George Galloway

His official portrait as an MP, 2024. Yes, this guy was, unfortunately, an MP.

“”[T]he "anti-war" movement has as its new star a man who is openly pro-war, but openly on the other side. A man who supported the previous oppressors of the region—the Soviet army in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq—who supports its current oppressors—Bashar Assad and his Lebanese proxies—and who still has time to endorse its potential future tyrants in the shape of the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere. Galloway began his political life as a fifth-rate apologist for the Soviet Union, but he has now diversified into being an apologist for Stalinism, for fascism, and for jihadism all at once! All this, and Jane, too. One’s cup runs over.

—Christopher Hitchens, September 2005.

How an Empire ends U.K. Politics

God Save the King?

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George Galloway (August 16, 1954–) is a carpet-bagging Scottish politician, radio and television host and the former leader of the defunct British left-wing (lack of) Respect Party. He was elected to the House of Commons seven times, four times for Labour, twice for Respect, and once as leader of the Workers Party of Britain. He was expelled from Labour in 2003 partly for advocating troops should disobey orders during the Iraq War. His luck ran out when he was not re-elected at the 2015 general election with a large swing vote against him but, after a series of disappointing (read, dismal) results in the meantime, he managed to gain nearly 22 per cent of the votes in a July 2021 by-election. He later won the 2024 Rochdale by-election with 39 per cent of the vote (Labour had disowned its own candidate), but lost his seat a few months later in the general election. Gorgeous George is often considered a carpetbagger who, according to Guardian contributor Marina Hyde in 2021, "sprays" division rather than simply sows it.

Galloway supports Palestinian independence and Irish independence, but opposes the independence of his native Scotland. In fact, he is quite happy to team up with loyalists and UKIP-types to do so, using RAF style roundels in his electoral material. British nationalism in that sense is a-okay for George, but not the Scottish variety. It is fair to say that George Galloway never met an enemy of the West that he didn't like. Galloway is a long-standing supporter of Hezbollah.

Political career

Born and raised in Scotland, Galloway has made great play of his Irish Catholic family roots. However, he has never been known as a particularly devout Catholic when it comes to divorce (he is on his fourth marriage). He supports Irish republicanism, but has allied with Ulster loyalist (Protestant supremacist) types in recent years because he loathes Scottish independence even more. He has no Muslim background (except through travel, and his last three marriages), but is all too happy to milk the Muslim vote, especially in England.

George Galloway has been politically active since the 1960s, becoming secretary of the Constituency Labour Party in Dundee as a teenager and chair of Scottish Labour when he was only 27 years old. He was first elected as the MP for Glasgow Hillhead at the 1987 general election, where he gained the seat for Labour from Roy Jenkins of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). Scottish Labour was notoriously corrupt at the time, the Dundee end especially so, and Galloway was ironically one of the Labourites involved in cleaning up the city.

Early in his time as an MP, Galloway managed to survive a February 1988 vote of no confidence by the Glasgow constituency party. In 2003, he was expelled from the Labour Party for his outspoken criticism of Tony Blair's leadership; his opposition to the Iraq War led him to incite British troops to disobey orders, one of the reasons for his expulsion. He would later obliquely call for Blair's assassination.

“”"Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber, if there were no other casualties, be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq?" Galloway responded: "Yes it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it, but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. "It would be entirely logical and explicable, and morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq as Blair did."

Galloway, using campaign methods which became all too familiar, was elected at the 2005 general election as the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow in East London; standing as a candidate for Respect Coalition, an alliance of the far-left and Islamists, and defeated Oona King of the Labour Party by 823 votes. In 2006, he appeared on the reality TV programme Celebrity Big Brother, where he pretended to be a cat sipping milk at one point and hugged house visitor Jimmy Savile at another. In 2007, he was briefly suspended (for 18 sitting days) from the House of Commons for criticisms of the House and a Select Committee, which had investigated his financial arrangements after The Daily Telegraph alleged that he had received kickbacks from Iraqi sources under a UN aid programme (allegations which were found libellous after legal action by Galloway, though that should be taken with a grain of salt, as English libel law puts the burden on the defendant to prove the statement true).

In March 2012, again capitalising on religious tensions, Galloway won a by-election in Bradford West - a seat previously held by Marsha Singh of the Labour Party - and defeated Labour's candidate Imran Hussain with a majority of 10,140 votes and a large swing in his favour. (It was reversed in the next general election with a large swing against him.) This election was fought partly with a bizarre campaign stressing that Galloway doesn't drink alcohol, making him a better Muslim than Hussain, and a speech in which Galloway implied that people who voted for his rival would be punished on Judgment Day.

In 2014, just before the Scottish Independence Referendum, George Galloway was invited onto a bizarre edition of the BBC's Question Time along with Nigel Farage. The audience consisted of 16/17 year old Scots, who were being allowed the vote for the first time in Scotland - neither Farage nor Galloway were elected representatives in Scotland, and mainly there to bolster the BBC's intrinsic unionist bias and make for TV ratings. Galloway showed how in touch he was with Scotland, when he told the teenagers they could smoke at sixteen, even though the Scottish Government had raised the smoking age to eighteen many years before.

In May 2015, Galloway lost his seat in Bradford West with the Labour candidate Naseem "Naz" Shah regaining the seat, with a majority of 11,420 votes.

In 2024 Galloway announced that he would stand in a by-election in Rochdale, triggered when incumbent MP Tony Lloyd died of leukaemia. As the candidate, Galloway focused on the campaign against the ongoing Israel–Hamas War, and the failure of both major parties to call for a ceasefire in the war. Despite receiving unwelcome endorsements from the likes of Nick Griffin, Galloway's campaign was boosted when Labour abandoned its own candidate, Azhar Ali, for comments he made about Jewish people and the 7 October attacks. With Ali out of the race, Galloway won with almost forty percent of the vote. Galloway then said gay relationships "aren't normal," and kids "shouldn't learn about them." He was apparently so unpopular as an MP that he was voted out at the general election, a mere 54 days later.

Support for repressive regimes

In January 1994, Galloway visited Iraq and met Saddam Hussein and concluded a speech while there by praising the then leader of Iraq: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability". Galloway has always said he meant the Iraqi people while speaking directly to Saddam Hussein himself using the honorific "Sir".

Galloway defended the government of Iran, especially during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier, asserting that the country does not execute people for homosexuality and that the boyfriend of Mehdi Kazemi, a gay Iranian asylum seeker, was instead executed for "committing sex crimes against young men." Galloway's argument was condemned by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who said that Galloway had provided no evidence for his claim and was merely purveying Iranian propaganda. Needless to say, at the time, Galloway was being paid by the Iranian government with his very own television show on the Ministry of Truth Press TV, the Iranian version of Russia Today.

Galloway described Syria in November 2005 as "the last castle of Arab dignity" and believes that Bashar al-Assad will be victorious in the current conflict.

Galloway will support any regime, no matter how vile, to pander to his constituents. To wit: while the conflict in Darfur was still going on, he made excuses for Omar al-Bashir's regime, claiming that the charges of genocide were actually part of an American conspiracy to stop Sudan from trading with China. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, he has also said that the whole affair in Darfur is really Israel's fault.

Galloway has been accused of supporting Saddam Hussein and allegedly profited from Iraqi oil dealings, while decrying the United States for doing the same. Galloway fell out with Christopher Hitchens because of this, having previously described Hitchens as "that great man of letters" and "the world's greatest polemicist." He went on to say that Hitchens was "the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug", though he did not elaborate on when in natural history he had observed a slug transform into a butterfly as it tends to be caterpillars that do that. Galloway also described Hitchens as "a drink-sodden, ex-Trotskyist popinjay," prompting Hitchens to respond "Are you saying I can't hold my drink?" and "only some of which is true".

While Galloway usually relies on weasel words to defend dictators in Muslim countries, he makes no effort at all to hide his admiration for Communist regimes. In 2002, he told a Guardian interviewer he "did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life." Of Fidel Castro of Cuba barking "viva Fidel!" during televised interviews. He has often reproduced on his Twitter account an image of the two men hugging. As of the 2020s, he leads the Workers Party of Britain whose policy document proudly states that "[w]e defend the achievements of the USSR, China, Cuba, etc" and refers to the "positive historical legacy of the Soviet Union."

Views on rape

Galloway has a history of making embarrassing statements, but he reached truly self-destructive levels in August 2012 when he weighed in on the accusations that Julian Assange is guilty of rape. Galloway said that "I think that Julian Assange's personal sexual behaviour is sordid, disgusting, and I condemn it" but also argued that Assange's alleged action—having sex with a sleeping woman after previously having consensual sex with her—did not constitute rape. Galloway was widely criticised for this statement: Salma Yaqoob, then leader of Respect, left the party, while the National Union of Students banned Galloway as a "rape denier."

Despite condemning Assange's behaviour, Galloway later held him up (alongside the anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon) as "two of the world's greatest."

Antisemitism

Atzmon appeared on Galloway's Sputnik television programme on RT in early January 2015, although Galloway had insisted two years earlier that "I don't debate with Israelis" when walking out of a debate at Oxford University. (The other speaker possessed dual British-Israeli nationality, to which Galloway has an objection.) Atzmon, he insisted, is "politically fascinating". He admitted being "enthralled" by Atzmon's book, The Wandering Who? and said he and his wife had read a chapter each night commenting "we went to bed thinking of you." The Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust, has described the book as "probably the most antisemitic book published in this country in recent years."

George Galloway's defences of Palestine has often crossed the boundary into antisemitism. In June 2019 he was sacked from a presenting role at radio station TalkRadio due to an antisemitic tweet about Tottenham Hotspur football club (which traditionally has a large Jewish following; also, he'd broken the station's code of impartiality by covering for official Moscow in a failed assassination attempt not long before). Earlier in 2019, he had compared complainants about the Labour Party's antisemitism to the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels. Although Galloway praised Jewish anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, he also defended former Labour politician Ken Livingstone when Livingstone was accused of antisemitism, Galloway saying that in a sense "Nazism and Zionism were two sides of the same coin". He has also campaigned against Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, saying "Tom Watson has done more for Israel than he has done for West Bromwich", his constituency. He is known for his staunch support for the terrorist organization Hezbollah, in 2006 saying: "I am here to glorify the Lebanese resistance, Hezbollah, and to glorify the resistance leader, [Sheikh Sayyed] Hassan Nasrallah."

Brexit and British/Scottish 'Unionist' hypocrisies, and assorted nuts

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, Galloway has expressed support for a hard Brexit and various right-wing political figures associated with the movement. He gave his support for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party in the 2019 European Parliamentary elections. He was also seen hugging former Breitbart editor and Trump advisor Steve Bannon in Kazakhstan in May 2019.

In March 2021, Galloway was accused of "race-baiting" after attacking Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf (of the Scottish National Party) on Twitter. He said in part: "Well #Humza you’re not more Scottish than me. You’re not a Celt like me." Yousaf responded: "You haven’t managed to ever get elected to the Scottish Parliament like me. And I suspect the voters of Scotland will show you the cat flap again come May 6."

In the May 2021 elections for the Scottish parliament at Holyrood (which uses a mixed-member proportional voting system [as additional member system in the UK politics]), he was a list candidate of the Alliance for Unity, which supported a continuing union with the rest of the UK. He advocated a vote for the Conservative candidate in the geographic element of the vote for the same reason. Despite previously in October 2018, he had tweeted: "Me?? Vote Tory??? I’d sooner poke my eyes out mate."

In the Batley and Spen by-election, held at the beginning of July 2021, he stood as a candidate of the Workers Party, another new initiative of Galloway which is connected to the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a tiny far-left group that supports the government of North Korea and defends the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. He had a derisive result in Scotland, but gained nearly 22 per cent of the vote in the Batley and Spen by-election in third place.

The brother of Andrew Tate, Tristan, donated to George Galloway's campaign during the February 2024 Rochdale byelection; the Tates had no role in Galloway's loss of the seat at the general election four months later. At that election, Tristan gave his support to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, and Farage won his first ever election to the Westminster parliament.

Wikipedia voo-doo doll incident

During May and June 2018, Galloway feuded with an English-language Wikipedia editor who modified Galloway's Wikipedia biography nearly 1,800 times, adding numerous verifiable facts Galloway was not happy with. Active as User:Philip Cross and based in the UK, Cross and Galloway attempted to stick pins in their Twitter virtual effigies, following Galloway's offer of £1,000 for his "positive identification". The Russian news media covered the story many times, implying Cross was really a British government agent. The Times journalist Oliver Kamm, himself accused of being Cross, dismissed the conspiracy theory asserting that they were "baseless and damaging rumours" and defended Cross.

Interesting quotes

“”I was re-elected despite all the efforts made by the British government, the Zionist movement and the newspapers and news media which are controlled by Zionism.

—George Galloway, MP. You'll be reassured to learn that he isn't an anti-Semite.

“”South Korea exists because America invaded Korea, killed millions of people, divided the country and continues to garrison South Korea with military bases, nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological weapons.

—George Galloway, MP, wishing that Korean people could be abused as one nation.

“”There have been achievements in North Korea … They do have a cohesive, pristine actually, innocent culture. A culture that has not been penetrated by globalisation and by Western mores and is very interesting to see.

—George Galloway, MP, praising North Korean cultural purity.

“”Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners — Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. Some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters…

—George Galloway, MP, attempting to rile up the mob with rape metaphors.

Things that make George happy

• Alex Jones,
• Nigel Farage,
• Gilad Atzmon
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
• Suicide bombing
• Bashar al-Assad
• Pervez Musharraf, until late 2001
• Saddam Hussein, from 1991 onwards
• The Taliban
• The Soviet Union
• Vladimir Putin
• Islam
• Sharia law
• North Korea
• Hezbollah
• Hamas
• Gamal Abdel Nasser
• Appearing on TV and radio
• Euro-free Scotland and UK
• A non-independent Scotland

See also

• Left Fascism — The closest thing George has to a coherent ideology.