It is a dark day indeed when George Galloway once again gains a platform in parliament to vent his views

Never knowingly understated, George Galloway, the freshly recycled member of parliament for Rochdale, declared in his speech at the count that his victory will “spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of parliamentary constituencies”.

There is some doubt about that, even though the issue of the war in Gaza – and Sir Keir Starmer’s attitude to it – has undoubtedly distressed many voters. Sir Keir has lost support for his “balanced” approach, and not just among Muslim voters (though they are not some homogenous bloc that can be shepherded around by Mr Galloway).

The young and those on the left are also especially moved by the plight of the Palestinian people, and disgusted by Israel’s conduct of the war. Even so, these groups will not be turning to the painfully Islamophobic Conservatives, and that is the crucial electoral factor that will spare Labour serious harm.

Some perspective is also needed even as Mr Galloway’s stentorian voice echoes out so menacingly from Lancashire. Gaza, whether a ceasefire is soon agreed or the war continues on its present pitiless path, will not be the major issue in the British general election of 2024.

The approaching “landslide”, if there is one, will belong to Sir Keir and his party, notwithstanding their abject failure to present the people of Rochdale with a candidate worth voting for, or even one not worth voting for. If they remedy that then the tectonic plates in Rochdale may yet shift against Mr Galloway; such movements are indeed unpredictable.

So the latest Galloway comeback – his long political career has a Lazarus quality to it – is not going to stop Sir Keir becoming prime minister. Nor will Mr Galloway’s latest political vehicle, the so-called Workers Party of Britain, win many or even any other parliamentary seats.

That, however, is to underestimate the wider, more insidious and pernicious impact of Mr Galloway and his acolytes on public life. Mr Galloway is a product of his times – and, like Mr Farage, with whom he has so much in common in terms of tactics, instinctive populism, and smart opportunism, he is also an instrument driving the longer-term fragmentation and polarisation of politics.

When this takes on a more sectarian flavour – as when one or other of the main parties attempts to attach and align itself to religious or racial groups – that is a dangerous and novel phenomenon in the UK.

It cannot be healthy for Muslims, Jews, Hindus, various overlapping ethnic minorities and the white population to drift towards identification on those kinds of grounds with a particular political party. The end result of such a trend would be towards communalism and the kind of politics that so long disfigured Northern Ireland, Glasgow and Liverpool, for example.

Just as the Conservatives suffer from an unacknowledged problem with Islamophobia and the parasitical predations of Reform UK, so too does Labour find itself suffering from a recrudescence of the virus of antisemitism – and its political base preyed upon by Mr Galloway.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both poisoning the body politic, and, as the nation faces more years of economic difficulty and the scapegoating politics of decline, the far left and hard right look set to prosper. Even outside parliament, Mr Farage and his mirror-image twin, Mr Galloway, can inflict enormous harm on our multicultural society.

It is, as some Jewish leaders have warned, a dark day when this Mr Galloway once again gains a platform in parliament to vent his views. He has, in his time, formed some unsavoury political relationships, not least with Vladimir Putin (albeit distantly, from the studios of the Russia Today/Sputnik television channel); and, infamously, the extraordinary praised he heaped upon the “indefatigable” Saddam Hussein when he met him in Baghdad some 20 years ago.

Though some may feel that he is a doughty advocate for the Palestinian people, they should also understand that he has some distinctly illiberal views on Ukraine, trans rights and Brexit, which he favoured for rather old-fashioned primitive socialistic reasons.

This highly rebarbative character is not as nice as he sounds – and the same may be said of his deputy leader, Chris Williams. Mr Williams is deputy leader of the Workers Party, and a former Corbynite Labour MP suspended from the party for saying that Labour had been “too apologetic” about the antisemitism scandal. He refuses to condemn Hamas for the atrocities against civilians carried out in Israel on 7 October.

One of the politer words used to describe Mr Galloway is “divisive” – and it’s actually more of a euphemism for his combative style of politics. It’s no accident, either, that his posters have featured him with fists ready for a punch-up. When he gets to Westminster he will be there to cause trouble, and, as he declared himself, to make Sir Keir’s problems a hundred times worse.

In that quest, Mr Galloway will have some success. It is striking that he has singled out some particular areas of the country, such as the West Midlands, for a push. He targets two safe Labour-held seats with significant Muslim communities in Ilford North and Bethnal Green and Bow – represented by Wes Streeting and Rushanara Ali respectively – both loyal to the leader.

The Gallowayites can’t win those constituencies but they can (and will) be an irritant and distraction both locally and nationally. It is intriguing, to say the least, that Mr Galloway will have Jeremy Corbyn formally “introducing” him to the Commons when he comes to take his seat.

Currently suspended from the party he recently led, Mr Corbyn’s political instincts are not so far removed from Mr Galloway’s, and the possibility of future collaboration between them must have crossed their minds. The pair were always men of the left: Eurosceptic, sympathetic to Russia, hostile to America, and long-term advocates for Palestine, to put it mildly. It would certainly be logical, and might attract the Momentum crowd to the Corbyn-Galloway alliance. Sir Keir might have mixed feelings about that.

In any event, what Sir Keir and his colleagues cannot allow themselves to do is to be pushed into more extremist positions simply to appease Mr Galloway. That is the catastrophic error made by the Conservatives with regard to Mr Farage over the past decade or so, with calamitous consequences – such as Brexit.

Just as the Tories can never out-Farage Mr Farage, so Labour will never be able to match Mr Galloway’s extremist instincts. This is no time for Labour to abandon the centre ground and the national interest.