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Batley and Spen by-election

Paul Halloran got over 6,400 votes at the last general election here.
Laurence Fox....is......himself.
Why the candidate is photographed with the.....himself....is anyone's guess, he hasn't captioned the post.






I fear this by-election is about to be catapulted into the realms beyond surrealism.
 
From former MP Tom Harris in the Telegraph (whose paywall can be easily circumvented on a laptop by rapid use of CTRL+A CTRL+C)


Privately, Labour strategists will be worried about Galloway's appeal to Batley's sizeable Muslim population

TOM HARRIS28 May 2021 • 1:30pm

My education in the legend of George Galloway came from Donald Dewar, the founder of Scottish devolution, a few years before he could add that to his CV. Donald was a constituent of Galloway’s in Glasgow Hillhead, the seat the latter had held since unseating former SDP leader Roy Jenkins at the 1987 general election.

As the 1992 election approached, Donald would joke that he was keen to secure a generic “Vote Labour” poster for his window before any Galloway campaigner arrived at his door insisting that he put a “Vote Galloway” sign on display instead. There is a famous, but sadly unsourced and therefore apocryphal, story of how Galloway once asked Donald, “Why do people take such an instant dislike to me, Donald?” To which the inevitable answer came, “Because it saves time, George.”

Apart from a very brief encounter with the man as he left his general election count in triumph in 1987, I had no face-to-face dealings with Galloway until I became an MP in 2001. Even then such interactions were rare and, when they did happen, they were curt (to say the least). We hailed from very different traditions within the Labour Party.

Yet he possesses an undeniable quality that, better focused, could have conceivably propelled him to the very top of the party. He is one of the last great orators of his generation and if you can listen to the tone, the passion and his mesmerising use of a wide vocabulary, without paying too much attention to the often nonsensical and occasionally offensive things he actually says, it is quite possible to understand what others see in him.

His status as a political celebrity was confirmed in 2005 when, having been expelled from Labour and having founded his own party, Respect, he won the previously safe Labour seat of Bethnal Green and Bow from its Labour incumbent Oona King. That in itself was unprecedented, but his subsequent major electoral triumph – winning the Bradford West by-election in 2012 with a gobsmacking 38 per cent swing from Labour – put his 2005 result in the shade.

It hardly matters that Labour regained the seat at the 2015 general election, or that Galloway has subsequently tried and failed to make a success of a new pro-UK initiative during the recent Scottish parliament elections. Like Alex Salmond’s attempts to write himself back into the Scottish narrative with his Alba Party, there is a temptation, after the fact, to dismiss Galloway as an electoral has been. But that is to forget the frisson of excitement and nervousness that shot through Scotland’s political class when each man announced his new venture.

Galloway has faced electoral defeat before and has frequently managed to stage a dramatic comeback. That is what unnerves his political opponents even today. Because they recognise that he still has enough of a presence and the following to make waves.

His announcement yesterday that he intends to be a candidate in the forthcoming Batley and Spen by-election – now scheduled for July 1 – will, of course, be dismissed publicly by the Labour Party as the last, desperate, attempt of a failed politician to get some attention. Privately, however, they are more likely to be acutely focused on how to prevent Galloway attracting the votes of the sizeable Muslim population in the constituency. What makes the contest a potentially more volatile one – and for Galloway a potentially more prosperous hunting ground for votes – is the controversy over the suspension of three teachers at Batley Grammar School over the use of controversial cartoons of Mohammed in a religious education class.

Other candidates will want to avoid the issue like the plague, hoping to deploy the traditional language of consensus – respect both sides, the need to be sensitive, more that unites than divides us, etc – while Galloway might be expected to take a more belligerent and partisan approach.

In minority communities he still has a lot of support, particularly because of his opposition to the Iraq war (both of them) and his track record of support for Palestinians in their dispute with Israel. Labour has no appetite for fighting a contest along these lines. More to the point, having to defend a majority of 3500, the party simply cannot afford any significant loss of votes from the Muslim, or any other, community.

Galloway made the announcement of his candidacy on the specific – and doubtful – premise that another by-election defeat for Labour in a seat it held at the last general election would spell the downfall of Keir Starmer as leader. That gives the party and its leadership an added incentive to quash Galloway’s campaign before it even starts. The problem they face is that Galloway has veered so wildly between triumph and disaster during his long career, it is impossible to anticipate which direction his latest campaign will go.
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And in a contest already so unpredictable, in a political context so febrile and inhospitable to the current Labour Party, that is the most discomfiting aspect for Starmer.
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I don't reckon Galloway will pick up much at all - he's not got the same roots in the muslim community now that he did in 2012, and has done much to alienate them. And Harris is wrong if he thinks none of the candidates will want to make anything of the grammar school suspensions, Paul Halloran is running a fundraiser for them so I'm fairly sure he'll be going in hard on it.
 
A prospective candidate for Batley and Spen has had some of their....erm.....provocative....ballot paper descriptions rejected by the Electoral Commission.

"
ELECTION watchdogs have thrown out an attempt to launch a new political party with the slogan “Sod Scottish Referendum”.

The Electoral Commission last week ruled the phrase was too “offensive” to appear on election leaflets and ballot papers.

The slogan was proposed by the new English Independence party, founded by Neil Humphrey from Nottingham, who also tried unsuccessfully to register it during the 2014 referendum itself.
The Commission also rejected five other offensive slogans from the party, including “Keep Calm and Vote English”, “Hang Murderers Death-Penalty” and “Just Hang’m High to Die”.

However English Independence was registered as a party last week, with approved slogans including “Full English Devolution” and “Independence from Europe, and the UK”.
Humphrey, 47, was previously in Labour, Ukip, the LibDems and the English Democrats, and stood for the latter in Berwick-Upon-Tweed in the 2015 general election, getting 88 votes.
He has now set up the English Independence party, and is considering standing as a candidate in the upcoming Batley and Spen by-election caused by the killing of Labour MP Jo Cox.
He said he would be appealing against the Commission’s decision to reject the slogan he wanted to use for that contest, “Lethal-Injection Death Penalty for Murder”."
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PR1Berske said:
A prospective candidate for Batley and Spen has had some of their....erm.....provocative....ballot paper descriptions rejected by the Electoral Commission.
Click to expand...

that article's from the previous by-election in 2016, not this year's

the then English Independence Party candidate (241) votes is listed as "Corbyn Anti". I wonder if he'll be running again
 
The "Jo" in this tweet refers to Jo Conchie, the previous LibDem candidate, whose previous role as producer of one of those "Benefits street" type programmes made her the target of severe social media backlash.

 
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