Belted Galloway Bull
Pale Green Vortex is not usually in the game of commenting on 'current affairs'. However, in a hastily-arranged meeting of PGV staff, it was decided to make an exception, and botch together a sentence or two after the Bradford West by-election last week.
For any reader unfamiliar with the geographical landscape of Britain, Bradford is a large settlement, part of the West Yorkshire conurbation in northern England, a child of the Industrial Revolution. It is the sort of place that, with its preponderance of working class and poor populations, only needs the Labour candidate to turn up to be elected to parliament with a handsome majority. Enter George Galloway, however, renegade and maverick politician, once a Labour man, now leader of the 'Respect' party. He is probably best known for his fierce and unfailing opposition to the Iraq war - and, less edifyingly, for his participation in a series of 'Big Brother' shows on television. He is looked upon by the 'main political parties' with loathing, scorn, and ridicule in equal measure. Nevertheless, in a way that no mainstream politician or commentator had an inkling of, he won the Bradford West by-election - not just scraping through, but with a huge majority, a swing of roughly three million per cent.
The pros and cons of Galloway's political policies are not the subject at issue in this piece. It is that here, in Britain, that most conservative and traditional (one might say 'dead') of nations politically, large numbers of people appear to have started to see what Pale Green Vortex has been intermittently banging on about for two years now. The mainstream political landscape is by and large irrelevant in terms of the welfare of the citizens of this planet. All players and parties are embedded in the same system/construct/matrix/call it what you will, that does not have the best interests of the majority of people in mind. Its agendas lie firmly elsewhere. Democrats - Republicans, Tories - Labour: all this means rather less than whether you support Chelsea or Arsenal. Similarly the bizarre sideshow of Scottish independence, a local moribund distraction from the important matters of the moment. Of course independence, as everybody knows, immediately confers enormous benefits on the mass of people; we only have to look at the majority of African nations, and how everyone has prospered in a fantastic atmosphere of benevolence and democracy since their rush for independence in the 1960s.
In the longer term, Bradford West might turn out to be insignificant. Yet, as a possible sign of a growing disenchantment with the entire rigged game, of some kind of awakening to what is really going on behind the facade of parliamentary democracy, we can watch with interest.
