Could George Galloway win the Rochdale by-election?

A look at the Rochdale by election and George Galloway's chances of actually winning

The by-election in Rochdale was called as a result of the death of the local MP Tony Lloyd in January.

It’s been a while since George Galloway popped up to fight a parliamentary by-election (Batley and Spen 2021), and much longer since he won one (Bradford West 2012), but he’s reappeared to contest the Rochdale seat as the "anti-genocide candidate".

Galloway is a notorious self-publicist and he burned an awful lot of trust on the left when he publicly stated that he would vote Tory in the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary elections because he put his anti-independence sentiments above all else, however he’s always been consistent in opposing imperialist war-mongering and criticising the brutal Israeli apartheid state, which sets him apart from most of the other candidates.

Rochdale has become a strong Labour safe seat since the collapse of the Lib-Dems in the area. They held the seat from 1972 to 1997 and again from 2005 until 2010, but since then they’ve completely collapsed finishing in 4th in 2019 with just 7% of the vote.

This time out they’ve fielded a guy called Iain Donaldson who repeatedly stands for the Lib-Dems in local elections all over Greater Manchester. Last time out he won just 100 votes in the Hopwood Hall ward finishing a distant third. He’s perhaps most famous for allegedly doing a Nazi salute at former Lord Mayor of Manchester Afzal Khan in 2013.

Fielding a placeholder candidate like Donaldson suggests the Lib-Dems have given up on winning back what was the stronghold of their parliamentary pervert Cyril Smith for two decades.

Labour’s candidate Azhar Ali caused a huge controversy by claiming that Israel allowed the October 7th Hamas attack to happen in order to "Green light" their invasion of Gaza.

It’s absolutely beyond doubt that Israel did allow the October 7th attack to happen because Israeli intelligence knew about the Hamas "Jericho Wall" plan to attack across the Israeli border wall at least a year beforehand. However it’s a leap to go from the incontrovertible fact that Israel knew what Hamas was plotting, to stating that they deliberately allowed it to happen in order to justify their genocidal retaliation, when their inaction could plausibly have been down to Israeli arrogance and incompetence instead.

You need evidence to state things like that, and as yet there’s none to prove that the Netenyahu regime deliberately allowed the attack in order to enact revenge, rather than through their own negligence.

Ali has apologised to "the Jewish community" for his comments, which seems more antisemitic than his original comments because he’s blatantly conflating British Jews with Israel. However, despite this grovelling apology, the Labour leadership have still distanced themselves from their own candidate, and it’s highly unlikely that any Labour big-hitters are going to show up on the Rochdale campaign to be photographed alongside Ali.

It’s even worse for the Green Party whose candidate Guy Otten totally withdrew after a load of his vile Islamophobic tweets surfaced. It was far too late to replace him, or even remove his name from the ballot papers, and it reflects terribly on the Green Party that they picked a raving Islamophobe as their candidate, especially in a constituency with a significant Muslim population!

Farage’s Reform UK have picked the disgraced former Labour MP Simon Danczuk as their candidate, despite the fact he was booted out of the Parliamentary Labour Party after sending sexually explicit texts to a 17 year old girl.

Considering all the fuss the extreme-right love to make about grooming and child sex abuse, it’s astonishing that Reform UK would pick a creepy sex pest like Danczuk as their election candidate.

It’s quite surprising that the Tory candidate Paul Ellison actually has some decent credentials. He’s a local guy who is heavily involved in Rochdale in Bloom and Keep Britain Tidy. However he’s standing as a representative of a political party that’s absolutely devastated Rochdale’s finances with their ruinous austerity cuts to local government funding.

If he really cared about Rochdale, surely Ellison would stand against the Tories and the destructive austerity agenda that’s seen Rochdale suffer amongst the 20 worst affected local authorities in the entire country since 2010!

There are a couple of notable independent candidates. Reverend Mark Coleman is a Just Stop Oil activist who has been arrested a couple of times and even jailed for non-violent protest, and Billy Howarth who is a Parents Against Grooming activist (hopefully he takes the opportunity to call out creepy sex pest Simon Danczuk if nothing else).

Finally, the Monster Raving Loony candidate Rabin Rodent Subortna says he’s aiming to get zero votes.

All in all it looks like a race between Galloway and a Labour candidate who has been disowned by his own party leadership, with the outside chance of the Tory sneaking in through the back door on a typically low turnout by-election.

It’s a long time since George Galloway stormed to by-election victory in the 2012 Bradford West by-election, but given the widespread public anger at Britain’s complicity with Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the identikit pro-privatisation pro-austerity agendas of the three main parties, who’s to say he can’t pull off another shock in Rochdale on February 29th?