Labour get a shot at Galloway

By Jack Dulhanty

Rochdale Town Centre on a Thursday morning. A man in a blue raincoat and bucket hat pushes a pram filled with loaves of bread, barmcakes, fruit and chocolate. He stops by a glass-clad retail district, completed in spring 2020 at a cost of £80 million, and shouts: “Free food, free food, free food. Anybody homeless — we’ll be here 7 days and 7 nights. Nobody’s son or daughter needs to be without food or water. This is England.”

Within 10 minutes, a man in a wheelchair comes over to take a loaf, and the man in the bucket hat gives him a free haircut; another one of his services, apparently. A woman dressed in jeans and a mac sits near the pram for a while, looking through the selection; she starts to walk away, then comes back to take something. 

Throughout the day, the man reappears around the town centre, along with another man pushing another pram full of food. These mobile food banks, seemingly run by the two men independently, are a grim sign of the poverty and cost of living pressures experienced by people in Rochdale.

It's just one of a coterie of issues that has beset the town in recent years. There’s also housing (the biggest local housing association was accused of perpetuating slum conditions after the death of three year old Awaab Ishak in one of its flats in 2020) and health outcomes (in 2022, Rochdale was the only borough of Greater Manchester to see a decrease in life expectancy since the devolution of health powers in 2014). The town hasn’t had a maternity unit since it closed in 2011. 

It has had an equally tumultuous few years politically. The local Labour council has been broadly criticised over its response to the town’s grooming scandal. Simon Danczuk, the town’s MP at the time the council were being scrutinised for their failure to protect victims, was later kicked out of the Labour Party for sending inappropriate texts to a 17-year-old girl. 

Then earlier this year, after seven years under the late Labour MP Tony Lloyd, Rochdale hosted one of the most chaotic by-elections in recent memory. George Galloway won the seat with a campaign that focussed almost entirely on the conflict in Gaza, after Labour’s candidate Azhar Ali was disowned by the party for spreading conspiracy theories about the October 7 Attack. 

Three months later, a few weeks off a snap general election, I find Galloway at the back of his constituency office — “for Rochdale, for Gaza” above the door — in his fedora, on his phone. It feels more like October outside, with rain falling hard on Market Way. “Are you enjoying the summer election?” he asks. 

Galloway’s few months in office (54 sitting days in parliament, he specifies) have been very busy. His party, The Workers Party of Britain (WPB), fielded multiple candidates across the country in last month's local elections. Its biggest result being the unseating of Manchester City Council’s deputy leader Luthfur Rahman in Longsight. Two WPB candidates won in Rochdale, but the council remained decidedly Labour. 

“The mother of all single issues”

Galloway and his candidates have all focussed their campaigns on the conflict in the Middle East, printing their campaign materials in the colours of the Palestinian flag. The Guardian recently found that, since the start of the year, Galloway has mentioned Israel 11 times more than he has mentioned Rochdale on his Youtube channel. 

“People ask me: are you a one issue party? And I say no, we're not, but if we were, Gaza is the mother of all single issues,” Galloway says. “It doesn't get much bigger than that as an issue for many people in the town, and indeed, up and down the country.”

He says he is campaigning on multiple fronts, focussing on the NHS, local investment and housing. “We need action on housing,” he says, “more than anything else. We’ve got a much higher number of damp houses than the national average, a higher than national average asthma rate, and bronchitis rate.” 

But in terms of concrete plans, Galloway says he is stymied by the local Labour Council. “The council is a problem for us in that we have a council that is terrified of us. And whenever we get something they try to rubbish it or say it wasn't me that got it.” 

It’s true that Galloway and Rochdale Council are at loggerheads (after his by-election win he promised to sweep mainstream parties out of the council) but local Labour figures say this is because Galloway isn’t engaging with them. 

“What he’s doing,” one councillor who asked to be anonymous says, “is sounding off in the House of Commons, getting hold of the wrong people and then getting into the paper.” Galloway has been criticised in council meetings as a “Johnny-come-lately” promising to solve problems the council have already been working on for years. 

Galloway doesn’t seem worried about his seat, saying he hasn’t much noticed Labour’s campaign. He tells me he’s trying to persuade voters that they’d be better with a non-Labour candidate, as that will essentially embarrass a Labour government into doing more for the town.  

“I work on the assumption that it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease” he says. “And if we get a Labour MP, a Labour Council and a Labour government, that is parked.” Having him there as a voice of opposition to the council and Labour, to Galloway’s mind, means the national government will throw more resources Rochdale’s way to win the seat back. 

It’s true that the Conservative government spent lots on electorally important towns, but it doesn’t seem to have actually helped them in the polls. The anonymous Labour councillor says: “the Tories have been quite pork barrel with where they’ve put money,” but “you’re not going to see a repeat of these blessed areas getting money and others not”. 

Second time lucky

“He is completely wrong about that,” Paul Waugh, Labour’s candidate and former political journalist, tells me when I describe Galloway’s thinking. “This idea that somehow as a party of one, you can get a hearing, and you can make a difference… I'm afraid what you need is someone who is a direct link to that new Labour government.”

Waugh lost out on the by-election candidacy to Azhar Ali in February, something that many in the local party came to regret. He grew up in Rochdale, is a fan of the local football club and in most other ways has a more authentic connection to the town than Galloway, something he is pressing home to voters. “If [you] say you're going to bang the drum for Rochdale in London, you need someone who understands Rochdale, who grew up here, who was born here, who puts it first in terms of its public services, who makes their home here”, he tells me.

Waugh toes the party line when it comes to policy, sticking to the national party’s priorities. “He’s very slick, he’ll say what the manifesto says,” one campaigner tells me before my conversation with him. “He’ll have some of his own ideas, but until he gets in he’ll toe the party line. He sees himself as part of the cabinet at some point.”

Waugh and Galloway definitely take a different tack as campaigners. While Galloway uses his rhetoric and charisma to get in the public eye, Waugh, a former journalist himself, isn't enamoured by media coverage. His campaign manager, who I called to arrange an interview, told me Waugh wasn’t interested in anything other than hyperlocal coverage to target voters. When I do get on the phone with him he’s reticent to give up too much of his time, “every minute I’m not knocking on a door is a minute wasted” he says. I ask if I can join him on a door knock in that case, but he says it can affect voters’ honesty, reminding me: “I’ve done this before as well.”

His particular focus is the NHS and the need for a new birth centre. He was born in the now shuttered maternity unit and his wife is a midwife. “I really feel passionate about women's birth rights and choices”, he tells me, saying he wants to give women in Rochdale the choice to have their baby in the town. 

The lack of any hospital capacity for giving birth is clearly a big issue locally — expectant mothers have to travel to Oldham at the moment. A new birth centre has been discussed as an option by the council for a while, but it wouldn’t be the same as a maternity unit. A maternity unit would require the hospital to also have an A&E, which it doesn’t and is even less likely to have in the foreseeable future, says Waugh. The birth centre would be a midwife-led unit, without obstetric, neonatal or anaesthetic care on the premises. It’d essentially work for very straightforward births, which, while not perfect, would be progress. 

One thing Galloway and Waugh agree on is that Rochdale needs investment. It’s a sentiment you pick up when speaking to local people in the town. Amira, 22, works in the town centre and was asked to campaign for Galloway after speaking to him about her cousins from Palestine. She hasn’t decided whether she wants to yet. “I think some of the biggest problems in Rochdale are the lack of investment into the infrastructure and everything around it. It's a really deadbeat town.” 

She says over the last fifteen years the high street has become more and more quiet — “you can just tell how much more deprived Rochdale has become.” Galloway and Waugh both think Manchester’s wealth ought to be more equally shared with outer boroughs. “The Tories were not exactly gearing up to throw money here,” says Galloway. “But the powers of the mayor are considerable. And I mean, frankly, there is an inattention to the satellite towns around Manchester.” 

“We need to share some of Manchester's wealth, and that's a real priority,” says Waugh, although he’s optimistic about Atom Valley, the giant manufacturing hub spearheaded by Andy Burnham that will straddle Bury, Rochdale and Oldham and bring with it hundreds of jobs. “High tech, well paid jobs just south of Rochdale,” Waugh says. “That sort of stuff is really exciting”. 

Time and again, what comes up when talking about Rochdale is its reputation. “We're at the bottom of every league you'd want to be at the top of, and at the top of every league you'd want to be at the bottom of,” Galloway tells me. Those door-knocking for Labour say Waugh has asked them to promote the positives, talk about what makes Rochdale good.

“I think what angers a lot of people in Rochdale is the way that we're somehow singled out for a lot of things that happen in other areas,” Waugh says. “We’re not unique in some of the awful stuff that has happened in Rochdale. Other towns have had to deal with it as well.” Trying to move on from that, and start to rehabilitate Rochdale’s reputation, is a priority for him: “I'm only doing this because I love my hometown, and like many Rochdalians, I'm sick of it being a bad news story in the Evening News.”

Rochdale’s travails and its struggling reputation is what made it such a ripe target for Galloway. It was for the taking, with so many in the town disillusioned with a Labour council they were used to seeing criticised for not protecting children. The town’s considerable Muslim population, and the importance of an issue like Gaza to them as voters, created the perfect conditions.

Speaking with Amira, she thinks that will be enough to carry him over the line next month too. “I think people are thinking more about what government they want, but Palestine is still a huge issue,” she says. “Because I think the government's stance on it has been appalling and a lot of people have died. And if that was anywhere else in the world with people that didn't look like that, I think that the government would have a lot more to say.”

On Gaza, Waugh says: “I share their anger and their revulsion at the actions of this right wing Israeli government,” he says. “It has bombed and starved thousands of men, women and children. I've called for the suspension of UK arms to Israel. I've condemned Netanyahu's sickening airstrikes in Rafah.” Looking back on February’s result, he says: “We cannot ignore the 12,000 people who voted for George Galloway in that by-election, they shouldn't be ignored, they should be respected and engaged with.”

But politicians should be able to engage with these voters on the issue of Gaza and what is happening in their backyard. Waugh says: “You want your decent public services restored, you want decent housing, you want your kids to go to a decent school, you want all children to be fed. You can hold two thoughts at the same time.”