On 8 October, the voters of this North London constituency will judge whether today’s Labour Party, a now tired vehicle born of Edwardian Britain, Methodism and industrial trade unionism, is still worth a punt against the siren calls of the radical Greens, who are offering “eco-populism”, festival aesthetics, youthful vigor and politics-by-meme. The result is likely to set the contours of Burnhamism over the years ahead, shaping the malleable politics of the new PM.

It marks a pivotal moment for both Burnham and his rival Zack Polanski: a contest over the viability of the Labour Party and its traditional hegemony over Left politics. It is freighted with expectations. Can Burnham reunite the Left’s broken voter coalition and reverse the precipitous decline stewarded by Starmer? Or will Polanski prove that his party’s poll surge can be translated into parliamentary seats, a first step on his path to “replace Labour” as the dominant Left force in British politics. Failure for either would be a humiliation: whatever the result, one man’s whole political raison d’etre will be deeply undermined, their respective coalitions left more fragile than ever.

For all his painfully awkward dilettantism, Zack Polanski has managed to turn the Greens from a kooky fringe outfit into a viable electoral force. Party membership has more than tripled to over 200,000 over the past year. As much as the march of Farageism across northern England saw off Starmer’s premiership, the Greens’ success in Gorton and Denton signaled to Labour MPs that his entire project was done for. It had failed to win back the disaffected postindustrial working class, and birthed a heightened national-populist insurgency — while simultaneously taking a sledgehammer to the Left coalition that won Starmer the 2024 election.

Part of that coalition found shelter in the warm embrace of the Greens, which briefly overtook Labour in the polls earlier this year, before settling more recently in the low double figures. That ceiling may well be down to Polanski himself and his enthusiasm for social media stunts. He has retweeted posts questioning the use of non-lethal force against an armed Islamist, mid-rampage in Golders Green, and reposted an image suggesting Nigel Farage should be guillotined. Nor is it easy to forget — or forgive — his mortifying history of promising to hypnotize women’s breasts bigger.

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Andy Burnham: King of normie populism

By Jonny Ball

Still, news of Polanskism’s early demise is greatly exaggerated, principally expressed as wishful thinking, and crucially missing the point: the Greens don’t need to appeal to the median voter, nor do they need to assemble a broad cross-class union of disparate social and cultural-political forces. Rather, their purpose is to energize, articulate and represent the interests of that small but significant portion of voters for whom Polanski’s Bluesky musings are not beyond the pale, but signifiers of superior virtue. Done well, that could be enough to wreck Labour’s prospects of being re-elected.

Altogether, the Green showing in Holborn will confirm whether Labour’s pains are principally superficial — the result of years of uniquely inept leadership under Keir — or structural. A Polanski victory would assert the latter narrative: if even Labour’s most popular politician is powerless in the face of the macro trend, then hope is surely lost. Perhaps, even under new leadership, the rot cannot be stopped; Labour’s decline is the terminal result of tectonic and sociological shifts that have plagued the movement since the decline of Fordist manufacturing. In this reading, Polanskism will flourish in a climate in which broad-based, rooted political projects have given way to mutually suspicious tribal bubbles.

But there is a paradox at the heart of this reading of defeat. For while losing his first by-election would doubtless embarrass Burnham, it would also temper the instinct for a more managerial, orthodox politics. His coalition problem cuts both ways: he needs the Green-curious metropolitan Left just as he does the Reform-curious disaffected working class. Defeat in Holborn would make this conundrum harder, not easier, to manage.

After all, efforts to mitigate the Green surge in North London could require a Leftward shift in all manner of tricky policy areas: not only on Mahmood’s immigration and asylum reforms, but also on North Sea drilling, wealth taxes, and Israel-Palestine. The seat has a decent share of Muslim voters (one in five), as well as stressed young renters in over-priced houseshares and thousands of students: all receptive to the central Green messages of inchoate anti-capitalism and Labour betrayal. The conflict in the Near East, in particular, has become a totemic struggle for the radical Left, the fulcrum upon which all social justice struggles now somehow hinge. For the fresh graduate class, the willingness to eagerly and interminably utter the word “genocide” has become the ultimate political axiom (simply “war crimes” or even “ethnic cleansing” won’t do). So Labour has been smart to select a hijab-wearing former child refugee as its candidate, a welcome reassurance for the Green-curious, for whom these markers of apparent oppressed minority bona fides really do matter. Not that Sagal Abdi-Wali is some tokenistic appointment. She has already been leader of Camden council, and has spent three decades as a well-known “community activist”.

Of course, Holborn is more complicated than just Camden, and not as straightforwardly Green as Hackney. As in much of London, there are pockets of urban deprivation, but the seat’s boundaries stretch to the smart facades of Doughty Street (home to Starmer’s former chambers) and includes the King’s Cross headquarters of Google as well as the homes of established liberal professionals in the Georgian terraces of Kentish Town. This seat is Rest is Politics, but it is also Novara Media. If that causes headaches for both Burnham and Polanski, George Galloway’s Workers’ Party candidature does too, proving attractive to conservative Muslims hoping to give Labour a bloody nose, and to those repelled by the vibes and coding of a party of hyper-liberal urban cool kids (the Greens’ cringeworthy efforts to appeal to Urdu speakers notwithstanding).

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Andy Burnham meets reality

By Jonny Ball

It is certainly true that running a party leader with an energetic local campaign might well turn the usual by-election distortions into massive swings. But even in May’s local elections, the absolute nadir of Starmerism, the Greens found themselves nine points behind Labour, and they will, according to the bookmakers, be relegated to second place in October too.

Still, even second place is no mean feat. Before 2024, the Greens were confined to a single electoral citadel: Brighton. Positioning itself rather smugly as a bastion of middle-class progressives, hedonistic students and New-Age crusties, the Sussex seaside town was practically synonymous with the old Greens. Then, at the last election, the party expanded its seat haul to four: Brighton, of course, and a similarly off-kilter hipster seat in Bristol, but also two true-blue rural constituencies concerned with over-development and nature conservation. This created a strange two-tier Green bloc. On the one hand, the party was for laptop-sticker postgrads; on the other for Countryfile-watching former Tories.

Needless to say, that is a shaky, contradictory political coalition, not unlike Labour’s own. And, under Polanski, the Greens have only looked to add further elements to the mix: northern mill-town biraderi networks, and Islamic migrant communities collectively appalled by Gaza. But Holborn doesn’t fit neatly into the new Green Party’s cultural-political triad: what you might call the Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance. It is a seat where the Green coalition’s internal contradictions are hard to hide: a constituency of students, renters and professionals for whom Gaza is important, gardens are largely irrelevant, and where clan politics holds less purchase than elsewhere.

Even if Polanski cannot forge his Greta-Gaza-Gardener alliance into a winning vote here, his leadership of the Greens will continue. As long as his loss is respectable, it may even be read as portentous, further eating into Labour’s temporarily rescued Left hegemony. A Labour victory, however, will hand Burnham the argument that his party’s malaise was mainly Starmer’s: and that a mildly Leftward, pub-friendly patter and anti-Thatcher schtick is enough to reunite the Left bloc and hold off Balkanization.

Once in this North London seat, Marx sat at his desk, with Lenin a few years and miles away, and the Fabians busily drafting the machinery of a welfare state that did not yet exist. Today, we have a former hypnotist who can’t stay off his phone, going up against a Labour candidate whose task it is to prove that having a nice-guy leader is enough to stave off secular decline. That this will be enough for one of the candidates to succeed is perhaps the biggest indictment of the politics of our era.

Who is that someone? Who will Make Rochdale Great Again?

Since storming to victory in February’s by-election, George Galloway has vowed to tackle Labour’s “corruption”, restore a maternity ward to the local hospital, and, as part of his “lasting legacy”, coax Primark to open a new store in the town. With the help of a Grand Alliance between his hard-Left Workers Party and other local candidates, he has also pledged to destroy Rochdale’s Labour Party in Thursday’s local elections.

One man hoping he’ll succeed is Billy Howarth. The flat-capped, plain-talking local attacked Galloway as “divisive” while running against him as an independent in Rochdale’s by-election but is now standing as a candidate for the Workers Party. “I thought his election would be a stepping-stone for the international stuff [Israel-Gaza], but actually he’s gone totally the opposite way,” he says. “Yes, he’s still speaking about the international stuff, but he’s speaking about Rochdale, and what Rochdale needs and he’s willing to fight for it.”

Howarth’s life has been deeply scarred by Rochdale’s depredations. Growing up on the sprawling Kirkholt Estate, built in the Forties by German prisoners of war, he was groomed and abused by a local paedophile, George Crawford, from the age of eight. “He was an animal of a man,” Howarth says now. “He was notorious. Never got convicted of it, but he was supposed to have raped over 200 boys.”

Widespread sexual abuse is still taking place in Rochdale, Howarth tells me, but he believes he has at least had some measure of justice. In 2000, Crawford, by then in his 60s and nearly blind, was charged with the sexual abuse of 10 boys during the Seventies and Eighties. A year later, while the trial was still ongoing, his wife found his body slumped against their living room door. He had been beaten to death by a local man with an ornamental lamp. At the killer’s trial, the prosecution said Crawford’s murder had been motivated at least in part by reports of his abuse spreading through the local area.

“I wouldn’t join any mainstream party,” Howarth says. “I hold all three of them accountable for Rochdale’s children being abused. It’s the poverty; it’s a class thing. I don’t believe it’s racial. There’s white guys involved in this too. They target girls from children’s homes and girls from dysfunctional families. They’re easy targets.”

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Out on the doorstep, he claims that people are warming to the Workers Party. “I don’t have Palestine conversations on the door. It’s not my field.” Instead, Howarth claims, voters care more about the poor quality of housing in the region. Few have forgotten the death four years ago of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who suffered from respiratory problems caused by the mould growing throughout his parents’ housing association flat. The tragedy led news bulletins, but little was done to make Rochdale’s houses safer.

Walking through a predominantly Asian part of Rochdale — where Palestinian flags flutter from buildings and a newsagent displays an advert for Salaam Cola, the BDS-approved alternative to Coke — support for the Workers Party seems widespread. Posters in shop windows feature Galloway shaking hands with local candidate Minaam Ellahi, a clean-cut young man who hopes to unseat the “pro-genocide Labour Party”. Standing on a nearby street, Muhammed, a bearded young man, tells me how Galloway won him over. “He’s trying to get a Primark in the town, he’s working on the market. Primark is a big deal for the town. We need to give him time. What have Labour done for Rochdale? At least Galloway is trying.” Waiting in a barbers’ shop, another man tells me he voted for Galloway because of Palestine, but thinks he is doing a lot for the town too. “Keir has failed to help Gaza,” he says bluntly. “I would never vote Labour again. Most Muslim voters will vote for the Workers Party, not Labour.”

In Rochdale, this is significant. While the town itself is 19% Muslim, that figure rises to 31% for the parliamentary constituency. And crucially, support among the community, long taken for granted by Labour, is faltering amid the fall-out from the Israel-Gaza war, with just 60% of Muslim voters who backed the party in 2019 willing to do so at the next election. This recalibration, the Labour Muslim Network said, revealed a “crisis point” that could prove irreparable.

And yet, when I ask the barber about the Workers Party poster in his window, he shrugs. “Someone came in and asked me to put it up.” A few doors down the road, Amhed, a butcher, seems equally perplexed at the Workers Party poster in his window. “I’m not supporting Galloway,” he tells me. “I was a Tory voter last time. Tories support businesses. They helped us during Covid.”

He is, however, the exception. Walking around the town, most Muslim voters praise Galloway’s character, while many non-Muslims condemn him as a fraud. He is a “showman” who is “all lip”, observes one retiree who is struggling to pay her rent on a basic pension.

Chris, walking two whippets and missing several teeth, tells me that he did not vote in the by-election on principle. “It was a farce. Galloway is a chancer — he’s not really seen in Rochdale now.” Labour, who control three quarters of council seats, have been in power here since 2011 and, Chris thinks, they will do well at the local elections. But, he adds: “They’re out for their egos — you never see any changes.”

In the shadow of Rochdale’s soaring Gothic town hall (so impressive, a local rumour goes, that Hitler had planned to ship it to Germany brick-by-brick were he to invade England), I speak to Jules, a middle-aged man who wastes no time tearing into his town’s new representative. Galloway, he insists, is a “disgrace”. “Anyone who hosts a show on RT should not be an MP,” he says. “He just wants a platform for supporting Russia in parliament.” People will be sick of Galloway soon, he believes, and his support will collapse.

A local Labour insider is similarly confident. “Voters seem to be making the distinction between the by-election and the local election,” he says. “That’s working for us. The council has a pretty good record. It’s not financially distressed.” Accusations of corruption have swirled around the local party, however. In 2018, a recording of former council leader Allen Brett surfaced in which he suggested he “might” withhold road funding from wards that declined to vote for his party. After being reprimanded for breaching the local authority’s code of conduct, he insisted his comments were just “banter”.

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When Gaza came to Rochdale

By MIchael Crick

Aware that the Labour vote is counted rather than weighed in Rochdale, where the Liberal Democrats have always held significant support, the local party has been out on the doorstep since the first morning after their election loss. And Labour have reason to be more confident this time. Galloway, after all, has always failed to convert his by-election wins into political momentum. In Bethnal Green, he stepped down; in Bradford, he lost; in Rochdale, Labour are confident the same will happen.

As for the local elections, while Muslims voters may be furious with Starmer over Palestine, the Labour insider claims, they also understand that their council cannot save Gaza. Galloway leans heavily on endorsements from community leaders, but that model of campaigning for ethnic-minority votes is outdated, they insist. “There are canny heads among south Asian voters who say: ‘are we being used as political pawns?’ I think they’re wise enough to realise that.”

But if this is true, I failed to meet any. Rather, the Muslim voters I spoke to gave the impression that a more decisive break had taken place. Palestine was just the most painful expression of a longstanding alienation between the party and its electoral base. For many, supporting the Workers Party stemmed less from a desire to empower Galloway than to give Starmer a kick in the teeth.

In the meantime, Galloway’s much-trumpeted Grand Alliance has struggled to cohere. Several Liberal Democrats and independent candidates offered his “personal endorsement” have angrily refused the support. Dave Tully, a popular local businessman who came second in the by-election, has accused Galloway of “manipulating the situation” after the MP claimed his backing. The coalition is, Galloway admitted on X earlier this month, “not as grand as we’d have liked”. When I visited Rochdale, he was not available to be interviewed, having left town for a Gaza solidarity rally elsewhere.

Back on the high street, the pair of florists insist they will not be voting for Labour or the Workers Party. “I think Galloway looks a bit like a pervert to me,” says one. “I only know him from when he dressed up like a cat on Big Brother.” Around the corner, another resident articulates the town’s lingering sense of pessimism with more clarity. She hopes Labour will win, but that little will change. “Rochdale can’t get any worse,” she adds wryly.

Front and centre, of course, was Starmer’s failure of principle and command over the war in Gaza. But it was notable that Galloway’s messaging made hay of many other unrelated issues, designed to attract disaffected white voters. Anti-woke rhetoric, Rochdale’s grooming gangs, local NHS inadequacy, and a sense of municipal dilapidation that an economically cautious Labour can’t be trusted to turn around: all also featured in his campaign. Far from a managerial mishap, this by-election points to a far graver threat to the Starmer project writ large. Just in time for this election year, the British Left that he swore to keep out and down is rearing its head once again.

Pollsters and analysts largely missed this development, obsessing instead over the electoral threat that Reform poses to the Conservatives. And this is considerable: we have a prime minister who waxes unlyrically over the “need to protect our democracy” even as, on his watch, trust in British political parties has slumped from a meagre 20% last year to a dismal 12% today. But this energy is not only clustering to the Right. A coalition of hundreds of thousands has assembled to march every week since the war in Gaza began. Galloway’s victory proves that, unlike a Reform Party whose political power still remains in the subjunctive mood, this is a movement that is capable of traversing from the streets to Parliament, depriving Labour of votes and MPs on the way.

Ever the opportunist, Galloway has lost no time in calling on Jeremy Corbyn to stop dithering, and lead a new party of the Left, which he says he would support. But, beyond him and his uniquely divisive personality, this is a move that a significant tranche of former Labour supporters, climate campaigners and peace activists would support, increasingly disenfranchised and frustrated by the Tweedledee and Tweedledum double act of Sunak and Starmer. Because the public fury over the failure of either politician to call out Netanyahu, and at the shenanigans in Parliament to prevent a vote on an “immediate & permanent ceasefire” that might acknowledge the collective punishment of Palestinians, is not confined to British Muslims. At a time when authenticity and answers to profound questions are lacking, it seems that the public increasingly regard Parliament and its occupants (taking their cue from Dennis Skinner) as a “Palace of Varieties”. An ineffectual conjuring house, utterly detached from real matters of politics.

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Keir Starmer the shapeshifter

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The terminal unpopularity of the Tories continues to provide for a large Labour lead on paper. The traditional parties of protest provide no comparable outlet: the Liberal Democrats have all but disappeared into one of those cracked pavements they tend to obsess about. But Labour’s standing as “the party of change” will only maintain its resonance while voters are on board with what this “change” represents. And a slip in the polls as the election approaches will open the door to new mathematical possibilities in Parliament, especially if Galloway’s win emboldens MPs on the rump Left of the party to jump ship. The best estimates suggest that at least eight Labour seats are threatened by the Gaza effect, while the anti-war SNP seem likely to hold on to more seats than hitherto projected.

And this could sabotage the entire strategic grounding of Starmer’s leadership. In their rush to congratulate him on winning the party leadership (with what proved to be a borderline fraudulent manifesto), and to salute the subsequent defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn (whom he had once claimed as “a friend”), many in Labour seemed to think they could happily do without their Left-wing. But the few successful coalitions of the Left in recent years have not permitted such arrogance. It is a mistake Joe Biden has strained to avoid, continuing to work closely with Bernie Sanders and members of the radical “Squad”, all while rolling out the kind of transformative, state-driven economic programme that Starmer has unceremoniously dropped. But for Biden, the fault lines over Gaza are also showing. He is dropping in the polls, and many of the younger activists who worked so hard for him last time are threatening to sit on their hands, even in the face of a third Trump candidacy.

Keir Starmer claims Harold Wilson as his political inspiration. But he shares none of his hero’s intelligence, shrewd political skill, or easy humour. If he did, he might be familiar with the irascible former Labour MP and Commons bookie, Ian Mikardo, who supplied the rule Wilson cleaved to in his own party management: the Labour Party needs a “Left and a Right wing to fly”. Starmer has decisively severed the Left from the body of the Labour leadership, ruling instead through a coterie of sectarian hatchet men. MPs and candidates from the Left have found themselves censured and suspended, often on the most spurious grounds, with even party veterans left wondering if they will be able to stand in the general election. The role of local parties in selecting their own candidates has been quashed beneath the boot of central office, and party panjandrums are said to have a list of approved, on-message candidates they intend to drop into safe seats that become vacant between now and the election.

All of this is unlikely to cost Starmer his victory, although it suggests a smaller majority than that predicted by the pollsters. But a network of internal opposition is forming, not least in Starmer’s own backyard. In common with a number of prominent Labour MPs who have demurred from calling for a permanent ceasefire (including West Streeting in Ilford and Rushanara Ali in Bethnal Green), Starmer’s home ground of Holborn and St Pancras will likely be facing an insurgent campaign from the Left. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP under Nelson Mandela, has lived in Starmer’s constituency for 20 years and is weighing up standing there in the general election. This weekend he endorsed the launch of a new political alliance, billed as the first organised movement of the Left outside Labour, calling itself “Collective”. The name is more than symbolic: a pragmatic grouping, Collective will likely work with other parties, including Galloway’s own, and could field several parliamentary candidates, targeting constituencies in inner cities with large student populations.

The idea that the bruised Labour Left could be bundled up and tossed over the ropes of the political ring was an enormous miscalculation on Starmer’s part. After all, we’re only seven years on from the peak of the Corbyn movement, which operated with a grassroots dynamism well beyond the playbook of the powerbrokers who’ve managed the party since the New Labour turn. The same forces will drive this new Left, with enthusiasm and young volunteers making up for the lack of donor money drawn to the big parties. And while some may dismiss the electoral damage a Left breakaway could do, as with Ukip and the Brexit Party’s influence over successive elections, independent Left candidates could one day hold the balance of a Labour majority.

For now though, the next election seems probably produce a Starmer-led Labour government, benefiting from the Tory collapse and a likely low turn-out. But beneath this victory, a new movement might begin to find its voice. For decades, first-past-the-post elections have been fought and won among swing voters in a small band of marginal constituencies. Independent candidates may perform better than expected, exerting a disproportionate impact at a time when constituency boundaries have been redrawn and pressure continues to mount for proportional representation. It is the election after this one which may deliver the body blow to the old political giants, who in any case already resemble, as Christopher Hitchens once said of America’s own dead two-party system, “two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derrière”.

It’s bleak here. The main shopping area, Yorkshire Street, is a sad parade of charity shops, discount stores, and closed-down businesses. Each time I go, I see more and more homeless people on the street. And the stories of poverty and neglect are heart-breaking. In 2020, a toddler died from a respiratory condition caused by mould in the housing association property he lived in. Shockingly, his death changed nothing: it’s still a widespread problem, almost four years on.

Steeped in political scandal and poverty as it is, things could be about to get a whole lot worse. The result of today’s contentious by-election could mean the infamous constituency could end up represented in Parliament by a clown.

Once the pride of industrial Britain, the town was soiled redeemably by “Mr Rochdale” for decades. Real name Cyril Smith, he became a Labour councillor in 1952 at the age of 23, and was Rochdale’s MP from 1972 until he retired from Parliament in 1992. He managed to sustain this lengthy term in office despite multiple allegations of profoundly inappropriate behaviour. In total, eight men alleged that Smith had indecently assaulted them as teenagers in the Sixties; six of them were living at a residential establishment for boys named Cambridge House Hostel, which Smith had been involved in setting up.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed in 1970, the advice was not to prosecute. That advice was reviewed by the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998 and 1999, when two further complainants were identified. Yet neither review led to Smith being charged. He was knighted in 1988, and died in 2010.

It’s only in the years since his death that the extent of his shocking behaviour has been revealed. Among other things, it transpired that in his spare time, Smith had been taking money from — and being handed shares in — a local asbestos firm in return for delivering speeches in parliament minimising its dangers. Then, as part of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), published in 2022, Lord David Steel stated that Smith had told him that media reports of his abuse of children were true. Yet Steel had allowed Smith to continue in office until he stepped down in 1992. The police, I’m told, were in his pocket. The IICSA report stated that this was not the case, but it’s easy to be sceptical when you’re even slightly familiar with his corruption.

Smith’s moral depravity cast a dark shadow across Rochdale where the authorities have a long history of turning a blind eye to abuse of the vulnerable. In the Smith Street public toilets scandal, for example, boys as young as primary school age were sexually abused by men for the price of an ice lolly in full view of the Social Services Department. The Child Protection Manager later described how she would regularly notice boys sitting on the walls and being beckoned by men to follow them inside. It was obvious to her and other staff who witnessed it that sexual abuse was happening. And in March 1989, representatives from the police, social services and schools met to discuss what was happening to a group of children aged 10-14 when they gathered daily at a local restaurant named “Tasty Bites”, when they should have been at school. Of the 12 children identified, five were in the care of Rochdale and a number were being paid for sex.

As the IICSA report made clear,  allegations of sexual assault were simply not taken seriously by those in authority — a culture that infected the council for years, and endured right up to the moment the grooming gang scandal that also took place in Tasty Bites was finally laid bare in 2012. Dozens of vulnerable girls — some as young as 14 — had been plied with alcohol and cannabis, threatened with violence, and passed around man after man for sex, while the authorities ignored their pleas for help. The ringleader was found guilty of 30 counts of rape. A string of inquiries followed, concluding that those in authority “lacked human compassion” and were “inexcusably slow” in dealing with the victims — who were seen as making “life choices”, rather than suffering.

There’s little doubt that Smith’s 20-year reign set in stone the culture of corruption, lethargy and abject failure of its statutory services that lingers. To this day, Rochdale is offered a dire choice of politicians. It’s difficult to believe that many voters will be inspired to turn out to vote for any of them. It is a battle between an ultra-macho, all-male list of prospective MPs, fought along Israeli-Palestinian lines, rather than between political parties. Amid the chaotic run-up, the Labour and Green parties dropped their candidates; not one woman is standing.

It’s an unedifying list of characters and Azhar Ali, is pretty representative of the calibre: a Labour Councillor who trotted out antisemitic conspiracy theories at a public meeting: he’s now out of the party, yet still standing. George Galloway, also accused in the past of antisemitism, is also standing — and is the favourite to win. He wants to “make Rochdale great again” — which makes you wonder when exactly he’s referring to. Standing for the Workers Party for Britain, he claims that he would save Rochdale AFC, and reopen the market. He also has the dubious honour of being endorsed by Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party. (Galloway rejected the endorsement.)

Galloway knows his audience. Rochdale is 19% ethnically Asian, and 13.9% Muslim — one of the biggest communities in the country — and appealing to ethnically Asian Muslims has always served the Scottish Catholic politician very well. When he won Bradford West from Labour in 2012 by a massive majority, he announced his victory through a megaphone, shouting, “All praise to Allah!” During that by-election campaign, Galloway produced a leaflet reading:

“I’m a better Pakistani than [Imran Hussain, the Labour candidate] will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim.”

His success was short-lived: he lost the seat in 2015, to Naseem (Naz) Shah, a local of Pakistani Muslim origin. During his campaign he repeatedly insinuated that Shah was pro-Israel, despite the fact that she had regularly and publicly expressed support for Gaza and Palestine. I accompanied Shah on her campaign trail back then, and was told by a number of Pakistani Muslim voters that they were sick of Galloway posturing while doing little for the community. “He expects us to vote the way the men do,” one Muslim woman told me, “so ignores the women.” Undeterred by his failure in Bradford, he has set his sights on Rochdale.

Also standing is Guy Otten, originally a Green Party candidate who was disowned when old social media posts (from 2013, 2014 and 2015) cast him in a questionable light. In one, he wrote: “The Koran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.” In other words, as well as the two candidates accused of antisemitism, there’s one who’s been accused on anti-Muslim prejudice.

And then, last but not least, there is Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for Rochdale. Now running for Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party), Danczuk launched his campaign by taking aim at his old party with a “work not woke” slogan. He has now pivoted to describing himself as the only alternative to Galloway, with a slightly less catchy motto: “Rochdale not Gaza.” In other words, he is also trying to capitalise on the tensions in the town over race, religion and ethnicity. Whether he has a vision for addressing poverty is less certain.

It is worth mentioning here why, exactly, Danczuk was kicked out of Labour. In March 2015 he made headlines because he appeared to have liked hardcore pornography on Twitter. He blamed an iPhone glitch, but admitted to having used porn, saying “I think we should not be too sanctimonious about this”. (Owen Jones wrote a column in defence of Danczuk, for the Guardian.) Then, in December that year, Danczuk was suspended. He had sexted 17-year-old Sophena Houlihan saying: “You want me to spank you?” and “God I’m horny!” Houlihan says she was bombarded with explicit messages for a month after asking him for a summer job in his Rochdale constituency office.

This candidate list is a tragedy. No wonder the people of Rochdale have lost faith in politics. Perhaps most disappointing is Labour’s failure: the party should have been a first choice for the majority of voters in a town that has been so abandoned by the bourgeoisie. Instead, its best hope is to become a case study that helps Labour understand why so many working-class northerners are turning their backs on the party that is supposed to represent them. The disenfranchised, impoverished people of Rochdale embody the negative consequences of exactly the kind of poverty and marginalisation that Labour romanticises or makes use of. But its residents are too angry, too battered to spark a revolution. In perhaps an attempt at protest, 60% of the town voted for Brexit in 2016.

What this means for the future of politics is as bleak as it is worrying. At times like this, when the downtrodden can neither take another kicking nor find the strength to get up from the ground and carry on, it is easy to get sucked into a world in which any enemy of an enemy is a friend. Rochdale, having been abused and abandoned by the state, exemplifies how and why dangerous, disgraceful politicians get elected. The beleaguered town deserves far better than any of the men currently vying to be its MP. Whoever wins this election, Rochdale will lose.

It is rare these days for a foreign issue to be so central to a British political campaign: two by-elections being fought this week — in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, and in Kingswood near Bristol — will be decided by the economy and other domestic concerns. The battle for Rochdale, which will be fought at the end of this month, is the exception.

The former textile town, in the Pennine foothills north of Manchester, is Labour’s biggest problem between now and the next general election. At the weekend, The Mail on Sunday published a recording of its candidate Azhar Ali telling a meeting of party members that Israel had “allowed” Hamas’s October 7 massacre to take place, to give it the “green light” to invade Gaza. Ali swiftly issued an apology, but it came too late: last night, the Labour Party withdrew its support for his campaign, after receiving “new information” about his comments. All of which makes for a rather peculiar scenario: come polling day, a constituency that has voted Labour since 2010 will not have a Labour candidate on the ballot.

Yet even before Ali’s comments were unearthed, the Rochdale by-election had been tainted by vicious dysfunction. From the moment it was called, after incumbent MP Sir Tony Lloyd died following a long illness, Labour insiders feared — correctly, as it turned out — that it would expose the party’s growing struggle to both retain its loyal support among Muslims and regain the confidence of British Jews. In Rochdale, around 30% of voters are Muslim; beyond the town and across north Lancashire, roughly two dozen Labour councillors have now resigned from the party over Gaza.

Events in the Middle East are far from Labour’s only local trial. There’s also the notorious child-abuse scandal, in which predominantly Pakistani men from the town, many of them gangsters and drug dealers, committed horrific sexual crimes against white, working-class teenage girls over many years, and indeed some are suspected of still doing so. Labour has run the council since 2010 and their councillors have been accused of brushing the issue aside — not least by Simon Danczuk, Rochdale’s former Labour MP, who was suspended by the party in 2017 following reports that he sent explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl. He is now running for the seat under the banners of the Reform Party.

And following last night’s developments, outsider campaigns such as his have been handed a significant boost. Indeed, how different the mood seems from 2019, when, despite losing scores of other northern working-class seats, Labour held Rochdale comfortably, with a majority of almost 10,000. For Starmer to lose such a solid seat, only a few months before the country votes as a whole, will shock and demoralise his party — and rejuvenate his opponents.

Yet the scent of defeat was never far away. Galloway’s announcement that he would join the fight in Rochdale must have terrified Labour organisers. Galloway, after all, is the most effective constituency campaigner of modern times. For 16 years, he was a Labour MP in Glasgow, before his party expelled him for attacking Tony Blair over the Iraq War and calling the party leadership “a blood-spattered, lying, crooked group of war criminals”.

Galloway took his revenge by moving to London’s East End, where he took the safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow for his new Respect Party in 2005. Then, in 2012, he contested a by-election in another strongly Muslim Labour constituency — Bradford West — and scored the most spectacular by-election victory of modern times, with a swing of 36.6%. He almost repeated his success three years ago in Batley and Spen, when, despite running a campaign accused of homophobia, he won almost 22% of the vote and gained so many ex-Labour Muslim supporters that Starmer’s party held on by barely 300 ballots.

“There’s a Labour mafia in Rochdale, run by total inadequates,” Galloway, now standing for the Workers’ Party, tells me when I visit his campaign headquarters in a Suzuki showroom. Despite the pro-Palestine chants at his launch rally, Galloway claims, “this by-election is about Labour, not about Gaza… Labour’s name is mud here. Gaza is just the hat on it.”

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Is it not also about Rochdale? I ask him if he has any links to the area. Well, he replies, one of his daughters was born locally — during his 2017 campaign for Manchester Gorton. And then he tells me he was a Manchester United season-ticket holder. “Really?“ I reply. “I go to most United games, and I don’t ever recall seeing you there.” He smiles.

Galloway seems just as unconvincing when he denounces his now-suspended Labour opponent. “Labour picked the wrong candidate,” he says a few days before Ali’s October 7 comments come to light. He then claims that Ali has to canvas alongside a minder who acts as his translator because he is a Gujarati Indian and doesn’t speak Urdu or Kashmiri like most Muslims in Rochdale. But this is simply not true, as Ali’s agent told me later: “Azhar was born in Burnley. His mum and dad came from Pakistan, and he doesn’t speak Gujarati. But he can speak Urdu and Punjabi.”

Yet this is how Galloway has always campaigned: in an aggressive and, many believe, unbecoming manner. It’s curious, for instance, that while Ali’s campaign literature doesn’t mention Starmer once (he is instead pictured with deputy leader and nearby MP Angela Rayner), Galloway’s glossy leaflet mentions him eight times. Starmer is, it claims, “in the pocket of Israel”.

Such tawdriness is never far from these parts. The town may have birthed Britain’s cooperative movement, conceived by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844, but in recent decades, it’s become a byword for political scandal and betrayal. It was here that former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was caught describing Gillian Duffy as “a sort of bigoted woman”, the first sign that Labour was losing touch with its traditional working-class base. And it was here that a string of horrific child sex abuse rings were uncovered. It has, as a result, become a petri dish for political disaffection, a mood which culminated in 60% of the area voting for Brexit.

“Rochdale has been badly let down by Labour in local government,” says Danczuk. He claims two Labour councillors are being investigated for sexual harassment. “Is the Labour parliamentary candidate going to challenge it, or cover it up?” When I ask about his own suspension from Labour, Danczuk dismisses the allegations as “absolute nonsense”, though he admits to texting three words to the girl that were “inappropriate”. The “real reason” for his sacking, he explains, “was because I’d been Jeremy Corbyn’s fiercest critic”.

In many ways, Danczuk is a similar figure to Galloway. Both are colourful mavericks sacked by Labour after being blunt and outspoken. And both are raffish characters. Galloway has had four wives, while Danczuk is now on his third, having married a Rwandan beauty therapist last summer. Galloway has six children; Danczuk has four. They even use the same turn of phrase to describe the local Labour Party: it’s run “like the mafia”.

But not every voter in Rochdale is convinced by such rhetoric. Tariq, a market trader, says he is “not happy about Labour’s response to the war in Gaza. I know Galloway has been doing well in the community. He’s been visiting takeaways and chicken shops late at night and then the videos are shared all over Facebook.”

Lorraine, who used to work in urban regeneration but is now retired, is more concerned about Rochdale’s interminable crime wave than a distant conflict in the Middle East. “Everybody knew the child abuse was going on,” she tells me. “You can’t get away from the fact it’s Asian men grooming young white girls. A lot of it is gang and drug-related.” She cites a horrific incident in the town recently, when a man had his hand chopped off by a machete after trying to defend an elderly woman who was being harassed by a gang of men. The attacker was convicted, but the gang leader allegedly escaped to Pakistan and has never been caught. “Nothing’s being done. This is what we have to contend with.” Only at the weekend, four boys — aged between 12 and 14 — were arrested on suspicion of raping a young female near the town centre.

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How likely is it that any of the candidates vying for Rochdale’s votes will remedy this? Although Labour were the clear favourites until yesterday, few could say how Ali planned to help his constituents. Indeed, Labour were so keen to get this campaign underway — and, one suspects, avoid a drawn-out contest against Galloway — that they ignored the normal by-election convention that, following an MP’s death, the incumbent party doesn’t move the writ until after the deceased’s funeral. Suffice it to say that Labour’s impatience has backfired, an act of self-harm that could wreak huge damage both locally and nationally.

Beyond Rochdale, this latest scandal illustrates a broader threat to Labour. For decades, the party has become dependent on the Muslim vote, which has been well-organised by influential leaders in Muslim communities. That strong support may partly explain why Labour politicians in towns such as Rochdale, Oldham and Rotherham seemed slow and reluctant to clamp down on child sex rings. It may also explain why Labour allowed antisemitism to seep into its ranks, both under Corbyn and now Starmer.

The result is that, thanks to the past few days, we now have an idea of what lies ahead for Starmer. When Labour returns to power, relations between the party and its Muslim supporters are likely to become even more strained. In the meantime, ordinary voters will be caught in the crossfire — and characters such as Galloway will continue to thrive.

Putin needs a buffer in Ukraine, said one on Twitter. Would you be a buffer, was one reply, and the tweet was duly taken down. The far Left’s most pleasing character trait is its cowardice. It collapses easily. Nato expansion is de rigueur in eastern Europe for countries seeking to join the EU, said a woman at a Stop the War meeting, as if national sovereignty — which she is blessed to have — is something trivial for those defending it in Ukraine.

Stop the War says we shouldn’t arm Ukraine or impose sanctions: it will only encourage Putin. Such is their determination, a man with a Ukrainian flag was escorted from a meeting this weekend as he cried, “Shame!” I would have listened to him but that is not part of their culture: not when they are met with opposition, which they do not like, and to hear them now praise “diplomacy” — as they did — is bizarre because it involves listening. During the meeting they congratulated themselves on their courage for speaking as they do, among friends — the media were barred for immorality even as independent media is fleeing Russia — and inside a liberal democracy.  Such is their toxicity now, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell pulled out of a Stop the War rally.

They may be a pottage of vanity, self-deception, and rage, but they have been clear on Ukraine, even before the hammer and the sickle appeared at a rally in London this week. “In [the] game of great power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea let it be Russia,” they said in 2014, when Jeremy Corbyn was their chair. “Some of us have never supported Putin,” he says now, a coward among cowards.

The willingness to understand Putin was obvious, again in 2014, when Corbyn’s spin doctor Seumas Milne, a rich Communist sympathiser, appeared with Putin at PR junket alongside leaders of the European far Right. A surprising number of far Left leaders are rich as if they, who don’t really need politics, can afford uniquely unserious ones. If you are rich, it doesn’t matter if the Socialist Utopia never comes. Dreaming, to steal their language, is a privilege.

For George Galloway, an original sponsor of Stop the War, closeness to tyranny seems to be a soothing and instinctive need. His address to Saddam Hussein in 1994 is infamous: “I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability and I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory in Jerusalem.” Another sponsor was Andrew Murray, a rich Communist sympathiser; yet another is Jeremy Corbyn himself. Plenty of them failed to oppose Bashar al-Assad, even as Muslim activists begged them to. They didn’t support aid convoys to Aleppo — too imperialist — or the White Helmets pulling bodies out of Russian-bombed rubble in Syria. They are only anti-war when the West is the aggressor. There are no just wars when the West fights them is their reasoning, if we are calling it that; but every war against the West is, if not just, then at least understandable.

But this isn’t pacifism, however they may brand it. It is Occidentalism: hatred of the West, and, with that comes hatred of parliamentary democracy too, because it is disappointing and hard work.

What real — rather than self-serving and performative — sympathy do they have for those beyond themselves? Who have they really helped beyond themselves? I often wonder what would happen if they threw themselves behind moderate Labour with all their fury as an experiment in real politics — if they acknowledged, for instance, that a Socialist Utopia is unlikely in a country that is also a monarchy. But this kind of self-reflection and generosity is not in their nature.

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Consider their brutal anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t know he is an anti-Semite, but that doesn’t make him any less of one. Much can be laid at the door of their idiocy; like idiots, their world is binary. They do not think the West can be saved, and they will not help others save it.

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them. Tory Right or soft Left: to the far Left there is no difference. Every day they say so on social media: Liberals and Centrists are bemused to find themselves called far Right. It’s poison on the doorstep. It made former miners vote Tory in 2019 because if soft Left is far Right, why not? The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner. I concluded that they do not believe in parliamentary democracy, because they do not believe in the legitimacy of opposition. It’s a defect that makes a nonsense of any good within them. It isn’t a whimsical thing. It’s a structural fault.

So, their kindness to Putin this last week — their willingness to see the world from his point of view, even as he destabilises it — is no accident. It is, consciously or not, a recognition of similar desires.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. True, the Government had had a pretty torrid time of it over the weekend thanks both to Matt Hancock and to Boris Johnson’s failure to sack him straight away. But the canny appointment of Sajid Javid was supposed to have steadied the ship, indeed set it sailing full speed ahead for 19 July when a swathe of Coronavirus restrictions now look certain to be lifted.

Even better, the Government could point to some seriously good news from Sunderland, where Nissan, in defiance of all the Brexit-hating doomsters and gloomsters, is committing to building a gigafactory and launching a new model at its plant there.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the fence, the knives were being sharpened for the supposedly useless Sir Keir Starmer, with mounting excitement that the ongoing beef between him and his salt-of-the-earth deputy, Angela Rayner, might produce a leadership challenge. And then there was Labour’s hard Left, some of whose social media stars were salivating at the prospect of another Hartlepool-style humiliation providing them with yet more proof that the party they love (or at least started loving in 2015) has supposedly lost “the working class” by dumping the socialist policies that won it two stunning moral victories at the general elections of 2017 and 2019.

No one can say for sure why things didn’t play out the way the way the pundits and, for what they’re worth, the betting markets, thought they would. But these are my best guesses.

First up, Labour had an exceptional candidate — a woman who is not just hyper-local and highly personable but who, because of her sister, who was murdered back in 2016 when serving as MP for Batley and Spen, could claim a profound emotional connection to the place that must have swayed some voters (and not just previous Labour voters) her way.

Second, Labour’s ground campaign, turbo-charged by the MP newly appointed by Starmer to be its National Campaign Coordinator, Shabana Mahmood, did a bang-up job of identifying and getting out the vote.

Third, the Conservatives can’t have been helped by the Hancock shenanigans. But, probably more importantly, their ground campaign was apparently a bit of a dog’s breakfast – a reminder that, in a close race, having boots on the ground can sometimes make the difference. It’s all too easily forgotten that, while the Tories may have grown their vote in the “red wall”, they haven’t necessarily grown their grassroots membership there.

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Fourth, the intervention and non-intervention of other candidates didn’t make the kind of difference that many had forecast. Much was made of both the prospects and the appalling antics of that inveterate publicity-seeker George Galloway, who back in 2012 managed to bag himself a by-election victory in the Labour seat of Bradford West by using the same divisive tactics. Clearly, those tactics still have considerable traction: he won over a fifth of the vote. But they may also have driven others to turn to Leadbeater in disgust.

It is also entirely possible that, by standing, Galloway siphoned off some the votes which the Conservatives hoped (perhaps even assumed) would go to them as a result of the decision by the Heavy Woollen District Independents not to stand. Meanwhile, the lack of a Green Party candidate may well have seen a few of the nearly 700 people who voted for it in 2017 and 2019 plump for Labour. Which way, incidentally, the nearly 2,500 voters who supported the Lib Dems in 2019 went, who knows?

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The same goes, perhaps, for what all this means. Strictly speaking, the line being briefed by the Tories to anyone who’ll listen – “This is not a Labour win. It’s a Labour hold” – is obviously accurate. But – partly due to Labour’s excellent expectations management – that’s not at all how it feels.

Nor is how it will sound to the majority of people who are sensible enough not to pay too much attention to politics. All they will hear is that Keir Starmer won a close race, giving him some breathing space and a chance to put things right.

Whether he can – whether Batley and Spen can be a turning point and not just a turn up for the books – remains to be seen. As the ancient Greek historian, Polybius, very wisely observed, “Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.”

Una, the graphic novelist and artist, grew up in the same world I did. I spent my youth in a small, white town in the northeast during a deep economic recession;  the only work available was in a very gloomy factory, 20 miles away. Racism was creeping and insidious. The National Front would recruit by standing outside our sink school and handing out leaflets, with headlines about immigrants “taking the jobs” of white men.

Most of the young blokes in the neighbourhood became skinheads, the few Asian families who lived there constantly attacked. After they learned I was a lesbian, I was targeted by the skinheads too. Walking to the shops on our council estate was deeply unpleasant as I was fearful I might bump into groups of young men, looking for distraction from the boredom and poverty.

Even the boys who defended me against the thugs frightened me. I was reminded of all this when I read Eve, new graphic novel by author Una, which though ostensibly about the climate crisis, also considers Right-wing populism and Left-wing authoritarianism. In her book the anti-fascists deployed the same tactics as the racists — just as I remembered from my own experience, and just as we’re seeing today.

I picked Eve up because I had so loved Una’s previous book, Becoming Unbecoming, all about experiencing sexual exploitation at the same time that the Peter Sutcliffe’s psychological cosh was terrorising young women. That book spoke to me because I came of age in the same time and place that Sutcliffe mutilated and killed six of his 13 victims.

The new book is also set up North, in a town similar to Keighley. It has a beautiful landscape, a diverse population — and a lot of tension. But this time it is set in the future. It is, Una tells me, about her worries for her children and the next generation. “It’s hard to talk to my own kids because I don’t feel optimistic for them,” she says. And so she funnelled all those worries into the book.

It is all pretty abstract. But if there is a story, it is about how a young girl and her family cope as society slides into totalitarianism. Their world is in turmoil, something we can relate to in our current angry political moment; and the family fears feel familiar — like something we’re about to experience ourselves. Following some sort of life-changing catastrophe, Eve leaves her community and sets off alone to seek a new way to live.

One of the things Una was trying to work through in the story were her memories of that tension in the Seventies. Because she was something of an outcast, she was protected somewhat from the poisonous views: “I knew not to trust what people say when they are in that racist headspace.” The best that most people who might be a target for these attitudes can – and could — do in the Seventies is just get on with their lives and ignore it. Which is precisely what Eve’s family is doing. “Eve is a sort of ideal, artistic, bolshy, outdoorsy loner,” Una tells me. “She had the childhood I wished I’d had. I wrote her as a lesbian because I didn’t want the story to be about Adam and Eve, but Eve and Eve.”

In the novel Eve’s best friend, Si, is a mixed race boy who ends up fighting the fascists. He means well, but he soon becomes more enamoured with the fight than the cause.

As Eve’s mother says in the book: “These kids grow up with the constant soundtrack of spite, resentment, envy, despair… then they pick up this weekend, superiority-based victimhood…Bad things on the Internet. A few psychopaths. That’s all it takes.”

This is what’s happened in today’s world, with many on the Left using social media to bully and harangue women and some minority groups. They claim to be on the “right side of history”, but they are causing misery and distress. Eve refuses to be online and won’t even consider having a Nokia mobile. She describes the internet as being “like a virus, infecting people… and we all like to think we are immune.”

I couldn’t cope with the homophobic bullying when I was growing up; I decide to leave home to look for work. My mum wasn’t happy, it was the last thing she wanted, but she showed me nothing but support. She understood there was nothing there for me, and that my world was becoming a living hell. I needed to leave everyone I loved behind. Eve, in the book, does the same. She walks away from safety and security into the unknown.

When I moved to Leeds, it felt much better. There were lesbians, feminists and, although predominantly still white back in 1979, the city was home to a number of people from black British and immigrant communities.

But the racism remained fierce. The National Front chose Elland Road football ground to recruit from and would sell its newsletter every Saturday morning in the town centre. I lost count of the number of times the flat in which I lived with Rosie, who was mixed race, was vandalised and daubed with racist and anti-lesbian slogans. In the pubs, my girlfriend would be asked “Where are you from?”, and Rosie would answer “Hull”. I was seen by my family and those I’d left behind as someone in constant conflict with the world.

This was 40 years ago. And, yet, we can see the same flames being fanned today. There they are there in Batley and Spen, where race baiting is rife and is poisoning the polls. And the electorate is just getting angrier and angrier. I was the same back then, in constant conflict with the world. Every advert on TV, every comment from a man, every single thing made me angry. Si is angry about the world he inhabits but has nowhere to go other than into battle alongside the totalitarian Left. Si may think he is counteracting the right-wingers, but in fact is becoming almost as bad. Luckily, I found feminism before I could be swept into a hard-Left faction which would have allowed me to act upon my frustration with the ruling classes.

As far as Eve is concerned, she escapes into the beauty and serenity of nature and her writing, which is exactly what I did as a teenager in order to shut out the ugly reality of the despair and hatred all around me.

But Eve has little faith in her writing skills, despite her mum’s encouragement and praise. Reading Una’s novel uncovered a buried memory for me. As a child, I used to write poetry and, because my dad kept promising to decorate my bedroom and never getting round to it (he worked long shifts and he never had the time or energy), I would scrawl them on my bedroom wall. In these poems I raged against the poverty, violence and brutality towards women and girls, and looked to the day when I could leave that town and escape the pain.

Una channels all her anger through the book, which poses some uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we’re building. The imagery of a world heading into dystopia is powerful and scary, with Una uses the metaphors of racism and fierce nationalism. There is politics: the shadow of Brexit, the idea of northern deprivation, and the fall of the red wall.

But the novel does manage to invoke a feeling of both hope and impending disaster, as though one force is in constant battle with the other. Which, of course, it is.

Eve is a book about human relationships, and in particular mothers and daughters, as well as how we build and maintain community and friendship. Human weakness and conflict are juxtaposed with hopeful futures and painful pasts. It is speculative fiction that feels incredibly timely. The questions threaded through the narrative is, “where will it all lead”, and “what kind of society do we wish to leave behind”?

As Eve says towards the end of the book: “We’ve wasted decades, arguing about things that didn’t matter.”

In the war between fascists and anti-racists in the Batley and Spen campaign, accusations of homophobia and bigotry have been targeted towards young Asian men, and the white, openly lesbian Labour candidate, Kim Leadbeater, has been aggressively challenged on her position on the Middle East conflict.

Everyone is certain that the arguments about such issues are about the things that do matter, but are we wasting our energy by entering into conflict with those that will never listen? If we wish to avoid slipping further into the dystopia depicted in Eve, we need to wake up to what is staring us in the face.

Back in my hometown recently, I heard from third generation Asians and newly settled migrants from southeast Europe. All had previously voted UKIP. All were disillusioned with the Labour Party, telling me they believe it could deepen divisions between minority groups if they ever regain power. I felt sad remembering the hopes and dreams of my youth, and the boys from my estate who got sucked in by racists. As Una so clearly sets out in Eve, we have choices, and we are standing not by the crossroads, but on the precipice.

‘Eve’ is published by Virago

For a start, all three indicate low standards: sleaze in the realm of morality; tawdriness in the realm of good taste; and shoddiness in the realm of workmanship.

However, delving into the etymology reveals a less obvious connection: originally they all referred to low quality fabrics. Thus sleazy may have been a mangling of Silesia, a region from which a type of thin cloth was imported. Tawdry was a corruption of “Saint Audrey’s lace” — a cheap version of a luxury product. As for shoddy, that was the name for a heavy woollen fabric made out of old rags.  

The relevance to tomorrow’s by-election is that shoddy manufacturing began in Batley. For its time — the early 19th century — the processing technology was cutting edge. A machine that could turn a waste product into a useful and affordable material was a wonder of the age.

Today we’d recognise the shoddy industry as an example of advanced recycling. We’d also recognise its geographic concentration — in towns and villages to the south of Leeds — as an example of economic “clustering”. Indeed, the Heavy Woollen District was the Silicon Valley of its day — which makes Batley the Palo Alto of West Yorkshire.  

Sadly, there’s no doubt as to which sense of “shoddy” best applies to the campaign for tomorrow’s by-election. Tawdry is an equally fitting description. As for sleaze, there are some searching questions to be asked. For instance, how did a bogus leaflet purporting to be from the TUC in support of Labour come to be produced?

Then again, one shouldn’t have too much sympathy for the Labour Party, not after a shameful leaflet that it definitely was responsible for. This one combined allegations of “whitewashing Islamophobia” and not caring about human rights in Kashmir with a photograph of Boris Johnson meeting the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Playing politics with the nuclear-armed tensions of the subcontinent is blatantly irresponsible — and so is trying to turn it into a domestic issue.

There is nothing wrong with British voters taking a special interest in foreign policy issues in parts of the world where they have family connections. For instance, I’m half-French and thus take a special interest in the politics of France. It’s equally understandable that someone of, say, Pakistani heritage would take a special interest in South Asian politics. 

However, to link an entire community to an overseas conflict — and politicise the association — is not acceptable. It’s especially dangerous when so many voters in Britain naturally take the other side of the conflict, for equally valid reasons.

The Labour leaflet has been widely condemned: Labour Friends of India called for it to be withdrawn; George Galloway, spotting an opportunity to stick his oar in, described the controversy as the “fruits of identity politics.” Meanwhile, Owen Jones is warning that, in the event of defeat, “supporters of the [Labour] leadership are preparing a narrative that Muslim voters are disillusioned because they’re homophobic, antisemitic bigots.”

I’ve no idea whether Jones is right about that, but identity politics is a dangerous game. Even if you play it with best of intentions you may be surprised where the ball ends up. To use a phrase popular five years ago, Labour risk “unleashing demons” in their desperate attempt to shore up support.

In all the discussion on what the different candidates think about Kashmir or Palestine, almost no thought is given to the dangerous consequences of focusing this by-election on just one part of the constituency’s population. It’s not that the Asian voters of Batley and Spen don’t matter; but how are the other 80% supposed to feel about being sidelined?

Indeed, how is any local voter — whether white, Asian or other — supposed to feel if their main concern is for where they live and its economic future? What has a party wrapped up in identity politics and foreign policy issues got to say to them? As with so many other seats in Labour’s disintegrating Red Wall, there is no real answer. 

At the outset of the by-election campaign, the conventional wisdom was that the constituency is not like Hartlepool, which Labour lost to the Tories in May. But in many ways, Batley and Spen is very much like Hartlepool — and scores of similar constituencies across the North of England. 

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For all their individual distinctiveness, they share an urban-but-not-metropolitan geography that isn’t found to the same extent in most other parts of the country. They exist in such numbers in the North because of the industrial revolution, which as well as creating new cities also transformed villages into a dense patchwork of towns. 

If the industrial revolution haunts the North, it’s not because of nostalgia, but because the North is still made in its image. This may have become a cliché of political reporting, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

A cliché that isn’t true, however, is that, before Brexit, these sort of seats were solidly Labour. In fact, the unbroken Red Wall that stretched from Lancashire to Hull was first breached in the 1980s. There were some seats that the Tories won back then (and later lost to Tony Blair) that not even Boris Johnson has managed to regain. 

One of them is Batley and Spen, a Conservative marginal from 1983 to 1997. Throughout this period, its MP was Elizabeth Peacock — who bore a superficial resemblance to another Tory blonde of the era, but was very much her own woman. In fact, she was well ahead of her time, being an independent-minded northerner with socially conservative but economically interventionist views. She was, for instance, a determined defender of the mining industry, not something that could be said of the prime minister at the time.

Today, the equivalent politics may differ in the details, but there’s no doubting its popular appeal, or that the Tory party of the 2020s is closer to Peacock than to Thatcher.

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The toxic battle for Batley and Spen

By Tanya Gold

If you take a chart and measure people’s economic views along one axis, and their views on Authority versus Liberty on the other, then you produce four quadrants. According to research findings tweeted out by Tim Bale, a remarkable 60% of 2019 voters put themselves in the Left-Authoritarian quadrant. By way of contrast, only 2% took the opposite Right-Libertarian position. 

This doesn’t make the British public quite as Stalinist as it sounds, nor does it make them raving populists — it just means that they support the National Health Service and national borders — and expect their politicians to defend both. 

There is, however, a divergence of opinion between our MPs and the people who vote for them. Labour MPs are more socially liberal than Labour voters, while most Conservative MPs are closer to George Osborne in outlook than Elizabeth Peacock on economics. The difference is that Tories find it much easier compromising with their voters on economic issues than Labour do on social ones; for Labour, progressive beliefs about the crusade against racism, sexism, homophobia (and now transphobia) are sacred causes. These issues cannot be compromised over, and because they are sacred activists inevitably push them to further extremes. As for the Tories, all they have to do is appeal to the median voter against an absent, divided opposition, while appearing less obsessed with strange, niche obsessions. In other words, they don’t have to try very hard. 

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They don’t even have to offer concrete details of how they’d propel northern towns back into the economic fast lane. The pits aren’t going to re-open and nor are the shoddy factories, and it’s a long time since anyone has expected that they would.

A competent opposition would therefore press the government on the specifics of renewal. A clever opposition would drive a wedge between our free-spending Prime Minister and his tight-fisted Chancellor. Once you divide the amount money that the Conservatives are willing to invest by the number of communities they’re promising to level-up, just how much difference can it make?

But perhaps that’s Labour’s cunning plan, to lose so many constituencies to the Tories that levelling-up fails by a process of dilution.

More likely though is that the opposition is neither competent nor clever nor cunning. Instead it’s hamstrung, a victim of its own longstanding, lazy use of identity politics. If Labour lose yet again tomorrow, they only have themselves to blame.

It is self-seeking and short-sighted: a mistake. There is a vacuum to be filled because Tory and Labour are a functional absence. I come upon them only through campaigning literature on lamp posts and under foot: it floats around the constituency like tumbleweed. Party leaders come for photo opportunities so there is evidence for posterity that they exist. Press officers rarely respond, even to requests for information. So, others come to fill the void. Their complaints are superficially rational — opposition is easy — but they are here not to soothe but to ignite. George Galloway, a charismatic, wants to exploit the racism British Muslims face because major parties will not grapple with it. Laurence Fox is here too, offering support to the teacher at Batley Grammar whose use of an image of the prophet Mohammed led to protests at the school, and the teacher choosing exile from the town. It is astonishing to see Fox and Galloway on the same platform but, as self-defined mavericks, perhaps it is not so strange.

Last week, the Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater, a well-being coach and personal trainer, was harassed in the street by a Muslim anti LGTBQ activist, demanding that she condemn LGBTQ education in schools. (Leadbeater is gay.) “The colour of blood is what you are,” he said. Now she has police protection. Labour sources say Galloway supporters are repeatedly driving past the campaign office; once they crowded in to harass them. Labour activists, including Muslims, were pelted with eggs and one was beaten. In white areas, fake Labour leaflets are circulated, saying, “Labour supports taking the knee”, and “The Labour Party believes that it is high time that white people acknowledged their privilege”. Labour itself published a leaflet showing Boris Johnson shaking hands with India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the caption: “the risk of voting for anyone but Labour is clear”. Labour Friends of India asked for its withdrawal.

It is a co-incidence, or perhaps, worse, an omen, that this is the constituency whose Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a white supremacist outside, of all places, a public library. Leadbeater is Cox’s sister. I wonder if it is another mistake from a Labour Party that embraced centralisation, a wound that took too long to show itself: the wrong candidate in the wrong place. Many Labour supporters feel unseen by the party they once embraced as family. Is it seemly to emphasise family ties, through a woman who only joined the party this year? What happened to Jo Cox is a tragedy, but her sister’s candidacy is still morbid nepotism, and it is unpopular with some voters. It takes politics further away from them, and into someone’s else’s personal narrative. “I can’t vote for someone who jumped on a bandwagon,” says one former Labour voter, “the sister of someone quite good.”

Batley is superficially sleepy. The once bustling market has declined; the police station has gone. Most commercial activity is sucked into a vast supermarket, with the now mandatory support for a foodbank in the window. (More than a third of children live in poverty in Yorkshire, and most of them are in working families.)

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Alienation is obvious as you wander Batley and Spen. The young SDP candidate Ollie Purser tells me: “The biggest demographic I meet is people who aren’t going to vote and before I can even give them a leaflet the door is shut.” I follow him as he campaigns in Birstall, an estate of red-brick houses dominated by a sign that says NO BALL GAMES, and in an area where people, according to Purser, either say, “There’s nought for kids to do”, or they else they say: “There’s too much anti-social behaviour”. The main issues here are public services — the Liberal Democrat candidate Tom Gordon says constituents are using Dentaid, a charity that usually operates in developing countries — and whether to build a new Amazon distribution centre for more air pollution and ill-paid, exhausting jobs.

“You all talk shite,” says a man when he opens the door to Purser, though genially. “I have no interest in voting whatsoever.” “Anything to do with working-class culture gets chopped up,” mourns the next, though he takes a leaflet. “I never go out,” says the next, “I’m a Mum”. As we leave two children wave from the window. “I’ve never voted in my life,” says the next potential voter, who must be 70, and Purser patiently explains the principles of a polling station to her. Even when voters do enter a polling station, Purser says, “they are always holding their nose. That’s the problem. [People] biting their lip and putting their cross next to the name because they hate the other team more”. These people are, Purser says, “dislocated. Atomised. Individualised.” As if to illustrate this point, there are two local Facebook groups dedicated to the town: Batley Matters and Batley Really Matters. Even the advocacy groups have split.

In the middle, preening calmly amid the chaos, is George Galloway, the former Labour MP fighting an Oedipal battle with the party he once loved. Though he remains the same, he changes parties more often than he changes his hat: from Labour to Respect to the “economically radical and socially conservative” Workers’ Party.

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Galloway hopes to take Labour votes from the Asian community that make up 20% of the electorate here. He believes they are vexed by what they perceive as Labour’s lack of support for Palestine and lack of action on Islamophobia. One woman says her five-year nephew saw a tabloid headline, and said: “Auntie, look, we are terrorists. It says there”. This has reached a tipping point for Galloway supporters, with Palestine as the flashpoint. Shops in Batley are papered with pro-Palestine messages, and it is not, for these voters, something remote. It is, at least partially, a proxy conflict. In Palestine’s suffering they see themselves: it is a paradigm of their perceived powerlessness. One woman explains the change in dynamic: “We’re not your servants anymore.” Another woman says, “Obviously Israel own everything. It is an untouchable country.” She, though, will vote Conservative. I doubt this view is as widespread as Galloway would like.

Outside Galloway’s campaign office I find a mass of photographs of Galloway on sticks, so they look like a bus station with only one destination: a Galloway victory. I meet him in Starbucks. He is all twinkling vanity; he reminds me of Boris Johnson. Like Johnson, he likes campaigning more than governing; like Johnson, victory over the enemy is not a moral but a psychological imperative. The chase is all. If policy alone was his aim, he would add his voice to the SDP perhaps — “we respect them”, he says — or the Yorkshire Party — campaigning for devolution through its candidate Corey Robinson — or even Labour itself, prostrate but still breathing.

He speaks in perfect paragraphs, emitting campaign literature laced with memoir. Galloway does not converse, not really. He orates, mirrors, boasts. Labour is now a party of “trans-maniacs” who deplore the British voters and the British flag. Labour has, he says, no leadership. They are, rather, “a series of people sitting in circles. I remember vividly Tony Blair’s wife shouting at me to stop shouting, when in fact all I was doing was speaking clearly in the way that one does when one is making a speech. I remember it vividly even though it was more than forty years ago”. I wonder if this, at least partially, is why he is here. He has a long memory.

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He also remembers a woman outing herself as a lesbian at Conference decades ago. “Everyone clapped. I remember saying to the fellow next to me, ‘Why is everyone clapping? Should I announce what I like sexually? Would they clap?’ The personal,” he mourns, “became substituted for what united all of us — whoever we slept with”. And yet here he is, effectively trying to deliver a Conservative MP to Westminster, because of who he is, and I can’t think of anything more personal.

Is he concerned about this? “I draw no distinction between Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson,” he says, “in fact Boris Johnson is better at it than Kier Starmer would be”. He compares Johnson’s campaigning in the Fox’s biscuit factory to how Starmer would do it, if he had done it: “He would have would have walked around like a robot, a desiccated calculating machine, while Boris was practically breakdancing on the factory floor”. For Galloway, Starmer’s failures are ever expanding, like space. Where they do not exist — the biscuit factory, for instance, where he did not appear and so could not fail — he imagines them.

I offer the decline of child poverty under Blair as an example of an important difference between Labour and Tory policy. “I didn’t say there was no difference,” he says, “I said I make no distinction. The difference is this,” he explains, “the Tory wears on his sleeve what he is. Labour are wolves in sheep’s clothing and it’s our job to tear away that sheep’s clothing and reveal the wolf within”. He changes his mind: “it’s not really a wolf, it’s more a jackal. The jackal within has to be exposed”. The jackal feeds on the dead. I think he is projecting.

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Eventually, after multiple emails and telephone calls and knocks on campaign office doors, I do meet a Labour activist, though by accident: a white man walking his Labrador in the park. He too speaks in perfect sentences, as if the relative silence on the street is creating rhetoric straining to be heard.

“The Tories,” he says, “are hoping to win by default, and they are hoping that Mr Galloway will help deliver that for them. He’s incapable of winning the election and if he wants to play a small part in electing a Tory candidate,” – his anger is obvious, though he speaks calmly — “for a party whose leader insults Muslim women, refuses to deal with Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and will do nothing to defend the causes including that of Palestine which Mr Galloway professes to hold dear then that’s up to him”.

That night there is a hustings in a community centre with only one candidate: George Galloway. His wife videos him for posterity. Kim Leadbeater pulled out, and Galloway seems both delighted and appalled. The Yorkshire Party candidate Corey Robinson says he accepted the invitation but was not given the address, and so wandered around Batley looking for it until he gave up and went to visit his family. That is not mentioned.

The interviewer thanks Galloway, whose rhetoric rises to this tiny crisis. “It is I who should thank you,” he says, “and commiserate with you for the great insult that the Labour Party has just delivered half an hour ago”.

He says Labour’s loss will cause an earthquake to destroy its leader. “Why do I care about that?” he asks himself. It’s a good question. The answer is, he says, that the country needs an opposition and, “Britain currently doesn’t have an opposition because the Opposition Leader is no leader at all. He’s so wooden that birds are trying to nest in him. He’s so robotic he might as well be speaking through a speak-your-weight machine. His words go nowhere, move nobody, persuade nobody.”

He continues in this vein for an hour while around him, in a vacuum made of cowardice, the major parties flail, and, in Labour’s case, sink to his tactics. This is a filthy by-election, and only one man is made happy by it. It will not be enough.

Putin aside, Scottish voters are now having to contend with the return of two Scottish political heavyweights of yesteryear: Galloway and Alex Salmond, two RT hosts who now find themselves leading two new political parties.

Each is attempting to outflank their former tribes on the constitutional question, playing to their respective unionist and nationalist bases as strongmen who will hold the current crop of MSP’s feet to the fire. But in doing so, both risk doing more damage to the cause they claim to support. North of the border, there’s more than a lingering suspicion that both are using their creations as a vehicle for their respective egos, rather than as a genuine attempt to shake up the body politic.

The comparisons don’t end there. For while Galloway and Salmond are not quite the opposite of each other, they represent, in a phrase favoured by the former, “two cheeks of the same arse”. They are both, in effect, attempting to game the Scottish electoral system.

Unlike the House of Commons, where an MP simply has to record one more vote than their nearest challenger to win a constituency, the Scottish Parliament — as well as the Welsh Senedd — is elected using the Additional Member System. In Holyrood, there are 129 seats, of which 73 are elected using the traditional first-past-the-post system. Scotland is then divided into wider electoral regions, where 56 further MSPs are elected on a proportional basis. This “list” is designed to ensure that parties are not penalised for recording their support evenly across the country, rather than seeing it pooled geographically in a number of individual seats. Or so goes the theory.

But when the architects of devolution were deciding on this modified “d’Hont system”, there was a general assumption that the same parties competing on the list would also choose to stand candidates in the constituencies; this matters, because the number of constituencies a party wins is ratio’d out of their list returns to make the result more proportional.

Both Galloway’s party, All for Unity (also, confusingly, called Alliance4Unity), and Alex Salmond’s vehicle, Alba, are standing solely on the list. And at least in tactical terms, that may make electoral sense.

In Galloway’s plan, the SNP will likely take the overwhelming number of first-past-the-post seats, but with less than half of the vote. So if pro-UK voters simply cast their wider politics aside and vote for the leading unionist candidate in the constituency vote and the Alliance4UK candidate in the regional list vote, the SNP would be crushed. Nicola Sturgeon would be out on her ear and there would be no more talk of independence referendums.

Salmond’s offer to independence supporters is the inverse of Galloway’s claim. Because the SNP records so many first-past-the-post wins — and will likely do so again in May — they return very few MSPs from the regional list. In effect, goes the Alba narrative, thousands of true believers in independence have their list votes cast aside. But, says Salmond, if they decided to split their vote — SNP in the constituency and Alba on the list — Scottish nationalists could record what he calls a “supermajority” for independence. With so many pro-independence MSPs in Holyrood, Boris Johnson would be forced to capitulate and offer another independence referendum immediately.

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On paper, there appears to be a logic to both arguments. But in reality, they are to varying degrees a combination of sleight of hand, misdirection and utter cobblers.

Both Salmond and Galloway fail to appreciate that Scottish voters are unlikely to put all other considerations to one side when they cast their ballot. Yes, there is tactical voting between Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters — Conservatives sweep up thousands of Lib Dem votes in the borders, many Tory voters in West Dunbartonshire are happy to vote for their local Labour MSP to keep the nationalists out and a fair whack of both Labour and Conservatives will cheerily vote for the avuncular Scottish Lib Dem leader in his NE Fife constituency.

But there is no wholesale transfer, nor would you expect there to be from such diverse political traditions. Indeed, because Scottish councils are decided on multi-member wards and with a single transferrable vote, where voters rank their choices, it is easy to track their second and third preferences. In the glut of council by-elections we have seen following the lifting of Covid restrictions, it is clear that as many  — and sometimes more — Labour voters would rather give their second vote to the SNP than to the Conservatives, even if the Tories are best placed to keep a nationalist out of office.

Moreover, as the vast majority of pro-union MSPs are elected on the list system, rather than winning constituencies outright, adding another unionist party such as Galloway’s and splitting the vote four ways, rather than three, is likely to reduce each party’s share and allow more nationalists in through the middle.

I suspect that George Galloway — whose itinerant political career has taken in the Labour Party, The Respect party, the Workers Party of Britain and now All For Unity — probably knows this. This is not, after all, the first time he has stood for Holyrood; in 2011, he managed to record 3.3% on the Glasgow list.

Fast forward to today, and the most recent three Scottish polls have All For Unity failing to cut through. But while it looks unlikely that Galloway will return any MSPs, he could still gather enough votes to keep some pro-UK members out. For a man who refused to join the Better Together campaign at the 2014 independence referendum because “I hate the Union Jack”, who has previously called for a United Ireland and last week saw a clip resurface of him calling on the UK government to deliver a second independence referendum, it is almost as if his new party is just another grift to keep himself in the public eye.

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For Alex Salmond, however, even his most devout opponents accept that he believes fervently in Scottish independence. It is a cause to which he has committed almost his entire adult life. Whether, though, he is fully invested in seeing his protégé, Nicola Sturgeon, be the one to deliver it is another matter.

The fallout between the two former allies has been seismic. It centres on a complex and unedifying series of events, involving Salmond winning a civil battle over Sturgeon’s government over the way it investigated allegations of sexual assault against him, and culminating in Salmond being acquitted of multiple allegations of the same nature. Along the way, Ms Sturgeon traduced the character of her former boss, mentor and friend of 30 years — and she has carried the attacks into this campaign, highlighting his gambling habits and suggesting his new party was about putting “self-interest first”.

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But is this likely? While a new nationalist party throws a spanner into some of the statistical modelling of polls and results, the general rule of thumb is that you need 5% of the regional vote to start taking seats. Get more than 5% of the vote and Alba begins doing damage to the pro-UK cause by displacing some pro-UK MSPs; receive less than 5% and the damage is mostly inflicted on the nationalist side by taking SNP and nationalist-supporting Green votes without anything to show for it.

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The most recent three polls, in which Alba has recorded between 2-3% of the vote, suggest the latter scenario is increasingly likely. Indeed, it’s hard not see Alex Salmond’s power play as anything other than a revenge mission. When he stepped down in 2014, he handed his deputy a parliamentary majority. Nicola Sturgeon promptly squandered it in the 2016 Scottish election — a setback which allowed the UK government to deny all claims that an independence referendum should be rerun.

But even if Alba does somehow manage to return the sort of “supermajority” Alex Salmond claims to be hoping for, there’s nothing to say that it will pay off. The UK Government would be well within its rights to point out that gaming the system isn’t the same as gaining support. After all, in recent polls a majority of Scots have not been in support of separation. It would also, I suspect, be easier to counter a fractured nationalist Scottish movement composed of squabbling splinter groups than an SNP majority.

Come election day, though, far more important will be the fact that voters simply don’t like the sense that they are being played; that so-called big beasts think the political stage is theirs for an encore even if there’s no applause.