Rochdale by-election result reflects Gaza anger

BRITAIN has more than three million Muslims from many cultural backgrounds. It has become customary for politicians to say, “the vast majority of Muslims are hardworking, decent and law-abiding, but there a small extremist fringe”.

My guess is most Muslims in Britain are pleased George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election. This is not necessarily an endorsement of Galloway as a human being. It is just that he reflects the anger and frustration they feel about the continuing death toll in Gaza, which is now said to have crossed 30,000 (according to the local health ministry). It is generally accepted by western governments that most of them are women and children.

As Eastern Eye has reported, Muslim voters feel they have been abandoned by Labour. This enabled Galloway to say in his victory speech: “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza. You will pay a high price for the role that you have played in enabling, encouraging and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Gaza, in the Gaza Strip.”

The new member for Rochdale is not one for understatement: “This is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates, a score of parliamentary constituencies, beginning here in the northwest, in the West Midlands, in London, from Ilford to Bethnal Green and Bow.

“Labour is on notice that they have lost the confidence of millions of their voters who loyally and traditionally voted for them generation after generation.”

Galloway’s strategy has not changed. After winning Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, where Bangladeshis voted for him, he told Tony Blair, then prime minister: “All the people you have killed, all the lies you have told have come back to haunt you, and the best thing the Labour party can do is sack you tomorrow morning.”

Rishi Sunak

When he won Bradford West in 2012, Galloway spoke of the “Bradford spring” and accused Blair of “swanning around making millions, instead of facing trial in the Hague for war crimes”.

Sir Keir is very confident of winning the next election, but will he be denied a majority because a high proportion of Muslim voters will not support Labour as they have traditionally done in the past?

Maybe it is in his interest to be seen to be pushing for an “immediate ceasefire”.

It could be argued that Galloway’s victory in Rochdale is good for the Tories, in the way any success enjoyed by the right-wing Reform party led by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice undermines the Conservatives and helps Labour.

However, in his speech outside No 10 last Friday (1), prime minister Rishi Sunak targeted Galloway by declaring that “it’s beyond alarming that the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate that dismisses the horror of what happened on October 7, who glorifies Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the BNP”.

Rishi’s vision of a more harmonious Britain included personal touches: “You can be a practising Hindu and a proud Briton as I am.”

He also said: “But I fear our great achievement in building the world’s most successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined. There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.

“I stand here as our country’s first nonwhite prime minister, leading the most diverse government in our country’s history to tell people of all races, all faiths and all backgrounds it is not the colour of your skin, the god you believe in or where you were born, that will determine your success, but just your own hard work and endeavour.”

The reality is British politics has been poisoned by the Israel-Hamas war. And the Muslim wish to see an immediate ceasefire is probably shared by most ordinary people in this country – and perhaps the world (judging from views expressed in the UN General Assembly). This has nothing to do with being anti-Semitic. It’s just that people find images of dead and mangled children very upsetting.

What would Mahatma Gandhi have made of Hamas’s extremism on October 7 and the response of the Israeli defence forces? The Israeli government says the war must go on until Hamas is completely destroyed. But an immediate ceasefire would also be good for Israel, whose DNA is being altered – and not for the better – by adopting a policy of war without end.