In September 2026 the Workers’ Party of Britain publicly disavowed the left and published a post describing Jews and their organisations as an enemy within Britain. This article traces how George Galloway, and the parties he has led, got here.
What the Workers’ Party is now saying
On 30 August 2026 the Workers’ Party of Britain posted the following on its official Facebook page: “The enemy is at home, not abroad”. A few days later, the party wrote: “The Left is a cul de sac. The Left is a dead end.” Both posts are reproduced as screenshots below.
Recent social media posts from the party unequivocally disavow the left and have now become explicitly antisemitic. This kind of language, that Jews and their organisations are an enemy within Britain, is highly reminiscent of Nazi Party propaganda.
In this article we attempt to map the transition of both Galloway and the political parties he has led from being clearly and deliberately associated with the political left to their disavowal of the entire political left, not just the Labour Party. Galloway’s pro-Palestinian sympathies are not in themselves something that Socialists Against Antisemitism regards as problematic; that is not the subject of this article. We do not deal here with other activities with which he has been associated, such as broadcasting and charity appeals, for the sake of conciseness.
The Labour years
George Galloway was born in Dundee in 1954 and was active in the local Labour Party from his teens, becoming Secretary of the Dundee Labour Party while still a teenager. After a period as General Secretary of the anti-poverty charity War on Want, he was elected to Parliament at the 1987 general election as Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead, defeating the SDP co-founder and former Labour Cabinet minister Roy Jenkins. There was little in his record as a Labour MP to suggest how fundamentally his politics would change as the years went on. He remained a Labour MP until 2003, when his opposition to British involvement in the war in Iraq led him to threaten to stand against Labour at the next general election, which together with other alleged breaches of party rules brought about his expulsion.
He sat for Glasgow Kelvin until 2005, by which time he had formed Respect, at first a coalition and later in effect a party, whose name was an acronym in which the S stood for “socialism”. In 2005 he won Bethnal Green and Bow for Respect, defeating its Labour MP Oona King. After changing constituencies and coming and going from Parliament, he wound up Respect and founded his current vehicle, the Workers’ Party of Britain, in 2019.
Although he has for many years held socially conservative positions on a number of issues, he was until quite recently still regarded as a person on the political left, albeit a highly unwelcome one in many quarters. Since 2019 there has been a complete change in how he sees his own, and his party’s, alignment in British politics.
The regimes he chose
Galloway’s break from Labour was ostensibly fuelled by his opposition to the war in Iraq. But well before this he had shown his willingness to be associated with certain Arab regimes, particularly the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As early as 1994 he saluted Hussein’s “courage, strength and indefatigability” in a speech that has become infamous amongst Galloway’s detractors (David Morley, Gorgeous George: The Life and Adventures of George Galloway, London: Politicos, 2007, pp. 210–211).
Since Hussein’s fall from power he has expressed outright support for Iran’s theocratic regime, and has worked for the Iranian state broadcaster Press TV since 2008. He even defended the execution in Iran of the boyfriend of the gay asylum seeker Mehdi Kazemi, saying on a chat show that the man had been executed for “sex crimes” rather than for being gay (The Wright Stuff, 13 March 2008). He was also a strong supporter of the bloody Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, calling him “a breath of fresh air” (“Galloway praises Syrian president”, BBC News, 19 November 2005), and supported the Syrian military presence in Lebanon, although latterly he attempted to deny that he had ever supported the Assad regime and said he supported the Syrian revolution.
He has denied that either Hezbollah or Hamas are terrorist organisations. In 2006 he said: “I glorify the Hezbollah national resistance movement, and I glorify the leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah” (Socialist Worker, 25 July 2006). In 2009 he was given a Palestinian passport by the then Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Many more instances could be listed. In short, he has consistently supported reactionary regimes, including that of Iran, and Hezbollah and Hamas, essentially on the grounds that they are the strongest opponents of Israel.
The social conservatism that was always there
This support has led him to condone some extremely socially conservative actions, including the Kazemi case. But it took a long time for his own social conservatism to show fully in domestic politics, although he was largely silent on, for example, the persecution of gay people in the Middle East. The dam finally burst in May 2024, when he told Novara Media in an interview that he did not regard gay relationships as normal. He has also, especially since his break from Labour, emphasised his opposition to abortion, for example in a 2004 interview with the Independent’s Deborah Ross. Despite his views on gay and abortion rights, Galloway was for many years keen to present himself as a left-winger, a pro-Palestinian alternative to Labour.
The pattern of his antisemitism
The issue that has particularly defined Galloway’s transition from the left towards the far right is antisemitism. He has been noted for forays into antisemitism for many years, and space does not permit a full listing of the instances. But there is a pattern. For a number of years he avoided direct criticism of Jews as Jews, always couching his most questionable statements in terms of criticism of Israel and Zionism, not of Jews as a people. He could point to his own record as cover: “throughout the entirety of my time underground in South Africa under apartheid, every house I slept in, every dinner I ate, every car I drove in, was provided by Jewish activists of the African National Congress.” He once angrily cut off a caller to his radio phone-in who complained that witnesses are able to swear on the Torah in British courts, asking “what’s wrong with swearing on the Torah?”. Neither of these is inconsistent with what followed. They are the credentials that allowed him to say, for years, that his target was Israel and never Jews.
2019: the hinge
His flirtation with rightist politics began in earnest in 2019, and it was arguably in that year that his antisemitism became more flagrant and less couched in terms of Israel or Zionism. In the European elections of May 2019, the last in which the United Kingdom took part, he said he had voted for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, now Reform UK. This was the first real sign that he was willing to cooperate with explicitly right-wing parties or people. The same year he entertained on his talk show Maram Susli, known online as “PartisanGirl” or “Syrian Girl”, who had previously been a guest of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and of Alex Jones, and who is noted for the virulence of her antisemitism.
In June 2019, when Tottenham Hotspur lost the Champions League final, he welcomed the result by tweeting “no Israeli hands on the Cup”. He used the word Israeli rather than Jewish, but this was simply a substitution of one for the other: Spurs are known for their strong support amongst Jewish communities, not for any ties with Israel. TalkRadio sacked him for the tweet. And 2019 was also the year in which he founded the Workers’ Party of Britain, essentially the successor to Respect.
Red-Brown
In March 2021 he claimed that Humza Yousaf, then Scotland’s Justice Secretary, was less Scottish than he was, saying “Well, Humza, you’re not more Scottish than me. You’re not a Celt like me. You’re not working-class like me”; it is difficult to see on what grounds Galloway could claim this other than Yousaf’s ethnicity. This was not antisemitism, but it was the language of the racist right. There is no longer even a pretence of using the language of the left; the rhetoric is recognisably that of parties such as Reform UK or Restore Britain. There is, in our view, a clear pathway away from the language and policies of the socialist left towards a kind of Red-Brown populism, with the brown element ever more to the fore.
Russia and the far-right circuit
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Galloway emerged very much on the Russian side of the argument, and since 2025 in particular he has spent an increasing amount of time in Russia. In the same way that Russia has kept a following among what we might call the Stalinist left while also gaining support from the hard or far right, Galloway has openly met people, often in Russia, clearly associated with the latter. In June 2025 he attended the “Forum of the Future” in Moscow alongside the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Errol Musk, the South African businessman and father of Elon. This long-term trajectory has led to increasing estrangement between Galloway and others on the hard or far left, an estrangement which started a long time ago when the Socialist Workers Party, a founding component of Respect, decided it could no longer work with him. It could be argued that Galloway has filled this void by increasing his contacts with notables on the far right as time has gone on.
The destination
And so, in 2026, we arrive at the posts with which this article began. They were published in the name of the party rather than of Galloway himself, but the party and he are essentially one and the same. The language is of a kind that hardly anyone on the left could recognise as the discourse of the political left. Those who have voted for Galloway, campaigned for him, or excused him over the years as an awkward fellow traveller now have his party’s own word for what it is. The horseshoe now appears to be ready at the farrier’s.
Barnaby Marder, active in the UK Labour Party since 1977, co-founded Socialists Against Antisemitism (SAAS) in 2018.
This article was first published on the website of Socialists Against Antisemitism.
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