Primer George Galloway (ogromna zmaga radikalnega ljudskega populista na nadomestnih volitvah za britanski parlament) je lahko zgolj enkratna bizarnost (se pač zgodi, da populist z igranjem na aktualno politično temo zadene sentiment volilcev) ali pa opozorilo etabliranim strankam, da jih njihovo implicitno sodelovanje v tem nepojmljivem sramotnem in neoviranem masakru nad Palestinci lahko stane ponovne izvolitve. Če politiki že nimajo hrbtenice, pa dobro razumejo ta signal. Slednje je vse, česar jim je mar.

Toda problem je večji – da sploh nimajo pravice spremeniti “svojih” stališč. Ker so to stališča, ki jih o tej zadevi morajo imeti. 

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The landslide victory of a radical working-class outsider like George Galloway — former Labour MP, longtime anti-imperialist and pro-Palestinian advocate, and now leader of the Workers Party of Britain, an old-school anti-NATO and anti-EU socialist party — is causing a political earthquake.

Galloway placed the bipartisan support of the UK’s two main parties for Israel’s exterminationist campaign in Gaza at the centre of his grassroots campaign, with a particular emphasis on the complicity of Keir Starmer’s Labour. It paid off: Galloway won twice as many votes as Labour and Conservative combined. “Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza”, Galloway said in his victory speech. “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”.

Mainstream commentators are now attempting to put Galloway’s victory primarily down to the fact that Rochdale has a big Muslim community. If this were true, there would be nothing wrong with it, of course: British Muslims have every reason to be particularly concerned about what is happening in Gaza. But the reality is that this attempt to explain people’s attitudes towards Gaza through the prism of religion or ethnicity is not only dangerously divisive; it is also divorced from reality. An overwhelming majority of British citizens — close to 70 percent — support a ceasefire. So this isn’t about the ethnic or religious makeup of Rochdale; it’s about the UK government’s bipartisan support for Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza — and the people’s growing opposition to it.

In this sense, Galloway is right to describe his victory as “historic”: his election represents the first serious crack in the political dam erected to ensure unconditional UK support for Israel despite massive popular opposition — and, of course, the first real challenge to the uniparty since Farage’s UKIP. No wonder the establishment is reacting in such a hysterical fashion. Not only have the media’s attack dogs been unleashed against him (but this was to expected, and besides, Galloway, a gifted orator, is perfectly capable of fending them off); more astonishingly, the prime minister himself, Rishi Sunak, felt compelled to give a 10-minute speech simply to address the results of the Rochdale by-election.

In the rather chilling speech, Sunak accused Galloway of being a terrorist sympathiser and, perhaps even more ominously, of being part of a broader extremist attack on democracy itself — against which the government would now be “taking action”. Sunak then went on to rehearse a script that we’ve become accustomed to in recent months: conflating the mass pro-Palestine and pro-ceasefire demonstrations with violence, antisemitism and pro-terrorist apology — despite the fact that these mass protests have been unequivocally peaceful, have been attended by people of all faiths, including thousands of Jewish people, and have been conspicuously devoid (with single-digit exceptions) of pro-Hamas imagery and slogans.

The intent is clear: to criminalise people’s right to protest — or even to vote for candidates who oppose the uniparty’s policies on key domestic and/or foreign policy issues. All in the name of the “fight against extremism” (Sunak mentioned the term 13 times throughout his speech). In this sense, Sunak’s speech heralds a dangerous turning point in the authoritarian and anti-democratic regression of British society — and Western societies more in general — which has been unfolding for various years now.

Vir: Thomas Fazi