George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election in a landslide on the back of the Muslim vote enraged by the genocide in Gaza.
The Workers Party of Britain candidate won 12,335 votes compared to his nearest challenger independent candidate David Tully who won 6,638 votes.
Meanwhile, the Tory and Labour candidates were humiliated. Paul Ellison (Conservative) got 3,731 votes and Azhar Ali (Labour) got 2,402 votes.
Reform UK candidate Simon Danzuk, who had run an openly Islamophobic campaign, was also humiliated winning only 1,968 votes.
Neither Azhar Ali nor Simon Danzuk turned up for the election result announcement.
In his victory speech Galloway immediately took aim at Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak.
“Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza,” he said. “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 Palestine, in the Gaza Strip…
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“Keir Starmer’s problems just got 100 times greater than they are today. This is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates, a score of parliamentary constituencies, beginning here in the north-west, in the West Midlands, in London, from Ilford to Bethnal Green & Bow.
“Labour is on notice that they have lost the confidence of millions of their voters who loyally and traditionally voted for them generation after generation…
“Yes it’s true that every Muslim is angry at Keir Starmer and his misnamed Labour Party but you would be very foolish if you did not realise that millions of other citizens of our country are too. Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two cheeks of the same backside and they both got well and truly spanked.”
Labour, defending a near-10,000-vote majority, had expected a straightforward contest to replace the sitting MP, Tony Lloyd, who died in January from leukaemia.
But its campaign was thrown into disarray when it emerged its candidate, Azhar Ali, had claimed that Israel had conspired to allow the October 7 attack by Hamas.
Labour was eventually forced to disown Ali and abandoned its campaign barely a week into the contest. Although Ali’s name was on the ballot paper it was too late to select another candidate and Labour stopped all electioneering in the town nearly three weeks ago.
On the other hand, Galloway ran a vigorous campaign backed by an army of volunteers which focused on exploiting Muslim outrage at the massacre of Palestinians by Israel and Labour and Tory support for it.
Galloway, 69, previously unseated his former party in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and Bradford West in 2012, both following campaigns based heavily on events in the Middle East.
