In his now infamous dual letters to Muslim and non-Muslim voters, George Galloway said that victory for him in Rochdale could lead to Keir Starmer being displaced as Labour leader, and that it would “Make Rochdale Great Again”. I wouldn’t have thought the second promise is any more likely to be kept than the first, but on the whole I’m glad that Galloway won, because it finally demonstrates that weaponising antisemitism against the Left is not a cost-free exercise forever, especially when it leads a Labour leader to tack so close to Israel that he even suggests that Netanyahu has the right to commit the genocidal act of cutting off food, water and electricity to the civilian population of Gaza.
Rochdale by-election result (29th February 2024):
Workers Party of Britain: 39.7% (n/a)
Independent – Tully: 21.3% (n/a)
Conservatives: 12.0% (-19.2)
Labour: 7.7% (-43.9)
Liberal Democrats: 7.0% (n/a)
Reform UK: 6.3% (-1.9)
Independent – W Howarth: 1.7% (n/a)
Independent – Coleman: 1.5% (n/a)
Greens: 1.4% (-0.7)
Independent – M Howarth: 0.8% (n/a)
Official Monster Raving Loony: 0.7% (n/a)
There’s always a frisson of excitement when a new party wins a parliamentary seat for the first time, so I turned to Wikipedia in the hope of discovering what manner of party we were getting, but I ended up more confused than when I started. The Workers’ Party of Britain ideology is described as (among other things) “far-left” and “communist”, which if taken literally would mean a communist party now has representation in the UK Parliament for the first time since Willie Gallacher lost his seat in 1950. But curiously, Wikipedia’s only source for this claim is a webpage in which communists denounce the Workers Party of Britain for “transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anticommunism”!
