In defence of George Galloway

Last week was a long time in politics for my running mate in the Scottish elections, George Galloway. It started with a YouGov poll finding that George is the best known opposition leader in Scotland and the one that voters in several regions think would provide the strongest opposition to the SNP. We used that as the springboard for our Covid ‘Potemkin rallies’, where George announces from his soapbox that he will be ‘holding his nose and voting Tory’ as tactical voting is the only way to defeat the SNP.

If Scottish Tories were grateful for the endorsement of Scotland’s best known left-winger, they had a funny way of showing it. Disquiet in the Tory camp that George is better known than their leader, Douglas Ross, led to aggressive trolling by anonymous Tory accounts seemingly primed with the narrative that All for Unity is a ‘fringe party that won’t win seats and is only going to split the vote’ – a rather implausible accusation given the poll.