George Galloway would be happy if his Workers’ Party of Britain denied Labour the chance of an outright majority at the election because it would mean that whoever was in power would have to listen to the smaller parties. That was his message today when interviewed by Andrew Neil on Times Radio: the former Labour MP does not see a Labour government as being at all worthwhile over and above a Conservative one. He is standing in Rochdale, which he won in a by-election earlier this year after Labour messed up with its own candidate.
‘We are a threat to Labour in at least 100 places. We can either beat them or at least cause them to lose because the Labour party is, as you pointed out in your introduction, our number one enemy, for the reason that the Conservatives are the wolves, the Labour party are the foxes: they appear to be smiling but in fact their intentions are exactly the same as that of the wolf, which is to eat the living standards of the working people of this country and cheat the working people of this country with their fiendish schemes. So we want to replace the Labour party, we are the ghost of what Labour once was, we’re Tony Benn’s Labour.’
Asked about cheating Labour of a majority, Galloway replied:
I would treat that as a considerable triumph. Our goal here is a hung parliament and whomesoever is the biggest party would then have to negotiate with all the other forces in the House of Commons about a programme for government. It wouldn’t be a coalition but it will be a price list and the first item on that price list would be a reform of our electoral system so that seats in the House of Commons were allocated proportionally according to the vote that they have achieved.
Galloway also seemed very relaxed about whether his candidates agreed with him on key events: one figure standing for the party is Craig Murray, who Neil pointed out believed the Salisbury poisonings had been orchestrated by the Israelis. Galloway said he was very proud of his two former ambassador candidates but that ‘doesn’t mean we agree on all issues and all interpretation of news events’.
That he is happy for someone like Murray who holds these views to stand shows that he thinks they will appeal to target voters, rather than put them off. Similarly, he reiterated his personal ‘old-fashioned’ views on homosexuality when Neil asked whether that would put off younger voters who agreed with him on other topics such as Gaza. He said: ‘Some of the young people in my own family don’t agree with me. I’m old fashioned, Andrew, I’m a man of my age and class and I believe in mum, dad, and the kids.’
Labour wouldn’t negotiate with Galloway if it did end up in a hung parliament situation. The party has long had a strategy of trying to pretend he doesn’t exist, which works in an air war and in parliament, but which has failed it when it has taken individual seats for granted or been slack about candidate vetting as it was in Rochdale. The party has now brought back one of the failed candidates from the by-election selection, Paul Waugh, who is trying to get Galloway out of the seat so that Keir Starmer doesn’t have to share a Commons chamber with him either. But the interview underlined why he keeps returning to politics in seats all over the country: he knows how to do a political interview in the way few others today do.
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