George Galloway, Scottish-English politician and broadcaster
George Galloway (born 16 August 1954) is a British politician, broadcaster, and writer serving as the leader of the Workers Party of Britain since 2019 and as the founder and lead spokesman of All for Unity since 2020. He currently presents The Mother of All Talk Shows on Radio Sputnik and Sputnik on RT UK. Between 1987 and 2010, and then between 2012 and 2015, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) for four constituencies, first for the Labour Party and later the Respect Party, the latter of which he joined in 2004 and led from 2013 until its dissolution in 2016.
Galloway was born in Dundee. After becoming the youngest ever chair of the Scottish Labour Party in 1981, he was general secretary of the London-based charity War on Want from 1983 until elected as MP for Glasgow Hillhead (later Glasgow Kelvin) at the 1987 general election. In 2003, he was expelled from the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute, including having called on British troops to disobey orders.
In 2004, Galloway became a member of the Respect Party, and then the party leader by late 2013. Having decided not to seek re-election for Glasgow Kelvin, he stood for Respect at the 2005 general election for Bethnal Green and Bow, defeating the sitting Labour MP, Oona King. He served for one parliamentary term and did not contest the seat at the 2010 general election. He returned to the House of Commons at the Bradford West by-election in 2012, but lost his seat at the 2015 general election. He stood as the Respect candidate in the 2016 London mayoral election, finishing in seventh place with 1.4% of the vote. He stood as an independent candidate for Manchester Gorton in 2017 and for West Bromwich East in 2019. Following the 2019 general election, he founded the Workers Party of Britain. He led All for Unity, a Scottish party he founded to support British unionism in the face of rising support for Scottish independence and the Scottish National Party (SNP), into the 2021 Scottish Parliament election, where it captured 0.9% of the vote.
Galloway testified to the United States Senate in 2005 over alleged illicit payments from the United Nations' Oil for Food Program. He supports the Palestinian side in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, opposes Zionism, and was involved in the Viva Palestina aid convoys. He supported Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 Labour Party leadership election and during Corbyn's leadership of the party. In the 2016 EU membership referendum, he advocated a "Leave" vote, campaigning with the cross-party, pro-Brexit organisation Grassroots Out, while before the 2019 European Parliament election he announced on Twitter, "for one-time only", he would support Nigel Farage's Brexit Party.