Papers: Weekly Worker: George and the right to choosePapers: Weekly Worker: George and the right to choose
Click above to turn pageApparently, this article angered George Galloway so much that he cancelled a planned interview with the Weekly Worker, and refused to arrange another. That news kept me awake exactly zero (0) minutes.
In fact, the original idea wasn't mine. John Bridge asked me to prepare the graphic because I knew how to use PhotoShop. He wanted it to accompany an article which another comrade was due to write on the subject of Respect's policy - or lack of one - on abortion. However, they were unable to complete the article. I don't remember who they were or why they had pulled out, but I do remember that two days before publication the editor Peter Manson called me and asked if I could write something on the subject. Stuck for time, I simply spun a story around the graphic I'd already prepared. Peter expressed fulsome thanks, and I even got an SMS from PCC member Tina Becker, on the morning of publication, expressing delight with the piece. I was just glad it had raised a smile.
However, one PCC member was definitely not smiling about it, and expressed fury that we should have published such an image. Why not picture the head of the MAB in stockings and suspenders? At first, it was with a certain relief that I explained that this fight, at least, wasn't mine to fight. The picture was John Bridge's idea.
But, he insisted, while John may have asked for the picture to illustrate my story, I wrote the story, so the original idea was mine. No, I explained: actually the graphic came first. I wrote only when another writer pulled out.
For some reason he felt unable to let go. It put me in an impossible position. One member of the PCC was publicly berating me for preparing an image which had been specifically asked for by a second member of the PCC, and writing a last minute article requested by and approved for publication by a third! Piled on top of battles over the accountability of the PCC, the appalling Respect policy, and the way in which my dissent on that subject had been handled, after a couple of weeks of this I decided I'd finally had enough, and resigned my membership.
I received a large number of kindly private emails from CPGB members, which I apologise for leaving unacknowledged, and I took time off and went to bed for a week. It felt wonderful.
Click here to download Weekly Worker issue 528.
And the had been so carefulYou may be familiar with the theory, beloved of a thousand science fiction writers, that we live not in a universe, but a multiverse. At every decision point, where events could have gone one way or the other, each universe has split into two. Therefore, throughout history, every conceivable possibility has been realised in a universe somewhere. There is a universe in which Trotsky won the battle for power against Stalin in the Soviet Union. There is another in which Marx was killed in a freak beard-trimming accident early in life, and leftists have had to learn to pronounce the word 'Engelsism'. And there are some even stranger. With apologies to the Twilight Zone, let me take you to just one.
Somewhere in this universe, the small hours of the morning find Mrs Galloway yawning as she drives, with an overcoat pulled over her pyjamas, to an all-night garage. She is on an errand to buy a dozen Marathon bars and a jar of peanut butter. Once home, she will watch George dip each chocolate bar into the light-brown spread and eat them, one after the other, without stopping. The cravings were preferable, she supposed, to the morning sickness: but how could it have happened at all when they had been so careful?
Gorgeous George was pregnant.
The famous Armani suit has already been let out twice. They could not afford a new one, thanks to the Red Platform: an organisation she could not name without cursing.
It ceased to exist over a year ago, having won a majority within the Communist Party of Great Britain to impose political conditions before calling for electoral support for her husband. The CPGB itself had grown dramatically, apparently as a result of some new recruitment strategy, and relentless pressure by the Daily Worker had finally won a majority in Respect ("The 'R' is for republicanism," she muttered under her breath, repeating its famous slogan) to demand all its candidates accept only a worker's wage for representing workers - and some other trifling changes to do with socialism or something. George's journalistic income had largely dried up (employers' prejudices against expectant fathers were simply criminal) and their income had dropped by about 80%.
They simply couldn't afford another child. There was nothing for it: he'd just have to have an abortion.
She pulls into the drive, and carefully checks the door of her home for booby traps. The 'Real AWL' had been particularly active recently, and security measures had been stepped up around the Galloway household. No trip wires in evidence, she lets herself back into the house, and calls a slightly weary "Home, pet", as she tramps up the stairs. George puts down his copy of Men are from Venus, women are from Mars, and grabs the bag of goodies as she enters the room.
She watches in a kind of shocked fascination as he eats bar after bar of chocolate. No matter how many wives experienced the cravings of their pregnant husbands, they still found them weird. And with peanut butter? She'd smoked a little blow in her time, but the munchies had nothing on this.
"Darling," she ventures gently. "You know we can't have this child. You're just being stubborn."
George speaks between mouthfuls. "I will not have an abortion. Who speaks for the child?"
She admonishes him gently: "But you voted just last week in the European parliament to make free abortions available on demand across all EU member-states."
He dips his last stub of chocolate into the peanut butter. "I had to. People voted Respect because that's what they believed we stood for. We are a leftwing coalition: the majority of our members support the right to abortion, the majority we received from the electorate expect to get it. That's democracy. I'm there to represent them."
She looks sadly at him. "So you won't take advantage of your own law?"
He looks at her evenly and speaks with a quiet dignity, fiddling with the cord of his Fathercare nightie: "It's a man's right to choose."
Did you notice the differences between that universe and this one?
1. In that universe, George Galloway knew the difference between his individual right to act according to his conscience, and the right of citizens to be democratically represented.
2. In that universe, Snickers are still called Marathons.
Everything else was the same - or may be, one day ...