NOVANEWS
Salma Yaqoob, in her first interview, explains why she left the party, what comes next – and her thoughts on George Galloway.
‘I really hoped a clarification would sort that out’ … Salma Yaqoob on her differences with George Galloway. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
If you wanted a quick insight into the character and capacities of Salma Yaqoob, you could do worse than bring up a clip, now on YouTube, of one of her appearances on Question Time, in December 2009.
The programme was broadcast that night from Wootton Bassett. It was broadcast not just to licence-fee payers in Britain, but also to serving British soldiers, including those in Afghanistan, and it had six panellists, rather than the usual five: Yaqoob, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then serving as defence adviser to David Cameron, Paddy Ashdown, Piers Morgan, Bill Rammell, then minister of state for the armed forces, and William Hague, then shadow foreign minister.
The first, striking effect was visual – six men, including David Dimbleby, and a slight woman in a bright green cardigan and pale hijab. The next was the reasoned force of Yaqoob’s argument, and how clearly and directly she spoke. Directly, first, to defuse any kneejerk doubts about her national loyalties: “I am a mother,” she said: “I have three sons. I would be proud to have my sons defend this country”; then to those abroad and in Wootton Bassett, concerned about the treatment of troops (the way the government is treating soldiers is “an absolute disgrace”), and then, having given the various constituencies unequivocal evidence that she had heard and thought about them, eviscerated the reasons for going to war, and the supposed reasons for staying. When she finished, four audience members spoke up, and all said the same thing. I agree with Salma.
The Respect party, of which she was leader, was doing well enough that when the general election was called four months later, they hoped to take three seats. In the event, they took none, though Yaqoob came second to Labour in Birmingham Hall Green by only 3,799 votes, achieving an 11.7% swing from Labour to Respect and making it a marginal seat. After 2010, membership dropped below 1,000, but then the coalition cuts began to bite, and a party that had always campaigned both against inequality (or neoliberalism, as they would put it) as well as foreign wars (imperialism, they’d say), found that it was the former that people really wanted to talk about.
Then in March of this year George Galloway was elected MP of Bradford West in a result that left Labour reeling. In the local elections in May, Respect acquired five councillors in Bradford. There was even talk of another possible byelection if Liam Byrne ran for mayor of Birmingham (voters rejected the idea of a mayor altogether), and of Yaqoob then becoming Respect’s second MP.
But last week, she resigned. The immediate catalyst was Galloway, who had said in a podcast that some of the allegations against Julian Assange by two Swedish women did not constitute rape “as most people understand it”; that Assange was simply guilty of “bad sexual etiquette”. When I ask how these comments led to her leaving the party she helped to found, there is a long pause.
Yaqoob, 41, is, in person, even slighter than she seems on television – she has long, thin arms and a face miraculously unlined by a decade spent raising three boys, working as a councillor in Birmingham (she resigned for reasons of ill-health last year), running a part-time psychotherapy practice – oh, and leading a new political party. She has just had a new kitchen fitted, and the backyard of her home in the Moseley area of Birmingham is piled with cardboard boxes. The ceilings are high, and the rooms full of light. On the kitchen table sits a straw basket of chapatis she has been baking.
“I’ve always admired George’s anti-imperialist stances and I don’t regret, for a second, standing side by side on those issues. But for me, to have to make a choice between that and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice. I thought it was a blurring of something that didn’t need to be blurred. It’s not that complicated – you can hold two ideas at the same time.” Of course, “we’re all human, we can’t always make perfectly worded and crafted sentences – I really hoped a clarification would sort that out.” She published a statement setting out her own position, but then, as she describes it, things escalated. Although she says Galloway never got directly in contact – and still hasn’t – she felt she was being personally maligned; that “under the guise of different names there were personal attacks”.
The irony is, of course, that so much of Galloway’s victory in Bradford West was ascribed to women, and particularly women from traditional backgrounds who had in the past been expected to vote the way their husbands or fathers or brothers voted – the baradari system that generally delivered block votes to Labour – “that’s why it’s been deeply disappointing, because I do feel that those women have been let down. [Comments like that] open the door to women being treated in a certain way. You are just dismissed, your views are not taken seriously, and a certain reactionary attitude is encouraged rather than challenged.”
A week before, Kate Hudson, who had joined Respect from the Communist party after the Bradford byelection, and had been selected as their candidate for Manchester Central, withdrew her candidacy; there have been reports that in the week since Yaqoob left, others have followed her. There were accounts of crisis meetings held in Bradford, predictions in the Pakistani press (which also noted that Yaqoob had been “highly upset when thuggish elements, including some with a highly radical religious agenda, took control of the party during the election campaign”, although this is not an issue she mentions in our conversation) of mass exit. Yet, according to a piece on this paper’s website, when Galloway addressed the Bradford Muslim Women’s Circle, hours after Yaqoob’s resignation, he was still standing by “every word I said in my podcast”.
It looks like Respect, only six months after a great electoral victory, is imploding. Is this the end of your party? “Only time will tell. Councillors have just been elected, on a very clear mandate. They are hardworking and principled and there is an opportunity still for them to enact that vision.” But it would not be too extreme to assume that a significant part of that famous women’s vote in Bradford came about because she comes from the Pakistani community (when her parents arrived in Britain they settled first in Bradford, where she still has family, and then in Birmingham, where her father worked 18-hour days at the Post Office to support seven children), because she is trusted and (often reluctantly) admired for a public role that has at times been difficult to play; surely the combination of her leaving, and leaving over an issue so specific to the way women are treated, is a body blow ? “I think … George has to deal with that in the way that he sees fit. And reflect on that.” There’s a sudden sense of the tone her sons must hear when they have overstepped the mark.
One of the issues that has been increasingly true of Respect is the way in which it has often seemed, from the outside at least, to be dominated by one man, Gorgeous George, with all his undeniable gifts, but also his unpredictability, his ego, his sometimes dubious decisions (his salute to Saddam Hussein’s “courage, strength and indefatigability”; his stated “respect and admiration” of Syria’s Assad in an email). Many people did not necessarily realise Yaqoob was party leader. Was that not galling? “Not at all! It’s not a popularity contest – at least not for me. It’s about the ideas – and I’m proud – whoever champions those ideas and they get that support it’s a victory for all of us. Which is why I’m very open about supporting, for example, members of the Green party, or members of the Labour party, who share that progressive vision.”
Ah yes, the Green party. And Labour. Immediately after she resigned, Caroline Lucas was tweeting, “Really hope Salma Yaqoob‘s resignation from Respect doesn’t mean she’s leaving politics – we need her clarity and vision,” and Birmingham Labour MP Richard Burden was suggesting a possible future in Labour. These overtures are not a new development – it has even, in the past, been reported that she’s had approaches from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives (which says something about the worlds she straddles, and the nature of her appeal; it could also be a cynical calculation about visible diversification and the attendant votes).
“This is all in 2010 – it’s no secret that people have made approaches. But then my political platform and principles are very, very clear – there was never that temptation. And right now, although I’m very flattered and honoured, I’m taking stock.” (She says that Galloway has been keen to find a way back to Labour. “This is the irony – he’s always said to me, ‘if you have an approach, just make sure that I can come back in’. Ironically, that has not been on the cards. I think it’s a great sadness to him, understandably, that he was expelled [for his vocal opposition to the Iraq war].”)
Not everyone, of course, would be happy to see her join the Labour party: “Labour right already hyperventilating at thought of @SalmaYaqoob joining party. No problem with Tories though #doublestandards,” tweeted Diane Abbott. Others pointed to an open letter Yaqoob signed that stated: “The US government and its allies, and their friends in the media, have built up a campaign against Assange which now sees him in prison facing extradition on dubious charges … We demand his immediate release, the dropping of all charges, and an end to the censorship of WikiLeaks.” “If you don’t want the seriousness of the charges to be diminished,” blogged Dan Hodges, “why denounce them as ‘dubious’, claim they are part of a US government conspiracy, and call for them to be dropped?” The word “charges” relates to extradition, she points out – Assange has not yet been charged with rape.
There is also a significant cohort worried about the nature of the membership of Respect, that it is an uneasy alliance of far left and Islamist far right.”I will not accept that. I’ve been there from the beginning. I know that we have fought those very reactionary forces, we challenged them from within. I get the hate calls – I get people in the streets saying, ‘She is trying to wreck our homes.’ I’ve had the death threats, that anyone who beheads me will go straight to heaven. Because I promote democracy, because I have a very clear stance on pluralism. Pluralism is not about just supporting people you happen to agree with anyway. I would challenge anybody to say where I have pandered to, never mind encouraged, any reactionary stance.”
It has been exhausting, she says, arguing with “people who misunderstand or deliberately project their stereotypes, so you’re constantly saying, ‘I’m not this’ or ‘I’m not that,’ while trying to maintain a clarity of what you actually are.” This is, in many ways, one of the most likable and impressive things about her – her robust refusal of easy, essentialising demographic assumptions, even those that might initially play, politically, in her favour – but also, having done this, her patient spelling out of a vision. Granted, that vision can sound incredibly idealistic, and in these careful days almost shockingly left-wing, but, unusually for a political leader, it doesn’t feel rote.
And this ability to stand for herself is, of course, what she’d be risking by joining a bigger party such as Labour – even though she makes a point of saying that they seem to be making baby steps in what (for her) is the right direction: “We’ve seen Ed Miliband say that the Iraq war was wrong. We’ve seen him be bold before a lot of other people about Murdoch and the corporatisation of media, the fact that he’s talking about inequality as an issue.” But for her it is all still too timid. “I think there is real potential for mobilising around what people are feeling right now at home. And yet [they are also] feeling, ‘Who’s championing us, who’s speaking for us?’ There is a vacuum there. Labour is the natural home for those people, but it needs to not take that for granted, needs to infuse [their message] not just with a negative narrative of, ‘Oh, the Tories are scary and let people down,’ but actually with hope.”
The programme was broadcast that night from Wootton Bassett. It was broadcast not just to licence-fee payers in Britain, but also to serving British soldiers, including those in Afghanistan, and it had six panellists, rather than the usual five: Yaqoob, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then serving as defence adviser to David Cameron, Paddy Ashdown, Piers Morgan, Bill Rammell, then minister of state for the armed forces, and William Hague, then shadow foreign minister.
The first, striking effect was visual – six men, including David Dimbleby, and a slight woman in a bright green cardigan and pale hijab. The next was the reasoned force of Yaqoob’s argument, and how clearly and directly she spoke. Directly, first, to defuse any kneejerk doubts about her national loyalties: “I am a mother,” she said: “I have three sons. I would be proud to have my sons defend this country”; then to those abroad and in Wootton Bassett, concerned about the treatment of troops (the way the government is treating soldiers is “an absolute disgrace”), and then, having given the various constituencies unequivocal evidence that she had heard and thought about them, eviscerated the reasons for going to war, and the supposed reasons for staying. When she finished, four audience members spoke up, and all said the same thing. I agree with Salma.
The Respect party, of which she was leader, was doing well enough that when the general election was called four months later, they hoped to take three seats. In the event, they took none, though Yaqoob came second to Labour in Birmingham Hall Green by only 3,799 votes, achieving an 11.7% swing from Labour to Respect and making it a marginal seat. After 2010, membership dropped below 1,000, but then the coalition cuts began to bite, and a party that had always campaigned both against inequality (or neoliberalism, as they would put it) as well as foreign wars (imperialism, they’d say), found that it was the former that people really wanted to talk about.
Then in March of this year George Galloway was elected MP of Bradford West in a result that left Labour reeling. In the local elections in May, Respect acquired five councillors in Bradford. There was even talk of another possible byelection if Liam Byrne ran for mayor of Birmingham (voters rejected the idea of a mayor altogether), and of Yaqoob then becoming Respect’s second MP.
But last week, she resigned. The immediate catalyst was Galloway, who had said in a podcast that some of the allegations against Julian Assange by two Swedish women did not constitute rape “as most people understand it”; that Assange was simply guilty of “bad sexual etiquette”. When I ask how these comments led to her leaving the party she helped to found, there is a long pause.
Yaqoob, 41, is, in person, even slighter than she seems on television – she has long, thin arms and a face miraculously unlined by a decade spent raising three boys, working as a councillor in Birmingham (she resigned for reasons of ill-health last year), running a part-time psychotherapy practice – oh, and leading a new political party. She has just had a new kitchen fitted, and the backyard of her home in the Moseley area of Birmingham is piled with cardboard boxes. The ceilings are high, and the rooms full of light. On the kitchen table sits a straw basket of chapatis she has been baking.
“I’ve always admired George’s anti-imperialist stances and I don’t regret, for a second, standing side by side on those issues. But for me, to have to make a choice between that and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice. I thought it was a blurring of something that didn’t need to be blurred. It’s not that complicated – you can hold two ideas at the same time.” Of course, “we’re all human, we can’t always make perfectly worded and crafted sentences – I really hoped a clarification would sort that out.” She published a statement setting out her own position, but then, as she describes it, things escalated. Although she says Galloway never got directly in contact – and still hasn’t – she felt she was being personally maligned; that “under the guise of different names there were personal attacks”.
The irony is, of course, that so much of Galloway’s victory in Bradford West was ascribed to women, and particularly women from traditional backgrounds who had in the past been expected to vote the way their husbands or fathers or brothers voted – the baradari system that generally delivered block votes to Labour – “that’s why it’s been deeply disappointing, because I do feel that those women have been let down. [Comments like that] open the door to women being treated in a certain way. You are just dismissed, your views are not taken seriously, and a certain reactionary attitude is encouraged rather than challenged.”
A week before, Kate Hudson, who had joined Respect from the Communist party after the Bradford byelection, and had been selected as their candidate for Manchester Central, withdrew her candidacy; there have been reports that in the week since Yaqoob left, others have followed her. There were accounts of crisis meetings held in Bradford, predictions in the Pakistani press (which also noted that Yaqoob had been “highly upset when thuggish elements, including some with a highly radical religious agenda, took control of the party during the election campaign”, although this is not an issue she mentions in our conversation) of mass exit. Yet, according to a piece on this paper’s website, when Galloway addressed the Bradford Muslim Women’s Circle, hours after Yaqoob’s resignation, he was still standing by “every word I said in my podcast”.
It looks like Respect, only six months after a great electoral victory, is imploding. Is this the end of your party? “Only time will tell. Councillors have just been elected, on a very clear mandate. They are hardworking and principled and there is an opportunity still for them to enact that vision.” But it would not be too extreme to assume that a significant part of that famous women’s vote in Bradford came about because she comes from the Pakistani community (when her parents arrived in Britain they settled first in Bradford, where she still has family, and then in Birmingham, where her father worked 18-hour days at the Post Office to support seven children), because she is trusted and (often reluctantly) admired for a public role that has at times been difficult to play; surely the combination of her leaving, and leaving over an issue so specific to the way women are treated, is a body blow ? “I think … George has to deal with that in the way that he sees fit. And reflect on that.” There’s a sudden sense of the tone her sons must hear when they have overstepped the mark.
One of the issues that has been increasingly true of Respect is the way in which it has often seemed, from the outside at least, to be dominated by one man, Gorgeous George, with all his undeniable gifts, but also his unpredictability, his ego, his sometimes dubious decisions (his salute to Saddam Hussein’s “courage, strength and indefatigability”; his stated “respect and admiration” of Syria’s Assad in an email). Many people did not necessarily realise Yaqoob was party leader. Was that not galling? “Not at all! It’s not a popularity contest – at least not for me. It’s about the ideas – and I’m proud – whoever champions those ideas and they get that support it’s a victory for all of us. Which is why I’m very open about supporting, for example, members of the Green party, or members of the Labour party, who share that progressive vision.”
Ah yes, the Green party. And Labour. Immediately after she resigned, Caroline Lucas was tweeting, “Really hope Salma Yaqoob‘s resignation from Respect doesn’t mean she’s leaving politics – we need her clarity and vision,” and Birmingham Labour MP Richard Burden was suggesting a possible future in Labour. These overtures are not a new development – it has even, in the past, been reported that she’s had approaches from the Lib Dems and the Conservatives (which says something about the worlds she straddles, and the nature of her appeal; it could also be a cynical calculation about visible diversification and the attendant votes).
“This is all in 2010 – it’s no secret that people have made approaches. But then my political platform and principles are very, very clear – there was never that temptation. And right now, although I’m very flattered and honoured, I’m taking stock.” (She says that Galloway has been keen to find a way back to Labour. “This is the irony – he’s always said to me, ‘if you have an approach, just make sure that I can come back in’. Ironically, that has not been on the cards. I think it’s a great sadness to him, understandably, that he was expelled [for his vocal opposition to the Iraq war].”)
Not everyone, of course, would be happy to see her join the Labour party: “Labour right already hyperventilating at thought of @SalmaYaqoob joining party. No problem with Tories though #doublestandards,” tweeted Diane Abbott. Others pointed to an open letter Yaqoob signed that stated: “The US government and its allies, and their friends in the media, have built up a campaign against Assange which now sees him in prison facing extradition on dubious charges … We demand his immediate release, the dropping of all charges, and an end to the censorship of WikiLeaks.” “If you don’t want the seriousness of the charges to be diminished,” blogged Dan Hodges, “why denounce them as ‘dubious’, claim they are part of a US government conspiracy, and call for them to be dropped?” The word “charges” relates to extradition, she points out – Assange has not yet been charged with rape.
There is also a significant cohort worried about the nature of the membership of Respect, that it is an uneasy alliance of far left and Islamist far right.”I will not accept that. I’ve been there from the beginning. I know that we have fought those very reactionary forces, we challenged them from within. I get the hate calls – I get people in the streets saying, ‘She is trying to wreck our homes.’ I’ve had the death threats, that anyone who beheads me will go straight to heaven. Because I promote democracy, because I have a very clear stance on pluralism. Pluralism is not about just supporting people you happen to agree with anyway. I would challenge anybody to say where I have pandered to, never mind encouraged, any reactionary stance.”
It has been exhausting, she says, arguing with “people who misunderstand or deliberately project their stereotypes, so you’re constantly saying, ‘I’m not this’ or ‘I’m not that,’ while trying to maintain a clarity of what you actually are.” This is, in many ways, one of the most likable and impressive things about her – her robust refusal of easy, essentialising demographic assumptions, even those that might initially play, politically, in her favour – but also, having done this, her patient spelling out of a vision. Granted, that vision can sound incredibly idealistic, and in these careful days almost shockingly left-wing, but, unusually for a political leader, it doesn’t feel rote.
And this ability to stand for herself is, of course, what she’d be risking by joining a bigger party such as Labour – even though she makes a point of saying that they seem to be making baby steps in what (for her) is the right direction: “We’ve seen Ed Miliband say that the Iraq war was wrong. We’ve seen him be bold before a lot of other people about Murdoch and the corporatisation of media, the fact that he’s talking about inequality as an issue.” But for her it is all still too timid. “I think there is real potential for mobilising around what people are feeling right now at home. And yet [they are also] feeling, ‘Who’s championing us, who’s speaking for us?’ There is a vacuum there. Labour is the natural home for those people, but it needs to not take that for granted, needs to infuse [their message] not just with a negative narrative of, ‘Oh, the Tories are scary and let people down,’ but actually with hope.”