powerful Kashmiri families, was determined to have a rematch with Galloway. He told the Guardian as much after being re-elected as a councillor last May. Last summer, before the AWS was imposed, his family invited the great and the good of Bradford West to an all expenses-paid banquet for 1,000 people as they attempted to drum up support for his campaign. Hussain told the Guardian on Wednesday it was an innocent “victory party” to celebrate his council re-election, though several attendees said it seemed more like a rally to get him selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate (PPC) for Bradford West.
Foiled, he turned his attention to Bradford East, and was selected as PPC before Christmas. He will fight David Ward, the Liberal Democrat with a majority of just 365, who lost his party whip for making disparaging remarks about “the Jews” back in 2013.
The Guardian understands eight women have applied to contest Bradford West.
Two local councillors are on the list – Shakeela Lal and Naveeda Ikram, former lord mayor of the city.
Lawyer and entrepreneur Nasreen Karim is also interested. She would be an intriguing choice, having clashed with Nasreen “Naz” Khan, former women’s officer of Respect, who was given a restraining order preventing her from contacting the solicitor back in 2011. Khan hit the headlines in 2012 after it emerged she had questioned Hitler’s reputation, writing on Facebook: “It’s such a shame that the history teachers in our school never taught us this but they are the first to start brainwashing us and our children into thinking the bad guy was Hitler. What have the Jews done good in this world??”
Respect did not suspend Khan at the time, saying she had written the remarks before she was a member of the party. On Wednesday a Respect spokesman said Khan was now campaigning for the Labour party and was not a Respect member. This claim was disputed by Karim, who noted Khan was posting on the Respect Women’s Forum just last week.
Another contender is Naz Shah, chair of a local mental health charity and longtime campaigner on domestic violence and women’s issues. She is best known locally as the daughter of Zoora Shah, who was jailed for 20 years after killing her abusive, drug-dealing partner by lacing his food with arsenic. My colleague Diane Taylor interviewed her about her mother’s ordeal back in 1999, when Naz had won the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize for campaigning.
One outsider who has thrown her hat in the ring is former barrister Sophia Cannon, ex political assistant to Oona King, who lost to Galloway in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005. King has endorsed Cannon’s candidacy. Asked by the Guardian this week why she wanted to contest Bradford West, Cannon said: “Two words: Bethnal Green, 2005.” A mother of six-year-old twins, Cannon regularly appears on TV and is an associate fellow at the somewhat rightwing thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice. She is keen to sell herself as a “clean skin who can’t be approached by one clan to sort out another” – a reference to the Biradiri system of clan politics which has plagued Bradford for decades. Shakeela Lal, incidentally, is said to be the favourite among the Jhat clan, whose members are believed to have more than half the votes in the Bradford West constituency party.
Meanwhile, after spending much of last year agitating against independence in Scotland and making a film about Tony Blair, Galloway is pouring all of his efforts into retaining the seat. He recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise £20,000 to fill his war chest - £2,625 had been raised on Tuesday.
Last month he spoke at a rally outside Bradford’s City Hall in which he called Charlie Hebdo a “a racist, Islamophobic, hypocritical rag”, and appeared to equate holocaust denial with printing what he called the “obscene pornography” of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. After denouncing the Paris attacks, he said:
In France it is illegal to deny the holocaust, which massacred millions of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. It is illegal. It should be illegal. Because of the harm and hurt and offence which it causes to the millions of Jews in the world. But how come it’s illegal to hurt and offend Jews in France but it’s some kind of freedom of speech to offend - and obscene pornography be drawn and published now in the millions of copies - against Muslims? That’s hypocrisy, not democracy.”
On Thursday he will be given a national platform by appearing on Question Time, prompting protests from the local Jewish community in Finchley, where the programme will be filmed.
Even Galloway’s fiercest enemies concede that he is a fearsome campaigner and speaker. Oona King can attest to just how bruising it can be to have Galloway as an opponent. So can Cannon, who remembers all too vividly the poisonous 2005 campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow. Bradford West showed he must never be under-estimated. So why the foot-dragging from Labour?
It’s perhaps understandable that the constituency was not on the party’s much criticised list of target seats, which was drawn up using data from the 2010 general election, when Labour still held Bradford West with a 5,763 majority. Party apparatchiks insist the delay is just down to central command recognising that a clean-up of the local party was needed before selection could commence.
But given how hated Galloway is within his old party, it seems remarkable that they aren’t putting serious effort into kicking him out of Bradford.
Luckily for Labour, there is only one Gorgeous George. Can it be the party has effectively written off Bradford West and is instead pouring its resources into winnable seats where their candidates will never have to debate one of the finest orators of our age? Are they scared of George Galloway?
