Since he single handedly took on the US senate and dismissed allegations that he had benefited from the Oil for Food programme, George Galloway has become much in demand in the UK, USA and around the world. The Respect leader talks to Marc Cameron about his recent success Stateside.

Q: What happened following your success in the USA?

I received around 20,000 e-mails, and had to juggle a fantastic number of television, newspaper and radio interviews. I did a tour of the American universities and town houses. Their politics and politicians are such a shrunken shriveled bunch and the kind of parameters that are permitted in US political discourse are so narrow that someone coming from the outside and bursting the bubble proved enormously popular and long awaited. As Oscar Wild said ‘sometimes the most bitter trials turn out to be blessings in disguise’.

Q: What singles you out from other politicians and why do you feel you’ve come under so much criticism and faced so many false allegations in your political career?

I’m fighting against very powerful people who I’ve been fighting against since the 1970s. Anyone that has the politics that I’ve got has got to get used to running against the wind and that’s what I’ve been doing, but I suspect the wind is beginning to change now. I think the better you do the more difficult it is. If you have politics like mine but you’re not very good at putting them across, and if you have politics like mine but you keep yourself on the margins of political life, you’ll largely be left alone. But where you make a challenge, like Mr. Benn did in the late seventies and early eighties and Mr. Scargill did in 1984 and 1985, then you become a danger that has to be crushed.

Q: Where did you develop your talent for making speeches that worked so well when you were in the USA?

Practice makes perfect. You have to have a certain ability. Some people can play football and some the piano. I can speak. Undoubtedly the more you speak the better you get at it. As Jack Nicholas said when someone said his shot was lucky, ‘the more I practice the luckier I get’. I’m a person who makes a public speech everyday and sometimes twice a day. And I spend all my day giving interviews. I know the case I’m making intimately and I’m practised in the method of communication whether it’s writing, television or public speaking.

Q: What is your opinion on Live 8 and what Tony Blair and George Bush have done towards erasing debt in Africa?

I’m glad when anyone evinces a care and an understanding that the world is very ill divided. Just like the wave of generosity that followed the tsunami these are greatly to the credit of the British people.

I’m a little worried about the lie that Bush and Blair are the angels and ‘if only they could persuade the others’. I don’t believe they are angels and I don’t believe the others are all taking the line that they are taking for bad reasons.

Q: How did you feel about Oona King’s comments that your campaign for Bethnal Green was “ one of the dirtiest campaigns we have ever seen in British politics”. Was that a fair comment?

In short Oona King has been slandering the people of Bethnal Green and Bow with the unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable smear that somehow they got rid of her because of her colour or ethnicity. She was just as black and just as Jewish in 1997 and 2001 when the same community that threw her out, voted her in. Nobody cares about her colour or her religion. She was voted out because of her record and what she did with the power that the people gave her in those two parliamentary terms. It would be more becoming if she accepted that and contemplated how she ended in this situation and how New Labour lost a seat that they had held for virtually a century to a party that was sixteen months old.

Q: If you had to describe George Bush to a visitor from outer space how would you define him?

I’d tell them not to judge the human race by the president of the world’s most powerful country. Neither his intellect, manners or his attitude to other human beings and the world itself. I have even more contempt for Tony Blair because his role in life is to act as a mouth piece for an imbecile and a dangerous imbecile at that. Bush has the excuse that he’s an undereducated chimp. Tony Blair was given money by us, including a student grant, that he’s now abolished for everyone else, to be educated at the greatest university in the world.

Q: You believe in ‘more redistribution of wealth’. How can this be achieved in Britain and Third world countries?

It has to be a new deal at home and abroad. Richer people shouldering more of the burden of the public wealth in the country otherwise we get private wealth and public squalor and that’s what we’ve got in Britain. The gap between the rich and poor in Britain is as wide as it was when Charles Dickens was alive and in the nine years of the New Labour government that hasn’t changed a bit. The number of children in poverty is the same as it was and that’s because Blair and Brown will not challenge the prevailing economic system that we have in this country. And on an international level we have to pay poor countries a fair price for that which they provide. We have to make reparations to them for the century or more of imperialist domination and even before that slavery itself. We didn’t just take all the wealth of the poor countries, we used to chain their people in the bottom of boats and sail them to the new world. Places like Glasgow, Liverpool and London became wealthy on the back of that grisly trade. We have to view the world as round and one, and the human race as one race.

Q: Where do you see yourself and Respect in four years by the next election?

We have a twelve month prospectus for a big increase in the number of Respect counsillors. We already have eight counsillors which in 16 months of existence is not bad going. Next May we hope to field hundreds of candidates and take control of the Tower Hamlet’s council and the Newham council which are two great east end boroughs with a huge populations and massive levels of poverty and depravation who need somebody to speak for them.
And then at the next general election we hope to expand our parliamentary base but unlike other parties we don’t just exist for elections. So we’re blockading fire stations to save fire engines from being taken away, we’re warning Cross Rail that they won’t be able to devastate the East End of London in the way they would never think of devastating the West End. So we’re a party of action rather than a party of words, though words are important. In the long run I want to leave a party that is filling the vacuum that has been left by New Labour’s abandonment of its traditional supporters. In other words I want help give birth to another labour party.

Q: Is Saddam as evil as the media make him out to be?

I try to stay away from concepts of evil. I have a chapter in my book called ‘Saddam and me’ in which I create a balance sheet of Saddam’s achievements and the disasters that he has brought upon the people of Iraq. I feel that is the best way to do it. That’s how history will do it. They will say that Iraq under Saddam industrialised itself, nationalised its oil resources, reinvested that wealth in the education of a huge class of engineers and professionals of all kinds and helped to create a single Iraqi national identity. These are all the positives but the negatives far outweighs them.

Q: What do you think of media ownership in the current political climate?

We simply have to get away from billionaire media ownership. Britain is virtually unique in the world by allowing so much of its media to be owned by not only billionaires but foreign billionaires. The US would never permit this but we do. Fourty per cent of the newspapers circulation is owned by Rupert Murdoch and before that there was Lord Conrad Black. We should try and proliferate more media using the new technologies that are becoming available and that are reducing the entry costs such as digital TV, radio, internet radio, internet magazines and the relatively reduced cost of entering the magazine market.