On Friday, George Galloway was elected by the voters of Rochdale to return to the House of Commons. What does this mean for our democracy, our politics, and the safety of our community?
George Galloway has been in and out of Parliament since 1987, representing constituencies in Glasgow, London, and Bradford. Now he has popped up in Rochdale, but one need not search his entire parliamentary career to understand what he stands for, and the types of issues that rally his supporters.
In 2014, Mr Galloway infamously declared that Bradford, where he was then an MP, would be an “Israel-free zone”. Despite having no power to issue any such ban, he declared: “We don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college, we don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford even if any of them had thought of doing so.” When he lost his seat, he lamented that “the venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating.”
Some, including Mr Galloway himself, seek to portray him as merely a fierce — even fanatical — opponent of Israel, but it is his own words that betray deeper extremism. He claimed that the institutional antisemitism within the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn was really “a disgraceful campaign of Goebbelsian fiction”, in reference to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist. He described David Baddiel, a Jewish comic who has spoken out on antisemitism but has also gone to considerable lengths to make clear his apathy towards Israel, as a “vile Israel-fanatic”.
