The Labour Party recently lost a parliamentary district after a chaotic election campaign that symbolized the anger in British politics over the war in Gaza. George Galloway, a left-wing firebrand, won the seat in Rochdale, north of Manchester, with 12,335 votes. He appealed directly to the district’s Muslim voters, who make up around 30 percent of the electorate and are angry about the war in Gaza. Mr. Galloway’s victory followed a chaotic campaign for Labour, which was forced to disown its own candidate, Azhar Ali, after a recording revealed that he had made offensive comments about Israel. The debacle was a particular embarrassment for Mr. Starmer, who has made a big push to root out the antisemitism that afflicted Labour under the leadership of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Adding to the sense of chaos, one of the other candidates was Simon Danczuk, who won Rochdale for Labour in the 2010 and 2015 general elections. He was suspended by the Labour Party in 2015 for sending explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl. This time, he ran as a candidate for Reform U.K. That hard-right party is a successor to the Brexit Party, which campaigned for Britain to quit the European Union and was once led by Nigel Farage. The night belonged to Mr. Galloway, one of the mavericks of British politics. Known for his fierce and at times inflammatory…
2024-02-29 22:40:34
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