George Galloway and the Great Experiment

Over across the pond, the left has enjoyed slightly more success since World War II, and therefore has a little bit more of an institutional structure. One of these institutional structures are the labor unions that still provide much of the funding to the Labour Party to this very day, and several of these unions are in the hands of literal comrades.

Over the years, one such comrade has been a fellow by the name of George Galloway. In 2005, George Galloway ran a campaign under the ephemeral Respect Party, appealing to the anti-imperialist left in the critical swing district of Bethnal Green and Bow who felt they had nowhere to go during a byelection. He won outright, destabilizing internal Labour politics in the process. This hastened the end of the Blair-Brown years and the beginning of the era of anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn.

Well, with Corbyn thrown under the bus by candidates for building roads in the Falklands Polly Toynbee, Nick Cohen, and their pals in the bourgeoisie's paper of record the Guardian, warmed-over Blairite Keir Starmer has taken over Labour. He's proceeded to stand for nothing, letting the Tory government of Boris Johnson get to his economic left several times without effective pushback. (That in itself is another tale I've waited a while to tell, but the story of our Tory quarries' poring over hoary theory isn't core to the moral of this story so I'm foregoing it; sorry but more later for sure.)

Anyhoo, the fall of Corbyn has left Galloway and his ilk on the Labour hard left with zero influence in the party now. On that basis, Galloway decided to resort to the tactic that had already successfully dickpunched the Blairites once before: running in a byelection as the candidate for a throwaway lefty party. The contours were going to be a little different this time though, and Galloway was going to go in a direction either pioneering or heretical for a leftist, possibly both.

This byelection involved a seat in Labour's "red wall," a string of seats in the culturally distinct north of England, where once stood the kingdoms of Rheged and Strathclyde, later the kingdoms of Northumbria and Jorvik, and much later the electoral kingdom of Labour. Just as various conquerors of this land have built walls to keep out the barbarian hordes, so was Ramsay MacDonald's red wall once built in the manner of the Hadrian or Antonine walls.

And as in the manner of the Hadrian or Antonine walls, the red wall too eventually collapsed to ruins. Labour lost these seats to the Tories in the last election, as the left has abandoned the working class for the middle class, and as the Tories have become more culturally similar to the working class over time. (This process playing out in America is why Ohio is now solidly Republican, as an analog for my American readership.)

This particular seat, Batley and Spen, is not just a part of the old Labour red wall. It's also, like the last byelection George Galloway contested, a site of much Muslim immigration historically, typically from the former British Raj. Galloway has intuited that his anti-imperialist credentials will carry the most resonance with people who have historically felt the business end of empire, and who are largely co-religionists of the people we're invading today.

Interestingly enough, within the boundaries of modern Scotland but also this broader old North is a Lowlander region called... Galloway. George can't possibly be of no relation whatsoever; he's of this land somehow. With those local roots and all the legitimacy of a lifetime of loud anti-imperialism, George Galloway set up a Workers' Party to contest the byelection.

In an interview with a Tory paper, Galloway confessed that he initially was just hoping to play spoiler, to draw enough Labour votes off to let the Tory win the seat. But as the campaign progressed, his internal polling had revealed to him that he had a real shot of winning the election outright, and so he played to win it.

What had Galloway done to move himself from Ralph Nader territory to Jesse Ventura territory? Here's where the story really gets interesting, and possibly heretical.

First, let's head off the heresy bit. I don't agree with the particular path he ended up choosing. I also know that any potential critics of my theorizing here are going to be broadly pro-identity politics and broadly pro-cancel culture. Identity politics is what the demsoc and the fascist have in common; communists focus on class. Where identity gets wrapped up in class, as it did in American slavery and segregation, we care about identity, but only in pursuit of class goals. But I do know that there's going to be criticism of his tactics.

Why? Because he decided to adopt a gripe common among Muslim parents in the area, that their children in public schools are being "brainwashed" by "trans ideology." I disagree with the notion, but I also recognize that it's not just possible but common for different identities to be in conflict with one another. Muslims raised in a culture that's not as accepting of trans rights may well be rightfully put off by the insistence that they adopt an alien culture that they don't yet understand to be their own, or else. I also know that many Muslims have historically held a much more nuanced view of trans rights than is often realized in the West, and that assuming that all Muslims must be naturally transphobic is itself Islamophobic.

On the merits, George Galloway demonstrably took the wrong side of the issue of trans rights. But were I a British citizen in that byelection, I think I'd have voted for him anyway.

Why? Because I might like the notion of upholding every right no matter how esoteric or limited to a certain segment of society, but we're all oppressed on the basis of class, and that pretty damn viciously. And I know it's heretical for me to consider this as a validator, but his campaign manager is himself gay. "But I have black friends!" is often a tired excuse for bigotry, but given a person who has been at the forefront of the anti-imperialist cause for my entire life, I'm legitimately willing to give him enough trust to overlook what's probably an electoral ploy in order to empower him to eviscerate the banks' favorite Labour leader.

Because, and regardless of the repugnance of his public stance on trans rights one has to admit it, Galloway's strategy almost worked. The byelection ended in a Labour victory by the hair of their chinny chin chin, but it was a three-way race and Galloway was a force in a way that these sorts of candidates rarely are. Any future project of economic radicalism that hopes to win power has lessons to take from this byelection.

First off, maybe that particular issue was not a proper one for a leftist to take, but the effort to reach out to social conservatives in general was proper. We need to find ways to appeal to social conservatives that also don't violate our own values, and that is much more possible than most people think. In America, gun rights is one such issue of agreement between us; if you go far enough left, you get your guns back. In Britain, Brexit is another such issue; it was the issue that tore the red wall down in the first place as Corbyn's Labour was torn in two directions on the issue and ended up going in the Remain direction, infuriating the red wall Brexit voters in the process. Meanwhile, Johnson's Tories offered a simple message: to deliver the Brexit that the voters had already voted for. After being a Remoaner for the last three years in order to advance politically, Starmer has now finally accepted that democracy should decide the issue that it decided three years ago, now that Corbyn's not around anymore to be beat over the head with it.

In any case, there are all kinds of issues where communists can apply the mass line to social conservatives. There's also no downside, as the liberal media has demonstrated throughout the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn that it will do its utmost to trash any truly anti-imperialist as the equivalent of the Nazis. It's all disingenuous lies, but the Guardian's constant reporting of imaginary antisemitism in Corbyn's Labour that its own shitlib allies mouthed in the first place put a lot of low-information working class voters off of Labour. So if we're going to be tarred with the brush of reaction by actual reactionaries whatever we do, we might as well make hay of it and try to mass line the workers fooled by reactionary bourgeois ideology while we're at it. Desperately begging the correct-thinking people of the world to think we're one of them is a losing strategy against these disingenuous media lies, especially when one is innocent. Better to just own the crimes you're not guilty of, and then at least the criminals will be on your side.

I mean, this fake antisemitism bullshit got literal Nazi chud Andrew Anglin to endorse Jeremy Corbyn. (Sidenote: does anyone else find it absolutely hilarious that the Daily Stormer had to relocate its domain name to the literal domain of the Soviet Union, because apparently a dead communist nation is the only place that will let them do business?) Anglin may be a literal Nazi chud, but at the time he had a mostly conservative readership. At no point should we actually do an antisemitism, obviously, but being silent in our own defense as the bourgeois media lies its ass off about us can win us credibility with these chuds and their readership nonetheless. There's a reason Steve Bannon said he's happy whenever the media calls him and his candidates racist; nobody in the working class believes the liberal media anymore anyway so there's no downside among 85% of the population, while among the actual 10% of the country that approves of the Klan, your numbers tick up for free.

Still, I bet if Galloway had found some other way to mass line the social conservatives, he might have achieved his objectives. The lies of the liberal media isn't why some comrades decided not to hold their nose and endorse him; trans rights is a non-negotiable issue for many.

Secondly, if his goal was to triangulate and win, he miscalculated. Although he came close to winning, he did not. If anything, it may be that he stole enough votes from the Tories to let Labour in, not the other way around. Because as the red wall has abandoned Labour, Boris has tried to capitalize on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by rebranding the Tories as a workers' party and delivering on the priorities of the people who he hopes will become part of the Tory base. Government money is being lavished on "levelling up" the North, using infrastructure spending to reduce the inequalities between the rich southern "home counties" and the poorer North. It's not ultimate communism tomorrow, but it's a more tangible program of improvement for these voters' lives than anything Starmer's talking about. This is why the workers of the North are going blue while Labour in the region has to rely on the middle class to prop them up, and the tiny bourgeoisie elects the tiny Liberal Democrats and Greens.

So if Galloway's program was economic radicalism and social conservativism, well, there's already a party on offer running on a milder version of that; they're called the Tories. Galloway enjoyed massive success eating their lunch, but in the end neither working class candidate took the seat, and Keir Starmer breathed a sigh of relief that night.

All the same, Galloway didn't run for nothing, and Starmer can't keep breathing easy. Galloway did peel off a significant chunk of normally Labour-voting Muslims, a constituency probably out of reach to Boris Johnson's Tories given his past comments about them, despite their shared social conservativism otherwise. (It's similar to how the socially conservative Latinos would probably become Republicans en masse if the Republicans would just accept them, but they won't yet because their own social conservativism won't permit it.)

Starmer's Labour has an obvious problem with the Muslim vote that nobody was willing to talk about in public before this byelection ended. If the Tories can figure out how to put those letterbox comments in the past, they have a chance to get the Muslim vote. As it is, they will have to choose between getting the pro-Israeli vote or the pro-Palestinian vote. Under Boris they're clearly angling for the pro-Israeli vote, but Starmer as a class avatar for the bourgeoisie doesn't have the manufactured problems with Jewish people that Corbyn did, and so he or people like him leading Labour is a much likelier leader of the pro-Israeli vote than Boris in the long run. Maybe it'll be the Tory leader after Boris who brings that one in; but in the long term, rare is the Tory who refuses to stoop to something that gets him elected. The Tories will inevitably reorient around Palestine and the Muslims as Labour does the same with the Zionist state and Jewish voters, and George Galloway has sped that process along.

The last fruit of his run is you and I, here on the left, talking about the electoral possibilities and potential ethical pitfalls of reaching out to the social conservative vote. My own Marxist-Lincolnist line has long embraced the usefulness of such "performative axisship," but it's nice to see it tested mostly straightforwardly in the real world and not come back lacking.

I think I'll sum up this article by bringing up a different minor British party in a different election. In the last European parliamentary elections that the UK would ever participate in, the newly-formed Brexit Party swept the vote, wiping both Labour and the Tories off the map, while the Lib Dems, Greens, and failed politician Chuka Umunna's personal vehicle Change UK hoovered up the Remoaner vote. And one of the candidates in Nigel Farage's latest flash-in-a-pan-yet-successful protest party? A former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, doing herself a praxis and getting Britain out of a neoliberal capitalist empire. She and people like her and George Galloway are our future, if we're to have a future at all. We'd best figure out how to make that work for everyone involved.