My first job after leaving university was working in the sewers of Belfast, that being the limit of my family’s nepotistic connections. Still, it was helpful preparation for attending an election event organised by the Tower Hamlets Community Coalition at which George Galloway, my least favourite carpet bagger, was top of the bill.

The support acts were a mix of barristers, accountants, businessmen and “community leaders” variously standing as independent candidates or for Galloway’s repulsive, personality cult, nationalist Workers’ Party. It was the sort of thing people don’t mean when they tell you need to get out more.

My estimate is that the audience was in the region of 150 -200 with maybe 20 women and about 10 men who weren’t Bangladeshi. The venue was by no means full and it was definitely a much less mixed crowd than Galloway used to draw when he wasn’t droning on about how great Putin is, climate change being an anti-working class plot and Russell Brand style wackery.

Ajmal Masoor, an imam, former Lib Dem and “community leader” has emerged as an anti-Labour candidate in the Bethnal Green and Stepney constituency through some process that makes selecting a pope seem like a model of proletarian democracy. Like the others, he’s riding a wave of anger over Gaza. The basis for his challenge is that the local Labour MP Rushanara Ali, who has in the past been supportive of the Palestinians, decided that her place in Starmer’s shadow cabinet was more important than voting for a ceasefire. It was apparent from the audience that there is a visceral disgust at this choice and it will definitely cost her a lot of votes, though probably not the seat.

Halima Khan the WP in Stratford and Bow told us that she got her job in the Labour Party through the will of Allah rather than personal connections. He was mentioned several times in the course of the evening.

Her speech was mostly about her struggles against the Labour bureaucracy and decisions to whistle blow. Her argument seemed to be that because a Palestinian had suggested she stand the other candidates should withdraw. Like most of the other speakers she offered an odd mix of British patriotism and Bangladeshi nationalism. This was epitomised by “a barrister, well known in community” who talked about Bangladeshis fighting for the British empire as if this were a good thing. This was not a place with much political clarity.

Galloway has dropped “comrades” from his opening but now makes space for “distinguished elders”. His speech was about his own achievements, Palestine and playing up to Bangladeshi nationalism, something that was well received after Starmer and Ashworth’s targetted racism against that community. He still deploys his full range of oratorical techniques swooping from shouty to quiet in a sentence and all that but he had the good sense not to into the weeds of the Workers’ Party programme which has echoes of that of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in the sections that are aimed at working class voters.

It was a dismal event with a bunch of unimpressive candidates with barely an idea to rub between them when they wandered off the subject of Palestine. From their point of view Starmer is only to be criticised for unconditionally supporting the IDF and singling out the Bangladeshi community in order to win racist votes. Anyone looking to find out why he makes these political choices and how a trajectory like that leads to election results like those in France on Sunday had come to the wrong place. The only bright point in the evening is that if there is a realignment on the left as party loyalties break down over the next couple of years there is one cult leader who won’t be part of it.