George Galloway | The State of Britain | Oxford Union

thank you very much for that introduction and that welcome it seems like only yesterday I was speaking in this very spot in a kind of - of the horizon-- of International Affairs I have no doubt in the QA some will want to touch on those especially that hapless young fellow who went viral in the video of the last event I don't know if he's here is he here what a pity I made him an international star millions and millions of people saw that encounter not just because the excellent video service and your YouTube channel but Hugo Chavez this television station telly sewer which is a pan latin-american Channel elicit ly used your video and as I say millions tens of millions of people watched it so do give him my regards tonight I'm going to speak about Britain rather than the world though of course you can't talk of one without the other given our country's past and indeed immediate present the issues though are important nonetheless though they are domestic because I want to talk this evening about the state we are in the need for change in Britain which is crying out for change and is in a terrible state for reasons which I shall expand upon just a few days ago I was speaking at Harrow public school which amongst many other famous alumni includes Winston Churchill the great British war leader a man with a very checkered political past a man whose motor car was turned upside down by amongst others my late grandfather when he was turfed out of the city of Dundee from which I come but a man who rose to the occasion the most important occasion in the history of these islands and at a moment in which Britain played a decisive role in the world if not for mr. Churchill we would have been conducting this session if one can imagine that such a session would be permitted in German no disrespect to any Germans present it's a fine language but we didn't want our selves to have to speak it at the point of bayonets it's important to grasp that if you're going to grasp the rest of what I have to say because mr. Churchill rose to the occasion as a person who loved his country a patriot he had an opposition to fascism no doubt but his principal opposition was to the idea that our country could be invaded and occupied and a system for stood upon us against our will and not of our choosing and he was very frank about the price that he was ready to pay for that there were many collaborators within the British ruling elite some of them once sat in this hall who are ready willing and able to offer their services to any invading Nazi force the City of London no doubt would have turned out to offer to sell them financial services they had friends in very high places including in Buckingham Palace itself they had friends in Parliament they had friends even in the Cabinet Room and after the fall of France when Britain stood alone when the Americans were watching the war on newsreel mr. Churchill was invited by his own Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax whom I'm pretty sure studied here to make a separate peace with Hitler a surrender peace with Hitler and mr. Churchill said that even if we have to lie on this cabinet floor choking in our own blood we shall never surrender mr. cha chose officials recount how some of them shifted uneasily in their streets at the end the seats at the prospect of that they could almost feel themselves choking on their own blood but mister Chacho meant it and if the nazi force just twenty two miles away at the Channel ports in France had successfully crossed and invaded and occupied our country and if mr. Churchill perchance had escaped death then he would have retreated to the hills and the streets of Britain to organize the British resistance to foreign invasion and occupation and every self-respecting person in the land would have joined him to the best of their ability if they could fight they would have fought they would have sought out the Nazi occupier and slit his throat if only could do was pass messages or give moral material support to that resistance they would have done so every self-respecting person in this land why do I live at this point because so many people in Britain have a problem understanding that any people invaded and occupied by others feels exactly the same no person loves their country less than mr. Churchill or us loved ours no country will agree to foreign soldiers and foreign tanks in their streets occupying their country this is a point I made most strongly to a man called Tony Blair who's coming to a cinema near you in a film that I'm making called the killing of Tony Blair he also studied here my goodness what rogues gallery have sat in this room present company excepted in the library corridor opposite the library main door outside the gentlemen's lavatory to be precise I told Mr Blair that if he invaded Iraq that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end merely the end of the beginning that the Iraqi people would fight him with their teeth if necessary until they had driven him from their land and that whilst there was no al-qaeda in Iraq now I said there will be tens of thousands of al-qaeda generated in Iraq and cascading around the world if you and Bush invade and occupy the country it got quite heated and mr. Alastair Campbell his enforcer finally dragged him away for fear that I might do some damage why am i laboring that point because mr. Blair even more than mrs. Thatcher though she in a sense began the process of transforming Britain mr. Blair gave an impetus to the transformation of Britain from a post Imperial power back into an imperial power again and that is one of the reasons for the state we are in we are a country that can't pay our national electricity bill we can't keep our old people warm in the wintertime but we imagine we have unlimited resources to go around the world setting fire to other people's countries we in the time of mr. Blair I was never a student I never attended any university I worked from the age of 16 and paid tax to pay for the Oxford education of mr. Blair and half of his cabinet and even to give him a student grant to enjoy with now every one of you is paying I imagine the top dollar 10,000 pounds a year someone's hat just fell from the gallery I don't know I just wanted you to know that I'm allowed 10,000 is it here 10,000 a year and 9,000 in most places I went to the University of Greenwich last Wednesday where 9,000 pound as the norm and where the vast majority of students are working class or lower middle class students struggling badly with the costs of university education one of the reasons why our country which once could afford in the immediate post Second World War years to build a national health service to build 300,000 new council houses a year one of which I was lucky enough to grow up in a country that could build a welfare state could transform the post-war United Kingdom give cod liver oil and orange juice and milk and school lunches free to children like me is now applying a bedroom tax upon the poor is now slashing public expenditure to the bone throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of work charging our students through the nose to be educated unable to meet the very basic requirements of that welfare state that mr. Attlee the Prime Minister in 1945 whose school Haileybury I also spoke at last week had made something special of this country by creating mrs. Thatcher and Mr Blair after her we shan't ments mentioned mr. Brown an unfortunate interregnum of just two years thank God which was a mere shadow even of the Premiership that had immediately preceded it the Blair rights the Thatcherite have been in power in this country for the last almost 45 years and they have turned the clock back in important respects to what Britain was like before the Second World War and before the great reforming labor government of 1945 we have millions of people unemployed in my constituency of bra for the West which is one of the very poorest places in the country life is completely incomparable to the life that you are living here fifty percent of the young people in my constituency are unemployed with no job no education no training just on the streets where of course the devil easily finds work for idle hands the public realm in my constituency can be viewed from a car just by driving through the center the boarded up shops the crumbling masonry the big hole in the ground for those of you who know bradford and yet we have a political class and this is the main thrust of what i have to say this evening we have a political class which is completely incapable of rising to that challenge in the way that mr. Churchill rose to his our country is crumbling all around us in fact you may not have noticed it but next September in the referendum in Scotland our country may cease to exist I doubt if you are properly focused on that yet but the United Kingdom may cease to exist next September such as the hatred in Scotland of Tory rule and of the New Labour rule which preceded it our political class has merged into one even in the 26 years that I have sat in the House of Commons I have watched the gap narrow the men and women shrink metaphorically with their shrunken ambition which mirrors their shrunken abilities to communicate for they have little to Munich ate about the are as I have described them two cheeks of the same backside and to continue the metaphor at the risk of being risky the closer those two cheeks are together the more noise they need to make to justify their separateness and a good example is the recent brouhaha over gas and electricity prices ed miliband is proposing to freeze once one off gas and electricity prices for twenty months its total value to every household is a hundred and twenty pounds one off 120 pounds the Bullingdon Club boys will probably spend that and more on an evening of 120 pounds that's all yet you'd think he was proposing the nationalization of the commanding heights of the British economy the media the owners of the gas and electricity prices industries the Conservatives even the Liberal Democrats yell as if this was some kind of revolutionary proposal that Miliband is making the reality is that the utility companies is we used to call them will merely have now this very weak increase their prices in advance and will increase their prices afterwards it's a meaningless proposal by Miliband but it's the only thing that differentiates the left cheek from the right cheek and it's because of this ironclad consensus between these two front benches on the big issues of the day the economy Britain's rule in the world nuclear weapons the wars and occupations the attitude to immigration the attitude to people on benefits you couldn't slip six months between the left cheek and the right cheek in all of these matters it's because of that that so many of you have come here this evening it's because of that that hundreds of thousands of people are following me on Twitter and Facebook and social media well it is it is they're not following anyone else check and see it's because of this above all that in 15 days last year just 15 days I transformed a rock-solid liberal majority in Bradford into a rock-solid majority for us 58 percent of the vote in an eight party race in 15 days when I arrived in Bradford the bookmakers odds were three hundred to one against me if I'd been a gambling man I would have made myself very rich because I knew that I was going to win not because I'm anything special but because the contempt felt in Britain for our political class is virtually you'll forgive the pun bottomless it is virtually bottomless people hate the main political parties they hate insofar as they even know who they are the political leaders who preside over those front benchers and the ironclad consensus of which I speak Parliament is full of expenses thieves it was revealed everybody knows it people were charging the public canes scores of thousands of pounds to clean their duck bones to take the IV from the rubes of their stables to toss scatter cushions around flats paid for by the public while flipping those very same flats lying about what their principal residence was in order to cheat the taxman of the capital gains tax that would have otherwise been applicable claiming that their main residence was a small studio flat in their constituency was the big house for all their family that they were living in in London was merely a convenience address that the public would have to pay for and vice versa members of the cabinet were caught flipping those houses in order to cheat the public poss we now know the institution after institution in our country has been found to be rotten to the core and Parliament is but one of them a parliament of poodles with pagers who follow the leader wherever the leader wants to go and actually get a message while they're sitting in the chamber telling them the line to take that's what it says I've never had one but I've been shown one the line to take is and men and women elected to Parliament for goodness sake Dulli stand up and parrot the line they've been told to take but it's not Parliament alone is it let's run through those institutions that have been found to be rotten to the core one of them affects me vitally and that's the disaster killing 93 people at Hillsborough at a football match crushed to death who were slain by negligence and foolishness on the part of those who organized the game and then slandered slain then slandered on the front pages of the national newspapers from a briefing given by chief police officers one of whom ended up as the chief constable in my area of West Yorkshire finally we hunted him out but haven't yet taken his knighthood and the gold-plated pension that he took with him the Hillsborough inquiry proved chaired by an archbishop proved that the police the British police falsified and fabricated thousands of witness statements thousands of them with their pens literally falsified and fabricated those statements in order to deflect the blame for the negligence that had killed all those people who had merely gone to watch a football match and if I had time I could run through a dozen police scandals every night I Drive past the Stockwell underground station where a young Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead seven times in the head on the floor of a London Underground train suspected of being in our Qaeda operative but was in fact a Brazilian electrician on his way to work the various inquiries have established a catalogue of catastrophic blunders by the Metropolitan Police that led to the slaying of John Charles but it's not just the police it's not just Parliament the noble Lord Leverson sitting over months demonstrated Shirley asked the photographer who's here who's working for the Sun this evening how do you feel about working for the Sun how do you feel about working for Rupert Murdoch and one yes of the victims of their phone hacking hundreds and hundreds of times they hacked my telephone as a matter of fact you can tell mr. Murdoch mr. photographer there's another writ on its way just this very day because the police have just released to me still more evidence of still more hacking they even hacked the telephone of a mothered girl giving her parents the false hope that she might still be alive because she'd been picking up her answer phone messages except it wasn't her that was picking them up it was some scumbag working for Rupert Murdoch who was hacking her telephone messages Leverson proved surely that the press the media in this country is rotten to the core but it's not just the press the police and Parliament do I need to talk about the banks here do I need to talk about how our square-mile I might run for the mayor of London in 2016 let me give them notice now we're going to clean up the square mile we're going to clean up the City of London if we get a chance to do it because their corruption recklessness greed malfeasance of all kinds some of you may be the children of bankers I apologize it's nothing personal but in the City of London if you pick somebody's pocket you go to prison for six months if the police the City of London their own police force how convenient pick somebody's pocket in Liverpool Street Station your go to prison but if you steal tens hundreds of millions of pounds if you threaten to bankrupt the entire British economy if you cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions hundreds of billions of pounds to bail out the financial institution that you took over the precipice over the cliff you won't be charged not a single banker not one single banker has gone to prison for the crimes which they committed which caused the collapse in 2008 white-collar crime in the City of London is unpunished book these bankers with their gigantic bonuses rich beyond the dreams of avarice one of them at Goldman Sachs some of you may end up working there nervous laughter one of the partners at Goldman Sachs was so rich that his secretary stole three million pounds from his bank account and he didn't even notice she went to prison so we know the story he never noticed stuff jangling her jewelry she was coming to work in a yacht moving it in st. Katharine's dock I'm not making this up she bought the yacht and the jewelry and financed a millionaire lifestyle out of his checkbook and he didn't even notice that's how rich they are and yet in an infamous encounter at Christmastime in 2006 with mr. Brown standing beside him mr. Blair announced to the assembled throng of Goldman Sachs partners and senior employees that every one of them present was paying less in income tax under him and mr. Brown than they had been under mrs. Thatcher he boasted about that I think he ought to have been ashamed about that and it's a perfect illustration of how these two cheeks have come together and how nothing important differentiates one from the other because of course there's no civilization without taxation this is something rich people don't appear to be able to grasp because we learn today from sources around Kable and he's in the cabinet that there is still more than a hundred billion pounds per year being avoided in some cases evaded in income tax and corporation tax payment from the richest people and corporations in Britain a hundred billion per year our entire deficit is less than the amount of tax being evaded or avoided in one single year if we got that tax there would be no deficit no need for cuts no need for tuition fees no need for the austerity winter into which we are about to plunge they waste billions of pounds on nuclear weapons useless nuclear weapons which can't be used except in an act of national suicide because of course any weapon with a nuclear warhead fire that anyone is going to be repaid in kind and a nuclear winter descend upon our country we spend scores of billions of pounds in the occupation of Afghanistan where so many of our young men have had to come back from inboxes as part of the player and Brown and Cameron Wars that seemed to have lasted longer than the first and second world wars put together and that's because they have tens tens of billions have been spent in Afghanistan and when we leave it we will leave it to the people that we invaded and occupied to unseat nothing will have changed all of that blood and treasure will have been expended entirely in vain except there is one thing that has been made different and here I touch on the great international issues that I tried to deal with the last time I was here our leaders have made our country amongst the hated of the earth our leaders have made us unsafe abroad and even at home extremism that I talked about cascading around the world has of course cascaded even here our leaders have let us down the political system that we have is discredited nobody believes anything that a minister or a senior civil servant or the head of the mi6 who used to be a secret and is now giving interviews in The Guardian but what interviews interviews that tell us that we should be sanguine about the fact that every single thing everything that's a cue for nervous laughter coming up everything you have ever searched on the internet everything is now in a vault at GCHQ in Cheltenham every email you've ever written every text you've ever received every call you've ever made has been stored digitally in the vaults of our security services entirely out with our own law entirely in contradiction to international Accords and protocols that we have signed entirely with our Parliament's knowledge indeed we learn from Chris Hyun the former cabinet minister that not only did Parliament not know of the existence of this gigantic electronic eavesdropping system even the cabinet was not told indeed the cabinet was deliberately misled by the security services when they told the cabinet they needed powers to do that which they were already doing so make up your mind if you want to live in a country that our leaders have made hated when the state is now spying on everything that you do if you want to live in a country where private is all and where public is nothing where the public realm diminishes and disappears in front of our eyes leaving gated communities literally and metaphorically literally in the case of how rich our people will have to live if this process continues metaphorically here at Oxford or Harrow or other lacunae of privilege that still exists in this country and I bear no Envy towards you by the way I'm proud of you I'm really glad that my taxes have afforded you all of this and I wish that you had the same opportunity that mr. Blair and mr. straw and all the others had of having it for free but you will never be comfortable being successful and prosperous in a land filled with alienation bitterness and hate you will never be secure you'll never be secure in what you have because envy that we saw erupting throughout the length and breadth virtually of the land in 2011 will just be one or two steps away Britain today in Britain today the gap between rich and poor is wider than it was when Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist official we can't go on like this that gap if it grows wider and wider can only bring destruction upon us and upon our country you have a bigger stake in this than me I'll be long gone when you're still in your Prime so I beg you to open your eyes to the state that we're in and to reject the state of mediocrity that British politics has become thank you very much you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 515,008

Keywords: George Galloway, The State of Britain, George, Galloway, State, Of, Britain, Speech, Oxford Union, Oxford, Union, Politician, UK, Economy, Press, Iraq, War, Bankers, Bonuses, Wealth, Promises, Austerity, Terrorism, Al Qaeda, Tony Blair, Phone Hacking, Labour, Tory, Politics, Scottish Independence, Israel, Palestine, Israeli Flag, Oxford Union Society, Full Address, Oxford University, University, Debates, Debating, Interview

Id: WTTXh9NG6Dg

Length: 39min 4sec (2344 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/MisoSoup]

I didn't see round 1 but this was quite powerful. I certainly don't agree with everything he says but it's hard to argue with the thrust of his argument.

[u/zahov14]

Seems like quite a few obvious points [bankers who ruin the economy should go to jail] mixed with Galloway's patented false comparisons [British under Churchill = Iraqis under Baathist rule]. Galloway's never impressed me much.

[u/duncanmarshall]

George Galloway is a lot of things, but I hadn't thought 'charismatic' was one of them.