Expelled MP Galloway considers rejoining Labour

BRITISH left-wing maverick and former Labour Party MP George Galloway has said he is considering rejoining the British Labour Party following last week’s election of Ed Miliband.

Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 having been found guilty of four charges of bringing the party into disrepute.

Charges laid against him at the time by the party’s National Constitutional Committee included claims that the then MP for Glasgow Kelvin had called on Arabs to fight British troops in Iraq and that he had planned to stand against Labour.

Galloway said: “If Ed Miliband were to follow through, as leader of the opposition, the policy pronouncements he has made, we would then be in a new era. He said he would welcome back into the Labour Party the members who have left along with the 7 million voters it has lost since 1997. I have said since the day I was expelled from the Labour Party that if the Labour Party became a Labour Party again we, who have left it, would all have to consider rejoining.”

Outlining why the party he has strongly criticised in recent years could still be considered his political home, Galloway said: “The Labour Party has always been, from its inception, an unfinished party as far as socialists are concerned, but the Labour Party has the support of a very substantial section of the British working class and still retains the vast support of trade unionists and is still the only mass organisation of the British working class.”

At the time of his expulsion Galloway said Labour would “rue the day” they expelled him.

Reflecting on his time outside of the Labour party building the stridently anti-war Respect coalition’s Galloway, who stood for the umbrella organisation in the last British election, now concedes the project was a failure.

“Respect failed to make the breakthrough. I had hoped it would be the beginnings of a new Labour Party. Respect, for me, was an attempt to refound a Labour Party but it has failed. Our project really depended on having parliamentary representation and if we had gone from one MP to three then everything would have been different. If Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone had come over to Respect then who knows.”