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As he celebrated his parliamentary election victory early Friday, veteran left-wing firebrand George Galloway took aim squarely at the leader of Britain’s opposition Labor Party.
“Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza,” said Mr Galloway, wearing his trademark fedora. “You have paid, and will continue to pay, a high price for your role in enabling, encouraging and covering the ongoing catastrophe.”
Mr Galloway won the seat of Rochdale, north Manchester, previously held by Labor, after a tumultuous campaign emblematic of the anger in British politics over the Gaza war.
A vote was held on Thursday to replace Labor MP Tony Lloyd, who represented the area but died of blood cancer in January. Mr. Galloway won by a landslide, receiving 12,335 votes.
Galloway, a founder of the far-left British Labor Party, once represented the Labor Party in parliament but was forced out of the party in 2003 for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war.
The victory in Rochdale was the latest act of revenge by the maverick politician, who had stood against his former party in the past few elections, sometimes successfully. Mr. Galloway has a long history of making harsh and sometimes inflammatory statements and has a talent for generating publicity.
For example, he met with Saddam Hussein in 1994 and told the Iraqi dictator, “I salute your courage, strength and fortitude.”
In 2003, he called then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair and then-US President George W. Bush “wolves” for invading Iraq and called on British troops to ignore military orders he called illegal. Mr Galloway was expelled from Labor later that year, but in the turmoil that developed after the invasion, he had powerful issues to campaign on. He won seats in Bethnal Green in east London in 2005 and Bradford West in north England in 2012, both for the Respect Party.
In 2009, when Mr Galloway was an MP, he was criticized by Britain’s media regulator for breaking impartiality rules during a program broadcast on Iran’s state-run network Press TV.
For a time, he appeared regularly on Russia Today and claimed to have earned tens of thousands of pounds from the broadcaster in 2014 and 2015. But not all of his media appearances were political. In 2006, he appeared on the British reality show Celebrity Big Brother and at one point surprised viewers by playing the role of a cat and licking another contestant’s hand.
In Rochdale, Labor inadvertently favored Mr Galloway when it was forced to suspend its own candidate, Azhar Ali, effectively leaving him unable to defend his seat. Ali was recorded claiming that Israel had “allowed” Hamas to carry out the October 7 attack as a pretext for invading Gaza. He later released a statement saying he “unreservedly apologized to the Jewish community for my comments, which were deeply offensive, ignorant and false.”
Mr Starmer, under the leadership of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, has made a major push to stamp out the anti-Semitism that plagued the Labor Party, but this latest failure is particularly perplexing.
To make matters worse, by the time Mr Starmer took action against Mr Ali it was already too late and his name remained on the ballot paper for Thursday’s election, collecting 2,402 votes. Independent David Tully came in second with 6,638 votes.
It is not the first time in his career that Mr Galloway has appealed directly to Muslim voters, who make up around 30 per cent of Rochdale’s electorate. Many have expressed anger at the rising death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and are calling on the UK to press for an immediate ceasefire.
Mr Galloway described Mr Starmer in his campaign documents as “Israel’s top supporter” and suggested the vote result could weaken his leadership. “Imagine: the people of Rochdale coming together to defeat a hateful Labor leader,” the leaflet said.
Latest polls show that voters support Mr Starmer over other leading politicians, while Labor appears to have a significant lead ahead of national elections due this year. Therefore, this prospect may be fanciful.
Robert Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester, said of Mr Galloway: “He is a one-off and you can’t clone him.”
“He certainly has outstanding campaigning skills and is very good at intuitively understanding emotional lines that apply to particular contexts, and he has proven that again,” Professor Ford added. Ta.
So while Mr Galloway’s success is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere, there are still some implications for Labor. “It’s going to have an impact on politics within the Labor Party in the run-up to the election. It’s going to have an impact on the debate about how to fight the general election campaign,” Professor Ford said.
Mr Galloway, back in Parliament, is likely to become a thorn in Labor’s side and do everything he can to exploit tensions within the party over the Middle East.
On Friday, he used characteristically crude imagery to equate Mr Starmer’s policies with those of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, calling them “two cheeks on the same back”.
“They both came out strong and got a real kick in the ass here in Rochdale tonight,” Ms Galloway said.
The only silver lining for Mr Starmer is that with a general election looming, Mr Galloway will have to fight for re-election soon if he wants to remain an MP for more than a few months.
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