George Galloway’s return points to deepening divisions in society. Emily Hohler reports
Rishi Sunak has announced a crackdown on extremism in Britain following George Galloway’s landslide win in the Rochdale by-election last Thursday, a result he described as “beyond alarming”. Galloway, the 69-year-old far-left firebrand, who has been elected as a British MP seven times, won nearly 6,000 more votes than his closest rival after running a pro-Palestinian campaign in the constituency, which has a large Muslim population. The Labour Party had paved the way for his victory by withdrawing support for the former Labour candidate, Azhar Ali, after he was recorded suggesting that Israel was complicit in Hamas’s October attack.
The return of Galloway to the House of Commons as the first MP for the Workers Party of Britain “after yet another ugly, divisive and nakedly sectarian election campaign is a stain on British public life”, says The Times. Galloway may be a “gifted public speaker with a unique ability to harness the discontent of Muslim communities”, but he is a “demagogue” who does not believe in Israel’s right to exist and “inflames tensions in the service of his own ego”.
His victory risks “legitimising the hyperbolic claim that there is a ‘Muslim vote’ in this country, exercised en bloc”. As Keir Starmer is “denounced from the backbenches” by Galloway in months to come, he must deconstruct this “dangerous and corrosive fiction”. His claim that his party has “59 parliamentary candidates ready to go” and could harm Labour in the general election should be “taken with a bucket of salt”, but Galloway’s “rhetorical intensity” could possibly “bounce Labour” into a harder stance on calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, say Nick Gutteridge and Ben Riley-Smith in The Telegraph.
Sunak seeks to ease tensions
Starmer was right to withdraw support for Ali, even if Labour duly lost the seat, and Sunak was right to suspend Tory MP Lee Anderson for his “repugnant” claim that Islamists have “got control” of the mayor of London, says Camilla Cavendish in the Financial Times. In his speech on the steps of Downing Street last Friday, Sunak denounced both Islamists and far-right groups for “spreading a poison”, saying that what had started as protests on o
