George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election, defeating the incumbent Labour Party who finished a distant fourth.
So, how about that arrival of the Muslim vote into British politics then? Quite the opportunity to build a little party carrying what, 15 to 20 seats? Because there are constituencies with highly concentrated populations, the thing needed to gain seats in a FPTP system by constituency.
Get it out in the open where it can be clearly seen. First past the post will do that.
Labour thought it could use 7th century savagery to guarantee it a number of safe seats. But primitive “thinking” like this cannot be appeased (not that the labour party is any more advanced).
Galloway, the turd that won’t flush. Damn, he’ll be right at home in wastemonster then!
Any Muslim party would break apart because of the internal stresses that they bring from their homelands. Pakistanis don’t even get on with Pakistanis of the wrong tribal group. They don’t actually care that much about Gaza, for example, other than in very general terms.
What would it stand for? If just boilerplate Leftism, the the Labour’s Party does that. If extremist Islam, then it won’t get much support.
I’d be relatively sanguine about it; of course, the “Muslim vote” will naturally and inevitably settle on a single, well-organised candidate in each seat where this is plausible.
I can’t possibly see how the “Muslim vote” in any given constituency would end up splintering between the Islamic People’s Front and the People’s Front of Islam, nor any possibility that debate over which version of Islam is correct might lead to a breakaway Islamic Popular People’s Front, even before some of the other effects come into play.
The left’s plan to elect a new people working out alright?
And of course, Galloway won with 12,000 votes and 40% of the poll. The electorate was about 30,000 ( total possible just under 80,000 )
In the last GE, the winning can didate scored double Galloway’s vote. The electorate then was arounf 50,000 with a 60% turnout.
A lot of people stayed at home didn’t they ?
I think that I would have too when faced with that shower on the paper
I wonder who George will be nominating for that peerage you insisted on.
Go to Tower Hamlets to see the future.
@Jason Lynch
I don’t buy that. You’ve already got enough Muslims sitting on local authorities & there’s little sign of them going tribal there. In this situation they have more to agree about than disagree about. To them, it’s them & us & us is the them.
Ok, Gorgeous George gets to pretend to be a cat again. Don’t like him, but:
The Board of Deputies of British Jews has labelled George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election a “dark day for the Jewish community”.
Is it really? I have a higher opinion of Jews than they do, possibly. I don’t think Jews are at risk from a Scottish guy in a hat.
The representative body said Mr Galloway should be “shunned as a pariah” by other MPs after he sealed a shock return to the House of Commons.
Do we think that trying to suppress the results of elections is going to help anybody in the long term? Or even the short?
It said in a statement: “George Galloway is a demagogue and conspiracy theorist, who has brought the politics of division and hate to every place he has ever stood for Parliament.
Stop trying to make me like George Galloway.
The thing is, voters in Rochdale completely abandoned Labour and their Muslim candidate. He came fourth! That shouldn’t be happening according to normal political swings. But things aren’t normal:
Independent candidate Dave Tully came second with 6,638 votes, beating all of the big political parties. The Conservatives came third with 3,731 votes while the Lib Dems came fifth.
So all three legs of the Uniparty triskelion got kicked away. What’s the Urdu word for realignment?
Jonathan: For the Labour Party as currently constituted, no. For the Left, it seems to be going swimmingly.
Steve,
“So all three legs of the Uniparty triskelion got kicked away. What’s the Urdu word for realignment?”
The problem is, he’s still part of the Spend Even More Money On Wank Party, rather than the Taking a Chainsaw To the State Party
“The independent stood on a range of local issues such as the reinstatement of a maternity ward, a crackdown on speeding, and for support for local businesses. He also advocated for funding to secure the future of Rochdale AFC and more backing for local amateur sports clubs across the borough.”
WB – Yes, nothing will be solved because of the Rochdale vote. It’s not obvious that our political system can solve problems anymore.
But even though Labour are massively ahead in the polls, Rochdale shows that they aren’t popular and their voters aren’t locked in. They’re not winning, the Tories are just losing that badly. 60% of the local electorate didn’t support any of the candidates on offer.
At last, the enemy in plain sight.
(Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour trilogy, can’t remember which one.)
Crap night for Reform, coming sixth with 6% of the vote (1,968) and actually down two percentage points.
Even the Tories managed 12%. With all the issues in Rochdale it really ought to be the kind of place Reform can pull something off, especially with it being a byelection and Labour going AWOL like that. So not good news for anyone hoping the Tories get wiped out and replaced by a proper right-wing party, rather than just almost-wiped-out then the cockroach-like survivors spending a decade or two out of power before the pendulum swings again.
I’ll be surprised if Reform win any seats at the next election – if they win more than ten I’m going to be astonished. If they do win seats, where are they going to come from?
Anon – Reform didn’t help themselves.
They ran with an ex Labour MP who was suspended for sexting a 17 year old. Richard Tice has so far shown exactly none of the campaigning skills Nigel Farage is famous for.
Even today, Tice is crowing to the media about replacing the Tories:
The country is crying out for a new small ‘c’ Conservative Party and Reform UK is that party.”
I submit to you that the country is not, in fact, crying out for another Conservative Party. As evidence to support that, note that Rochdale just elected a populist outsider whom the establishment fear and hate. (Sure, he’s not our populist, but still…)
Reform is far too conservative for its own good. Bland men talking about doing 90’s conservative stuff isn’t moving the needle.
Have a feeling the Brexit Euro election was Nige’s last hurrah. He might well come back for an encore but because he’s Mr Brexit at this point, it does reduce his ability to cut through to broader swathes of the electorate.
If there’s going to be a serious right-wing, not necessarily “conservative”, resurgence, sadly it’s going to have to capture a decent share of the voters who think Brexit is crap. I’m very pro-Brexit, the problem is the electorate isn’t, even if there isn’t the mood to reverse it. I’m not talking about winning over Brussels-loving vegans here. I mean the kind of people who think Brexit is crap and full of broken promises because all politics is crap and full of broken promises – there’s a potent anti-politics energy out there of the same kind that swung the referendum for Brexit, but how do you tap in to it?
“We just need to do Brexit properly!” may be true but isn’t going to convince many people who are already sick of it. Someone needs to fight on fresh issues and forge a fresh agenda. That person cannot be Nige – who has the talent, but too much history -and it cannot be Tice – he just isn’t up to it.
If someone can get me a chainsaw I can just about play Milei. But I’ve not the charisma to be successful in politics, even as a chainsaw waver.
Anon – George Galloway is a Brexiteer.
I don’t think it’s so much about the issues, I think it’s about “whose side are you on?”.
Or to put it another way, all politics are trending towards identity politics.
Anon said some good things there. Not really my problem now but I was an original Brexiteer. Member of the Referendum party in the 90s. I now wish the referendum had never bloody happened. Not saying it’s made any difference to me. I thoroughly severed my links to the UK in ’08. But looking from afar at what’s happened after ’16, what a complete waste of time & effort. Why didn’t any of them have a plan of what to do if they won?
BiS – Don’t blame people in 2016 for not knowing what we know in 2024: that we’re playing a rigged game, our supposedly democratic form of government is a fraud, and we’d have to literally chase MPs around Westminster to make them care about what we want.
It still seemed plausible in 2016 that politicians might broadly respond to the incentive of being elected. It seemed plausible in 2019 that an 80 seat Conservative majority might finally be enough to get us some conservative policies.
You live and learn, eh?
Brexit is the greatest victory Britain has achieved since Mrs Thatcher was PM. I’m still proud of us for winning the referendum, those magnificent 17 million Fuck Offs. We need more of that sort of thing, not less.
“we’d have to literally chase MPs around Westminster to make them care about what we want.”
But then, they’d change the rules to avoid having to confront an issue, indent for additional security to keep the plebs away from them and then resign when it all gets too hot.