George Galloway contests London byelection without setting foot in UK

Veteran leftwinger has been ‘in exile in the east’ in Russia and not been to Holborn and St Pancras constituency since campaign began

George Galloway has been elected seven times to parliament, but his attempt to succeed for an eighth this week, in the London seat formerly held by Keir Starmer, is undoubtedly his most curious effort yet.

Since the byelection campaign began, the leader of the Workers party of Britain has yet to set foot in the UK, let alone the Holborn and St Pancras constituency, because he is in what he describes as “self-exile” after being questioned by counter-terrorism police at Gatwick airport a year ago.

Prolific social media feeds show that the veteran leftwinger has spent the past few weeks on a speaking tour in South Africa, with his most recent public appearance on Saturday at a pro-Palestine rally in Cape Town, though posts in the last 24 hours suggest he is in Shanghai, China.

Prior to that he was in Moscow, repeatedly making his hostility to Ukraine and Nato as explicit as his support for Palestine and opposition to apartheid.

“The biggest issue in the H&StP byelection is the path leading us to WW3 in Ukraine,” Galloway wrote on X in the middle of September, an argument that has not gained much traction with voters, though he has chosen to repeat it online – the only way he can reach voters personally before Thursday’s byelection.

Meanwhile, social media feeds show handfuls of Workers party activists campaigning in the constituency without their candidate, fighting a peripheral campaign in a byelection considered to be a battle between Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali and Zack Polanski, standing for the Greens.

“Sincere gratitude to my campaigners who are performing miracles on the ground in my enforced absence. Salute to the supporters they are encountering every day. We can win this. And me and my family can come home. Thank you,” Galloway posted at the end of September.

The campaign highlights an anomaly with Britain’s electoral law. Any British, Irish or qualifying Commonwealth citizen over 18 may stand for parliament – as long as they are not bankrupt or members of the police, armed forces, civil servants or judges. There is no requirement to be a registered elector or other residency requirement, according to the Electoral Commission.

Last month, Galloway also revealed he had been “debanked” – his bank accounts suddenly closed – by the Lloyds-owned Bank of Scotland. “Thirty-nine years ago I opened a personal bank account with Bank of Scotland in Byres Rd Glasgow. Yesterday without explanation or notice they closed my accounts,” he posted on 4 September, threatening Lloyds with legal action.

The bank said it would not comment on individual cases, though account closures are rare. A Bank of Scotland spokesperson added: “Our policy is not to close a customer’s account based on political or personal beliefs and we make customers aware if we make the decision to close an account.”

Galloway chose to leave the UK after he and his wife, Putri Gayatri Pertiwi, were stopped for what he said was “a total of 11 hours” in September last year by “five armed police officers” after returning from the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod and attending a World Youth Festival assembly.

Last month, the former MP said the first question police asked him was: “Why do you admire Mr Lavrov?” They were referring to Russia’s long-serving foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Posting on X, Galloway attached a photo of Lavrov smoking and added: “I could have just shown him this picture!”

Galloway told the broadcaster RT, the former Russia Today, in an interview in March this year that officers “took all our stuff and copied everything on our phones”, forcing them to miss a public meeting in London at which, his wife said in a post on Instagram, “the Chinese ambassador [was] waiting for us”.

Neither Galloway nor his wife were subject to any further legal action in a stop that took place under schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019. This allows police to detain people to determine if they have been engaged in hostile activity, considered by investigators to be a low bar.

The former MP had appeared on a discussion panel with Lavrov in Moscow in June 2025, at the Forum of the Future, an event described as “far-right” by the Moscow Times, where Elon Musk’s father, Errol, and Alex Jones, the rightwing founder of Infowars, were also speaking.

In Galloway’s March interview with RT, where he had hosted a talkshow for nine years until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said he was “now in exile in the east, and I must say that Moscow in the spring is quite the place to be”.

He was in Moscow in late April, speaking at the inaugural conference of Sovintern, an international pro-Soviet socialist network led by the opposition A Just Russia party, where a welcome address from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was read out.

In early September, Galloway released a video promoting his online talkshow, filmed from Moscow’s Red Square where he also said he would appear at a roundtable event on security at the city’s “prestigious university”.

On 13 September he participated in a public Sovintern discussion with Zakhar Prilepin, a leading pro-war author and propagandist who has fought in Ukraine and called for “the return of Kyiv to Russia”.

A day later, Galloway was selected as the Workers party candidate, and he shortly afterwards went to South Africa for a speaking and fundraising tour with the leftwing activist and former journalist Yvonne Ridley. He continued to post on social media from South Africa, frequently on international affairs.

He places a particular emphasis on Russia and Ukraine. Earlier this month Galloway posted an anti-Andy Burnham image, with the prime minister dressed in blue and yellow, the colours of Ukraine. “I want you to die for Ukraine. Conscription coming soon!” the caption read.

Particular criticism has also been reserved for Polanski, his most obvious rival for political support. On 25 September, Galloway posted: “I am with Russia Zack is with NATO. I am with an end to the war in Ukraine Zack is with Zelensky and risking WW3.”

Galloway and the Workers party were approached for comment.