Meet the new MP for Rochdale: George Galloway. Galloway’s a serial Parliamentarian, the MP for Glasgow Hillhead and Glasgow Kelvin from 1987-2005, for Bethnal Green and Bow from 2005-2010, and for Bradford West from 2012-2015. Originally a member of the Labour Party, he was expelled in 2003 because of his opposition to the Iraq War. Later he was a member of, and then leader of, the Respect Party until its dissolution in 2016. He currently heads the Workers Party of Britain.
He’s his own man. Although aligned with the left, he deviates from left establishment views in a number of significant ways. He’s strongly pro-Brexit, anti-Scottish independence, and skeptical about trans people’s right to self-identify. People called him a “rape apologist” after he excused having sex with a woman while she slept as “bad sexual etiquette.” He defended Julian Assange against the accusations of rape that kept him incarcerated in the Ecuadorian Embassy for several years. The allegations were later dropped.
Galloway’s an astute political operator, pugnacious in interviews and one of the best orators in the business. He works without notes, starting slowly, but building up momentum to a powerful climax. He rarely stumbles over his words and is fiery and imaginative in his rhetorical style. It’s hard not to be swept along by his passion. He has a healthy disdain for other, mainstream politicians and for the media, as this interview demonstrates.
The interviewer is referring to a speech made by the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, on the steps of 10 Downing Street on the evening of Galloway’s election. The speech was widely anticipated and space cleared in news schedules to accommodate it. This is something that Prime Ministers rarely do, unless they’re about to announce something particularly significant, such as a General Election or a declaration of war; instead, we heard Sunak commentating on the results of a by-election by someone from a rival party. He said that Galloway’s election was “beyond alarming” and linked it to the rise of political extremism and to divisions within society, referring specifically to the unprecedented number of demonstrations held in London and throughout the UK in opposition to the war in Gaza.
He was wearing his serious face. He was playing the statesman, like Winston Churchill addressing the nation during the dark days of the Blitz. He said: “I need to speak to you this evening because this situation has gone on long enough.” It’s not clear what he’s talking about here. That line follows immediately from his reference to Galloway’s election victory. Is he saying that democracy has gone on long enough? He describes Britain as a “patriotic, liberal, democratic society,” while condemning the most recent result of its democracy. He waxes lyrical about the UK’s multiculturalism. “You can be a practising Hindu and a proud Briton as I am, or a devout Muslim and a patriotic citizen as so many are.” He refers to “our great achievement in building the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy,” but expresses fear that “there are those trying to tear us apart.”
Since October 7th, he says, “there have been those trying to take advantage of the very human angst that we all feel about the terrible suffering that war brings to the innocent, to women and children, to advance a divisive, hateful ideological agenda.” This is a clear reference to Galloway, who opened his victory speech, only a few hours before, with the words, “this is for Gaza.”
It’s true that the current cabinet is the most diverse, ethnically and culturally, that Britain has ever known but, despite that, they have one crucial thing in common. They’re all rich. Sunak isn’t only the first Hindu to achieve high office, he’s also our first oligarch PM, as George Monbiot explains here. The government are also, overwhelmingly, either active Zionists, or tolerant of Zionism. So far, no one has called for a ceasefire.
You’ll also notice the passive construction in the way Sunak characterizes the war in Gaza. It’s “war,” in the abstract, that has brought suffering, he says, not the State of Israel, or the army conducting the war, as if war was a natural phenomenon, like the weather. He also fails to acknowledge Britain's part in continuing to supply arms and logistical aid to the Israelis. Those who oppose war are “hateful and divisive,” while those who support it are suffering “intimidation” when voters, outraged and offended at the sight of wounded, starved and dying children on their TV screens, voice their objection, and ask why their elected representatives have failed to call for a ceasefire.
“On too many occasions recently,” says Sunak, “our streets have been hijacked by small groups who are hostile to our values, and have no respect for our democratic traditions.” The “small groups” he’s referring to must be the up to one million people who attended the march on Armistice Day, one of the largest demonstrations ever to take place in Britain. I was there. It wasn’t hateful, welcomed all groups, all nationalities, all persuasions—including the much-celebrated Jewish Bloc—it was, by its very diversity, the living embodiment of our multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multicultural society.
Galloway’s dismissive of Rishi Sunak, referring often to his small stature, but he reserves his strongest words of condemnation for the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer. “You have paid, and will pay, a high price for the role that you have played in enabling, encouraging and covering for the catastrophe currently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip,” he said in his victory speech, adding that, “this is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of parliamentary constituencies, beginning here in the North West... Labour is on notice that they have lost the confidence of millions of their voters who loyally and traditionally voted for them generation after generation.”
I’m one of those people. I’m from a Labour family. My parents and grandparents were Labour supporters. I’ve voted Labour all my life. I’ve met a significant number of my friends through my involvement with the Labour Party. Almost all of them, like me, have either been expelled, or have left in disgust since Starmer took office. What few remain do so under straitened circumstances.
There’s a witch hunt going on. Anyone with pro-Palestinian views has found themselves being labelled anti-Semitic, including a significant number of Jews. Jews are disproportionately targeted and more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism than any other group. In 2021, the Party hired a former Israeli intelligence officer, Assaf Kaplan, as its social listening and organising manager. After this they started trawling through people’s social media posts to try to find incriminating evidence against known dissenters. Thousands of people have been suspended or put under investigation.
A typical example is my good friend, Anne Belworthy. Anne’s in her 80s and was a member of the Labour Party for 65 years before she was unceremoniously kicked out in December 2021. You can read her testimony here, in a piece I published on my Whitstable Views site. The article’s based upon Anne’s own letters of defense written to the Labour Party. In the end they couldn’t make the accusation of anti-Semitism stick, so they chose another course. She was expelled, finally, because she was a member of a Facebook group, the Labour In Exile Network (LIEN) set up to defend people who’d been expelled. Anne was expelled for showing solidarity with her expelled comrades, a traditional socialist virtue.
Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has been reversing every policy commitment he ever made. From banker’s bonuses to nationalization of the energy companies, from the green investment promise, to wealth taxes, Starmer’s post-2019 pledges have all been cast aside. Labour’s manifesto at the next General Election will hardly be any different from the Tories. Their entire election strategy seems to be based on giving the impression that they’re somehow different from the Tories, while continuing to offer the exact same policies. It’s no wonder that Galloway refers to Sunak and Starmer as “two cheeks of the same backside.”
—Follow Chris Stone on X: @ChrisJamesStone
