George Galloway 'no longer involved in Scottish politics'

He called journalists to a press conference outside Parliament on his first day back in Westminster on Monday.

The newly-elected Workers Party of Britain MP for Rochdale hit out at the Daily Mail, the BBC and GB News – accusing the last of “pumping out hatred of Muslims” under the guise of “hatred of extremism”.

Galloway was asked about his election campaign, in which he aggressively campaigned on the issue of Gaza.

“I know that many journalists like to shut that G-word down but when the highest court in the world finds that there is a plausible case that Israel is committing crimes of genocide and sends Israel for trial on genocide charges, it doesn’t get much more serious than that,” he said.

“I always ask journalists – and it’s never made it into print yet, let’s see if I can do it this time – if the by-election had been in February of 1940 or 41, would anyone seriously have condemned me for putting the crimes of the Holocaust at the centre of my election campaign?

“Actually in some papers, they would because some of the papers were supporting the blackshirts. ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts’, screamed the Daily Mail in the run-up to the Second World War. Some of them would but most would not, I hope.”

Asked whether he believed Hamas should run Gaza – which the militant group has controlled since the 2007 Palestinian elections – Galloway said the question from the BBC was “dripping with imperial condescension”.

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He said: “Perhaps they should let the BBC pick the government of Gaza […] It’s an intriguing question, dripping with imperial condescension.

“Do I think that Hamas should be allowed to run the government of Gaza? Should we ask Britain to decide who runs Gaza, or the BBC, perhaps? The people of Palestine must pick their own governments.”

Galloway – who has now achieved the rare feat of representing four separate towns and cities in the Commons – was also asked for his response to the Prime Minister calling his election “beyond alarming”.

He accused Rishi Sunak (below) of seeking to “whip up Islamophobic, racist fervour in the likes of GB News”, adding: “GB News at the forefront, presenter after presenter, programme after programme, pumping out hatred of Muslims, thinly disguised as hatred of extremism, but when you ask them, ‘What do you mean by extremism, who are the extremists’? They can never tell.

“It’s clear to me that Sunak has identified Muslims and Gaza as the proximate centre of that wedge issue that he intends to use as perhaps his only hope of re-election. It’s quite clear that there’s going to be a raft of measures that will take away still further freedoms of the British people, freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, freedom to protest and to demonstrate.

“And if they have their way, freedom to elect people that the establishment doesn’t like. That was also the meaning of his rather embarrassing impromptu performance outside Number 10.”

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He also claimed his party could unseat Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner (below) – claiming there were “15000 supporters of my point of view in her constituency” where she has a majority of 4263.

The Workers Party of Britain will be unable to fund candidates’ election campaigns, Galloway later admitted – meaning they will need to fund themselves.

Galloway said the next General Election would be “about Muslims and the taking away of civil liberties” and claimed that if Keir Starmer failed to challenge what he described as the Tories’ assault on democratic freedoms, his party could “pick up potentially millions of votes”.

The former leader of the Unionist group All For Unity and former MP for Glasgow Kelvin said he was not “going to fight against the SNP in here”, saying his involvement in Scottish politics was over.

"I am no longer involved in Scottish politics, so I will leave that to the Scottish people to decide in Scotland," Galloway said.

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He said while he was “not a supporter of the SNP” he thought the party had been “outstanding on the Gaza question, at least by comparison with the two big parties of the state”.

And he said he planned to antagonise Ulster politicians in Westminster by hanging a photograph of the Pope in the corridor where his office is. 

Galloway said: "My office is situated in a corridor in which every other member there is a member of either the Democratic Unionist Party or associated points of view and I did ask the clerk if she knew that I was a Roman Catholic and I might not be welcome on that floor.

"And then I met a DUP MP and I told him this amusing story and I told him that a picture of the Pope and JFK would be put on the outside of my door, just so they could walk past it every day."