Galloway and Farage are a contrasting study in
what it takes to ‘shift the tectonic plates’ of British politics
March 1,
2024
Henry Hill
George
Galloway and Nigel Farage offer an interesting contrast in the different ways
one can succeed, and fail, in British politics when one is outside the main
party system.
Farage has
never, despite repeated attempts, managed to be returned to Parliament. Yet he
built UKIP into such a power in the land that the Conservatives were levered
into holding the referendum on our EU membership. The aftershocks of that
tectonic shift in British politics are still playing out.
Galloway,
on the other hand, not only sat for 18 years as a Labour MP but has since been
elected no fewer than three times to the House of Commons for a minor party:
for Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and Bradford West in 2012, for Respect, and
now for Rochdale, under the colours of his Workers Party of Britain.
Yet is it
true that his latest victory represents a “shifting of the tectonic plates”
away from Labour, as he claimed this morning? That very much remains to be
seen.
This
by-election, after all, could almost have been designed for Galloway. Not only
was it held in a strongly Muslim seat at a moment when Gaza has been thrust to
the top of the political agenda, but there wasn’t even a Labour candidate.
Whilst
undoubtedly a strong result – a majority of almost 5,700, on just shy of 40 per
cent of the vote – it is nonetheless much less decisive than that he secured in
Bradford West, where his majority stood at over 10,000 after securing 56 per
cent of the vote. Yet Labour’s Naz Shah trounced him at the general election
three years later.
Past
failure is no guarantee of future performance, of course. There will not be
three years to wait until the election this time, and events in the Middle East
will almost certainly undermine any attempt to shift the focus back towards
domestic politics. There will also likely be a lot of attention paid to
Labour’s candidate after its (eventual) expulsion of Azhar Ali, making it that
much harder for Sir Keir Starmer to quietly run another communalist and draw
the sting of Galloway’s campaigning on Gaza.
Perhaps,
too, his new guise as the Workers Party will prove better able to win over
Labour-inclined voters less motivated by Palestine; Galloway certainly seems to
have been running two parallel campaigns this time.
Even so,
the danger to Sir Keir Starmer seems, from here, relatively limited. Galloway
has never yet managed to return a second Member of Parliament for any of his
personal vehicles.
Contrast
that with UKIP. It won two by-elections, albeit in both cases after the
defection of the sitting MP, but more significantly it managed to come second
in a hundred seats in 2015. Had the referendum not taken place, its entry into
Parliament as a significant force was very likely. It also secured a large
number of council seats and representation in the Welsh Assembly.
That
combination of sustained campaigning, a slow but steady advance into elected
politics, and a clear demand – a vote on the EU – is what allowed UKIP to so
dramatically shift the tectonic plates of British politics.
Galloway
has been, to date, a personal force: a skilled and dogged campaigner, and a
genuinely powerful orator of the sort modern politics no longer produces. Even
if Labour win back Rochdale at the general election, it wouldn’t be terribly
surprising if Galloway were to return to the Commons again at some point.
But the
ingredients for UKIP’s real success aren’t there. There are relatively few
seats with the demographic profile he performs best in; even if the Workers
Party can do a better job than Respect of growing into more than a personal
vehicle, Labour’s exposure to such a challenge is much more limited than was
the Conservatives’ to Farage’s – and thus, so is Galloway’s capacity to shape
the political agenda.
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