Who is George Galloway, the new MP for Rochdale?
George Galloway has now been elected to the House of Commons for a third political party.
Having previously held seats for Labour and Respect, he is now the MP for Rochdale, representing his own Workers Party of Britain.
He has been on a long journey having joined Labour in his teenage years, with appearances on Big Brother and working for Iranian state-funded television as well as his career in politics.
There have been allegations of antisemitism, but Mr Galloway has always denied these.
So who is “Gorgeous George” – and what has his career looked like up to now?
Labour years
George Galloway was born in 1954 and raised in Dundee, Scotland.
He was active in the Labour Party as a teen, and by the age of 26 he was the chairman of the party in Scotland.
In the 1987 general, he first won his way to the Commons, taking the Glasgow Hillhead seat for Labour.
George Galloway was first elected in 1987. Pic: PA
In doing so, he beat the Social Democratic Party incumbent Roy Jenkins, who had previously been the Labour home secretary under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan.
Shortly after getting elected, he was asked about a conference in Mykonos, Greece, which he had attended.
He said: “I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me.
“I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece.”
It was this response that earned him the moniker “Gorgeous George”.
He existed on the left of the Labour Party, leaning more towards the likes of Michael Foot or Tony Benn, and rebelling numerous times against the party when Tony Blair was prime minister.
By 1997 his seat had changed to Glasgow Kelvin, but he still controlled it.
He fell out with Mr Blair over the UK’s intervention in Iraq, and was expelled from the party in 2003 over his comments on the issue.
Galloway with defeated Labour candidate Oona King in 2005. Pic: PA
After Labour
Following his expulsion from Labour, Mr Galloway was an independent MP before he joined the Respect Party, which focused on opposing the war in Iraq.
His seat was abolished ahead of the 2005 general election, and so Mr Galloway left Scotland to contest the east London seat of Bethnal Green and Bow.
He managed to win the seat off Labour’s Oona King by just over 800 votes – although Ms King later said the election was the “one of the dirtiest campaigns we have ever seen in British politics”, saying she faced antisemitic abuse during the campaigning.
The election in the seat was run largely on the Iraq War, which as a Blair supporter, Ms King backed.
In 2006, and while still an MP, Mr Galloway was a contestant on reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, during which he pretended to be a cat and dressed up in a leotard.
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George Galloway was part of an aid convoy to Gaza. Pic: AP
In 2010, Mr Galloway stood for election in the Poplar and Limehouse constituency, neighbouring Bethnal Green and Bow.
But his electoral luck ran out and he finished third.
It was just two years before Mr Galloway took another crack at Westminster, and in 2012 he won the Bradford West by-election.
At the next general election, however, he lost his seat.
In 2016, he stood for Respect in the London mayoral election, but only won 1.4% of the vote.
He then stood in the 2017 and 2019 general elections as an independent, but was unsuccessful both times in Manchester Gorton and West Bromwich East.
Come 2021, he contested the Batley and Spen by-election for his own Workers Party of Britain, but finished in third place.
It is for this party that he is standing in Rochdale.
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Middle East
Mr Galloway has long been outspoken about issues in the Middle East, going as far back as campaigning for Dundee to be twinned with Nablus, a city in the West Bank, in the 1970s.
He says that in 1977, after returning from a trip to Lebanon, he pledged to devote his life “to the Palestinian and Arab cause”.
While he opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in the 1980s, he later backed the Ba’athist movement after the Americans withdrew their support in Iraq. He says he was not a supporter of Hussein.
In 1991, he opposed the first Gulf War, where Western forces were deployed to the nation after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded. He later described Kuwait as “clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion”.
His book also compared the Iraqi leader to Joseph Stalin: “Just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.”
In 1994 Mr Galloway met Mr Hussein, and said: “I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” The then-Labour MP later said he was saluting the Iraqi people as a whole.
After this, he was given a “final warning” by Labour whips, and issued a “full apology”.
He was vociferously opposed to the second Gulf War as well, and was vice president of the Stop the War Coalition.
George Galloway was part of an aid convoy to Gaza. Pic: AP
In March 2003, he said that Tony Blair and George Bush had attacked Iraq “like wolves”, and called on British troops to “refuse to obey illegal orders”.
It was following this incident that Mr Galloway was eventually expelled from Labour.
As well as speaking out on Iraq, Mr Galloway has also long been vocal on Palestine, including taking part in a convoy to take aid into Gaza.
But he has faced allegations of antisemitism, and was sacked from his role at TalkRadio in 2019 over comments the station called antisemitic.
Since 2008 he has worked for Press TV, the Iranian state-run television channel.
He has also been pictured with two heads of Hamas, including being pictured with current leader Ismail Haniyeh in 2009.
In 2013, while MP for Bradford West, he walked out of a debate with a university student after discovering they were Israeli.
“I don’t recognise Israel and I don’t debate with Israelis,” he said.
The student accused Mr Galloway of “pure racism”.
Galloway with the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in 2009. Pic: Reuters
Rochdale
After the death of Tony Lloyd, Mr Galloway announced he would be standing in the by-election in Rochdale.
Like many of his previous election campaigns, this seat has a high proportion of Muslim voters, and Mr Galloway has campaigned hard on the Israel-Hamas conflict and Gaza.
His campaign material even included the Palestinian flag, and branded Labour “pro-Israel”, adding that the two main parties were “two cheeks of the same backside”.
But after Labour abandoned its candidate following an antisemitism scandal, Mr Galloway emerged as favourite, has now swept to victory once again, and will return to Westminster.
While MiCA’s implementation phase is ending on Dec. 30, 2024, there is also a transitional 18-month phase in MiCA’s total 36-month timeline.
Politics
Special educational needs children ‘segregated and left to struggle in wrong schools to save money’
Children with special educational needs are being “segregated” and left to struggle in the wrong schools because councils are trying to “save on costs”, parents have told Sky News.
Maire Leigh Wilson, whose four-year-old son has Down syndrome, says she “shudders to think” where he would be now had she not been in a “constant battle” with her council.
“I think he would probably just be at the back of a classroom, running around with no support and no ability to sign or communicate,” she said.
Mrs Leigh Wilson wanted her son Aidan to go to a mainstream school with additional specialist support, but her council, who decide what is known as a child’s Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP), wanted him to attend a special school.
The number of EHCPs being appealed by parents has risen “massively”, according to education barrister Alice De Coverley.
She said councils are struggling to meet the volume of demand with “stretched budgets”, and parents are also more aware of their ability to appeal.
Mrs De Coverley said more than 90% of tribunals are won by parents, in part because councils do not have the resources to fight their cases.
She said, in her experience, parents of children with special educational needs will put “anything on the line, their homes, their jobs”.
On whether she thinks the system is rigged against parents, Mrs De Coverley said: “I’m not sure it’s meant to be. But I think that parents are certainly finding it very tough.”
She added the number of “unlawful decisions” being made by local authorities means parents who can afford it are being “utterly burnt out” by legal challenges.
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Maire Leigh Wilson with her son, Aidan, four
Mrs Leigh Wilson’s case was resolved before making it to court.
Her council, Hounslow in southwest London, said they complete more than four in five new EHCPs within the statutory 20-week timescale, twice the national average.
Hounslow Council said they “put families at the heart of decision-making” and young people in the area with special educational needs and disabilities achieve, on average, above their peers nationally.
They admitted there are areas of their offer “that need to be further improved” and they are “working closely with families as a partnership”.
“We have a clear and credible plan to achieve this, and we can see over the last 18 months where we have focused our improvement work, the real benefits of an improved experience for children, young people, and their families,” a Hounslow Council spokesman said.
He added the council had seen the number of EHCPs double in the last decade and they “share parents’ frustrations amid rising levels of national demand, and what’s widely acknowledged as a broken SEND system”.
Emma Dunville wanted her son, Albie, to go to a special school but the council took too long to assess him
Emma Dunville, a friend of Mrs Leigh Wilson whose son also has Down’s syndrome, describes her experience trying to get the right education provision for her child as “exhausting mentally and physically”.
She said: “For the rest of his life we’ll be battling, battling, battling, everything is stacked up against you.”
Unlike Mrs Leigh Wilson, Mrs Dunville wanted her son Albie to go to a special school, but she had to wait more than a year for an assessment with an education psychologist to contribute to the council’s decision, which meant she missed the deadline for an EHCP.
“The people making these decisions just don’t see that all children with Down’s syndrome are totally different and can’t be seen as the same.”
The guidelines are that if there are not enough local authority-employed education psychologists they should seek a private assessment, but her local authority did not do that.
Mrs Dunville said her son has been “segregated” in a mainstream school, where they are “trying their best” but “it’s just not the right setting”.
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