10/07/2005 04:57:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

I've done it! I've met my second minor party leader! If you're politically ignorant, and can't identify the man in the picture above, it's RESPECT leader George Galloway.

In case you can't be bothered to read what I'll write below, long story short is that its not quite as impressive as when I met Kilroy- I don't hate the man with a passion, nor did I spend six months beforehand making jokes at his expense, repeatedly.

Unfortunately, to meet him, I had to attend what they called a "meeting" of the DeMontfort University Respect Party... of course, anyone could just turn up. After an introduction by the DMU Respect leader, and then the NUS Respect Leader, we finally got to what everyone was there to see:

A middle-to-old-aged man ranting about how awful the government is, and how brilliant all these left wing causes are.

He went on for nearly 40 minutes (click the picture to listen to the whole main speech that I recorded)- using words like "comrade", "blair" and "100,000". Curiously, it appears that George, the man elected off of the back of racial tensions, was fasting for Ramadan. Now, I'm not a muslim, nor can I claim to know a lot about Islam... but surely George Galloway can't either? If he'd converted, it'd have been in the news and that... if George is going to jump on the "muslims should vote for me because I follow their traditions/customers/whatever" bandwagon, he should at least be slightly more discreet about it!

I also liked how a man who famously got owned by Jeremy Paxman on election night, used Paxo in explaining why other people (I forget who) were rubbish.

After his rant, there was a badly-executed Q&A. The DMU organiser picked people to ask questions, and George answered them with another rant later on.

(Calling him "George" over and over makes us sound like mates)

Do you remember that famous video from when Saddam first took power from President Bakr? It's in black and white, its dead grainy and had the See Hear! team doing the sound. It was a meeting of the regional (ie: Iraqi) Baath Party. Saddam sat there in his big chair, cigar on, looking important, and read out a list of traitors. These people were then escourted out of the building and shot. Occasionally people would stand up and shout things like, "Saddam, you're ace!" (paraphrasing), and he'd sort of nod approval, and not murder them yet.

It was just like that. "What's your question?" "I think you should join Respect, it's really great, issues, people, Galloway! It's got them all! Woo Yeah!".

Galloway even bears a passing resemblance to Saddam- what with the moustache and cigars.

There was even some dissidents there- so-called ultra-leftists from the likes of The Socialist Party and so on. Galloway didn't send them out to be shot- he tried to verbally batter them, though.

After all of this, I dashed down to the front of the lecture theatre, and before I knew it, Rob, who's in my seminar group, had taken the photo of me and George that you can see above. After some more milling around, with me acting as photographer for Rob, Mike, and Shaz, and another guy, who's name I don't know yet, the room was almost empty. Whilst not knowing someone's name may sound really, really rude, I thought Mike was called Mark until yesterday. Whoops!

Afterwards, when practically everyone else had left the lecture theatre, for some reason, a militant socialist got talking to us. Now, as much as I like politics, I'd just finished two hours of Gallowaying, and was tired and wanted to go home... he just wouldn't shut up! It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't more or less agreed with him- although not on everything. I found myself thinking and saying relatively right wing things, which is really quite odd.

Worst bit was, I sort of put my foot in it.. again. The socialist explained how his father and brother were really racist, and how his brother was a member of the BNP. When he told us that his girlfriend is asian, I remarked that "I bet you have some interesting conversations with your brother and father at Christmas!".

"I havn't spoken to them in seven years".

...

Whoops!

This hiccup couldn't have been too bad, though, as he invited us to somewhere for some reason, to which I declined as I had a train to catch- Mike went, and it turned out that he dined with George Galloway. Wow.

Now THAT would have made one hell of a blog entry.

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