March 3, 2024 - 8:00am
That someone as politically and morally discredited as George Galloway has been elected as member of parliament for Rochdale — and by a landslide too — is troubling enough for the UK. Worse still, his brand of ethnic identitarianism may well be a template that other leaders to exploit in the years ahead.
Despite making a few milquetoast local pledges — bringing back a maternity hospital and a Primark to “make Rochdale great again” — Galloway’s single-issue campaign was clearly targeted towards Rochdale’s Muslim population that comprise 30% of its population.
Outside mosques, he campaigned for votes by appealing to the consciences of worshippers. Could they face God on “judgement day” and say they opposed Keir Starmer and the Labour party’s position on the Gaza crisis when they had the chance? He won a by-election in Bradford West in 2012 with a rather similar strategy, where he beat Labour by portraying himself as a champion of oppressed Kashmiri Muslims.
One can see this in the leaflets Galloway’s campaign team ran. One set of leaflets, seemingly targeted at white English households, affirmed his patriotism, his support for Brexit, his belief in the reality of sexual difference contra the “mainstream parties”, declaring that “there will be no grooming gangs under my watch” and support for small business. The other set was explicitly targeted towards “voters of the Muslim faith in Rochdale”, where he bragged about how he has “fought for Muslims at home and abroad all my life”.
The idea of Galloway as a champion of oppressed Muslims is rather fanciful (he openly supports the Syrian Baathist regime, which has slaughtered thousands of Palestinians). But on a broader level, his success offers a window into an unhappy future for politics in Britain. For most politicians, it has become rote to affirm modern Britain as a multicultural success story. But in reality, in a place like Rochdale, this multiculturalism isn’t a cosmopolitan paradise, but really what Amartya Sen called “plural monoculturalism”. Here different groups live apart with little contact with each other or any sense of shared social space.
This magnifies ethnic divisions and degenerates politics into nothing more than championing tribal grievances at the cost of enacting a broader social vision for the benefit of all. And while it is doubtful that there will be explicitly Islamic parties like in Germany, or a BNP-style party based on white majoritarian resentment seizing power any time soon, it is the logical endpoint of this ethnic identitarianism.
A centre-Left party such as Labour is particularly vulnerable to these trends because in the absence of having an alternative vision for society that addresses the problems people care about, they triangulate, take their voting base for granted and would rather not confront any “difficult” issues. In not wanting to alienate anyone, they end up pleasing no one, and thus discredit themselves.
That a sectarian grifter like Galloway can be elected is not a sign of the good health of British politics. It may be a sign of things to come.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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Subscribe“And while it is doubtful that there will be explicitly Islamic parties like in Germany”
There has already been an application turned down, but I’m sure another one will be coming down the pipeline.
The writer said it best- This magnifies ethnic divisions and degenerates politics into nothing more than championing tribal grievances at the cost of enacting a broader social vision for the benefit of all. X
A good, succinct analysis. Thanks! Gorgeous Gerge’s latest triumph is described in the article as a “landslide”, but it is worth noting that only 16% of the voters in Rochdale voted for him. That is a smaller percentage than the proportion of muslim voters in the constituency. Gorgeous George knows that 15% of the electorate is typically sufficient to win a by-election. He got in because (a) he motivated a minority to get off their backsides and vote and (b) he could not care less about p1551ng-off the rest of the electorate, whether in Rochdale or further afield.
None of the mainstream parties is capable of running a by-election campaign like that because they are too self-conscious about their national image. It is not simply because their politices are unappealing to the denizens of Rochdale.
It is always entertaining when a commentator, whilst purporting to give an objective analysis, throws in pejorative descriptions.
“politically and morally discredited” is quite obviously nonsense. Like it or not, Galloway just won an election…so, far from politically discredited. In fact it is the mainstream parties which are politically discredited; the electorate doesn’t much like any of them or their (non) policies.
As for morally, Galloway opposes the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza, which is an entirely moral stance, supported by many people, not just Muslims.
And yes, he appealed to the people who would vote for him, in this case the Muslim population of Rochdale; it’s what politicians always do.
There may be many reasons to object to Mr. Galloway; to incorrectly state he is politically and morally discredited isn’t a good start.
One thing in favour of Mr. Galloway is that he has the guts to say what he thinks. His performance in front of a US Senate Committee was a tour de force; he very effectively took apart their lies and dishonesty.
I very much look forward to similar fireworks in the currently moribund House of Commons.
One never knows, perhaps there may even be a revival of real politics with passion, rather than managerialism which has utterly failed the electorate.
Not familiar enough with his story but on the face of it he looks just like another loud mouth and opportunist politician. He doesn’t make an impression of a leader, maybe a ringleader
Although i don’t support his point of view, i think that’s a perfectly fair standpoint. Perhaps he just wears his opportunism on his sleeve, unlike other politicians who conduct their ‘opportuning’ away from the gaze of the electorate.
Former Labour MP Chris Williamson made the comment on social media on October 17th, ten days after Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis.
He told his 149,000 followers on X: “The people of the world now know that Israel has forfeited the right to exist and that resistance to the genocidal Zionist entity is the only option.” … © The Daily Sceptic.
As for morally, Galloway opposes the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza, which is an entirely moral stance, supported by many people
Let me ask you, how should Israelis behave for you to consider them moral? I am very interested in the logic of an intelligent person like you, because any intelligent person should foresee the consequences of his advises.
Chris Williamson, whoever he is, is not George Galloway, and my response was about George Galloway, which the article seeks to hold up as being discredited, which is clearly wrong.
It is also perfectly moral to oppose the bombing of a civilian population. Indeed there was opposition to the Allies, specifically Britain, bombing German cities during WW2… a good example was Bishop George Bell.
Chris Williamson is now the deputy leader of Mr Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
When asked about October 7, he refused to condemn the Hamas attacks.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You can’t expect to live in a situation where people have been oppressed for 75 years and not expect a reaction.”
“In international law, oppressed peoples have an absolute right to armed resistance,” Mr Williamson said, before going on to claim that the majority of those innocent people killed on October 7 were killed by Israeli forces.
Williamson is a former close ally of Jeremy Corbyn and was suspended from the Labour party for claiming it had “given too much ground” and been “too apologetic” in tackling antisemitism.
The ex-Labour MP for Derby North had faced previous criticism for incidents of alleged antisemitism, including offering to host a parliamentary screening of a film by a Labour member suspended for claiming Jews had been the “chief financiers” of the slave trade.
According to Williamson Israel should never have been created when it is Williamson himself who should never have been created.
I wonder how many politicians get brown envelopes from Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia or other similar countries?
Probably less than get them from Israel and the US.
A seven times elected Member of Parliament is in the Premier League while a seven times failed parliamentary candidate is not even a ball boy, a job that is sometimes done by a dog, but George Galloway did campaign with Nigel Farage in the 2016 referendum, and he did endorse the Brexit Party at the 2019 European elections. Richard Tice offered George a byelection candidacy. He kept the receipts.
George advocated a vote for the candidate best placed to defeat the SNP in each Holyrood constituency last time, plus a list vote for All for Unity, and accordingly he voted Conservative. Subsequent events have thoroughly borne him out. In 2006, it was a coalition with the Conservatives that retained the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. That coalition did eventually lose an election to the Liberal Democrats, but it did not collapse.
When George is introduced tomorrow, then it will be by Jeremy Corbyn and David Davis, an economically left-wing Eurosceptic and opponent of American, Israeli and Saudi domination, and a socially conservative Brexiteer with regular reservations about the foreign policy hegemony. If Rishi Sunak meant what he said about George on Friday evening, then he would withdraw the whip from Davis.
For as long as I can remember, condescending Telegraph types of the kind who are all about to discover how many foreign holidays per year you really can have on Universal Credit, or they would not care about losing their jobs, have been effusing about the sad decline of economically left-wing and socially conservative MPs from the patriotic working class. Now that one such has been elected, entirely as that and as nothing else, then it is a national emergency to both frontbenches and to the entire official media. This was supposed to be written about through dewy eyes. It was never supposed to happen.
Still less was it supposed to happen in the person of the world’s finest living political orator in the English language, fantastically well-informed, and phenomenally well-connected in every part of the country and on every continent, not least by having the political programme with the biggest weekly audience on the planet. If George is not that orator, then who is? If The Mother of All Talk Shows and its podcast do not have that audience, then what does? MPs and Lobby journalists who were not born when George was last in Parliament, are not going to know what has hit them when they hear him speak there. Take your patronising salt-of-the-earth and rub it in your wounds.
After the coordinated hysteria in response to the Rochdale byelection result, then no one could possibly doubt that centrism and right-wing populism were con tricks, designed to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. When centrism put up as itself and nothing else, in the now-forgotten form of Change UK, then it crashed and burned spectacularly, never electing anyone to anything. Right-wing populism puts up as itself and nothing else, with the result that Reform UK’s elected representation consists of eight councillors, fewer than the number of members of many an Independent or Residents Group that exists on only one authority. I do not know how many of those eight were even elected as Reform UK. I doubt that it was all of them.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.
Well that’s quite long but has some good information and good points.
Your prophesy of a hung Parliament is interesting…and certainly that result…both lose…is preferable to a win by either of the main parties.
However a hung Parliament probably won’t produce the change in politics which is necessary.
It would be a start.
A far better piece than the one you are commenting on. Bravo!
The idea that Galloway’s ascent in Rochdale is due to his social conservatism coupled with his Leftist economics tendencies, the populist
Holy grail, (Basically the SDP) – is ridiculous.
G merely appealed to religious & cultural tribalism – namely a commitment to pro Palestine – That is all.
He saw an opening and went for it. Like any spiv or street hawk.
But democracy is mob rule. So that’s the way it goes. One man one vote.
But motives are everything.
Such bad faith & cynicism cannot help us go forward in a sustainable way.
As many can now see, demographics are everything.
Ethnic tribalism in politics can only increase.
We have the centrists, the open border enthusiasts and their complicit coward MPs to thank for that.
This is way better than the original article!
Galloway is a conceited if clever, roguish man, whose confidence, nay arrogance, is certainly good at fooling himself as well as quite a few others. The “Saddam toady” is not a great man of principle. As the article pointed out, he is very good at saying one set of things to one audience, and a completely different one to another.
“That a sectarian grifter like Galloway can be elected is not a sign of the good health of British politics. It may be a sign of things to come’.
Quite.
The other thing to point out is that the easily said recommendation.of “right-wing on social issues and left on economic” implies that we already live in some sort of laissez faire “night watchman” state in Britain. There simply are not easily accessed additional massive resources waiting to be deployed on more public sector projects boosting people’s incomes and benefits. If you don’t want to be beholden to “international finance” then sharply reduce, not increase borrowing!
The bitter truth is that the UK with a few exceptions is a very unproductive society. Improving that, which will be painful, is the key to increasing wealth for every for all of our citizens of all races.
Is amazing how quickly we forget that “real existing socialism” was constantly making cuts to wages, demanding increased output etc. Simply dubbing these societies “state capitalist” is just a easy rhetorical trick not an argument
Sectarian politics seems to be the inevitable outcome of multiculturalism, commentators pointing this out have been vilified and marginalised for years.
60 years+ after the first waves of ex-empire immigration you are still waiting. The primary manifestations of what you contend have been far Right parties and not ethnic minority formed parties.
Unless of course you go to N Ireland where you’d be right, but that’s all white people isn’t it?
George Galloway represents a party doesn’t he, and there are reports of widespread intimidation by his supporters.
Thank you for your defence of the establishment, the uniparty, and the status quo. I guess the Paul Marshall ownership of this publication is really showing its colours now.
People are not buying it any more. I hope there are many more George Galloways. I hope there is change in this country. The people are not stupid, they know what austerity did, they see what happened since late 2019, and they fear what is coming next.
Wake up. Look at the FT poll.
It’s not a surprise that Galloway appealed to the Muslim vote, or that less that 40% turned out to vote. Many areas in the North of England have entirely given up on politics and politicians, and why wouldn’t they? Promised the Earth and given nothing, every time.
Jeremy Hunt was unable to name the extremist formations that had either organised or hijacked the Gaza ceasefire marches, vast weekly events that in nearly five months, and counting, have still seen fewer arrests than there were at last year’s Glastonbury Festival.
The theatrical “protection” of a statue of Winston Churchill was comedy gold. There is now the first MP since Churchill to have sat for four entirely different constituencies. The line has changed from “he won by appealing to Muslims over Gaza” to “he won by uniting Muslims and the white working class”, as if that were a bad thing. George Galloway’s two leaflets were wholly compatible with each other, and if anything mutually dependent. This is now called microtargeting, and the Conservatives have been known to deploy it in support of Narendra Modi’s position on Kashmir, but it was just called politics when I was starting out, never mind when George was. Whether you mean theology, or whether you mean sectarianism, religion is not remotely new to the politics of Great Britain.
We need to re-learn structured daily prayer, setting aside one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique of both capitalism and Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science. The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point. Buy the book here.
What an extraordinary politician. One who appeals to the concerns of the electorate. Anyone might mistake him for a democrat. Or if he cynically promised the earth, for a Westminster politician.
In his Downing Street sermon the Prime Minister didn’t explain why Muslim people in Rochdale would pay any attention to a former leader of a far Right grouplet who made a specific appeal to vote for Galloway on social media.
If people living in the ‘white areas’ of Rochdale were moved by such a man they could have voted for a white man in a hat. They just couldn’t vote for a local businessman because he was both a local and a businessman?
In his sermon the Prime Minister ascribed the success of the most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-cultural society to the influence of the Established Church. That is, to something created before this multi-everything society.
The Church of England, the Prime Minister said, supplies the quality of tolerance to other faiths. As if these other religions were shoots of a wild olive grafted onto the rootstock of a cultivated olive. Cribbing the Apostle Paul is to prescribe the wrong medicine in a society where few have faith in the Church of England and the effects on custom, habit and law that Christianity had over centuries has been scrubbed from the public square. It also implies that these other religions lack such a quality.
The Prime Minister described a society of multiplicities. There are multi-faiths, multi-ethnicities, multi-genders, multi-cultures. Strangely, there are no multi-opinions. Any opinion that the political class dislikes they classify as a form of mental derangement.
The good people are so good that anyone is so bad who doesn’t agree with them. Not only bad but mad – phobic – as well. Here begineth the persecutions, as Saul of Tarsus would have put it. ‘You have a demon’, the opponents of Jesus of Nazareth declared of him.
There are the shared values the Prime Minister praised in his Downing Street sermon. The shared values are the values that everyone must share. On pain of being de-banked, or having reputation and career ruined: all forms of internal exile or excommunication.
A two-party democracy can cope with two constituencies. It cannot cope with a multiplicity. They can tell themselves whatever they need to hear over at Conservative Home, but if they want to find ‘proper’ conservatives for their ‘tent’, they will find them in the Victorian cemeteries.
There is no formulation of words that the Labour Party or the Tory Party can weave to form a tent to include the concerns of all the multiplicities without being so unspecific as to make no appeal to anyone above a general jollying of them along. As if they were a Scout leader urging their charges to enjoy a cross-country hike on a drizzly day on the promise of the prospect of a damp picnic of jam-sandwiches and tepid tea at the end of it.
Galloway can temporarily represent a grievance whilst Grifting for himself. His ability to actually change anything for the better is zilch and he’s not interested in it anyway.
A unique election at a unique time. I wouldn’t read too much in to it. Most folks far too busy getting on with their lives and when time comes they’ll vote with economic realities and experience to the fore.
George Galloway has his faults and plenty of them. But he’s been a forceful critic of our disastrous middle eastern adventures from the outset.
People act as though he’s the worst man ever to enter Parliament, as though being thrown out of Blair’s Labour party for opposing the war in Iraq, was a sin rather than a badge of honour.
Have we forgotten how, in 2005, he was hauled in front of the senate committee on investigations, charged with profiting off Saddam’s oil for food programme? The mauling he gave the senators that day was one of the more striking bloody noses received by the younger Bush’s war machine. About the same time, he debated the sainted Christopher Hitchens – then at the height of his jingoistic bloviation phase – and rhetorically flattened him before a New York audience.
Would I want Galloway to be PM or even on the front bench? God forbid. But is the presence in parliament of a peacenik brawler with a whole host of grudges, a sign of the sectarian apocalypse? Don’t be ridiculous.
Just a reminder: the entire British establishment is currently united behind a policy of seeking US permission to bleat (weakly) for a slight lessening of violence against civilians, whilst continuing to provide logistical and political cover (as well as armaments) to an Israeli regime which has now been found to have a case to answer for the most serious war crime of all – genocide.
This is abject hypocrisy raised to the status of a murderous art form. It is a shimmering edifice of delicate falsehoods, shibboleths and ellisions piled perilously high, one upon the another.
Enter, stage economically-left-but-culturally-right, Britain’s foremost china-shop bull…
PS note to Keir Starmer. If you don’t like aggrieved single-issue populists with no party affiliation entering parliament via by-elections on a tiny electoral turnout and calling you a war criminal under parliamentary privilege, there is an elegant and eminently democratic fix – Proportional Representation.
…it would simplify matters considerably if there was an explicitly Islamist Party…we would then understand both the scale and the location of the problem we are facing…