George Galloway wins former Labour stronghold seat

George Galloway has won the Rochdale by-election with 12,335 votes, securing his place in what was previously a Labour stronghold.

The Workers Party of Great Britain leader received just under 40% of the vote, while David Tully, an independent candidate and local businessman came second in the vote, with more than 6,600.

Speaking straight after his victory was announced, Mr Galloway said: “Keir Starmer – this is for Gaza”.

“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,” he said.

“I want to tell Mr Starmer above all, that the plates have shifted tonight. This is going to spark a movement, a landslide, a shifting of the tectonic plates in scores of parliamentary constituencies.

“Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are two cheeks of the same backside and they both got well and truly spanked tonight here in Rochdale.”

Earlier in the night his party claimed it was on course to win the by-election “comfortably”.

Chris Williamson, a former Labour MP and now deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain, told Sky News a win would “send shockwaves through the Palace of Westminster”.

He added: “But it will also, I think, give hope to tens of thousands, if not millions of people in the country who are looking for a genuine alternative, because our democracy has been stolen from us.

“The Labour Party and the Conservative Party are effectively often the same thing.”

He added that a victory for Mr Galloway represented “a total rejection of mainstream party politics”.

The turnout in the by-election was 39.7%.

The by-election was triggered following the death of Labour MP Tony Lloyd. But what was originally supposed to be a straightforward win for Labour was blown apart when the party was forced to pull support for its candidate Azhar Ali amid an antisemitism storm.

A recording emerged in which Mr Ali claimed Israel was complicit in the terrorist attacks of 7 October, but he remained listed as the Labour candidate as the party’s decision came too late for ballot papers to be changed.

Alleged death threats, candidates wearing stab vests and vandalism were reported during campaigning to win the seat.

Richard Tice, leader of the Reform Party, speaking at the election count earlier in the night, said the poll in Rochdale had “not been a free and fair election”, as he declared Galloway as the winner.

Mr Tice said Mr Galloway had won by a “significant margin” but said his victory was “irrelevant”.

He added: “What’s really relevant is the implications for democracy in the United Kingdom.”

Mr Tice claimed his candidate, former Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk, had received a death threat during the campaign and said his party’s campaign team had been subject to “daily intimidation and slurs”.

Mr Danczuk secured a little more than 6% of the vote, coming sixth behind Mr Ali.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has said it is “extremely concerned” about how Mr Galloway will use his platform.

A spokesperson for the CAA said: “He has previously and infamously declared Bradford an ‘Israel-free zone’. He said of his previous election loss that ‘the venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating’.

“He claimed that the institutional antisemitism within the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn was really ‘a disgraceful campaign of Goebbelsian fiction’, in reference to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist.

“He was sacked by TalkRadio over his views. Recently he has described the atrocity carried out by Hamas on October 7 as a ‘concentration camp breakout’ and referred to Hamas terrorists as ‘fighters’.

“Mr Galloway has now been chosen by the voters of Rochdale to represent them and is once again an MP. Given his historic inflammatory rhetoric and the current situation faced by the Jewish community in this country, we are extremely concerned by how he may use the platform of the House of Commons in the remaining months of this parliament.”