Didn't see that coming



The Respect party's vote in Bradford West went from about 4% in the 2010 election to 56% in 2012. Labour went from 45% of the vote to 25%.

That is an absolute ass-kicking out of the blue.

I wonder if Galloway's "Bradford Spring" could be the catalyst that sees Yorkshiremen finally shake off the shackles that have bound us since 1485?

Nice to see Ed "Wallace" Milliband making progress in opposition. A real spanking for Labour this one. He'll be back at Aardman Productions by November.

Galloway is an opportunistic, unprincipled, ultra-leftist. That's all been known for years. In the BBC report online, he's also quoted as this being a massive vote against the previous governments warmongering. So he's probably also been going around doing his 'I'm almost a Muslim' routine - which, in the past, has included u-turns on equality issues for women and LGBT people.

But the scale of the vote suggests that this win is beyond that and that there is at least also an element of Labour's inability to re-connect with its historic supporters and offer any sort of meaningful alternative to the orthodoxy (in the main political parties) of neo-liberal economic policies.

Living in Bradford is an interesting experience - the fact Labour put up a pillar of the ethnic community and still got walloped must be shock.

The Tories have proved to be the most inept government since Callaghan and still Labour get hammered in seat they have held since 1974?

Maybe Labour need to show their true colours and provide us with a real alternative to the wishy/washy stuff of Cameron/Clegg. Maybe they could just make McCluskey leader and let the rest of country be exposed to the thoughts and actions of the barmiest union leader of them all rather than his puppet!!

Politicians being oportunistic? Well you could nearly blow me down....If only he was a little more mainstream, like the present, and last incumbents!

Not really bothered about Galloway, but can't help wondering if this signals good times to come for other opportunists such as the BNP.

I love the way you and others still portray Labour as being in thrall to the unions. What is surprising is that the unions continue to bankroll the party, considering what has (not) been coming the other way.

It will certainly make for interesting times if Lliam Byrne forces another by-election in Hodge Hill. Anything but an increased Labour majority there would see the back of Miliband as leader. I just hope the focus group that will have convened to discuss Bradford West has managed to complete their navel-gazing by then.

Labour has never had a better time to re-connect (or in some cases to simply connect), with the voters. There are millions out there who feel disenfrachised and who can blame them with the politics we've been subjected to over the last 30-odd years? The worrying aspect is that for every Galloway-style seat won, there is equal opportunity for far more insidious right-wing groups to do the same

Whitechapel is just a 20-minute walk from here, so we were near enough to appreciate the full joys of Galloway's campaign there - and then the local annoyance with his subsequent antics pretending to be a cat licking cream out of Rula Lenska's hands while wearing a red leotard.

He was so determined to appeal to the more fundamentalist Muslim voters down the road that he suddenly started making announcements about how bad abortion was and how LGBT rights were not actually far less important than the Middle East.

Of course, his Trot backers were helping with all this too - including suddenly deciding that they were going to start holding pickets outside a strip club that had been around for years and was not in the Muslim area of Whitechapel.

Galloway is little more than a Trot puppet who is entirely prepared to play with the rights of women and LGBT people to win the votes of religious fundamentalists.

That doesn't win an iota of respect from me. And that is not dependent on how other politicians behave.

A leotard, a leotard, my kingdom for a leotard ...

Chist, if I'd have known you were in the Whitechapel locale, I'd have come and stayed in your spare bedroom and gone out canvassing for him....Left out of the tube to the Blind Beggar then across the road to the White Horse...Those were the days...Mind, he wants to leave them strip joints alone...Loose change in a pint pot down Bethnal Green...Those were the days.

Say what you like about him, they were out in force all week campaigning. I work at the uni' in that constituency and the only loud speakers I heard today, or even all week, have been for him.

He's done his research too. When he announced his campaign he hit all the right emotional local politics buttons for me. I don't live in that constituency anymore, not that I'd vote for someone who's as infantile as thinking opposing one thing means giving oxygen to their genocidal and dictatorial enemies anyway, but I can see how he would appeal to local Labour stock. He got a huge local muslim turnout and pushed hard for it, but one of the issues they used to get that vote was don't vote for who your community leaders tell you to - you end up with people who are good at giving out taxi licences to their mate's brothers and nothing else.

Galloway went past me in his shouty wagon on Tuesday and I had the great pleasure of both holding up traffic and giving him the finger at the same time.

Hopefully not, but the councils in these areas don't help. I look after three clients in Bradford at the moment, two are new build social housing and one is conversions of flats back to houses, also social housing. All three are being built in predominantly Asian areas and will be occupied by the Asian community. Speaking to some of the lads (and managers) who are working on them who are local to the area, there seems to be a lot of resentment that very little money is allocated to areas that are mainly white social housing areas, in fact one lad who lives on a large council estate said they are in desperate need of even basic repairs but there is no money for routine maintenance. This is the sort of thing the BNP will latch on to and gain support by playing the race card and could end in an election success as the white community feel they are being left behind.

There may well be the need for housing in the areas where they are situated, but spreading money out to cover all areas would help ease any feelings of 'us and them'

Irrespective of my views on Galloway the result is pleasing in that it's showing the first stage of people's rejection of mainstream political parties. Hopefully the UK is finally getting the idea. Vote them all out and have Parliament full of independent MPs. That's Big Society!

Pretty much exactly what I thought word for word.

So you'd have happily worked alongside Respect's resident anti-Semites, who also got involved in Bradford? Or just turned a blind eye to that?

It shows just how little Labour have learned, especially after Galloway had beaten Oona King in 2005. To lose one safe seat to Galloway is misfortune, to lose two safe seats to the man is sheer incompetence.

The May local elections will be a watershed moment for Miliband

BTW, [url=http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/03/george-galloway-bradford-west-by-election-anti-semite-supporters/here's some more detail on Galloway's campaign[/url.

In essence, disgusting.

If they're playing the sectarian card, they've missed an important point: are Muslims so predicated to voting for rabid Catholics? When's the Pope's official visit to Islamabad?

Bradford has long been a lost cause in terms of the failed multiculturism experiment......Galloway's election win and the pandering to the extreme, anti-British Muslim vote which was scarily apparent, has just sent that area to an even lower level in the eyes of the rest of the UK.

Personally, I thought the 'Bradford Spring' victory speech was almost inflammatory in its tone.....In the era of racial sensitivity that we now live, Galloway is no more welcome in British politics than Nick Griffin is.

Who really wants to vote for Labour? Can you see any of the shadow cabinet forming a government?

To be fair, even though I get your drift and agree in the main, they couldn't fare much worse than the present lot.

Though Thatcher and Blair (rightly) had their critics, they at least had brains.....Cameron and his cronies are just plain incompetent.

A bit like Warsi trotting off to Rome and shrilling that the West should stop being afraid of its Christian heritage?

Lots of people from outside Bradford keep telling us this. You do not have even the slightest idea of what you are talking about beyond crude stereotypes of the city you've picked up from third parties.

I don't blame you for your reaction, though I'll refrain from accepting your invite.....The simple thing is though, to many outside Bradford (and probably a good few inside), it is a city which highlights everything wrong with the idea of multiculturism.

Large swathes monopolised by people with no wish to be 'British'....Indeed, many seem to have a major dislike to the country, despite being happy to use the many advantages our country offers over the nations that they 'support' over their adopted home.

The rhetoric of the last 24 hours has not helped Bradford one bit, and the sight of Galloway being chaired around by cheering Muslims is something that will only serve to build tensions around the country as a whole..... This was an election with massive racial undertones, which Galloway was well aware of, and appallingly exploited.