LABOUR’S Rochdale meltdown means the momentum in the Lancashire race is now with anti-war candidate George Galloway.

No by-election is an island. They take place in a definite context. And for Rochdale, celebrated as the birthplace of the co-operative movement, this one offers it another chance to reshape politics.

The most important single issue in the world today is halting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, an attack which has already slaughtered more than 12,000 children.

Britain is deeply complicit in the tragedy. The left must look to any and every possibility to rebuke the politicians backing Israel, and to begin to impose a change of course.

That would be true of any by-election, but in most constituencies electors will not have a clear pro-Palestine option. The Westminster consensus backing aggression and war has seen to that.

That isn’t true in Rochdale. Galloway, who has previously sat in Parliament for over a quarter of a century as a Labour and later Respect MP, is standing on a Workers Party ticket, and openly calling on electors to use this by-election to punish Labour for supporting Israel’s genocidal war.

Galloway cannot be accused of jumping on a bandwagon here. Justice for the Palestinians has been a campaigning priority of his for decades. So has opposition to British aggression abroad: his campaigning against the Iraq war prompted his vindictive expulsion from Labour under Tony Blair, while his courageous confrontation with US senators in their own den over that criminal invasion won him international admiration.

He’s nonetheless a deeply controversial figure, even on the anti-imperialist left, his reputation undermined by a string of controversies. 

Some of them have related to an unfeigned social conservatism, although his voting record on many issues is more liberal than supposed.

Some can be attributed to the excesses inherent in a shock-jock social-media milieu, which is a poor anchor in a political storm compared to the labour movement.  

Others still betoken lapses of political judgement — populism and socialist politics have always made uneasy bedfellows.

There are too many such turbulent episodes to be explored here, which is not to belittle the strong feelings they arouse.

Even so, socialists should not find it hard to understand why left and pro-Palestine sentiment in Rochdale is hardening around a Galloway vote. Today, the focus is above all on Britain’s criminal role in the Middle East and Gaza: and on these Galloway has always been on the right side of history.

Rising support for him would be likely even if the left alternatives had not self-destructed, which they have. Labour has disowned its own candidate Azhar Ali for reported anti-semitism, including references to “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” allegedly shaping events.

The Greens had previously disowned theirs for reported Islamophobic social media posts. Socialists can hardly be expected to endorse a Lib Dem, a Tory, or the other ex-Labour MP in the race, Simon Danczuk, now standing for far-right Reform UK.

Wider questions have been thrown up by Labour’s disastrous campaign management, even gaining mass media scrutiny. 

Its claims of forensic due diligence on prospective MPs are exposed for what they are: bogus assertions used to disqualify left-wing candidates, applied exclusively on a factional basis. 

Martin Forde KC and others are right to highlight the hypocrisy of senior Labour figures who bent over backwards to excuse Ali until it was entirely unfeasible, when they have insisted on suspensions and expulsions of leftwingers on far weaker grounds.

All this is important, and should be used to confront Labour’s rigged disciplinary processes and culture of top-down bullying.

But it is secondary to the urgent need to oppose imperialism and war. What result in Rochdale would the besieged Palestinians want to see?

Merely asking the question points plainly to a vote for George Galloway.