George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale byelection has been greeted with a shrug of complacency by most commentators. After all, Galloway has a habit of pulling off shock byelection wins only to disappear quickly afterwards, and his success this time owed much to happenstance. Perhaps if Labour had not been forced to suspend its candidate after he was recorded at a public meeting claiming that Israel had planned the 7 October attacks, Galloway would not have won. Perhaps the whole episode tells us little about the outcome of the forthcoming general election, let alone the future of British politics. Then again, perhaps not.
Things would be more straightforward if we could take Galloway, and the Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB) that he leads, at face value. They claim to be a leftwing outfit that won Rochdale on a surge of pro-Palestinian sentiment in the wake of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. But the truth is murkier. During this campaign, Galloway’s team sent out more than one set of correspondence. One, addressed to Muslims in the constituency, urged voters to “use your vote to send Keir Starmer and the Labour party a message – stop supporting genocide, stop supporting Israeli aggression, and stand with Palestine”.
His other election address, targeting a different demographic, tells another story. It trumpets Galloway’s record of backing Brexit, opposing Scottish independence and supporting family values. A whole paragraph is dedicated to outlining his opposition to transgender rights and his conviction that “God creates everything in pairs”. “I believe in law and order,” the letter reads. “There will be no grooming gangs in Rochdale. Even if I have to arrest them myself.” It ends with a deliberate nod to Donald Trump, promising to “make Rochdale great again”. Alienated white voters were a key part of Galloway’s winning coalition.
The WPB is as much about social conservatism as it is about leftwing economic policies. It promises decent housing, better-funded public services and workers’ rights. But it also promises to combat the “ridiculous intersectional ideology of radical liberals”, and to put a stop to net zero. Perhaps this is why Nick Griffin, Britain’s most famous far-right leader, called for a vote for Galloway in Rochdale, saying Galloway “understands the position of working-class white Britons on immigration”. Chris Williamson, a former Labour MP and now the WPB’s deputy leader, was asked on the BBC’s Today programme if he would like to distance the party from Griffin’s endorsement. He declined to do so.
Galloway’s political shift can be measured in organisational terms. When he was expelled from the Labour party in 2003, he joined Respect, a broad leftwing party that emerged from the movement against the Iraq war. Galloway last stood for Respect in 2015, when he lost Bradford West to Labour. By 2020, he had shifted gear entirely, founding All for Unity, an unsuccessful attempt to bring together Scottish unionists, including Tory and Ukip figures, before the 2021 Scottish parliament elections. Now, Galloway leads the WPB, which campaigns, in its words, “for the workers not the wokers”. Whereas Respect often relied on the activist work ethic of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), the WPB was until recently backed by the Communist party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), an explicitly Stalinist organisation. The authoritarian, socially conservative group made excellent bag-carriers for Galloway’s long march away from the left.
Across Europe, figures are toying with the same strategy. Sahra Wagenknecht was until recently a prominent spokesperson for Germany’s Left party. She split last year to found her own project and is now polling at about 7% before May’s European elections. Like Galloway, she espouses an explicitly conservative agenda on culture war issues and opposes environmentalism. She has long called for a rolling back of Germany’s acceptance of refugees, once warning that “there should be no neighbourhoods where natives are in a minority”. Like Galloway, she was critical of Covid lockdowns, playing to an audience otherwise courted by the far right. And, like Galloway, Wagenknecht has spoken about Putin’s right to push back against “Nato aggression”.
There are plenty of caveats to Galloway’s success in Rochdale. The demographic coalition he is trying to unite – Muslim voters angry about Gaza and socially conservative white working-class voters – are not obvious bedfellows. It is more than possible that Labour will regain the seat at the general election. But politics is about more than election results, and after a decade of upsets it is unwise for anyone to write off what Galloway represents. Received wisdom has him down as a fringe left figure whose moment in the sun will pass. The opposite is the case: Galloway is no longer bound by the left, and freed from it he is dangerous.
• Michael Chessum is a freelance writer and socialist activist
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