What could happen if George Galloway wins the Rochdale by-election?

Soon the voters will go to the polls in Rochdale, in what is proving, without hyperbole, to be the most bizarre by-election in recent decades. The most striking aspect, of course, being that the Labour candidate, Azhar Ali, who had an excellent chance of holding the seat, lost the support of his party in a row over antisemitism. So now the Labour Party is not campaigning at all, and is offering its supporters no guidance as to whom they should vote for – but formally, Ali remains the “Labour Party candidate” on the ballot paper.

Theoretically, he could still get elected. The intervention of the pugilistic George Galloway and his Workers Party of Britain is the other great novelty, though he has done this sort of thing before. In any case, and despite the circus, the by-election may tell us a few things about what’s going on in politics; and the result may have consequences far beyond the town...

The bookies’ favourite is Galloway, and it seems things have been going his way. He appears to have the momentum, and the numbers. But, given the loss of a proper Labour candidate and the proximity of a general election, the turnout may be extraordinarily low – which would mean a weak mandate for Galloway.

When the previous MP for Rochdale, Tony Lloyd, who passed away last month, was elected in 2019, he commanded more than half the vote. Since then there has obviously been a significant swing to Labour nationally, which means that, even on a low turnout, Labour should have won the seat easily and probably with an enhanced share of the vote. In fact, it would have been a fairly dull by-election but for the reverberations of the war far away in Gaza and the arrival of Galloway.

Even in the strange circumstances of Labour denouncing its own candidate, the party will probably still receive a substantial share of the vote, and there’s an outside chance it might win. It would be rather like one of those horses in the Grand National that loses its jockey but somehow manages, riderless, to be first past the post.

Ali, despite his fall from grace, will still have his name in the ballot paper next to the magic words “Labour Party”, and people are free to vote for him. A vote of say 25 per cent or more with only a nominal candidate (and more than the Tories) might be considered a bit of a perverse triumph for the party in the circumstances. At any rate, it’s an intriguing psephological experiment.

There will be a fuss. According to Galloway: “I stand on the brink of an historic by-election victory, which will shake the walls of Westminster, which will change history.” That is typical overstatement, but it will be a “moment”, and political attention will turn once again to Labour’s divisions. From Galloway’s perspective, he will have taught Starmer a lesson.

Much as his on-and-off parliamentary career has been so far, Galloway will be a noisy, high-profile voice never far from controversy. He will be a thorn in Labour’s side and a focus for dissent. If Labour returns to government and Galloway manages to hold Rochdale, he’ll be a nuisance, and perhaps rather more than that if he foments trouble with the Labour left – possibly in an informal partnership with Jeremy Corbyn, if the former Labour leader fights and wins his seat as an independent socialist.

Yes, but it has to be interpreted carefully. Rochdale has a relatively high Muslim population. They are not a homogenous bloc, but, before the latest conflict in the Middle East, they tended strongly to vote Labour. That support has now fallen, locally and nationally, because of the stance of the party leadership on a ceasefire – some say by around half.

However, in electoral terms, that will have only a limited immediate impact, because those disillusioned ex-Labour supporters are not turning to the Conservatives, but to the Greens, Lib Dems, independents and, maybe, to some Gallowayites where they stand. Some won’t vote at all.

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Most seats with a large Muslim population have large Labour majorities anyway, and the chances of Labour losing any seats in the next general election are slim. If Galloway were able to recreate the old socialist-Islamic coalition of Respect, he might have more of a chance of building a wider political movement. (That grouping grew out of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain.)

Looking further ahead, there will be some marginal seats where, in a fairly good year for the Tories, an intervention by an independent “Muslim candidate” or some agent of Galloway’s might split the Labour vote and let a Conservative in: indeed, this almost happened when Galloway stood at the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election – before the collapse in Conservative fortunes – where Labour’s Kim Leadbeater squeezed home with a majority of only 323. So the significance of a Galloway win, such as it is, is in the longer term.

If, as is speculated, a ceasefire is soon to be agreed in Gaza, the issue should gradually subside, and Muslim voters will drift back to their original allegiance. That is what happened after similar episodes of disaffection, such as at the 2005 general election, when many on the left defected from Labour to the Liberal Democrats in protest against the war in Iraq; the trend was not permanent.

All over the place. Reform UK has some hopes of coming second. It has a former Labour MP for Rochdale as its candidate: Simon Danczuk, who sat for the constituency from 2010 to 2017. He has the advantages of name recognition and knowing the area, but the disadvantage of standing for a party associated in some minds with Islamophobia – not to mention the fact that he was suspended from the Labour Party in 2015 after it emerged he had exchanged explicit messages with a 17-year-old girl, which terminated his Commons career.

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The Tories’ candidate has been on holiday for some of the campaign, and can’t have been assisted by the Lee Anderson fiasco. The Green Party candidate has been disowned by his party for past comments on social media, and has basically withdrawn from the contest. There is a Liberal Democrat, but he seems unlikely to be able to capitalise on the mixed political heritage of Cyril Smith, the town’s outsized but latterly discredited MP, who was elected in a 1972 by-election and stood down in 1992.

This is an even more interesting question than whether he’ll win the by-election. It’s assumed that the circumstances of this by-election make it such a one-off that Labour would be bound to win the seat back at the general election with a more acceptable candidate. That may be to underestimate Galloway, and the strength of feeling among those who feel that the Labour leadership has let them down.

Much will obviously depend on who Labour picks next time. Interestingly, Galloway lost Bradford West, which he’d unexpectedly won in a 2012 by-election, to Naz Shah, who is of Pakistani heritage, at the 2015 general election; Shah had actually voted for Galloway in the by-election. She may have her flaws, but a similarly credible candidate could restore Labour’s fortunes in Rochdale with a fresh start.

What indeed. The people of Rochdale deserve far better than the kind of terrible publicity that they’ve had to endure in recent years, up to and including coverage of this chaotic and bitter by-election, with Galloway being a particularly divisive force in the town.

Indeed, only a few days ago, former British prime minister Liz Truss travelled to a conservative political conference just outside Washington DC and declared, in answer to a remark by Trump associate Steve Bannon about grooming gangs and the “hero” Tommy Robinson’s activities in Rochdale, that the town is about to return a radical Islamist to Westminster as its MP. She gave the distinct impression that Rochdale was sending a terrorist to bomb Westminster.

More substantively, Rochdale, like many other towns across the North and the Midlands, remains “left behind”, and has visibly neither been “levelled up” nor “built back better”. The by-election, sadly, is not going to change that.