Who is George Galloway?

As we go to press, George Galloway is the bookmakers’ favourite for the Rochdale by-election (29 February), and has been backed by the Socialist Party. But he is not fit to become an MP yet again.

He first became an MP for Labour in 1987. He was at best soft-left, by no means an outstanding rebel, with a strong Stalinist tinge such as had been relatively common among MPs for some time. As he has developed a distinctive individual profile as an “anti-imperialist”, he has become a bad smell the left seems unwilling to get rid of.

While on a delegation of European MPs to Iraq in 1994 he spoke the words that should follow him to his death, to Iraqi dictator and butcher Saddam Hussein. “Sir, we salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability.” While presenting Hussein with a pennant from Palestinian youth in the West Bank he added “we are with you” and then in Arabic, “Until Victory! Until Jerusalem”.

We called for his local Labour Party to dump him. But he and others portrayed his pro-Saddam war-mongering rhetoric as a matter of being a great fighter for the Palestinians and a trenchant critic of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In reality Galloway has been a mercenary self-promoter, serving different imperialisms of his choice against others: Iraq and Iran against Israel and the US. Russia against Ukraine.

From 1996 he got money from two successive Pakistani governments to run a newspaper in London (East) aimed to back Pakistani policies in Kashmir. The paper folded after a Newsnight exposé.

He was kicked out of the Labour Party in 2003 for calling for troops to defy orders in Iraq. In 1998 he had launched the Mariam Appeal, notionally to pay for the cancer treatment of an Iraqi child and then provide other medications to Iraq. Galloway was able to spend much of the money raised on overseas trips by himself, which included Christmas lunch with Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister Tariq Aziz. When challenged about the funding, he said that most of it came from the United Arab Emirates or from a businessman trading with Iraq, and he didn’t know the businessman got money from the Iraqi regime.

Even before he became an MP, his time as general secretary of War on Want, 1983-7, ended with criticism of his spending. Later, when he became MP for Bradford West (2012-5) he pocketed another £265,000 from TV presenting. He earnt £150,000 from a previous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.

His prominence in the Stop the War coalition was at its height in 2003, and then he helped to break up the Socialist Alliance, a short-lived coalition of almost the whole radical activist left. The SWP, which was the biggest component in the Alliance, wooed Galloway. Workers’ Liberty denounced that wooing. At the time, almost all other left groups denounced us as “sectarian” for doing so, but we believe we have been vindicated.

With a new electoral vehicle, Respect, or rather, “Respect (George Galloway)”, Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 general election. He turned against the SWP, which had provided foot-soldiers for Respect, in 2007. The rump Respect which he ran after that wound up, after scandals, in 2016.

While a Bradford MP he also suggested that Julian Assange could not have been guilty of rape because these allegations were not rape, “as anyone with an sense can possibly recognise it”. He added: “I mean, not everybody needs to be asked priort to each insertion”. He has long been opposed to abortion rights and has proudly used his stance to show that he is “not as left wing as you think”.

He had paid little attention to Bradford or to parliament since being elected. Losing the seat to Labour in the 2015 general election. He has been active as a media figure on RT, the Russian state international broadcaster, and since 2019 as the head of the “anti-woke”, Stalinoid Workers Party of Great Britain.

We hope he will not be able to reactivate his parliamentary career from Rochdale. Whatever about that, he has no place in the left.