had to pay the price for supporting Iraq, reports Alistair Alexander from London 's expulsion from the Labour Party last week was as controversial as it was predictable. The Labour Party machine moved swiftly to suspend the Glasgow MP following comments he made on Abu Dhabi TV in March, while the invasion of Iraq was underway. In the interview Galloway, who has been one of the most prominent anti-war MPs, denounced Bush and Blair as "wolves" before urging British soldiers to disobey illegal orders. "We see Arab regimes pumping oil for the countries who are attacking it," Galloway told the broadcaster. "When are they going to stand by the Iraqi people?" Galloway's comments were picked up by the Murdoch-owned tabloid The Sun, which has been staunchly supportive of the war and of Blair, and printed under the headline "Traitor" -- a verdict Labour ministers fell over themselves to concur with. "Are there no depths to which will not sink?" fumed Defence Minister Adam Ingram when the story broke. "I am sure such disgraceful comments will be rightly condemned the length and breadth of this country." In any event the condemnation was mainly limited to the government and its supporters in the press and the House of Commons. Any indignation the government could muster was somewhat undermined when it emerged that The Sun was fed the story by Downing Street. At the Labour Party hearings Galloway was found guilty on four counts of bringing the Labour Party into disrepute. The main charges were that he incited Arab armies to attack British troops and that he incited British troops to disobey orders. The first of those accusations was highly dubious at best; Galloway's comments might have been provocative, but they hardly amounted to sedition. On the second, Galloway argues that he was simply following international law to the letter -- he is hardly alone in regarding the invasion of Iraq as an illegal war. The two other charges suggest that the proceedings were more about political manoeuvering than moral outrage: supporting an anti-war candidate in a local election over the official Labour candidate and threatening to stand as an independent against Labour candidates in upcoming elections. Nevertheless, Galloway was found guilty on these four charges and finds himself expelled from the party he has belonged to for 36 years. If that didn't look like an orchestrated campaign against the embattled MP, then sensational allegations in the press after US forces entered Baghdad certainly added credence to the theory. In April The Telegraph broadsheet published documents it claimed to have found in the remains of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, detailing payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from Saddam's regime to the Miriam Appeal -- Galloway's fund to get medical help for an Iraqi orphan that became a broader campaign against Iraqi sanctions. The payments were apparently made in barrels of oil. The Telegraph claims their journalist miraculously stumbled across the unharmed documents in the Foreign Ministry, while virtually all the other millions of Foreign Ministry documents were burnt to a crisp. Remarkable. Days later a similar story broke in the US-based Christian Science Monitor, which published details of documents they "obtained" that alleged Galloway had taken millions more from Saddam's regime. In June, however, the Monitor issued a comprehensive apology after ink tests revealed the documents to be bogus. Galloway is reported to have received an out-of-court settlement which he will use to fund his libel action against The Telegraph. That paper is still sticking by its story, but many, particularly in the anti-war movement, are convinced those documents are further evidence of dark forces working against Galloway. So why has Galloway attracted so much unwelcome attention? Certainly he has been an irritant to his party's leadership since becoming an MP in 1987. His revolutionary rhetoric was never likely to win him favour with Tony Blair, a prime minister who can barely bring himself to say socialism, let alone advocate it. And it probably doesn't help that Galloway is widely acknowledged as one of the finest political speakers of his generation. But Galloway is hardly a significant threat to the Labour leadership; he's one of a dwindling band of hard-left MPs who are firmly on the margins of the current Labour Party. Galloway is also drawn to controversy the way other politicians are drawn to babies at election time. He attracted widespread derision for his high profile campaign against sanctions on Iraq -- hardly the most popular cause among British politicians. The campaign may well have been courageous, but his relationship with Saddam's regime appeared far too close for comfort. In one TV clip -- shown repeatedly whenever Galloway hits the news -- Galloway tells Saddam: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability and I want you to know that we are with you." Galloway claims he was talking about the Iraqi people, but such deference to a notorious tyrant doesn't play well with his domestic audience or his party's leadership. The campaign against Galloway might well be another example of Labour's obsession with control overriding any sense of proportion. With the prime minister's popularity plummeting over the war, any threats to his leadership inevitably loom larger than life. Cynics might also point to the redrawing of Glasgow's constituency boundaries -- Galloway's Glasgow Kelvin seat will disappear at the next election. This leaves Galloway needing to win selection from one of the new constituencies as the Labour candidate. That would mean a contest against Health Secretary and arch-Blair loyalist Dr John Reid. By dispatching with Galloway now, Reid might well be spared any awkward selection difficulties. Instead of waiting for the next election, however, Galloway could resign his seat now to force a by-election, standing as independent. And given Galloway's strong local support in Glasgow, particularly with the large Muslim community, and the government's unpopularity, he might well win his formerly-safe Labour seat back. Not for the first time, the Labour Party could well find out that with the expulsion of the removal of one headache might simply produce a bigger one.
