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.
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Rachel Reeves has told Sky News she is looking at both tax rises and spending cuts in the budget, in her first interview since being briefed on the scale of the fiscal black hole she faces.
“Of course, we’re looking at tax and spending as well,” the chancellor said when asked how she would deal with the country’s economic challenges in her 26 November statement.
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Ms Reeves was shown the first draft of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) report, revealing the size of the black hole she must fill next month, on Friday 3 October.
She has never previously publicly confirmed tax rises are on the cards in the budget, going out of her way to avoid mentioning tax in interviews two weeks ago.
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Chancellor pledges not to raise VAT
Cabinet ministers had previously indicated they did not expect future spending cuts would be used to ensure the chancellor met her fiscal rules.
Ms Reeves also responded to questions about whether the economy was in a “doom loop” of annual tax rises to fill annual black holes. She appeared to concede she is trapped in such a loop.
Asked if she could promise she won’t allow the economy to get stuck in a doom loop cycle, Ms Reeves replied: “Nobody wants that cycle to end more than I do.”
She said that is why she is trying to grow the economy, and only when pushed a third time did she suggest she “would not use those (doom loop) words” because the UK had the strongest growing economy in the G7 in the first half of this year.
What’s facing Reeves?
Ms Reeves is expected to have to find up to £30bn at the budget to balance the books, after a U-turn on winter fuel and welfare reforms and a big productivity downgrade by the OBR, which means Britain is expected to earn less in future than previously predicted.
Yesterday, the IMF upgraded UK growth projections by 0.1 percentage points to 1.3% of GDP this year – but also trimmed its forecast by 0.1% next year, also putting it at 1.3%.
The UK growth prospects are 0.4 percentage points worse off than the IMF’s projects last autumn. The 1.3% GDP growth would be the second-fastest in the G7, behind the US.
Last night, the chancellor arrived in Washington for the annual IMF and World Bank conference.
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The big issues facing the UK economy
‘I won’t duck challenges’
In her Sky News interview, Ms Reeves said multiple challenges meant there was a fresh need to balance the books.
“I was really clear during the general election campaign – and we discussed this many times – that I would always make sure the numbers add up,” she said.
“Challenges are being thrown our way – whether that is the geopolitical uncertainties, the conflicts around the world, the increased tariffs and barriers to trade. And now this (OBR) review is looking at how productive our economy has been in the past and then projecting that forward.”
She was clear that relaxing the fiscal rules (the main one being that from 2029-30, the government’s day-to-day spending needs to rely on taxation alone, not borrowing) was not an option, making tax rises all but inevitable.
“I won’t duck those challenges,” she said.
“Of course, we’re looking at tax and spending as well, but the numbers will always add up with me as chancellor because we saw just three years ago what happens when a government, where the Conservatives, lost control of the public finances: inflation and interest rates went through the roof.”
Pic: PA
Blame it on the B word?
Ms Reeves also lay responsibility for the scale of the black hole she’s facing at Brexit, along with austerity and the mini-budget.
This could risk a confrontation with the party’s own voters – one in five (19%) Leave voters backed Labour at the last election, playing a big role in assuring the party’s landslide victory.
The chancellor said: “Austerity, Brexit, and the ongoing impact of Liz Truss’s mini-budget, all of those things have weighed heavily on the UK economy.
“Already, people thought that the UK economy would be 4% smaller because of Brexit.
“Now, of course, we are undoing some of that damage by the deal that we did with the EU earlier this year on food and farming, goods moving between us and the continent, on energy and electricity trading, on an ambitious youth mobility scheme, but there is no doubting that the impact of Brexit is severe and long-lasting.”
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