George Galloway has announced that he is going to run as a candidate in the upcoming Holborn and St Pancras by-election, which will be held on 8 October. It is already set to be a hard-fought contest, with Green leader Zack Polanski standing for his party. Can Galloway, the leader of the Workers Party of Great Britain, affect the result?
Since he was expelled from Labour in 2003, Galloway has won elections in seats with significant Asian populations – Bethnal Green, Bradford West and Rochdale. By contrast, only 22 per cent of Holborn and St Pancras residents are Asian, and only half of those are Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Some 20 per cent of the seat’s population are Muslim.
This is notable because Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters are, according to latest polling, the ethnic minority group that feels most favourably towards Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn, who share a lot of supporters with Galloway. Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters are twice as likely to feel favourably towards Polanski as white voters, and 11 and six points more likely than black and Indian voters respectively.
Holborn is not natural Galloway territory. But can he take enough votes from Polanski to guarantee a Labour win? It’s hard to say. Last week, Burnage, a ward in the Green-run Gorton and Denton constituency, held a by-election to replace a resigning Labour councillor. Labour won the seat with a ten-point majority over the Greens. Galloway’s Workers Party candidate came third, with 14 per cent of the vote – enough to swing the vote.
Of course, not every Workers Party vote would have gone Green. But a pro-Gaza Green candidate would have been able to win a high proportion of them – possibly enough to win the seat without the Workers Party getting in the way.
How Galloway as a candidate could impact Holborn is hard to quantify. A very rudimentary assessment of his past election performances suggests he could poll between 8 and 25 per cent in the seat. Galloway is currently “in [self-imposed] exile” in Russia, so a lot of his campaigning may have to be done online.
Last week Polanski told my colleague Megan Kenyon he was “incredibly confident” about winning Holborn and St Pancras. But the by-election is a challenge for the Greens. They did not top the poll in May’s local elections, and Polanski’s popularity is down from earlier this year. Galloway may only receive a few hundred votes. But that could be all it takes to push Polanski into second place.
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Subscribe here to comment“Incredibly confident, but not complacent” is what he said. And that quote was at the beginning, before this galloway joker threw his hat in the ring.
Keep in mind Galloways own WPB deputy resigned because it’s evident Zack is the unity candidate for the left in this by election and disagreed with Galloways reckless decision.
I think Greens will still take it…some things are just fate.
It’s worth mentioning that the Labour councillor, Bev Craig, resigned because she’d been elected to replace Andy Burnham as Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Perhaps more importantly, the Greens won Burnage in May’s local elections.