Rochdale Loses Its Own By-election (Again)

First Cyril Smith, then Simon Danczuk, now George Galloway

If it were raining bloody fur coats, Rochdale would get hit by the only flying shithouse in Britain.

Gorgeous George’s “Muslim” leaflet.

It’s difficult to convey to the non-British reader just how calamitously shit Thursday’s Rochdale by-election result happens to be. Some background is therefore necessary.

Rochdale is located in Greater Manchester and was once a wealthy Victorian mill town: it did very well out of the Industrial Revolution. It was also the birthplace of the modern cooperative movement (where a business structure developed in Roman times was skilfully repurposed as a successful vehicle for working-class financial uplift).

There are still many fine old buildings to be found locally: once rich enough to put them up, Rochdale was later too poor to knock them down and replace them with hideous “New Town” brutalism. There is some evidence Adolf Hitler coveted Rochdale’s spectacular Victorian Town Hall, which is why (allegedly) it wasn’t bombed during WWII.

Rochdale spent many years as a Labour-LibDem marginal, itself politically unusual in a UK context. Most marginal LibDem constituencies are held against Conservatives, and are in wealthy parts of the country: the former party is where the latter’s voters go when they’re annoyed with Team Blue. Rochdale is poor, and in the 2016 Referendum voted heavily Leave. The LibDems, recall, were so pro-Remain they wanted to scrap the 2016 Referendum result without even troubling to hold a second referendum.

Meanwhile, angry Shire Tories have always been more likely to vote Liberal Democrat than Labour. In that sense, the LibDems are both a brand and a bath of protest: you step in, stretch luxuriantly, and hop out when you consider yourself clean. People can abandon the Tories, vote Prosecco Party, and consider themselves a better Tory afterwards. I know this because, in the time (before Brexit), I sometimes did it myself.

Rochdale now, however, presents a picture of sad decline, driven into the ground thanks to decades of profligate local councils, de-industrialisation, Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs, and a string of inept and predatory MPs. And I mean predatory in the proper sense, not “he fiddled his expenses”.

Cyril Smith—the gross individual depicted below—was Rochdale’s (apparently) immovable Liberal MP for decades. While he was MP (and even before he was elected), he molested boys at local children’s homes—including ones he’d helped found.

Yes, this is Cyril Smith, erstwhile MP for Rochdale; no, it isn’t Photoshop

In some respects, Smith provided a warning of the extent to which choosy-choice liberalism really can degenerate into licence. His misadventures fall on a Liberal Party continuum that includes party leader David Steel turning a blind eye to Smith’s criminal activities and the extraordinary Jeremy Thorpe “Dog in the Fog” scandal.

You may have noticed—if you’ve followed reporting on the Rochdale result—that Reform UK ran sixth, polling behind not only Galloway, Conservatives, Labour, and the LibDems but also local centre-right independent David Tully (who ran second and offers some hope that the embers of Rochdale’s civil society are still alight).

Reform’s complaints since Thursday have been loud and long, particularly given they’ve polled well in other recent by-elections. However, their problems in Rochdale were self-inflicted: the party endorsed Rochdale’s former (Labour) MP, Simon Danczuk, as its candidate.

Danczuk held Rochdale from 2010 (where he swiped it off the LibDems) to 2015 (when the seat temporarily became a Labour-UKIP marginal) to 2017, when he was booted out of Labour and ran as an independent.

Then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn booted him out because he’d been sexting a 17-year old who’d applied for a job in his constituency office. Among other things, she told The Sun that “I never expected the messages to get so graphic.” Danczuk apologised profusely and said the behaviour emerged out of an “extremely low point in my life”.

Unsurprisingly, he lost the seat to Labour (2017 was Corbyn’s “good” general election as Leader of the Opposition).

Obviously sexting is not as serious as Cyril Smith’s paedophilia or the vast organised criminality of Muslim grooming gangs. Danczuk was investigated but not charged. He is (rightly) annoyed at the way an incident that failed to reach the criminal threshold has been used against him. He also played an important role in exposing what Cyril Smith had done in Rochdale when he was still its MP, so the whole episode grates.

However, criminal threshold or not, Danczuk was an entirely unsuitable candidate to endorse for that seat. One wonders what Reform UK were thinking (if anything).

Labour—as I think everyone knows by now—disendorsed its own candidate (Azhar Ali) for saying very similar things about Israel-Palestine to the eventual winner, George Galloway. Of course, Keir Starmer forced Ali to walk back his comments and to apologise before disendorsing him. Because this came so late in the campaign, Ali’s name could not be removed from the ballot paper on polling day. Despite his apology, it would appear Ali did not undergo a genuine change of heart, however.

That said, I should note that the leaflets distributed on his behalf (see below) after Starmer disendorsed him have no imprint, always a red flag in local political campaigns. One wonders what is going on in Rochdale’s Constituency Labour Party.

This is what he really thinks of you, Sir Keir

Starmer has since claimed that Galloway would have lost had Labour managed its candidate selection process better, but I’m not so sure.

Yes, Labour were idiots for endorsing Ali over a genuinely nice and talented (and local, he’s actually from Rochdale!) radio broadcaster and columnist called Paul Waugh. However, it’s clear they were running into Galloway’s buffers long before they selected any candidate. Sadly, one of the reasons Ali got ahead of Waugh when it came to candidate selection was the presence of the sort of biraderi politics Galloway has proven able to exploit in the past.

Biraderi politics have their roots in Pakistan (the word is derived from a Farsi term—برادر —meaning “brother”). They involve community bloc voting along lines of kinship, and manifest at local council level when related individuals (often quite inexplicably) “take turns” to run in specific wards over a period of years. Sometimes this process is visible to outsiders: everything from controversies over postal votes gathered up in bin bags to the mobilisation of hitherto unknown local constituencies.

One need not be of Pakistani origin to exploit biraderi politics. Galloway is better at it than any British politician of Pakistani extraction regardless of party: he’s used it to devastating effect against Labour in particular.¹ That said, you can’t blame Rochdale’s CLP for believing that an OG Pakistani would be better at it than a posh Westminster hack—despite Waugh being a genuine Rochdalian made good.

And what of Galloway himself?

This is his first time in parliament since May 2015; he hadn’t won an election of any sort since 2012. He does have a history of overturning Labour majorities with large swings, though. In the 2005 general election he won Bethnal Green and Bow from Labour with a 26.2 per cent swing. He won the 2012 Bradford West by-election from Labour with a 36.6 per cent swing.

Now he’s won Rochdale from Labour with a whopping 41.8 per cent swing. That makes it the fourth biggest swing ever at a by-election (Bradford West was the sixth biggest).

Gorgeous George’s “non-Muslim” Rochdale leaflet.

In all, Galloway has run for parliament 12 times and won seven times. He’s represented three different political parties (Labour, Respect, Workers’) in the process while taking time out to pretend to be a cat on 2006’s Celebrity Big Brother.

He tends not to last, though. Local Muslims (and others) who were warm towards him across the various seats he’s held have discovered he’s a lazy constituency MP who seldom speaks in the Commons.

After she’d voted, 60-year-old Rochdale resident Janice said this to the BBC:

She was up at 2am, she tells me, to watch the result coming in and found herself getting anger and angrier.

“Galloway’s not a man for Rochdale. He’s in it for himself. He’s a divisive character. And he spends all his time in London anyway.”

Janice didn’t want to give her full name because of “intimidation” surrounding the election saying “it’s been getting really nasty”.

She voted for the independent David Tully and I asked her if she would have voted Labour ordinarily.

“No,” she says emphatically. “I’ve never voted Labour, they’ve ruined the place. Don’t come to Rochdale! There’s nothing here anymore.”

I do feel sorry for the people of Rochdale. As awful as this result may be, it did emerge on the back of 40 per cent turnout, serious Middle Eastern conflict, and decades-long mismanagement of Muslim immigration at a national level, particularly from Pakistan. However, it’s also true that Galloway still won by nearly six thousand votes. Those people, if it were not already obvious, are Rochdale electors.

In that (important) sense, Rochdale just lost its own by-election.

1. It is worth downloading the paper in question from an organisation that may or may not be called “sci-hub” and reading it.