You’re going to hear a lot of talk about George Galloway in the coming days, much of it negative and almost all of it true. But there will be one charge thrown at the new member for Rochdale – winner of a byelection victory yesterday as sweeping as the triumph he recorded in Bradford West more than a decade ago – that will be false and unfair.
Start with the accusations that stand up. Galloway poses as a man of the left – his latest vehicle is called the Workers party of Britain. But he backed Nigel Farage’s Brexit party (now Reform) in 2019 – the pair had appeared together, during the 2016 referendum campaign, laughing and smiling – and the Conservatives in Scotland in 2021. You did not misread that sentence: George Galloway voted Tory only three years ago.
The right are more comfortable with Galloway than you might expect. In Rochdale, he won the warm endorsement of Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party. “George Galloway isn’t just right on keeping us out of Zionist wars,” wrote Griffin. “He also understands the position of working class white Brits on immigration.” Offered the chance to reject that support on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, Galloway’s deputy – the former MP Chris Williamson, who was suspended from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party over comments he made about antisemitism – pointedly refused. You may also have seen the photographs of Galloway apparently bonding with Steve Bannon, a one-time Trump lieutenant and current peddler of online conspiracy theories.
Others will remind you of Galloway’s employment history, and those facts will also be true. He did serve as a well-remunerated presenter for Press TV and Russia Today (RT), mouthpieces of Tehran and Vladimir Putin respectively – hardly a surprise given his admiration for a string of tyrannical regimes. In 1994, he stood before Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the man who had jailed, tortured and killed so many of his own people, and declared: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” In 2002, he told this newspaper that “the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.” When an estimated 1,300 Syrians were killed by chemical weapons in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Galloway did not, as most did, blame Bashar al-Assad – who he had long praised for his “dignity” – but rather pointed the finger at an imagined, if improbable, alliance of al-Qaida and … Israel. He offered no evidence, but that was his “theory”.
Indeed, given his determination to cast himself as a defender of Muslims – a pitch that paid great dividends in Rochdale – it’s striking how often he lines up behind those who kill, maim or oppress Muslims, even in their hundreds of thousands. In 2020, Galloway used his platform on RT to dismiss the copious evidence of China’s persecution of an estimated one million Uyghur Muslims: “There are no concentration camps in China,” he said, merely “re-education centres” for terrorists that humanely seek to draw them away from the path of extremism.
So he should not be confused for any kind of progressive. Doubt over that question was surely set aside in 2012 when he defended Julian Assange, then facing allegations of rape, by announcing that any accusation would be rendered absurd if there had first been an act of consensual sex. As he memorably put it, “I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.” If campaigners against sexual violence disliked that, LGBTQ+ advocates might similarly recoil from some intriguing lines that appeared in Galloway’s election literature in Rochdale. “I believe in family … I believe in men and women. God created everything in pairs.”
He likes to boast that he is an implacable foe of racism. Yet he was fired by Talk Radio in 2019 over a tweet the station deemed antisemitic. After Tottenham, a north London club with a strong Jewish following, lost in the Champions League final, Galloway posted: “No #Israël flags on the Cup!” (Note the diaeresis on the ë, with its whispered hint of the German umlaut, scarcely a shock from a man who’s long been fond of comparing Israel to the Nazis – a comparison that is specifically cited in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.)
In short, much of what you hear about Galloway from his detractors will be true. Where, then, is the falsehood? What is the unmerited charge laid against him?
It is the claim that he is somehow uniquely guilty of exploiting the pain of Gaza for political gain. Don’t get me wrong, he is certainly using that agony for his own advantage. He targeted the Muslim voters of Rochdale, sending them a flyer that did not mention re-opening the local maternity hospital, securing the future of the local football club or luring Primark to the town – all of which featured on the leaflet aimed at everyone else – but instead focused solely on Gaza. No, the flaw in the claim is the notion that Galloway is unique in what he’s doing.
He’s louder than others and his rhetoric is more florid – but the grim truth is that, when it comes to using the horror of the Israel-Hamas war, and all the fear and loathing that has stirred up in this country, Galloway is far from alone.
The former Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson was playing the same game when he baselessly accused Sadiq Khan of being so in thrall to his Islamist “mates” that he was failing to police pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London sufficiently harshly. Anderson was trying to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment, following a lead set by Suella Braverman when she spoke of “hate marches” and “mobs” – and followed again, if codedly, by Rishi Sunak in his address outside Downing Street late on Friday. He, too, attacked the marchers, warning against the threat extremism and bigotry pose to democracy – a bit rich given his indulgence of extremism and bigotry within his own party and his inability to call Anderson’s anti-Muslim prejudice by its name. Still, the prime minister can glimpse some favourable battlelines for the coming general election campaign and didn’t want to let the opportunity slip. Sunak, Braverman and Anderson all affect to have the purest motives – offering themselves as protectors of British Jews in particular, as that community faces a record surge of antisemitism – but, like Galloway, they’re in the exploitation business. Others’ pain is their gain.
They are the crudest practitioners, but they are not the only ones. The MPs of the Scottish National party are, of course, sincere in their outrage at the plight of Gaza. But few would argue that the ceasefire motion they tabled last week – which triggered such ructions in the Commons – was aimed solely at helping Palestinians in need. It was also designed to expose and widen the rift within the ranks of their electoral rivals, Labour. Meanwhile, Labour and the Conservatives plotted their own procedural moves thinking less of the Middle East than of the great Westminster game.
As it happens, this week a few members of the Commons foreign affairs committee sat in a modest room and took evidence from Israelis and Palestinians about how Britain might actually do something useful to end the bloodshed. The discussion was serious and practical – and delivered precisely zero attention or political benefit to those involved. If you want to profit from all this death and destruction, it seems the trick is not to try to solve the problem – it’s to capitalise on it, to take all that grief and heartache and trade on it.
So, yes, Galloway has a record that brims with poison. But he is not quite the outlier we might wish him to be. He was always a demagogue and a populist, and now our politics is crammed with such people: “Make Rochdale Great Again” was his slogan, a knowing, admiring nod to Donald Trump. As for what looks like a habit of swooping down to prey on those in pain, pitting community against community – well, maybe that once set him apart. But vultures are all around us now.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 3 March 2024 to correctly describe the “ë” diacritic as the diaeresis, not the umlaut as a previous version said.
