 Can you make sure you click the subscribe button for my channel and the notifications button so you will be updated when my next podcast goes out. You can also follow me on social media, my Facebook page is JamesEnglish11, my Twitter is JamesEnglish0, my Instagram is JamesEnglish2 and you can also download these podcasts on Podbean and iTunes. Number one, today's guest, we've got a lovely man, Jaws Galloway. How are you? Great, it's a great pleasure. What a success you've been. Thank you. Fantastic. It's great to see working class Scottish people breaking through in the media. I'll tell you, there's not a lot of them around. But a real breed, Jaws. How you been? Good. Busy, television every day, radio once a week on a Friday night. I'm making a film. I've got four kids under 12 and I'm probably running for the European Parliament elections in Manchester Liverpool, the north west of England. If we are fighting those elections and at the time of recording, that's not exactly clear yet. So not got time to scratch my arse, but I'm doing fine. Working so hard at your young age, how do you manage to keep doing it? I've never lost enthusiasm, never for a single day. I wake up every morning as determined as any other morning to pursue the things I'm interested in, the causes I believe in, chase the enemies that I hate, that I hate with the same vengeance I did decades before. So I guess that's unusual. I've never had a moment's doubt about the kind of life I wanted to lead. Never had a moment's doubt about the things I believe in. And I stand for the same things now that I did when I was a young man in a council housing scheme, as we called them on the east coast, all these decades ago. And Dundee? Yeah, in Loughy actually, which was the Irish quarter of the city. It was known as Tipperary. I was born in a slum, lived in an attic for the first four years of my life outside toilet, shared it with eight other families. Then I moved to a council house, which was like, I mean, frankly, like moving into a palace, a council house in Dundee when you came from the slums. But recently I was back there, I took my kids down the street that I was brought up in. The slums long gone, but the council house is still there. And I think they were amazed. The householder very kindly invited me in when he saw me looking and he was amazed that I used to live there. And my kids were amazed that, you know, a family of five as we were, could have actually lived happily in that tiny wee hoose. But we did, and it was very happy, and I have only happy memories of it. Which is a good thing, because it's difficult in housing in the States. It's difficult getting raised up in, as you say, slums, because it's a struggle. But you've clearly did well for yourself. You've clearly worked hard. You've clearly worked hard. Yeah, but nothing comes easy either. You make your own looking life and you're no short of controversy either. You believe in, you stick to what you believe in, which is massive respect from me for that, because it takes a lot of balls to stick to what you believe in, especially in this day and age as well. When you first started growing up, because I believe you were the youngest person ever to be elected at Labour at 14 or 15 years old, or chairman? Actually, I went through a period of being the youngest ever everything in Scottish Labour politics. So I was the youngest of our constituency Labour Party secretary. I think I was under 18. I was the youngest ever elected member of the party's Scottish Executive. I was 21. I was the youngest ever chairman of the whole Scottish Labour Party at 26. Now, that's a record that'll never be taken off me, because I think you've got to be 56 to join the Scottish Labour Party now. There's certainly not many young people flocking to join it. Unfortunately, I should say. So yeah, I was for a long time the youngest ever everything. And one of the sadnesses about getting old is that now you're the oldest. Now you're the oldest ever everything. So with that driving determination to succeed in life, where did the politics side of things come into play? Why did you get into politics? I was born into it really. My father was a trade union activist, a shop steward, a branch official in the EU as it was known then, the Amalgamated Engineering Union. It's now a part of Unite. My mother from an Irish republican tradition taught me everything I needed to know and her family did about imperialism, empire, the role of the British in Ireland, the role of the Irish in Scotland and how difficult it was for Irish immigrants in Scotland. Some things have changed, some things haven't about that. So in a way, it was a perfect synthesis for me because it meant that I grew up in the Labour movement tradition and in the Irish republican, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist tradition and that's where I still stand today at the age of 64. What do you think the state of politics is now and for an independent Scotland because I know you went and voted against an independent Scotland. What do you think the outcome would be now if they were to have another vote? Well I think the fact that the SNP don't want to have another vote tells you that they, like me, believe that they would again lose it. As a matter of fact, I think the case against it is stronger today than it was when we had the last once in a lifetime referendum on the matter. Let me be clear, Scotland has a right to be an independent country and if the Scottish people voted for it to be so, no power on earth could stop them. I just don't think it's the best thing. If I was persuaded it was the best thing, I would support it but I don't and I'm not saying that will be the case forever. I mean if you told me, for example, that the Tories will be in power at Westminster for another 50 years, if you told me that Jeremy Corbyn had no chance whatsoever of becoming Prime Minister of a united country, well that would change my mind. It's not a question of principle. The principle is clear, Scotland has national rights of self-determination. They have the right to exercise them anytime they like. In other words you could have a referendum every year if you liked but the fact that Nicola Sturgeon will not trigger a new independence referendum is I think because she knows, even though she'll never admit it, that actually Scottish people are pretty canny. We count pennies. We know that money doesn't come easy and we know that leaping off the cliff into a breakup of this small island and a hooking up with a European Union that's falling apart in front of our eyes, adopting the euro free movement of cheap labour and so on. Once that went under a relentless microscope in a four or six weeks campaign, I think the case for separation would fall apart. And what about, what do you think of the Theresa May and the Brexit thing just now? Well at the time of recording Theresa May is sitting down literally a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn to negotiate the terms of a Brexit. Now these are words you could never have said even a few days ago and by the time this comes out it may all have crashed and burned but at the time of recording it looks like to me that Corbyn and May will will reach an agreement and therefore we will Brexit on the 22nd of May. It won't be the Brexit I've been looking for, fighting for but it'll be a Brexit and moreover it'll be one that between Labour and Tory will be able to command a very stable majority in the House of Commons. That's what you call famous last words because by the time you see this you might be laughing, a belly laugh at the naivety of what I've just said. You've, like I say, you've been nothing short of controversy through your career and you've had the balls to do things that to stand out there because you spoke about against Bush and Tony Blair and stuff they said they had blood in your hands while it was and stuff. How was that through the time? What were you meaning then? Well I knew that Tony Blair was wrong and the first time I set eyes on him literally. I knew that no good could come of him becoming the leader of the Labour Party. Him and his crew Peter Mandelson and the other Blairites that are still around today haunting the corridors of power and that was before he started five wars in four years. The biggest number of wars ever fought by any British leader, royal or common in the whole history of the country. Five wars in four years but even before that I knew he was wrong and I knew that he wasn't really Labour, that he was hijacking Labour, that he would fly it to destruction and that's precisely what he did, the near destruction of the Labour Party, its actual destruction in Scotland arguably, a near-death experience from which only the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn saved it and we'll see what happens in the next months, pardon me, a couple of years as to whether it has been saved or whether it was a false dawn. So I fought against Tony Blair to his face from the first before he even became the leader. I said at the Scottish Labour Conference in Inverness in 1993 that he might have a pretty face but don't buy a pig in a poke and he was sitting as close to me as you are now and I said it at the rostrum right in front of him. I opposed everything he did, I'm not saying he had no achievements, he obviously did. Setting up a Scottish Parliament was one, bringing John Major's peace process in the north of Ireland into the harbour was another but for all the good that he did, the amount of bad and harm that he did was simply enormous and our children and their children unborn will continue to pay the price for the things that Tony Blair did. With politics there's obviously a lot of power behind the curtain, does anybody ever pull your side and say George, man, fucking be quiet or is it, can it be scary? Can I be, let's step out and against your life? No, I'm scared easily because I'm a religious believer, I'm only playing for the big election, you know, the judgement day on the last day and that's the only election that really counts for me. Yeah, but not in a sinister way. The late John Smith, God rest his soul, who was a good friend of mine, was the Labour leader before Blair. He did say to me, you know, tamp it down a bit on this and that and I can promote you and put you on the front bench and so on, but it's not really me and whilst I don't have to say everything that I believe on every conceivable occasion, I cannot pretend not to believe it. I cannot say anything that I don't believe, that's impossible for me, it's in all conscience I could not do that, whereas if you're going to get on up the political greasy pole, you've got to be willing and able to do that and so the people I grew up with, for example in the Labour Party and Labour movement in Scotland throughout the 70s, who were far more left wing than me, communists, trotskists and so on, they ended up in Tony Blair's War Cabinet. I'm not joking, I mean a fellow like John Reed, for example Dr John Reed, now Lord Reed used to be the chairman at Celtic for a time, he was a communist when I first met him and a really hard line communist and he used to chide me for not being a communist and he ended up Tony Blair's War Minister pulverizing brown people across the world. Now people can change their mind, of course, I just have never changed mine, but if you are changing your mind you've got to explain why. You've got to say I was wrong then and I'm right now and here are the reasons I was wrong then, but these people just tiptoed across the political stage and that's wrong. Is that, there's money coming to play then? Well Dr John Reed is a very rich man now, all these people have gone on to seats on the boards of arms companies and international conglomerates of all kinds, so yeah, not so much money at the time, but the prospect of money later, but by the grace of God I have never given a toss about money. I have more than enough money and what money I've got, I work for, I work every day, I'm a day rate worker, a working man in his prime as Sir Van Morrison would say. Do you think that's the Scottish mentality? It comes into play, standing your own two feet, don't take any shite and stick to what you believe in. I think so, it's the best of what I believe to be Scottish, and we do look after our money. Imagine our house, my wife is Dutch and they're the meanest people on the planet and I'm Scottish and we're the second meanest, so there's no chance of a pound of scaping our door without being carefully scrutinised. She asked me every day how much have we made today? Well clearly, what in seven days a week you must be making something. You're probably the one, the other Scottish man, you're going to the US Senate and absolutely rip them on your ass. How was that feeling? That was my best day so far, no doubt. God gave me wings that day, gave me breath and I felt I was flying and that was confirmed afterwards when I walked out the door and a black janitor came up and high five me, it was the first high five I'd ever done actually, high five me and said, way to go man, you just sent George Bush back to his ranch. Because they accused you of making money from oil. They never asked me back for a second. But you stood up for what you believed in and you won? That's become a multi-million bestseller. If you look at it on YouTube it's up hundreds of times and if you add them all up, it's tens of millions of views. It made me famous in America. I'd now got a daily television show in America, a tour America and in America they pay you to give speeches, it's not like here, a tour America, coast to coast, north to south. They made me big in America so the law of unintended consequences kicked in. How are you feeling that day then? Going into that, worried, are you scared? He asked me that all the time and they also asked, did you prepare? Not only did I not prepare, I had absolutely no need to because everything that I was going to say was on the tip of my tongue, on the tip of my fingers and secondly, far from being scared, it was a complete joy for me to get up close and personal with these war criminals almost within punching distance. Better than punching distance because you had all these cameras from around the world filming it. So it was the opportunity, the mother of all opportunities and I was a boxer when I was young and you can always tell when you're in a boxing ring the moment when your opponent no longer wants to be there and vice versa also they can tell from your eyes. Something dies in their eyes and they're looking around for the bell for the towel coming in and I saw that on the senator's face really quite early on. I could just think of them saying to themselves, can I swear on here? Of course you can't say anything goes. I could think of them saying to themselves, whose fucking idea was this? We've misunderestimated this guy. We thought he was a working class tag from a council house in Dundee and here he is live on television across the world knocking fuck out of us and they're still half an hour ago. That's how it looked to me from where I was sitting and afterwards I think almost universally people agreed with that. Did you get a lot of respect for that? I did and also from enemies and opponents. I think for a class of British person it was a triumph of the House of Commons over the American Senate and government system. It was a triumph for a relatively uneducated, I left school at 17, went to work in a tire factory in Michelin Tires, never went to university, no Oxford, no Cambridge, no Eaton, no fancy debating chambers, nothing like that. It was a triumph for that. So working class people I think saw something in that. Scottish people saw something in that. Irish people saw something in it. It was a triumph. There's no other way of putting that. If I could bottle that and sell it it would be a billionaire. Because I always say no matter what you're doing life you're going to be late and you're going to be hated no matter what. If you stand for something. Of course what you believe in you're never going to please everybody. You're a massive support of Palestine. How did that come about as well? By accident up to a point. I mean I knew that we were on the side of the Palestinians back in 1975. But only in a vague way. I had never met an Arab. I had never met a Palestinian. I had never met a Muslim. And just by chance in mid-summer of 1975 a Palestinian came to the door of the Dundee Labour Party office in One Rattery Street where I was at work on a printing machine, printing leaflets, and where I also lived. And there was no one else in the office. So I wasn't going to answer the door because my hands were covered in ink but the bell kept on ringing. So I opened it and there was this fellow. He looked like Omar Sharif. But I thought all Arabs looked like Omar Sharif at that time. I did learn differently. And then he came. He said he wanted to speak to the leaders of the local Labour Party about Palestine. He was a student at Dundee University. I said there's none of the leaders here but you can talk to me and I'll talk to them. And he spoke in such a mesmerizing way that by the end of his talk and the discussion I was assigned up, supporter, more than a supporter. Two years later I went to Beirut in a lull in the civil war there. So 1977. I lived in Palestinian refugee camps. I met the late President Yasir Arafat. He took a liking to me. So that would be 1977. So I was 23. Arafat took a liking to me. He asked me to stay on when the rest left. I grew very close to him. And I remained so until I was at his deathbed in Paris. And so I became completely absorbed. Not just in the Palestinian cause but in Arabic culture, Islamic culture, the food, the music, the boards. I need to get myself there then. There was music in the cafe at nights and revolution in the air. It was for a man of my age in that period in the 70s. You'd have to have been there. The 70s was a really revolutionary era when everything seemed possible. And I've spent my whole life in that. I would have stayed on. But Arafat told me to go. He said if we find you still here we'll shoot you because I'd been offered a job as the Labour Party's full-time organiser in Dundee. And I said to him, will I go or will I stay? And he said if we find you around here we'll shoot you. You've got to go because you can do far more for our cause in British politics than you can do hanging about the street corner in Beirut. Yeah, I'd probably be dead by now. So there's a lot of wars in this world. A lot of wars we don't hear of as well. Violence is controlled. There's a lot of power behind the money industry, the oil, whatever. If you were president or if you were prime minister, what would you do to make this world a better place? That's a very big question. And being half an Irishman, I'm entitled to say as the Irishman apocryphally did when asked the directions to Dublin, I wouldn't have started from here. And so much has gone so wrong and we're so far down the rabbit hole, it's not easy to say how we could get out. The first thing you've got to do when you're in a hole is stop digging. So if I was the president, the prime minister, I'd stop digging the hole that we're in and then work out how to get out of it. What do I mean by stop digging, stop invading and occupying other people's countries, stop propping up tyrants and dictators around the world, stop ripping other people off, stop robbing them, stop selling weapons to criminals, and stand on our own two feet and be an independent country. It's one of the reasons why I support Brexit because I don't want to be following a foreign policy that's decided by other people, either the United States or the European Union in league with the United States. Who can you trust, George? For people running the country, I always believe that if people are divided, the world's easier to control. I believe that if I look into these people's eyes, I don't fucking trust them. I'm a man who likes to concentrate on me and provide for me and do what's right for me. I just don't think when you look at people who are leading the countries and the things they say, do they have people's best interests at their own heart? Are they controlled with the money that's pulling the strings behind them? Well, I think you're right to be cynical. I was going to say skeptical, but cynicism is a better description because they've earned your cynicism. If not your contempt, there's no doubt not only that we are led by pirates in almost every country, but the pirates aren't even as big as they used to be, as good as they used to be. You know, I think Greta Garbo, I think somebody said to her, you used to be big in the picture. She said, I'm still big. It's the pictures that got small. The political class has got smaller everywhere. I mean, if you imagine that the president of the United States could be a joker, like Donald Trump, that the prime minister of Britain could be a dollar, the robot, like Theresa May, or that the president of France could be little Macron shooting his people down every Saturday afternoon in their yellow vests. If you go across the world, it's the same in almost every country that not only are they pirates, they're not even very impressive as pirates. And that's why their whole shtick, their whole game, is running into trouble because the world is changing, China is rising, Russia is rising, India is rising, South Africa is rising, all of Africa will soon be rising, and the sun is rising there and sinking here. And it's partly a reflection of that that our leaders are such lily-pusheons. So what country do you look at and go? Because I believe everything's model. I mean, if somebody's doing something right, then model them until you find out a better way how to go above them. What country would you look at and say they're thriving? Well, China is the obvious success story in the world today. China has lifted more people out of poverty than any regime ever in the history of humankind. China has more than a billion of a population, getting on for a billion and a half. It's taken 800 million people out of poverty in the last 30 years. So economically speaking, you'd have to say China, which is a synthesis of socialist planning with capitalist activity. If you like a synthesis that all of us, I believe in the end, will have to search for and find. I think a leader like Putin, who stands up for the independence of his country, Putin has again lifted gigantic proportion of the population of Russia out of the poverty that they slumped into at the collapse of the Soviet Union and has restored Russia's standing in the world. Now, you don't have to want to be Chinese or want to be Russian. I want to be neither. But you've got to look at systems and leaderships that are doing a good thing for their own people. Turkey, with all its many problems, the Turkish leadership has managed to synthesize an Islamic philosophy with capitalist economics and has done very well. The Turkish economy is doing very well for a time till very recently. It was absolutely booming. Its growth rate was higher than China's. I'm a big friend, as you probably know, of Cuba. Cuba is a country, a very small island, which has chosen not to worship the dollar, but to worship the collective and has made for itself a culture and a political system, which, whether you want to be in it or not, again, is another matter. I don't want to be in any of these countries. But Cuba has a greater life expectancy for its children than the United States, a longer life expectancy, lower child mortality, a better health system than developed capitalist countries like Sweden and Denmark. So all these countries have done something right, and we ought to learn from what they've done right. We, on the other hand, have done everything wrong. But it takes a lot of courage to pull away from Cuba, from the dollar, who maybe think they miss out on the material stuff, because I know they drive about in old-fashioned cars and they do all that stuff. Things are beauty, by the way. Yeah, but if the life expectancy is higher in your life, the most valuable currency in life is your own life. It's your life, yeah. Do you know what I mean? And the health of your children. Yeah, and if you look at it. You know in Cuba, if your child is born successfully, it will live till nearly 90 years, imagine, in a poor third-world country, before the revolution, before Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and the great heroes of the Cuban Revolution, you'd be very lucky to see 45. Now you'll live till nearly 90. That's worth a lot. That's a human right, by the way. Did you ever meet any of those men? I'm a biographer of Fidel Castro. I met him hundreds of times. I've spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours in his company. He's the greatest man I ever met by a country mile. How, yeah, he's a very powerful man over there, wasn't he? Because you've met a lot of powerful men. You've met guys like Saddam Hussein. How was he as well? He was steady when I met him. I mean, I met him twice in 1993 with a group of MEPs, ironically, as I might be about to become one, just briefly and in a big crowd. But I met a man-to-man in 2002 in the summer, just before the war, therefore. Man-to-man translator, maybe one or two, but almost, you could say, tet-a-tet, as they say in diplomatic circles. He was steady. He was not crazy at all. Not nearly as dangerous as the people that came to power in Iraq after we toppled them. He was a dictator, of course. He did a lot of bad things. He did a lot of good things. You have to, if you're going to be historical about things, rather than be led by Sky News or the front page of the Daily Mail, you have to be able to, as I did with you with Tony Blair earlier, for example. I could have said to you, Tony Blair is a TORAC from A to Z, but that wouldn't be true. I told you the good things that he did, and you have to do that with when you're looking at eras or leaders or systems, unless you're going to be dishonest. Because a lot of these men, do you think they were killed in for money, for money, the oil and gold? Well, I do think Iraq was attacked for oil. It was attacked for Israel. It was attacked, though, mainly to demonstrate America's overwhelming power in the world, what we call hegemony, the hegemony, the dominance of the U.S. empire in the world. And paradoxically, of course, it proved the exact opposite. It proved that the Americans don't rule the world, and they never will. Because we know that the media plays a big part in people watch or what they read that sticks in their mind. And I think the world's a bad place, and I believe the world does a good place as well. I believe there's a lot of goodness in the world, George, and when people constantly watching the negative shit, they just, like, it's going to bring them down or going to be, is that they can throw in fake countries like Russia. And Russia, I believe Russia is thriving and people look into it and they think it's not. No, totally. It's the biggest economy in Europe. Moscow is the biggest city in Europe. Russia is the biggest country in Europe. Yet most people don't even know Russia is in Europe. They talk about Europe as if it was a different place to Russia. No, I mean, I wouldn't myself vote for Putin, for example. I would have voted for his communist opponent. But anyone who says that Putin hasn't done a good job for Russia would be lying. I mean, they're either stupid or they're lying. Anybody that said the Communist Party of China hadn't done a good job for China would either be stupid or would be lying. Yeah, I believe Putin's loved over there because of the thing that he has done. You would also attack George 2014. What was that about? About Israel. It's the reason why I'm wearing a hat during this interview indoors. I was quite seriously assaulted. I was hospitalised by a man wearing an Israeli army outfit. He attacked me from behind as a former boxer. I'm fairly pleased that I kept my shape up well enough that I'm still the good-looking man that appears in front of you today. But I'm ashamed of the fact I literally did not land one single blow on him. He was half my age, but I'm still ashamed of it. I believe me. I blush to the roots of my hair when I recall it that I didn't land a single punch on him. Does that scare you, George, as well, when you ruffle a few feathers? Does it ever scare you to push your back a bit and go, fuck this? No, it doesn't. No. I mean, I don't want somebody to kill me, of course. I've got five children, and I want to have more. Do you? Yeah. But I'm ready to face my maker if it comes. And I take precautions, not all of which I can tell you about on screen. So for going on in the future for yourself, obviously you work every day. I know you're working on a film. Can you speak elaborate on the film? Yeah, I'd love to. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm making a film called Killing Kelly, which is the story of the strange death of Dr. David Kelly, who was a British government weapons inspector in Iraq, who burst into public consciousness when he told a BBC reporter that the government was lying about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He predicted that he would be found dead in the woods. And lo and behold, a few days later, he was found dead in the woods. It was the worst case of suicide anybody had ever seen. Not many believed at the time that he did actually commit suicide, and after they've seen my film, nobody will believe that David Kelly committed suicide. It was crowdfunded. I did a crowdfunding appeal on Kickstarter. I raised over £60,000 to make the film. I'm in production now. And a highly acclaimed Irish director, Sean Murray, is the director of the film. I'm the producer and the writer and presenter of it. It's a very disturbing, frightening story that even someone, an OBE with the highest possible security clearance, a servant of the state that would undoubtedly have finished his career with a knighthood, can end up dead in the woods in the circumstances I'll be telling you he ended up dead in. What made you get involved into that, George? Well, it has the cast that constantly is in front of my eyes. He was outed by Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair. It was, he's one of the casualties of the Iraq war against which I gave my every breath. You could argue my political life's blood. If there had been no Iraq war, I might still be the member of parliament for Glasgow, Kelvin. And maybe you wouldn't have been interviewing me. Maybe nobody in America would ever have heard of me. But the Iraq story has completely dominated my life. And I often say, as long as God gives me breath, I will pursue Tony Blair until the ends of the earth and after me, my sons. Does it hurt your heart, George, to see these wars and to see the pain that people go through in the families and these kids that are dying that people don't see and you'd need to really, really search into these things to actually know these, this shit that's going on. People sit in their house to watch EastEnders and Corn Nation Street and they don't realise actually what's going on in some of these countries. Does it hurt you? It breaks my heart, particularly if you say there's injustice everywhere, there's wars everywhere. But when you know the people on the receiving end of unjust war, overwhelming fire power from bullies, it breaks my heart. When I meet someone from Iraq now, as I seem to do in London almost every day, I always say to them, Iraq, it's in my eyes. Iraq is in my eyes. It's in my blood. Because over a period of years from, say, 1993 to 2003, I dreamt of Iraq. If I heard somebody say the word Iraq, I'd turn round as if they called my name. And it breaks my heart that for all our efforts, we were unable to stop the war. Even though millions of us marched against it, we were unable to stop it. And that every prediction we made came through. And the consequence of it, as I say, will be felt not just in our lifetime, but our children's, maybe even their children's. A poison was set into the bloodstream of world politics, which we'll be lucky if it ever abates. Can we all see peace in this world, George? No, but I think we have an obligation to struggle for it. I believe that life, and therefore public life, is a struggle between good and evil. I believe in the angels on our shoulder, the good one, the bad one. I believe that that's why God gave us a conscience. Otherwise, why give us a conscience? You know, a lion doesn't have a conscience. Why have we got one? We've got a conscience because the divine intended us to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong. And I believe, you don't have to, but I believe that on the judgment day, we'll be judged according to how we lived our lives. Did we try to do right by and large? Or did we try to do wrong by and large? I think that's what Jesus meant when he said that it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. I believe that's what that parable means. I'm going off course here, but there's a book I read called Many Lives, Many Masters. The pain and misery you cause in this life, if you don't sort it here, whatever problems you've got, if you don't sort it this life, you actually take it into next life and add one on. So it's a fascinating book for anybody watching. I believe that. Obviously, we'll find out. Not too soon, I hope. You were in Labour, George, for 34 years, 36 years, and then you were out. How was your life after that experience as well, after giving something so much? You raised that because it was like a stab in the heart for me, even though I knew it was coming because Blair had rigged a kangaroo court. But as I sat there with Michael Foote as my witness, my character reference, Tony Ben as my character reference, and they made their arguments, I thought they can go through with this. The case is just paper thin. It's not worth the paper that it's written on, but they did. It was like a stab in the heart, and in a way I have never recovered from it. It's been a long exile, 2003 till now, 16 years, an exile from something that I loved far more than the people who were papping me out of it, loved. And of course, I still regard myself as a part of the Labour movement, and some friends of mine are now running the Labour Party, or at least on paper they are. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by a fifth column of enemies that make it very difficult for them. But it's my friends that are sitting in Downing Street today with the Prime Minister almost in power, not the Blairites. The Blairites are spitting blood outside, so that gives you some satisfaction. Do you think that's what gives you the fuel then for that incident, for you to keep going, to keep fighting, to keep bringing things to the way? Yeah. Well, on the day I was expelled, I did say, I remember people laughing at the way I said it in a very Scottish way, I said that Tony Blair would rue the day that he expelled me, and I'm glad to say he's rude it more than once. Is that the power, and they had at the time then when you had to move up the ladder that you can just plant seeds in? Well, Dr John Reid that I spoke about earlier, he was the chairman of the Labour Party that expelled me, him that used to be a hardline communist. He expelled me from the Labour Party for my role in opposing the war in Iraq. Go figure as the Americans. You've had some career so far, you work hard the tip, you do what you do, and no matter what you do, George, you're going to ruffle a few fairers. Before we finish up, though, I have to touch on the Big Brother incident. Oh yeah, I thought you were going to talk about Celtic. The cat thing, if I'm honest, I think it's funny, I think it's funny. At the time, is it just going, it's a game show on it? It's a game show and it's for charity, so there's a lot of hypocrisy talked about it. Children in need, people, famous people dress up and make a fool of themselves for a good cause, to raise money for children in need, and I was raising it for Palestinian children when not many other people were doing so. The problem is I did it too well. If I'd just gone through the motions, people would have long ago forgotten it. I was starting to think you were, I can't at that point. I believe if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. It's fucking brilliant, but a lot of people know you from that as well. But on that Big Brother House as well, Jimmy Savile came in. He did, yeah. Obviously, the extent, the shit that he was involved in didn't come out then. How was it then when he came in? Well, to be honest, after 22 days of sensory deprivation, no radio, no TV, no newspapers, no books, no phone calls, no internet, no internet hadn't been invented then. More or less, you're basically going up the wall. You're basically going crazy. So suddenly, of course, nobody in the house knew then what they know now about Savile. He promised me something that he, he broke his promise. He promised to, I can't remember now if it was to get me a ticket for the Oscars. I think it was that. But I never heard from him again. So I only met him once. Now that we know what we know about him. Of course, one wishes that Channel 4 hadn't brought him in. Yeah, because the slated you as well was at MP because you were in the Big Brother House. Yeah. Because in the Christmas holidays, but yeah, because I only missed a couple of days. I think you raised 60 grand as well for Charity. 72. That doesn't think it spoke about. No, no. Do you not mean that? I also used my fee for public works. So not only did I raise a lot of money for Palestinian kids, I spent my fee on assistance in our constituency office in Bethnal Green and Bow to serve the, serve the people there. Yeah, and the wishes are an amazing thing. So how do you think Celtic are getting on this? I know you're a massive Celtic fan. Who do you think this scenario just now, the Brendan Rogers leaving as well? Yeah, I don't agree with most Celtic supporters about Brendan Rogers. I don't hold it against him. And he's done a really good job at Leicester. He's done fantastic. I think that Brendan Rogers, look, if Celtic hadn't been happy with Brendan Rogers' performance, they'd have sacked him. So he got an opportunity of a better job and he took it. And Leicester is a better job because it's a bigger stage. Celtic have now got Neil Lennon. I've written a book about Neil Lennon called Open Season, The Neil Lennon Story. I think Neil Lennon is a perfect fit for Celtic. And I think he'll take them all the way to the 10 in a row. So I don't think we should be childish about Brendan Rogers. I drew up my chair on Sunday morning to watch the famous Glasgow Celtic playing a new team on the block, Sevco. And I was a very happy man at the end of it. I had a smile wider than the cloud at the end of it. Hell, hell! Neil Lennon, for me, George, what do you think about though the violence in the Catholic and the Protestant in Glasgow, the Celtic Rangers after the game? Because there was a lot of trouble there. I think there's someone clinging on to life, isn't there, one of the people who was stabbed? I don't agree with that, shit, because it is only a game of football. But I think social media doesn't help because there's so much people getting wind up. You can wind people up so much. So Woody, how do you think that gets stopped? They're talking about maybe putting a game on a Monday night, which is, I don't think it'll work anyway. How do you think, what's the best thing to put in place to get it brought down and stopped? It's very difficult because I hate to contradict you, but it's not just a football game. It's much more than that and Celtic is much more than a football club. And so is Rangers. These are manifestations of a schizophrenia in Scotland. At least 20%, maybe 25% of Scottish people, I'm one of them, are from an Irish Catholic tradition. And a section, of course, not all, not a majority, but not a small number either. Of supporters of Glasgow Rangers are ethno-religious supremacists, like their brethren in the north of Ireland. They think, though they don't actually have many reasons to think, because most of them don't have two pennies to rub together any more than our people do. Their arse is hanging out, their trousers, just like it's hanging out of many of our people's trousers. But they think that they are somehow better than us, or to put it as they do, we are the people. Well, we're all the people, them and us. We have to find a way of coexisting together in a small country of 5 million people and enjoy the rivalry that will always be there and treat it more as a sporting occasion rather than a rerun of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. I'm older than you, a lot older than you, so I remember when you couldn't get a job cutting the grass at Ibrox if you were a Roman Catholic. Literally, you could not get a job cleaning the floor there. Never mind playing in the team. But actually, there are as many Catholics in the Rangers team now than there are in the Celtic team. Graham Soonest did a big job, a great, great job. And David Murray, by the way, who's not often praised, they took bold and significant steps away from that. And yet, you've still got people running into boozers and stabbing Celtic fans in the back and shouting metaphorically, we are the people. And all my life, they sang, we're up to our knees in Fenian blood and they meant my blood. I am a Fenian. I'm proud to be a Fenian. I'll end with a funny story. In my first election, I was on top of a campaign bus in Byers Road in Glasgow, 1987, and a pan-loafy woman shouts up from the pavement. We don't know what she's saying because we're playing music. We switch the music off. And I say, what's that you're saying? And she says, we know what you are. And I say, what am I? She says, you're nothing but a Fenian bastard. And my mother folds her arms like Les Dawson and says, with the microphone still picking up, he may be a Fenian, but I can assure you he's no bastard. George, how can people get in contact with you? How can they watch your stuff? How can they? Good, yeah. Thanks. They can follow me on Twitter at George Galloway. My website is GeorgeGalloway.com. I've got a thumpingly good YouTube channel, I think, George Galloway official. You can follow me on Facebook, George Galloway official. I've got a million and a half followers on social media. I hope you'll join them. Yeah, getting followed, Blaney's active and loves that. And you're very friendly. Speak to the people and you give your time. But George, for coming on my show today, I really appreciate it. Pleasure and the best of luck to you. You're doing a great job. Thank you. Great, great job. The fact that people are queuing up to get on your podcasts is a tribute to you and your colleagues. I appreciate it. So thank you. All power to you. Cheers. Appreciate it. Thanks.