Where populists rush in: How George Galloway harnessed the Middle East to derail an election in forgotten Rochdale

Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist.

ROCHDALE, England — Even among the post-industrial towns of northern England, Rochdale, the setting for the ugliest by-election in memory Thursday, has a haunted quality. The town hall is a Gothic palace that looks as if it could, if asked, drip blood.

Local people say Adolf Hitler loved this building, and wanted it moved to Germany. It’s a myth, but they believe it, because Rochdale feels cursed.

It was “Ground Zero” for the abuse of children in Britain for many years: the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith was a notorious abuser and there have been many grooming scandals including a number in which members of the British-Pakistani community raped local girls. In 2020 an infant died of mold inhalation in a dank flat.

On Thursday, with a crawling inevitability, Rochdale embraced populism, electing the maverick socialist George Galloway its new MP on a Free Palestine platform. His slogan was: “For Rochdale. For Gaza.”

The result itself may get swept away by a U.K. general election within months but the race gives a taste of how crisis in the Middle East plays into a toxic mix of economic decline and social depravation.

The ground is fertile for populism: a cost-of-living crisis, failing public services, and an air of irrevocable decline. “Look!” a man told me on the high street, “Pound shops, paper shops, charity shops. Everything’s wrong. We want to be working.” He adds longingly: “If there were factories I wouldn’t be talking to you now, would I?  I’d be working, and I’d be proud. It’s never got better. If people are smiling, I’ll give you a pound for each one.”  

There is almost no faith in conventional politics here. “I’ve never voted in my life,” a gentle-faced woman told me, bewildered to be asked for her preference. “I don’t know what’s what.”

As if to meet her, this by-election, which was called when the opposition Labour MP died in January, was chaotic. The noisiest candidate was the successful Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain, an anti-Zionist expelled by Labour in 2003 for outspokenly opposing the Iraq War. He wore a jaunty hat, and expressed his customary Oedipal loathing for the party that betrayed him: this is the third seat he has taken from Labour, though he never stays long.  

He attracted young Muslims galvanized by the Gaza War — Rochdale is 20 percent people of South Asian descent — and disillusioned white voters. He was not the only populist: there was the Rightwing Reform UK candidate Simon Danczuk, a former Labour MP for Rochdale suspended by the party for asking a 17-year-old girl if she wanted him to spank her bottom: he came sixth, and his party accused Galloway supporters of intimidation.

The Green candidate Guy Otten was suspended by his party for posting anti-Muslim comments on X — he said the Quran was “full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage with genocide and slavery … not fit for the 21st century.”

There were no female candidates. With harassment of British politicians growing daily, I doubt any would dare.

An election like no other

As for the mainstream parties, in a seat which hasn’t elected a Tory since the 1950s, the governing party Conservative candidate barely appeared. His election material had “Conservative” written in a tiny font and he spent some of the campaign on holiday in Egypt.

The Labour offering, Azhar Ali, was suspended from his party when a secret recording emerged of him making antisemitic remarks about Jews and the media, but because it was too late to remove his name from the ballot paper he remained the official candidate. Though Labour is expected to win this year’s general election, and will probably retake Rochdale then, its office was shuttered, and its activists sent home.

In the sodden high street, I met an independent candidate, Mark Coleman, former vicar of Rochdale and an environmental activist. He stood because of Labour’s “ever weakening commitments around the environment.” There is, he said, “great sadness at the way Rochdale used to be, sadness there that politicians can exploit. We are a place that has been forgotten.” He reminds me that even McDonald’s abandoned the town center; a stinging rebuke.  Galloway, he says, has promised a Primark in the town: jam today, jam tomorrow.

Coleman introduced me to two (unofficial) Labour activists: a retired engineer and his friend, an Ethiopian asylum seeker. They spoke of failing public services — the man claiming asylum says he was sexually assaulted by a male council-adjacent worker — and growing political violence. The older man was heckled by young Galloway supporters while posting flyers. “They said I had blood on my hands.” He complained to the council but received no reply.

The most visible candidates on the campaign trail were Galloway and Danczuk | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

He embodied the problem that now dogs Labour leader Keir Starmer, who supports Israel and has vowed to vanquish antisemitism in his party. Having voted for the suspended candidate, Ali, the man says: “What he has done is just voice the opinion of a lot of South Asian people. We really want to give Starmer a bloody nose on this, show him that he’s let us down.” He goes on: “He’s eradicated so-called antisemitism in the Labour Party at the expense of antagonizing Muslims. A plague on all your houses,” he ends.  “You caused strife.” In the end, Ali came fourth behind Galloway, local businessman David Tully, and the invisible Conservative.

Racism flies around Rochdale with the wind: I have never heard anything like it. I think everyone is frightened; they face a future they are not prepared for, and embrace the simplicity of a Middle Eastern conflict brought to them by Tiktok. Young Muslim men with no money dress as gangsters: do they even inhabit their own lives?

Older white men cursed them from the pubs. “Rapists, the lot of them,” said one; almost everything else he said is unprintable. I met a man who told me, “I respect them [Jews]. Although they are in very limited numbers quantity wise, they have control in all the powerful economies in the world. The thing which is very common with them [is] wherever they go they want [to be the] center of attention.”

I met an 18-year-old Galloway voter by the town hall. “Fuck Israel,” he said. “No Israel. Wipe them out.” I asked him: what should happen to Jews outside Israel? He thought, then said: “Wipe them out as well”. Why? “Because they support Israel.” He had no other political opinions. Perhaps he did not need them.

Tension comes to Rochdale

I met another local independent candidate, William Howarth, who was politicized by surviving sexual abuse. He runs a hub and shop for survivors in view of the former social services office where he was sexually assaulted as a child. “This is why I picked here,” he said. “So, I could look at it every day and say — ‘I won. You didn’t beat me. I beat you. I’m still here and most of you have gone.’”

“Half the town is on the breadline,” he said. “There are more people in the food bank queues than there are tins on the shelves. We’re past breaking point.” His shop attracts people who can’t afford other charity shops: its customers are 70 percent Muslim, he added, and, he claims, there was no real tension until Galloway came.  Or rather, it lay below the surface, and bloomed with his coming.

Howarth feared race war if Galloway won. “I can promise you that because people are angry,” he says. “Palestine is a problem. It’s not a Rochdale problem. I believe it’s going to create a breeding ground for the far right and the far left.”

Until now, he says, “we were getting on, no race wars, nothing like that.” He says he was stopped by a Galloway supporter who threatened to cut his throat if he campaigned in Muslim areas. He went anyway: “I’m a Rochdale boy, we don’t put up with that shit.” What happened? “Nothing.” After I left, Howarth rang to say he was racially abused by a white man on the street, who screamed: “Do you not love Palestine, you dirty white Zionist?”

Haworth knows that his campaign attracts the far right. He tells them not to come, and he informs the police. He reported Galloway to the police for shouting the antisemitic taunt “From the river / To the sea” outside the town hall.

Haworth fretted that Galloway’s younger supporters believe he can stop the war. “That’s the message. Stop telling [that to] these people, because they are buying it, and they are getting very emotional about it.” They believe in him absolutely. “We need George Galloway,” said a young boy with the gentle eyes of a child. “He’s going to help us. He’s a kind man. He’s going to help all the people who have no money.”

On the ground

The most visible candidates on the campaign trail were Galloway and Danczuk.

Galloway ran his campaign from a Suzuki car dealership, which is both darkly funny, and a metaphor for the way in which democracy can feel like another glib consumer choice. Do you want a car and a dream? Or just a car? I stood outside the dealership, and looked at the tiny pictures of Galloway hung on the railings, and thought, as I always do when covering a Galloway campaign: did your mother pay any attention to you at all?

I went out with Galloway canvassers: they are drawn to him, they said, for socialism. The Labour Party, “isn’t a home for socialists,” one said. “It’s more like a trap for socialists.” I am assured that Galloway’s plan for Israel involves nothing murderous, and that if you have less than half a million pounds he is on your side.  He brings real trouble for Starmer, who, though well ahead in the polls, now faces a threat from the left of his party. Galloway will galvanize them from inside parliament and inspire independent pro-Palestine candidates to stand against Labour in Muslim areas across the country.

Danczuk told me Galloway is, “a chancer and a grifter and he should go back to wherever he’s come from.” It didn’t happen. I viewed a death threat posted on Danczuk’s Facebook page. “If you guys ever see this bald motherfucker, I’m going to fucking put one in his head,” it said. The man lived two doors from where Reform campaigners were staying. He posted under his real name and was arrested. Danczuk hired security and his wife left the constituency.

I went on the Reform bus in the rain. Danczuk took the mic and handled it like a comic: perhaps his levity was too much? “Hello young man,” he said, “good to see you, get your steps in, hello, have a good day, take care, goodbye, good to see you, enjoy your school day.” He waved at schoolchildren, who waved back. “You alright, sir? Have a good day. Take a right here, Trev. Hello sir, give us a wave!”

When we drove past the Galloway HQ in the second-hand car dealership, Galloway supporters waved too. Danczuk stopped broadcasting and told me, happily: “This is real campaigning!”

I’m not so sure. We were driving at speed past people, which is not the same as listening to them. Galloway listened fiercely — and was rewarded.