THAT GEORGE Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election sent shockwaves through the political establishment is no surprise. George is second to none in his ability to provoke expletives from our political elite. He embarrassed Labour in by-elections in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and Bradford West in 2012. He is a powerful media performer, deftly turning the tables on hostile journalists and famously at a US Senate Committee in 2005.
Given he dedicated his Rochdale win to the suffering people of Gaza, many in the mass movements of the last months are now looking to his methods as a model to replicate.
For the liberal commentariat, Galloway is a dangerous demagogue playing on voters’ anger for personal gain. Adept in the courtroom too he has seen off a series of their libels. They cannot imagine why he might appeal to people. Easier to write him off as just a cynical grifter and those who vote for him as gullible idiots.
Galloway can appeal to Muslim voters, rightly angry about both Gaza and Starmer’s support for Israel’s appalling actions as justified ‘self-defence’. And to people in towns like Rochdale, which have been relentlessly run down economically and socially under Thatcher, Blair and the five Tory prime ministers since 2010, he appears as voice of revolt.
Also he can be relied on to oppose British and US wars in the Middle East and therefore win the sympathy and votes of communities with origins in those countries or shared faiths.
Demagogue
But the real problem with Galloway’s politics is his simultaneous appeal to right wing prejudices. He says he is ‘proud to be British’ and the day before the by-election told Good Morning Britain that ‘Our country can’t even defend its own border. It can’t even keep control of the thousands of people who arrived here illegally.’
He has repeatedly denounced ‘mass immigration’, ‘woke culture’, especially with regard to the Trans movement, and is opposed to women’s right to choose. He says, ‘I am strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral.’
He famously put out two letters leading up to the by-election, one focusing on Israel ‘s crimes in Gaza, the other with more right-wing themes, with statements like, ‘I believe in Britain’, ‘I believe in family’, ‘I believe in law and order’ and indicating opposition to trans people’s rights: ‘God made everything in pairs’. In short, he appeals to voters of all classes and all communities with socially reactionary views.
This letter is part of a rightwards trajectory by Galloway on a number of issues. Over the last decade he has flirted with far right figures such as Nigel Farage and Lawrence Fox, campaigning alongside the former for Brexit and the latter against the net zero climate change goal. In his programme, Galloway aims to combine what he calls real Labour economic policies with culture war rhetoric, which he believes appeals to the ‘real’ working-class.
Make Rochdale Great Again?
What is no less significant, in his Rochdale campaign Galloway also appealed to voters on local issues, some perfectly correct like the demand to reopen Maternity and A&E wards at Rochdale Infirmary, others pro-business like the call to rejuvenate the town’s market and ‘bring back big names to our town centre like Primark’. All under the slogan ‘Make Rochdale Great Again’. There is, however, a political strategy behind his contradictory politics—populism.
In his by-election letter he ends by saying, ‘I fight for small business, the hardest working people in the country’. Odd perhaps from a candidate for an organisation called the ‘Workers Party’. Indeed, small business owners may work hard, but they can be as exploitative and oppressive as any bigger employer.
But for a Marxist, which Galloway has posed as, the working class is the only class in that can end the capitalist system, and in the process liberate all the world’s exploited and oppressed. Above all our class is an international one and this should mean remorseless opposition to nationalism and racism. This he does not do, either by joining with the likes of Farage over Brexit or by talking now about the of ‘waves’ of immigration taking British jobs and access to housing and healthcare.
Even Galloway’s approach to imperialism is deeply contradictory. To his credit he has been a long-time and outspoken critic of Israel and Western imperialist policy in the Middle East, including Tony Blair’s murderous wars. But rather than basing this on independent working class internationalism he famously he visited and shamelessly flattered the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
For all these reasons the politics of the Workers Party and George Galloway do not represent a way forward either for the Gaza movement or for the idea of a militant working class party. His politics are not new either. They were on full display in Respect in the 2000s and for this reason Workers Power saw this as populist project and refused to join it when the Socialist Workers Party was boosting it. Today the SWP has refused to rally to him, correctly for once. Thus we reject the suggestions in the Morning Star and Counterfire that Galloway could be the representative of a new politics, a viable alternative to Starmer.
