We still don’t know how many (if any) far right candidates will compete with Reform UK at the Runcorn & Helsby by-election, expected to be held within the next few months.
Even if Nigel Farage’s rival Rupert Lowe, who presently sits as an independent, decides to form a new and more virulently anti-immigration party, it wouldn’t be registered in time for the by-election.
One candidate who has already announced his intention to stand is Peter Ford, deputy leader of George Galloway’s “Workers Party of Britain”.
Distinctly unproletarian
Ford has a distinctly unproletarian background. He went from Queen’s College, Oxford, into the Diplomatic Service and spent most of his career in the Middle East, eventually as Ambassador to Bahrain (1999-2003) and Syria (2003-2006).
In 2017 Ford became a director of the British Syrian Society, a propaganda front for the Assad dictatorship that was finally ousted last December. This organisation was created and run by Assad’s father-in-law, a Harley Street cardiologist. Perhaps he is another of the “workers” that Galloway claims to champion?
But for Searchlight readers, the most disturbing thing about Ford is that he’s yet another example of the Galloway party’s readiness to associate with extremist conspiracy theories and antisemitism.
It’s fair to ask whether the “Workers Party of Britain” should be seen as belonging in any way to the left. Isn’t it time to admit that Galloway’s party is pro-Assad, pro-Putin, and arguably Strasserite?
Holocaust denier
Ford has come to anti-fascists’ attention more than once as guest speaker at one of the UK’s most extreme antisemitic conspiracy theory groups. This is an outfit called “Keep Talking”, organised by Ian Fantom and Dr Nick Kollerstrom, a leading Holocaust denier and Putin apologist.
On 14th April 2022 Ford spoke at a Keep Talking meeting, held at their regular venue, the Tea House Theatre in Vauxhall, a stone’s throw from MI6 headquarters. The title of his speech (“Covidism, Climatism and Russophobia”) managed to combine several themes beloved of the group’s tinfoil hat wearing conspiracists.
The ex-ambassador went on to “guide a discussion about how covidism, climatism and Russophobia appear to be linked, and about how these crises have generated or accentuated new forms of politics where the old Left-Right divide has become meaningless.”
Common cause with the far right
Ford and Galloway are doing a good job of demonstrating that the latter phrase is in their case true enough. They repeatedly made common cause with the far right in defending the murderous regimes in Damascus and Moscow: Ford could not have been ignorant of the true nature of the Keep Talking group, which was exposed in several press and online articles as early as 2020.
He and Galloway have not uttered one word of apology since Assad’s fall last December and the incontrovertible evidence that emerged of corruption, torture and murder that characterised the Ba’athist regime under the Assad family for over half a century.
It’s no secret either that Assad’s government sheltered nazi war criminals including one of the architects of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man Alois Brunner.
Not that Peter Ford’s friends at Keep Talking would care about that, because they think that the Holocaust was a big lie invented by Jews. Other guest speakers and performers at Keep Talking have included Alison Chabloz, who has convictions for posting “grossly offensive” antisemitic material online.
Ford’s other conspiracist friends include Piers Corbyn, another Keep Talking regular, with whom Ford shares pandemic-related conspiracy theories.
Pro-Putin propaganda
Since 2022 Keep Talking has regularly promoted pro-Putin propaganda. Not content with Holocaust denial, the group’s co-founder Kollerstrom specialises in insulting Putin’s victims. He has asserted that the attempted poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal by Russian military intelligence agents was a “hoax” perpetrated by British intelligence.
Within weeks of the death last year of another Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, in one of Putin’s camps in the Arctic Circle, Kollerstrom rushed to defame him at another Keep Talking meeting.
The voters of Runcorn & Helsby are unlikely to be conned by Galloway and Ford’s attempt to present Moscow propaganda and conspiracy theory as any sort of authentic voice for British workers. But social media will continue to amplify both their fake version of the “left”, and their often-indistinguishable fellow conspiracy theorists on the far right.