The Rochdale by-election raises a question that Labour will find hard to duck in government: can a European left-wing party survive without a pro-Islamist foreign policy? They can’t win with one, as Jeremy Corbyn proved twice. But the shocking success of George Galloway last night shows that the arguments of the Corbyn years have not been settled.
No one can pretend they do not know who the loudmouthed old ham really is after all this time. Just before Muslim voters propelled him to victory, Galloway received the endorsement of none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National Party (BNP).
Rochdale raises a question about how Labour will deal with the obsessions of a large section of the left once in power
To use an overused label correctly for once, the BNP is genuinely neo-fascist. And yet Griffin had no qualms in recommending that his followers ‘get out and vote for George Galloway’ and ‘stick two fingers up to the rotten political elite and their fake news media cronies’. Like cocktails before a dinner party, obsessions about Jews bring all the extremists together.
What better illustration could you have of the horseshoe theory? Admirers of dictators admire each other. Galloway ‘saluted’ Saddam Hussein, whose forces killed tens of thousands of Muslims. He praised Bashar al-Assad, as the Syrian president’s forces slaughtered the country’s Sunni Muslim population, for maintaining the ‘fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs’ – the grandiosity of Galloway’s pompous language was in inverse proportion to the misery Assad inflicted.
None of this concerned Muslim voters in Rochdale. Opposition to Israel was all that mattered.
There’s an argument doing the rounds this morning that Labour’s disastrous performance was just a blip. Galloway is a narcissist, it runs, who won’t last long. Muslim voters responded to his anti-Iraq war campaign and gave him victory in Bethnal Green in the 2005 general election. He was out by 2010. He won the Bradford by-election in 2012, and the voters rejected him in the 2015 general election. The voters of Rochdale will almost certainly do the same later this year.
Labour sounded confident this morning. ‘George Galloway is only interested in stoking fear and division,’ the party told the BBC. Labour will ‘quickly’ select a new candidate for the upcoming general election, the spokesman said, adding the party wants to deliver the ‘representation and fresh start that Rochdale deserves’.
I am sure they will. Labour’s poll lead is so great, it can afford to be confident. But Rochdale raises a question about how Labour will deal with the obsessions of a large section of the left once in power, which are unlikely to go away.
The best way to think about it is to look at the threats to MPs and the endless denunciations of Keir Starmer. They are absurd on the face of it. Labour is in opposition. It has no influence over the Israeli government or Hamas whatsoever. What it says is supremely irrelevant.
But the explosion in rage makes sense if you see the anti-Starmer campaign as an attempt to bolster the chances of independent left-wing candidates and to change party policy. For one, Jeremy Corbyn, kicked out of the party in October 2020 will be thinking of running in Islington North after Galloway’s victory.
To date it has been a mess. Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer’s biographer says that the Labour leader and his team had simply not thought about Israel when they gave Benjamin Netanyahu a blank cheque after the Hamas atrocities in October. My guess is that they were so appalled by Labour’s anti-Semitism scandals of the 2010s they swung to the opposite extreme.
You can see how extreme they became by watching a YouTube clip from four months ago of Starmer telling Nick Ferrari that Israel had the right to ‘cut off power, cut off water’ to civilians in Gaza. It has been played tens of thousands of times by Starmer’s opponents. Now he has spoken to the Israeli left, government figures in Qatar and Jordan, and the Biden administration and has embraced a standard centre-left suspicion of Netanyahu as a result.
I could go on about the Labour leadership’s naivety. How can you not have a settled view on the Israel/Palestine question when Israel so dominates leftist thinking? When, indeed, supporting Palestine is now for a large faction on left almost the definition of what it means to be left-wing? It’s astonishing.
It is equally astonishing that due diligence did not spot that the official Labour candidate held views about Jews that weren’t just anti-Israel but were simply racist. Now Labour has moved on, and I can easily see a Labour government offering full diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian Authority as a compromise.
But that is no more than a Conservative government is likely to do. The activists are crying ‘from the river to the sea’ on the streets, and the Labour left do not want compromise. They want Labour to be like France’s largest left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), which is for electoral, as well as ideological, reasons pro-Islamist.
LFI repeatedly declined to call Hamas a terrorist group (a conclusion the EU came to about Hamas a full 20 years ago). Their initial communique on 7 October used Hamas’s own language about itself, calling the attack ‘an armed offensive by Palestinian forces’ that came ‘in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem’.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party can’t win a presidential election any more than Corbyn could win a general election. And as with Corbynism, its foreign policy is not just about Palestine but includes a softness towards Vladimir Putin and the other dictators George Galloway salutes. On the other hand, LFI captures a large chunk of the Arab-French vote because it is pro-Islamist. And no French left-wing party can succeed without that vote.
Labour is so far ahead at present it can shrug off the mess in Rochdale, and predict with assurance that it will retake the seat at the election. It can say it has learned from its mistake in underwriting Netanyahu and his extremely right-wing government and moved on.
In power, however, things will be different. What Labour says and does will finally matter, and elements in its electoral coalition will be making their demands very clear. Labour hopes that Joe Biden’s ceasefire initiative will work, and that Israel will just go away as an issue. That hope, as anyone who knows the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict since 1948 will guess, is likely to be vain. This is the conflict that never goes away.
Comments