Skip to content
Home » Broadcaster George Galloway on Tucker Carlson Show (Transcript)

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.