George Galloway has announced that he would like to return to the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader. The former Respect MP for Bradford West sees Corbyn as a comrade in arms and would feel at home alongside him. He told LBC this week:
‘I think if Jeremy were to win everyone on the left would rejoin the Labour party. That’s the part of the problem that saw us part solved. I’ve always been a Labour man I consider myself real Labour. I’ve never been a Marxist or a Trotskyist or any other kind of -ist other than a Labour-ist.’
And asked if he would contemplate a return to the Labour fold if Corbyn wins, Galloway said ‘definitely, pretty damn quick. I think that 100,000s of people will,’ adding that ‘by 2020 a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party would have one million members.’
But it is not quite that simple: Galloway is running as an independent candidate for Mayor of London. Labour will announce the result of its leadership contest on September 12 and its mayoral candidate on September 13. There is no time for Galloway to enter the race to be the official Labour candidate, even if the party accepts him back into the fold after his post-Iraq War ejection in 2003. Therefore, Galloway would either have to drop out of the mayoral race — or stay out of his old party until the contest is over.
Coffee House understands that Galloway has no intention of dropping out of the London Mayoral race and intends to see his Mayoral campaign through to May 2016. He is pleased with his progress his campaign has made so far — plus Galloway has doubts about whether the Labour hierarchy would ‘allow’ for Corbyn to win in the first place. Either way, a Galloway return to Labour in the immediate future is unlikely.
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