TL;DR: A WhatsApp debate about Cuban press freedom became an argument about George Galloway. It shouldn't have. Galloway was detained for nine hours at Gatwick, not arrested, not charged, not exiled. Abraham Jiménez Enoa was driven from Cuba for running an independent magazine. These are not the same thing. The Workers Party of Britain co-mobilises with neo-nazi-aligned networks, refuses to spurn BNP endorsements, and has chosen to compete with Reform on Reform's terrain. The campist logic that makes Galloway a martyr is the same logic that silenced Your Party on Iran. Galloway's friends are not ours.
Start with a simple proposition. The enemies of your enemies are not automatically your friends. The left has always known this, or claimed to. The history of the twentieth century is littered with the wreckage of movements that forgot it.
A few months ago, a Guardian piece on Cuba’s first independent magazine triggered a discussion on a socialist WhatsApp thread that revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, how thoroughly campism has colonised even the instincts of people who consider themselves on the left. Someone raised George Galloway as a comparable case. Press freedom, they said. State intimidation. The same logic.
It isn’t the same logic. It is precisely the opposite logic (indeed, the WhatsApp group later purged supporters of Iranian and Chinese trade unions persecuted by those regimes, showing the organisers’ limited support for freedom of speech).
Abraham Jiménez Enoa co-founded modern Cuba’s first independent magazine, El Estornudo, and was driven into exile by a state that could not bear to hear the truth from its own citizens. He had no sponsors. He was not a broadcaster for a foreign state. He reported on flooding, on poverty, on the daily texture of life under a system that preferred silence: on the baseball stars the regime had erased from history, on the internet dealers in Havana’s parks selling illegal connections in whispers, on the ordinary Cubans whose stories the state wanted buried. The Cuban security services monitored him for years, subjected him to strip searches, broadcast his interrogation on national television to destroy his reputation, and eventually made it impossible for him to remain. The comparison to Galloway fails on every particular.
On 27 September 2025, Galloway was detained at Gatwick under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, held for nine hours, his phone and laptop confiscated, then released without charge. Neither he nor his wife was arrested. The Metropolitan Police confirmed this explicitly. No medical incident was documented. He has since relocated to Malaysia, describing his departure as self-imposed exile; the contrast with Jiménez Enoa, driven from Cuba by a state that gave him no choice, is the whole argument in miniature.
There are real cases. Richard Medhurst, a British journalist, was arrested at Heathrow in August 2024 and held for almost 24 hours on terrorism grounds; six months later, Austrian authorities detained him, threatened to revoke his residency, and confiscated his electronics, including the manuscript of a book he had spent years writing. PEN America lists his case as active, status: continued harassment. His politics on Ukraine and Gaza are not Red Mole’s politics. That is precisely the point. Press freedom defence does not require political agreement with its beneficiaries. It requires factual precision about what is and is not happening to them. Medhurst was arrested. Galloway was not.
Schedule 3 is a genuinely troubling power. It permits border detention and device seizure without arrest, without charge, without suspicion of a specific criminal offence. Its misuse deserves consistent opposition. That opposition does not require treating its targets as comrades.
Galloway is not a comrade. He is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, a formation that combines left-wing economic rhetoric with anti-immigration politics, transphobia, and a documented, systematic pattern of co-mobilisation with the far right. Not an occasional bad booking. A pattern. In May 2023, Galloway shared a No2NATO platform with David Clews of Unity News Network. In August 2024, Clews was on the publicity for a Glasgow rally alongside WPB representatives. On 2 May 2026, a gathering outside the Ukrainian Embassy in Holland Park was co-promoted by Clews and headlined by Chris Williamson, until recently the WPB’s deputy leader. Searchlight Magazine has documented Clews’s record: Patriotic Alternative conferences in 2022 and 2023, self-described ‘race realist,’ white genocide conspiracy theorist, one of those who helped incite the 2024 Southport anti-Muslim riots by spreading a false Arabic-sounding name for the alleged killer. In Manchester, a WPB local election candidate addressed a Patriots of Britain rally alongside the UKIP leader. The party’s Runcorn by-election candidate regularly sat at meetings with Holocaust deniers. When Nick Griffin endorsed the party during the 2024 Rochdale by-election, stating that Galloway ‘understands the position of working-class white Britons on immigration,’ Williamson was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether he would distance himself. He said he would not ‘spurn endorsements.’ Mishal Husain offered him the opportunity right there on air. He declined.
Galloway’s own explanation of his project, offered in December 2024 and cited approvingly at the WPB’s Political Committee, is worth taking seriously: ‘The rising tide is with Reform. Right populism is looking unstoppable for this period. We have to develop a left populism that competes against it in a language that the mass of the people can understand and relate to.’ In the same month, he told Piers Morgan that Trump’s ‘instincts are right’ on America First economics, though he has since described Trump as ‘a clear and present danger to America and the world.’ The oscillation is not incoherence. It is the structural logic of a politics that defines itself primarily against liberal internationalism and finds, reliably, that it shares its conclusions with the nationalist right: oppose arms to Ukraine, legitimise Russian territorial claims, treat NATO expansion as the primary cause of the war. Different premises, identical outputs. That is what red-brown means in practice.
There is a name for the broader politics this represents. It is campism. The logic is structurally simple: the enemies of American hegemony are, by that fact alone, objectively progressive. So Galloway becomes a press freedom martyr. The Iranian theocracy becomes a force for anti-imperialism. The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine becomes a defensive response to NATO provocation. The people who suffer under those regimes become invisible, or worse, are recharacterised as Western agents.
The BSW in Germany runs the same logic on different terrain. Sahra Wagenknecht’s party combines economic grievance rhetoric with anti-immigration politics, scepticism about climate policy, and a ‘peace’ position on Ukraine that amounts to endorsing Russian territorial gains. Within two years of its founding it was forming regional coalition governments with the CDU. The AfD did not absorb BSW. BSW absorbed BSW. The scratch became gangrene by accumulated daily logic, not by crossing a bright line. The WPB is its British sibling: same Stalinist aesthetic, same identification of progressive content with state power, same drift from economic radicalism toward cultural reaction.
At Rochdale, Galloway ranked joint last among all eleven candidates on environmental protection measures, level with the Reform candidate; the WPB's position, according to a former member, is that 'environmentalism as a thing is anti-working class.' Wagenknecht's party says something structurally identical in different language.
The Iranian uprising of January 2026, triggered by 75% inflation and the collapse of the rial, made the stakes concrete. When workers took to the streets across 110 cities, when factories in Arak began forming workers’ councils, when protesters chanted ‘neither Shah nor Supreme Leader,’ Your Party issued no official statement. Not a cautious one. Not an insufficient one. None. Jeremy Corbyn appeared instead at a London demonstration in March 2026 calling for an end to US and Israeli strikes on Iran. The people shot by Revolutionary Guards in Lorestan and Ilam, the wounded protesters dragged from hospital beds in Ilam City, the council organisers in Arak: they were not the subject of that demonstration. This is not silence. It is something worse than silence; it is the campist substitution, replacing solidarity with the oppressed with solidarity with the oppressing state, because the oppressing state happens to be an enemy of Washington.
The campist logic produces this pattern reliably. First: establish the hierarchy of crimes, US sanctions caused this crisis, which may even be partly true, but whose function is to suggest that crimes must be addressed in sequence. Second: the ground reports, someone is ‘in the region,’ the violence is ‘not organic,’ external forces are manufacturing it. Third: the geopolitical trap, any change will only bring something worse, the oppressed must wait until the imperialist core is weakened. Fourth: the accusation, those who disagree are not merely wrong but ‘deluded’ and ‘dangerous,’ backing regime change. The result: no solidarity actions, no international workers’ connections, nothing offered to those in struggle except the advice to wait. Red Mole has examined this pattern in detail.
The press freedom principle is worth defending. Galloway is not. Those are different sentences. A left that cannot hold both simultaneously, that collapses the distinction between opposing Schedule 3 detentions and treating their target as a comrade, is a left that has lost the analytical clarity it needs for everything else.
Abraham Jiménez Enoa is in exile because a state decided he was its enemy. Galloway is in Malaysia because a border power inconvenienced him for nine hours. Iranian workers formed councils in Arak and were shot in the streets. The campists know which of these requires their solidarity.
That is the problem.
Red Mole’s analysis of the WPB’s co-mobilisation with the far right and the campist response to the Iranian uprising are available on this Substack.