YAHOO!: Slowly and reluctantly, more and more commentators have had to acknowledge that the sensational Bradford West by-election result cannot be trivialised or put down to accidental factors.
If more had bothered to visit Bradford during the campaign, they would have been less taken aback by the result and not left floundering for an explanation.
Bradford has revealed the yawning gap between the cast-iron consensus shared by the old three parties over so many fundamental issues on the one hand, and the alienation of millions of people in Britain on the other. The leitmotif of the Bradford Spring was above all the cry for change, rather than the same old, same old. It was for a change in economic policy - not to the Labour frontbench's alternatives of savage cuts for tea rather than for breakfast, but to a strategy for growth, investment and jobs rather than forever putting the interests of the banks and bond markets first. It was for a reversal of over a decade of war and the threat of more war.
Those who claimed that calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan was somehow disreputable in an area where high unemployment has driven many into the armed forces and which has lost all too many in combat over the last few years clearly failed to appreciate the public mood. This war is unpopular - not only among those whose coreligionists are being killed in even greater numbers than British personnel, but among the public as a whole. And the succession of wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, the threat of war with Iran - has come to symbolise something deeper: that the political class, and sitting in the same echo chamber so much of the media, simply do not represent the feelings of most people over most things.
That was the most salient truth revealed in Bradford. No amount of promises to listen (while carrying on in the same old way) will bridge that gulf. It's not just that people want politicians to sound like they actually believe what they are saying - whether the audience fully agrees or not - it's also the message. » | George Galloway MP | Guest writer | Thursday, April 19, 2012
