LONDON, 8 June 2004 — Britain is about to be plunged into a maelstrom of elections. On Thursday, London will be electing a new mayor. At the same time, the whole country will have the opportunity to vote in both local elections and elections for the European Parliament. This does not necessarily mean that the British public is about to be consumed by election fever: In the Britain of Prime Minister Tony Blair, voter apathy has become the rule. Still, great numbers of Britons are by all accounts itching to vent their anger at their leader’s blatantly undemocratic style of government. The high-handed manner in which Blair brushed aside mass opposition to British involvement in the war in Iraq has not been forgotten. Least of all has it been forgotten by Britain’s Muslims, whose voting preferences are now an important factor in British politics.

It is indicative of Blair’s unpopularity that London’s current Mayor Ken Livingstone — a former Labour MP who was elected as an independent — has not improved his chances of winning a second term by rejoining the party which previously spurned him. Many Londoners, not a few Muslims among them, are dismayed that Livingstone has opted to make his peace with a party whose leader declared pre-emptive war on Iraq. It is true that Livingstone’s own anti-war credentials have never been in doubt, but opinion polls suggest that he has forfeited a significant number of votes through his decision to stand for re-election as the official Labour candidate. A canny political veteran, Livingstone has been busy reaffirming his opposition to the deployment of British troops in Iraq. The mayor is calculating that the advantages of having the Labour Party behind him will outweigh the harm he has inflicted on his reputation by reconciling himself to a discredited prime minister.

Livingstone — who has enjoyed a huge PR success with his “congestion charge” to curb London’s swollen traffic — is still likely to be re-elected. The outcome of the European elections, however, is rather less predictable — not least because of the emergence of two new British political parties which, with radically different agendas, are alike bent on outflanking the established parties. The new party Respect, led by the former Labour MP George Galloway, is campaigning to rescue the Labour Party’s socialist soul and to champion a brand of politics that is cosmopolitan, inclusivist and independent of the US in matters of foreign policy.

The new UK Independence Party, on the other hand, boasts as one of its pre-eminent candidates the former BBC television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk and stands above all for an end to Britain’s membership of the European Union. It must be said that Galloway and Kilroy-Silk also represent starkly polarized attitudes toward the Arab world, Galloway being as pro-Arab in his sympathies as Kilroy-Silk is anti-Arab in his.

A Britain made in the image of Robert Kilroy-Silk would be an insular, backward-looking place, hostile to immigrants and all who reject the conception of Britain’s destiny that crystallized during the nineteenth century when the British routinely regarded other peoples as “lesser breeds”. A right-wing nationalist, Kilroy-Silk believes that civilization remains the monopoly of the Anglo-Saxon race. The “civilization” dear to Kilroy-Silk is epitomized by that American gift to mankind: Daytime television. However, Kilroy-Silk’s message is making a powerful appeal to disorientated Britons who feel that, thanks to the Britain’s membership of the European Union, their country has been robbed of its identity.

From a leftist perspective, George Galloway is also opposed to the European Union, but his vision of Britain is far removed from that of Kilroy-Silk. It is founded on a respect for difference, on a recognition of the complex, multiethnic place that Britain has become. In his new book, I’m Not the Only One, Galloway sets out his case for a Britain free from the old arrogant imperialist reflexes which have spawned so much intolerance and wrought so much destruction. Part manifesto, part political memoir, the book includes many diverting anecdotes about New Labour which highlight the cynicism that lay behind this ostensibly virtuous political development. It is amusing if not altogether surprising to gather that before becoming his dependable cheerleader, Tony Blair’s corpulent lieutenant John Prescott was apt to speak contemptuously about the future prime minister’s quintessential insincerity. In the fullness of time, this personification of the Labour Party’s working class roots was only too happy to be used as a fig-leaf to conceal the extent to which Blair was jettisoning the party’s socialist heritage.

Galloway’s main appeal is likely to be to those on the left who feel cheated by the pseudo-progressive politics of Blairism. The chances that he could ever reach out to the wider electorate are remote.

Even before he was frog-marched out of the Labour party for denouncing the war-mongering of George Bush and Tony Blair, he was commonly seen not only as a left-wing extremist but also as a servile apologist for Saddam Hussein. The television footage in which he appears to be groveling at the dictator’s feet became notorious. In his book, Galloway expresses profound regret about this embarrassing episode. He insists that when he said “I salute your courage and indefatigability”, he was addressing not merely Saddam Hussein but the Iraqi people in general, afflicted as they had been by years of crippling Western sanctions.

A romantic leftist, George Galloway can hardly expect to turn Respect into a major political force. His immediate objective is to revive faith in old-fashioned radicalism. If nothing else, his initiative represents a bracing alternative to the stultifying consensualism of mainstream British politics. The same, it’s true, could be also said of the UK Independence Party. Britain’s fate — to retreat into the past or engage imaginatively with the challenges of the present — has yet to be decided. The battle goes on. This June it will be at full pitch.