George Galloway’s Trumpian diatribe felled Labour – but it’s a pyrrhic victory for democracy

A man who trades in incendiary language made a mockery of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party

The signs were there all along for George Galloway to take Rochdale, but it was a “shock win” all the same.

“Shock” because a man who trades in incendiary language – who made an almost Trumpian figure in his winning speech, declaring “this is for Gaza” – made a mockery of Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.

Indeed, to put the “shock” into context: it is to imagine as though Mike Tyson, at the height of his controversy, somehow won a by-election. Galloway – the king of the verbal knuckleduster, reveller in rows and division – may have won his seat, but it is a pyrrhic victory for democracy.

It wasn’t really a night for the usual spreadsheet analysis of swings, differential turnout and tactical voting, but the climax to a highly chaotic by-election, marked by death threats, vandalism and candidates wearing stab vests.

And despite an apparent late (and inexplicable) surge in betting on Labour to win, ever since they abandoned the seat, it was always going to be George Galloway’s evening. With 40 per cent of the vote, on a decent turnout, he turned on Starmer directly, saying: “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza. You will pay a high price for enabling, encouraging and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine in the Gaza Strip.”

For that very reason, the Rochdale by-election tell us precisely nothing about the next general election.

A result that puts Galloway and his so-called Workers Party first, an independent businessman second, the Tories third and a nominal Labour candidate fourth is certainly a poor predictor of who will next find themselves in Number 10: It certainly won’t be the new honourable member for the Gaza Strip.

As ever in his long and chequered parliamentary career, Galloway will be a voluble, performative presence in parliament, always happy to chucked out of the chamber, and something of a pantomime villain; but he won’t succeed in his professed aim to “end imperialist wars”, liberate Palestine and get the UK out of NATO. One suspects that the more the voters learn about Galloway the less they’ll like him.

There will now commence some overexcited talk about where the “Muslim vote” will be going, but the truth is that at a general election it is not going to be a homogenous bloc, and even if it were, it’s not going to transfer to the Conservatives and help many of them win in any marginal constituencies.

The seats with a substantial Muslim vote are overwhelmingly ones with large Labour majority, and if there is a leakage of support to independents or Workers Party candidates it won’t alter the outcome. One day, when the Tories are competitive again, a split Labour vote might let them come through the middle (as almost happened when Galloway intervened in Batley and Spen in 2021).

All that said, no Labour leader, indeed no responsible democrat, can look at what happened in Rochdale without some concern about the degree of division and sectarianism that Galloway and the war in Gaza brought to the town’s politics and those of the wider party; and his own party’s failings.

The former Labour candiate, Afzhar Ali, lost his career because he casually regurgitated a conspiracy theory about the Israelis organising the murders of their own people on 7 October. That’s not healthy.

Maybe they know their minds in Rochdale, but the fact is that it is the Labour Party, and the other mainstream parties, let the people there down rather than the other way around. Any Labour candidate would have had a hard time defending Keir Starmer’s position, as he himself did, but a more dexterous person could have done things rather better than Ali managed. To borrow a fashionable phrase, Rochdale deserved better.

Labour can beat Galloway next time round, but they will need a strong and credible local candidate to do it. The last time Galloway’s raucous roadshow won a by-election he did so in even more spectacular style.

The contest in Bradford West a decade ago was a much bigger surprise than Rochdale, and Galloway managed to grab 55.9 per cent of the vote then in what was also previously a safe Labour seat. Place that against his 39.7 per cent poll in Rochdale, with no real opposition, and maybe the tectonic plates aren’t now shifting quite as Galloway claims.

On his success in March 2012 he declared in typically bombastic style that this was the “the Bradford Spring”, supposedly another spontaneous uprising in the Arab Spring waves of protest then rocking regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria in the name of democracy. It didn’t sustain in West Yorkshire, either.

In Bradford, there had been much local disillusionment with the way Labour had been running politics, which the mountebank Galloway, in typical skilful style, exploited. But at the subsequent general election, in 2015, Galloway was crushed by Labour’s Naz Shah, and in what was a pretty poor year for Ed Miliband’s party nationally. She holds Bradford West still. Assuming the Gaza issue will have subsided in salience with a ceasefire soon to be negotiated, Galloway may not be an MP for much longer.

Labour was a big loser on the night, not so much psephologically – it didn’t campaign, after all – but because it highlights one of the few areas where the party remains deeply divided. But the other mainstream parties have little to be optimistic about; actually the Liberal Democrats in particular. Rochdale was once represented by another larger than life star, the now disgraced Liberal, Cyril Smith.

He won a by-election there in 1972, and the party won it as recently as 2005, when it was retaken from Labour in the aftermath of the Iraq war – a time when Galloway’s former party, Respect, was doing well enough to see him win Bethnal Green and Bow. At that point it was the Lib Dems who attracted disaffected anti-war Labour voters, Muslim and otherwise, also winning a by-election in the safe Labour seat of Leicester South, again with a high ethnic minority vote, in 2004.

The current incumbent, Jon Ashworth, might reflect on that. But Ed Davey’s party is now far too weak to repeat those sort of successes in Labour areas. The wider lesson, though, is that outrage about a foreign war doesn’t necessarily persist when it fades from the headlines and more domestic factors come into play.

The Greens, too, let Rochdale down in disowning their candidate and failing to provide a solid alternative.

The other notable loser, it has to be said, is Reform UK, which was quite unable to capitalise on the strange circumstances of recent weeks. Their man Simon Danczuk, a former Labour MP for the seat, came sixth and only won a 6.9 per cent vote share – actually lower than its predecessor, the Brexit party, achieved at the 2019 general election, and far less than the 18.8 per cent Ukip registered in 2015.

Like the other recent by-elections in Wellingborough and Kingswood, it confirms that Reform’s notable rise in the polls over the past year is real enough, but may now be stalling, at least in the absence of Nigel Farage or a high-profile Tory defector such as Lee Anderson.

So there we have it – Rochdale as a one-off, rather like its new member of parliament. The reaction of the Muslim community – like many others – to the pitiless war in Gaza should not be ignored or disdained, because the voters in any seat have the right to say what matters to them and to vote accordingly – and for the parties have to respond to those priorities. That’s democracy.

Labour does need continually to assess what its attitude to the Palestinian question is, as does the government, because the revulsion at what’s been happening there since the Hamas atrocities on 7 October is certainly not confined to those of the Islamic faith.

In Rochdale, many voted with their consciences – and there’s no shame in that. Yet, contrary to what Galloway so often claims, Britain isn’t in a position to do much about the Middle East, and Gaza won’t be the defining issue at the general election. The tectonic plates may have shifted last night, but not by that much.