George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election. The new MP for the town announced the result as a ‘shifting of the tectonic plates’ in his acceptance speech, but that’s not an accurate way of describing what’s just happened. It’s more like a blip and an unpleasant one at that. No one who hopes for the best out of British politics can look at Rochdale with any joy.
Certainly not celebrating this morning will be the Reform party, who came a shocking sixth, behind even the Liberal Democrats. Richard Tice was campaigning heavily in the constituency himself yesterday, with various Reform figures having talked up the candidate Simon Danczuk’s chances of winning. To get a measly 1,968 votes after all that, barely clinging on to the deposit, is laughable.
This is an ugly result that few who care about this country and its democracy should be cheering about
There is a lot of talk right now about Reform causing the Conservative party a huge headache at the general election. Based on this result, Tory campaigners might want to reconsider how seriously they take that threat from here on out. Those hoping for some sort of Reform-European Reform Group realignment of British politics after the general election, one capable of winning a majority at some point, might want to do some heavy thinking also.
Azhar Ali, the former Labour candidate, deserved to lose: his fourth-place finish seems about right, in retrospect. Where Ali ended up finishing doesn’t say anything much at all about the Labour party or if they will win the general election. It would have been interesting to know how they would have done against Galloway had they had a decent candidate that they didn’t have to disown, but unfortunately, we’ll never know. It’s easy to say that Labour would have won it with someone that was still actually their candidate come polling day, but given Galloway got almost 40 per cent of the vote, it feels difficult to be too confident in that assertion. The Tories, at least, can feel good about coming in third, ahead of the ‘Labour’ candidate.
George Galloway will now make a return to the House of Commons. He almost certainly won’t be there for long, less than a year. But he’s back for now nonetheless, and that return will be speculated on endlessly. So what does his return as an MP truly mean, for British politics, for the Rochdale, for the country?
The Rochdale result will be used to talk up the rising tide of political Islam in British politics; some will go even further down this road and use Galloway’s return to say that British democracy faces an existential threat to its very existence. Another, related angle that will be chewed over by the political and media class is the degree to which this result threatens Labour’s ability to win the general election due to losing Muslim and young leftist voters to a challenger like Galloway and his party. There is also the questions of whether Labour needs to move closer to a pro-Palestinian position to stem this flow of voters away from them.
Labour certainly shouldn’t overreact to the Rochdale result. For a start, Galloway is a one-off in British politics, a far-leftist who nonetheless was happy to stand beside Nigel Farage and Peter Bone during the Leave campaign. He is unique – Galloway himself also cannot stand in more than one place at any given time.
Galloway has demonstrated an ability to win by-elections with a corresponding inability to hang on to those constituencies come the general election. He has also never demonstrated an aptness for taking the political draw he himself possesses and rolling that out into a political party capable of winning in multiple seats. No, the only lesson Starmer should take out of this whole event is that his office needs a much, much tighter hold on candidate selections from here on out, taking the process away from constituencies completely if he can.
Rochdale itself deserved better than this by-election and being Galloway’s latest pit stop in British politics. Labour needs to make up for the Ali debacle by finding the best possible candidate to put up against Galloway in the general election, particularly given Labour are likely to win the seat back at that point. It’s the least the town deserves.
This is an ugly result that few who care about this country and its democracy should be cheering about. It has been a chastening episode for Starmer and his party, one they will hopefully take the right lesson from. Galloway managed to win in a field of unattractive options to provide himself with a platform upon which to espouse upon his many awful political positions. We can only hope that the general election comes around sooner rather than later, so that this electoral blip can become nothing more than what it deserves to be: an obscure pub quiz question.
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