Broadcaster George Galloway on Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of British politician and broadcaster George Galloway’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, November 28, 2025.

Former British MP George Galloway joins Tucker Carlson to explain how criticizing the Ukraine war led to his detention under the UK’s anti-terror laws, the seizure of his devices, and what he describes as forced exile from his own country. In this extended conversation, Galloway lays out why he believes free speech is collapsing in Britain, why Western elites are obsessed with prolonging the Russia–Ukraine conflict, and what it will take to save a “sick” West from cultural and political self-destruction.

The Interview Begins

TUCKER CARLSON: George Galloway, thank you very much for doing this. I’m sitting in London, in the City of London right now. I’m an American. You’re a citizen of the country I’m sitting in. But you’re not in this country, you’re in another country. Why are you there and when are you coming back?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, it’s a long and difficult story. It started last month when my good wife and I were detained but not arrested by the anti-terrorism police at Gatwick Airport in London.

Now ponder that piece of Kafkaesque framing. “You are not under arrest, but you are not free to leave,” they said. These pistol-packing anti-terrorist cops said you have no right to silence and if you refuse to answer any of our questions, you will automatically be guilty under the Terrorism Act of an act in defiance of that very serious act. And the policeman joked, “Good luck ever getting on an airplane again.”

Now to complete the framing: I’m 71 years old, seven times elected member of Parliament, a member of the British Parliament across five decades, the leader of a British political party, the biggest broadcaster in Britain—not nearly as big as you, but the biggest British broadcaster in Britain—broadcasting to the largest audience every single week.

I’m one of the best known people in the country and I’ve got armed anti-terrorist police telling me I’m not under arrest, but I am not free to leave.

And of course, it quickly turned out that the purpose of the detention was speech. My podcasts, my broadcasts, my tweet output, my Facebook output. That’s the Britain that we now have today.

We spent four hours in my case, five hours in my wife’s case, in two separate rooms surrounded by armed police officers being questioned about our political views. And in my wife’s case, her fingernail, which is painted rather nicely in the Palestine colors.

A Patriotic Citizen Treated as a Threat

Now, if you had told me eight weeks ago that such a thing was even remotely possible, I would not have believed you. There is no more patriotic British citizen than me. In the last decade, Mr. Carlson, I fought two major battles for the British state.

2014, The Spectator said my speeches saved the union when Scotland’s separatist referendum looked very much like it was going to succeed. And 2016, I was one of the leading figures in the Brexit movement trying to win Britain’s independence.

And so here I am sitting in a police station in Gatwick Airport with armed men questioning me on my political views. So the trauma of all that, to be honest, being outside of the country is the least of it.

If I tell you, and nobody knows this except you and me and whoever watches—it literally broke my heart. I now have a cardiologist. I’m a man who never lost a day through illness at work in my entire life. And now I have a heart condition, arrhythmic arrhythmia, which the consultant cardiologist, a very fine one, tells me is of recent provenance.

So you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that these cops actually broke my heart.

TUCKER CARLSON: First of all, let me just commend you for your very long string of good calls. You were against the Iraq war, you were against Scottish secession and you were for Brexit. So I don’t think there are many people who can say they were right in all three. But I’m confused as to why a 70-year-old former Member of Parliament would be considered a terror threat. And what was the pretext for doing this to you? Do you know?

The Abuse of Anti-Terrorism Laws

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, the Terror Act, through which I sat in its passage and opposed every line, precisely because of the possibility of its abuse in this kind of way, allows the police to seize your documents, seize your telephone, your laptop, seize everything, only at the port. They would need a warrant to do it anywhere else in the country, and they’d be very unlikely to get one in regard to me.

But they saw the opportunity of stopping me under that act and divesting me of my whole life, everything. My parliamentary correspondence, my legal correspondence, my personal family pictures, my political correspondence, the members of my party, the membership list of my party, and they took it.

And this is precisely the abuse of the terrorism laws that you saw in London yesterday, where old ladies, old men, people in wheelchairs, blind people, are being arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding up a placard, a little piece of cardboard at their breast, and they are being taken away under terrorism charges. This is the nightmare that is Britain.

Your stature will definitely not be a cause for your being treated in the way that I was. You are a very big global figure. They wouldn’t dare to touch you, to get your telephone, to get your laptop. But if they could even do it to me, then I ask you to ponder just who would be safe in Britain from that.

So, to complete my answer to your first question, I’m not going back to Britain until I know that that will not happen again, not least because of the health problem that it has given me after the first time. And they will not give me an assurance that it will not happen again.

And if you think about it, why would it not happen again? Because it happened because of my broadcasts and the fact that the British state and Keir Starmer who leads it, for the moment at least, don’t like what I say on my podcast. Well, I’m still broadcasting every Sunday and Wednesday and I still have the same point of view, so there’s no guarantee whatsoever that the same thing wouldn’t happen to me again.

My wife couldn’t sleep or eat for weeks after it. She’s already thin. She lost 10 pounds in weight as a result of the trauma of this occasion. We knew that it had happened to other people, but we didn’t think that we would be regarded as other people because of the position I have over 50 years in politics in Great Britain. But it did happen and it could happen again.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did they accuse you of doing wrong? Had you called for armed insurrection against the Starmer government, or what was their claim?

Opposition to War with Russia

GEORGE GALLOWAY: No, I don’t even believe in that, never mind call for it. I believe in democracy. I believe in freedom of speech. That’s the problem.

We are governed by a Prime Minister and a pygmy cabinet which rubber stamps every cockamamie scheme he has to take us into war with Russia. Now, I don’t want to go to war with Russia, not for Russia’s sake, but for Britain’s sake. For the sake of the British people whose blood and treasure would be burned and the British people whose country might disappear into cinders and ash underneath their feet if such a war were to take place.

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So the proximate reason, insofar as one can glean it from four hours of circumlocution, is that I oppose the British government’s policy towards Russia. Now, I might be right on that, I might be wrong on that, but as John Stuart Mill points out, if you deny a point of view the right to be heard, the loser is not the person with that point of view, but the rest of us, because we will not hear what might actually turn out to have been good advice.

But that’s not the way these social democrats—Christian Democrats all across Europe—have put the lights out on freedom of speech, lights out on democracy. They’re interfering in elections, they’re canceling other people’s elections. They are throttling free and independent media. They are bankrolling stooge media to try and crowd out. They are threatening the social media platforms with sanction and even closure if they don’t kowtow to the prevailing orthodoxy. And I’m afraid Britain is in the vanguard of all of that.

And again, I make this point: I’m not saying this because I hate Britain, but because I love Britain. It is an ache for me to be outside of my country all of this time. I have children there. I have a house there. I have a very keen addiction to the English Premiership in football—soccer, you call it. I’m torn from all of that. I’m torn from my family and friends.

So it’s a dull ache for me. But it’s not as painful as another armed arrest by the anti-terrorism squad would be. So for the time being, it looks like my wife and I are around the world in 80 days.

TUCKER CARLSON: And has anyone come to your defense? Anyone with authority in Great Britain, anyone in the political classes, anyone on television, anyone?

Surprising Defenders of Free Speech

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes. And the most surprising people. People like Lord Hannan, Daniel Hannan, who when he was the leader writer for the Daily Telegraph at the time of the Iraq war, I cost his newspaper £2.1 million in libel damages. But that didn’t stop him taking the principled stand of denouncing this misuse of the word terrorism, this abuse of the anti-terrorism legislation to impound a prominent politician for nothing other than expounding, he said, his abhorrent views.

And that’s a real measure of a believer in free speech. And there were one or two others on the other side of the political aisle from me, but not that many from my own side. Because my own side, the so-called left, which is really now just liberal—Americans don’t get the difference—has drunk the Kool-Aid of the Ukraine war. They appear to be going quietly into the potential good night of nuclear war.

Well, I will not. I will rage against that dying of the light.

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so remarkable is you became famous as a leader in the Labour Party, as a big figure in Labour Party. I know that you were kicked out 20 years ago or so over your opposition to the Iraq war, but I mean, just listen to your accent. Everything about you says old-fashioned Labour Party. How weird is it to see that party that you grew up in and worked for become a kind of spokesman for war and international capital and like everything I thought they were against?

Political Cross-Dressing: The Left as Warmongers

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, as you know, this is the era of cross-dressing and political cross-dressing more than any. The left are now the warmongers, and the peacemakers, so far as they exist, are largely to be found on the right, particularly in the United States. Particularly, if I may say so, in your own person.

The truth is the right-wing, slightly unhinged president of the United States is doing everything that he can to stop a war in Europe. And the Europeans, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats alike, are determined to stop him stopping the war, to continue the war. That’s the ultimate cross-dressing, it seems to me.

I grew up in an era out on the streets protesting about US wars. Now the US is trying to stop the war in Europe, and the people who would once have been demonstrating with me, alongside me, are the ones demanding that the war should continue.

So the Labour Party and indeed all of European social democracy and social democracy in the US in the form of the Democratic Party, have cross-dressed. They believe that a woman can have a penis, that a man can have a cervix, that I am somehow a phobe or an -ist if I say I don’t want my daughters changing for the swimming baths alongside a man, a fully formed biological male. That makes me a phobe, an -ist to be denounced and blackguarded and blacklisted, shadow banned.

We are truly living in a nightmare in the Western world as a whole, I believe. But in Western Europe in particular, where all that is solid has melted into air and all that was sacred is now routinely profaned.

And I rage against it. You know, I want nothing from anybody, and nothing that matters to me can be taken away by anybody. So I’m a free man in that sense, and I intend to use that freedom to speak my truth. And I think any attempt to stop me is doomed because there are many, many people ready to pick up my microphone should they ever be able to prize it from my hands.

TUCKER CARLSON: God bless you. What a wonderful description. There are so few free men, and everyone who is free has a moral obligation to do what you’re doing, which is to speak his conscience out loud. So thank you.

I follow this as closely as an American can, but trying to be honest here, European politics is not my politics. And it’s confusing despite, you know, however hard I’ve tried to understand it, and I don’t fully think I comprehend why nations that are beset with systemic and very serious problems, including economic problems, that don’t have meaningful standing armies, they can’t prevail. If they were actually to fight Russia, I mean, of course they would lose. But why would they want to? Why are they dead set on war with Russia? Do you understand the motive?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, you know, there’s an old First World War truism: we’re here because we’re here, and ultimately we’ll be here to guard the graves of those that were here because they were here. It’s partly that they have dug themselves. I don’t want to get Shakespearean, but they are steeped in blood so far that it is a genuine question whether it’s bloodier to go on or to go back.

And they have spent so many hundreds of billions of euros, pounds, dollars of their people’s money in a forlorn charge of the Light Brigade, that it’s fatal for them politically to admit that they were wrong, that they misused all those funds and they caused the deaths of all those people for no reason. And so it seems to me it’s partly that.

Don’t forget, Mr. Carlson, these people are at rock bottom in public opinion approval rates. Keir Starmer’s currently at 10%. 10%. Only 19% of the people actually voted for him a year and a bit ago in the general election, but now it’s down to 10. Macron is at 11, Merz is at 18. They couldn’t muster a majority if you put them all together.

And so what choice do they have? It’s continue to reinforce failure, to continue to throw good money after bad, to continue digging, even though they know they’re in a hole. So I don’t know what choice they really have.

The Media’s Failure to Hold Power Accountable

The bigger question for me is why are the media, as they still describe themselves, not holding to account? You mentioned that you first knew me and didn’t like me because of my stand on the Iraq war. I was on the BBC every single day in the run up to the Iraq war, right throughout the war and for many months after. Virtually every single day. I haven’t been on the BBC for 10 years.

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The mass media, as they still call themselves, though the real mass media is you, and exponentially less me. But the people who call themselves the mass media have entirely given up any role that they might have had to hold to account the political leaders for making decisions that are manifestly not working.

An American leader said just yesterday, forgive me, I didn’t know him, forgotten his name, he said about the European Union’s 19 sanctions packages against Russia. He said, well, if you’ve tried something 19 times, you’ve got to admit you failed already. And yet they are currently planning a 20th round of sanctions against Russia.

The Disintegration of Western Society

And I didn’t properly answer a point you made earlier. These societies, one of which my own, are not just economically failing, they are culturally and socially disintegrating. Hatred, racial hatred, fear of immigration, large scale immigration, collapsing birth rates, demographic time bombs. Our societies are the very definition of sick societies.

So what are we doing about it? Well, we’re sending uncounted and uncountable and untraceable billions to the little chiseling crook in Kiev.

TUCKER CARLSON: It seems like suicide to me.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes it is. It’s self harm now headed for suicide. And by the way, it’s no accident that amongst the sicknesses in our society is the drive towards state assisted suicide. Keir Starmer has spent more time in Parliament this parliamentary term piloting a scheme by which you can shuffle your old grandmother off to a pod provided by the state, give her a glass of sherry and put her in the pod and say good night.

We in Britain have now a 42% abortion rate. Almost every other baby is aborted and we’re shuffling off granny. We have a demographic nightmare and pornography everywhere. Gambling everywhere. Everybody is sponsored by one gambling.

You know, I’m so old, my father used to have to slip a piece of paper on a street corner to a bookie’s runner to put a bet on a horse race and the runner had to literally run in case the police saw him. To a Britain where gambling online, offline, in every high street is practically the only economy we’ve got. How’s that for a sick society?

TUCKER CARLSON: I just wonder. I mean, I just have to pause and say everything. It’s just so amazing to hear you say what you’ve just said. I’ve never heard a British politician talk about any of those things. And those are meaningful to me as someone who thinks that human beings have souls and human dignity is, that’s the project we’re engaged in. How do we improve people’s lives and make them more fully human, not extinguish those lives?

You’re the only British politician I’ve ever heard say anything like that, ever. In 50 years of watching this country pretty carefully. Why? Why is that? Why are those issues never addressed?

The Criminalization of Faith

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, we haven’t just lost faith in this country. We deride faith, we mock it, we even criminalize it. We’ve had people arrested for praying the rosary outside of abortion clinics in Britain. People like me who believe in God are regarded as freaks by the liberal establishment, the liberal prevailing orthodoxy.

And as Dr. Johnson said, the prevailing orthodoxy is the grimmest dictatorship of them all. And indeed it is. And anyone outside that prevailing orthodoxy is called a freak, called a phobe, called an est, and banished and silenced.

If it wasn’t for social media, nobody would have heard me for 10 years. I would not have been on the mass media. By the way, in that 10 years, I’ve been elected and reelected to Parliament, but they still would not have heard me.

Social media has made me, given me an audience, sometimes of double figures, millions per week. One week, 13.5 million in one week. Again, nothing like your numbers. But in British terms, massive numbers. Far more than any BBC program or Sky News. But I have to do it all. My wife and I. A mom and pop podcast broadcast.

The Power of Independent Media

And look where it got me when my numbers grew so alarmingly that the state realized that actually not only was I continuing to speak, I was reaching more and more people. They send the police to Gatwick Airport to not arrest, but detain me and seize my material. That’s a measure, I think, of how dangerous the independent man or woman is.

Look, the two greatest broadcasters in the world today are you and Candace Owens. What’s the main thing you have in common? That the audience believes you to be independent people, honest people who may be right, may be wrong, but whom you can count on to be telling you what they genuinely believe to be the truth.

That’s worth its weight in gold, but it’s also a sword pointed at the hearts of the liars, the deceivers, the people who count on the ignorance of the mass of the public and to be a threat to them is very heaven, as Wordsworth would say.

TUCKER CARLSON: How does this resolve? My understanding is your current prime minister has a number of years. I mean, it’s years to go in his term. There won’t be an election until then. The country is changing at very high speed. War looms, economy teetering. The demographic change is very difficult for people to metabolize. I mean, how is this fixed?

Britain’s Political Future

GEORGE GALLOWAY: It’s a very real and difficult question. Keir Starmer is here today, gone tomorrow. I predict to you that he will not be the prime minister the next time we speak, unless it’s very, very soon. He may be gone by Christmas. He’ll definitely be gone by May when Labour’s local election disaster, avalanche, defeat is certain.

Now, if you do as I do and read the runes of the local government by elections every Thursday, it’s regular as clockwork. The Labour Party vote falls somewhere between 20 and 50% in each of these contests. So in the local council elections, there will be such a slaughter of Labour councillors that he will be unseated.

The problem is, in this existential hour, there’s no Churchill in this picture. There’s no labor figure who’s any better than Starmer, any more popular than Starmer, with policies any more palatable than Starmer. But he will be unseated and he’ll be replaced with another Tony Blair clone. And I could tell you his name if you want it. His name is Wesley Streeting. And you won’t be impressed when you read about him, you won’t be impressed when you see him, but he’s virtually certain to be the next Labour leader and that will not improve Labour’s fortunes.

So Britain has the task of holding on and surviving in time for the next general election, which, as you rightly say, is more than three and a half years from now. So we are in big trouble. We haven’t been in trouble like this since the autumn of 1940, stretching into the summer of 1941. And as I say, there is no Churchill on the horizon.

The Transformation of the Labour Party

TUCKER CARLSON: I watched what happened to Jeremy Corbyn. I was never a Labor voter or sympathizer really, but I was struck by, and I’m not a friend of Corbyn’s or anything, and it’s not my job to defend him. However, I noticed the unfairness, just the sort of transparent unfairness of the attacks against him, and that piqued my interest. Why are they calling this man names that clearly aren’t true?

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And it seemed obvious again from across the ocean just watching that this was the kind of last step in converting what was a Workers party, a Labour Party, into a neoliberal banking party with the foreign policy and social policy to match that. That was my read of what happened. Is there any chance that you could return from exile and take it over and return it to what it was, a pro Britain party?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: I don’t think the Labour Party can be saved. That’s why I lead what we call the Workers Party of Britain. We got 212,000 votes in 150 constituencies. So if you gross that up, we would have had a million votes. We didn’t win any seats, but we came second in several, all of which were currently predicted by the opinion polls to capture. So you can’t rule out new developments.

And Mr. Corbyn himself is next weekend forming another party, though it’s beset by wokeness and division and ultra leftism, left extremism. He’s already having trouble staying at the helm of that new party and it isn’t even founded yet.

But there’s the Greens, who are the ultimate in greenery, quackery and wokery, but they’re doing quite well. So I think the next election, if Britain survives, will be a parliament, a Balkanized parliament. The nationalists, separatists will have another go, and this time they may very well succeed. The Greens, Socialist parties like mine and others.

The Rise of Reform and Britain’s Uncertain Future

But the main winner will be reform. Nigel Farage is currently on track for an absolute majority in the next Parliament, but I’m sorry to tell you, you probably like him more than I do. And I worked hard with him in the Brexit campaign. So I know him up close and personal. He isn’t the answer either.

He has a shallow political outlook which depends entirely on the race question. And the race question in Britain can never really go anywhere. First of all, the ethnic minorities in our country are very, very much smaller than they are in yours. And in any case, white people will soon be an ethnic minority in your country. That’s not the case in Britain. Britain is an 88% white country and that’s not going to materially change.

So if you try to frighten people into believing that Britain’s problems are the fault of Abdo, who owns the local shop on the corner, or the fellow who you buy a piping hot curry from on a Saturday night in the high street, you’re really not going to be able to solve the problems.

Because if you remigrated, as the new vogue word, if you remigrated every person of color in Britain, well, first of all, the English football team would crash out at the first round of the World Cup in the United States next year. But the economy would collapse, the health service would collapse. It’s very heavily staffed by people who you count on to save your father’s life when he gets carted in with angina on a gurney.

So it’ll never succeed. And if that’s your only club in your golf bag, then you are merely setting yourself up to fail. And all of the other prescriptions that Nigel Farage has are all tired, clapped out Thatcherite solutions which weren’t solutions then and they definitely ain’t now.

So in short, I’m saying we are in deep trouble, Tucker. We are a country in deep trouble. And there’s only one consolation, that all of our European neighbors are in the same trouble.

The Role of Faith and Community in Modern Britain

TUCKER CARLSON: Since you brought up the uncomfortable race question, something that I have noticed, this is different from the United States in some ways. And I’ve noticed that on the issues that you described, including mass migration, by the way, but particularly on questions of birth rate and the value of life, foreign wars, foreign entanglements, that a lot of the people from an American perspective we assume would be not on the same side as you are, and that the most kind of hysterical pro-death forces in your country, and I hate to say this because I am Anglo white, but they’re liberal Anglo whites. Is that fair to say?

GEORGE GALLOWAY: It is. In the last Parliament, one of my last acts in the last Parliament was to go on a parliamentary visit for an audience with the late Pope Francis. And I was the only socialist person that was there. All the other people that were there were not just conservatives, but they were pretty far out conservatives for the most part.

And it got me thinking that such is the parlous state of demoralization of my side of the political argument, that there is nobody I could think of on the left in Britain that would have joined me for that audience with the Pope, despite all of the very fine things that that Pope in particular represented. They would not have been seen, if you’ll forgive the pun, dead with the Pope.

And when I, as I do every hour, retweet the right to life propaganda about the suicide bill, about the disastrous abortion rates and so on, I realize that the traction I have is largely amongst people who would describe themselves as conservative or right wing.

The Saving Grace of Minority Communities

But there’s one saving grace, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m still an electable politician. Practically the only people in Britain who as a bloc can be counted on, on these moral questions, are the black and other ethnic minority populations. I mean people rubbish the Muslims, for example, routinely in Britain. But the only people you could reliably say who will be pro-family, who will be pro-marriage, who will be anti-abortion, who will be anti-state suicide, are that very community.

And of course, because I have all my life trumpeted these views, then apart from issues like Gaza and so on, I have a very big following in those communities. And not just Muslim, black Christians, for example, particularly in the London area. There are happy clappy churches in every part of London that are filled to their gunnels with black African Christians and they feel exactly the same way as I do on these issues of life and death, on these issues of morality.

So these are a saving grace. There are many other reasons to be grateful for the presence of these people in the country, but that’s quite a big one.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. I hope that if you ever leave exile, and I hope it’s sooner rather than later, you will come to the United States and stay in my house. You are always welcome. George Galloway, who I didn’t even know how much we agreed on, but thank you very much for doing this and Godspeed.

GEORGE GALLOWAY: Me too. Thank you. It’s been an honor. Thank you.