This campaign is an affront to justice and free speech

The Galloway saga has eerie echoes of the Scargill affair of 1990

Roy Greenslade
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

A bell rings faintly somewhere in the back of my mind. King Arthur and Gorgeous George. Scargill and Galloway. Both larger-than-life leftwingers, guys who stand out from the crowd, controversial, iconoclastic, with a gift for rhetoric, a talent to amuse, enemies of the status quo.
Galloway is accused of taking funds from a pariah Arab regime. He immediately suspects that the documentary evidence, having fallen so fortuitously into the hands of a newspaper, is forged. Is he the victim of a plot by the secret services?

Now the bell won't stop and it is getting louder, prompting memories of 1990 when I was editor of the Daily Mirror. It accused Scargill of using miners' strike funds - allegedly donated by a pariah Arab regime - to pay off his mortgage. Despite Scargill's vehement denials, I was convinced we had the evidence.

Sue us, Arthur, I said. But look out, you're about to be covered in buckets of manure while you make up your mind. The Libyan money is only the start.

What about the supposed misuse of funds from Soviet miners and money switched through Swiss and Irish banks? What happened to the overflowing bags of cash collected by trades unionists across Britain during the 1984-85 strike? It was open season on the president of the National Union of Mineworkers for weeks afterwards. Papers could, and did, say whatever they liked.

Within two days, the Mirror's owner, Robert Maxwell, was musing to me over whether we had been "used" by the secret services in a plot to discredit Scargill. I later wondered whether the duplicitous Maxwell had been only too happy to oblige. Indeed, was he in on the plot himself?

Clang! Back to 2003 and Galloway issues a blunt denial of the allegation that he has received £375,000 from Saddam Hussein's government. The documents are either forged, doctored or part of a deliberate misuse of his name by someone else, he says, and announces he will sue the Daily Telegraph for libel. OK George, counters the paper, our lawyers will be only too happy to receive the writ and, meanwhile, here are more allegations. Like Scargill before him, the floodgates open and suddenly Galloway is caught in the wash as newspapers compete to drown him in sewage.

The bell is ringing clearly and consistently now. After our Mirror story, Scargill - who refused to sue - was subjected to a whole slew of official investigations to see if there was, after all, any credence to the trial by media. If only he had sued, we told ourselves, then he would have put a stop to the wilder speculative stories. In fact, none of the inquiries laid a hand on Scargill, though his main accuser, the former NUM chief executive, Roger Windsor, was found by a French court to have lied and, in all probability, been guilty of forgery.

But Galloway has sued and it hasn't made a blind bit of difference. Libel writs are not covered by contempt of court rules until the case is due for trial, whereas when people are prosecuted in criminal cases further press coverage is inhibited. He remains fair game for journalists to dig up more alleged filth. It would appear that anyone can say what they like about the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin now. There isn't an instant rebuttal service large or swift enough to cope with the stuff being thrown at him.

Meanwhile, Galloway faces an internal Labour party investigation into whether he has brought the party into disrepute, a charity commission inquiry into his Mariam Appeal fund, and an inquiry by the parliamentary commissioner for standards about whether he correctly registered all his Iraqi sanctions campaign-related interests.

The bell rings once more. One of Scargill's main accusers was his one-time driver who told my Mirror reporters lurid tales of ferrying bags of cash across Britain in twilight runs which ended up in Scargill's headquarters.

This time around, up pops Galloway's former driver - a man who, by his own account, attempted to defraud an insurance company over the hire of Galloway's car - to make claims about being paid in allegedly strange ways.

The similarities between the Scargill and Galloway cases are so pronounced it's impossible not to believe that the next stage in the Galloway saga, even if it takes place long into the future, will eventually end up echoing the Scargill affair.

Last year, after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill, I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing.

The whole case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials, our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine".

Regardless of whether Galloway is the victim of a similar plot, there is one obvious difference between him and Scargill. He was supported by his union (after an initial wobble) and went on running the NUM. Galloway has been abandoned by his party which has suspended him.

Wilting under the media pressure, Labour has chosen to throw Galloway overboard. He must sink or swim without the aid of the party he has belonged to for 35 years and represented in parliament since 1987. Worse is the mealy-mouthed reasoning behind the party's decision.

We are asked to believe that the suspension is due to Galloway's anti-war remarks on television. According to Labour's general secretary, David Triesman, a party inquiry will concentrate on his references to Tony Blair and President George Bush as "wolves" for invading Iraq.

Apart from the obvious point that, in suspending Galloway before an inquiry, the rules of British justice about being innocent until proven guilty are being ignored, there is a more profound concern.

Galloway, unlike previous party miscreants, is being traduced for nothing more than stating an opinion. Labour is trampling on the rights of one of its own MPs to speak his mind at a crucial moment. Moreover, given the huge anti-war demonstrations and consistent anti-war poll majorities until the fighting began, he was clearly expressing the views of a major proportion of the public.

That bell rings again. Scargill was effectively marginalised after 1990. Is the Labour movement prepared to allow Galloway to suffer the same fate?

· Roy Greenslade is professor of journalism at City University and the Guardian's media commentator

 roy.greenslade@guardian.co.uk