THE Workers Party will challenge Labour in almost every English seat at the general election, its leader George Galloway announced today.

Among the party’s standard bearers will be former England cricketer Monty Panesar, who will stand in the Southall seat in west London.

Unveiling the largest left-of-Labour electoral challenge in history, Mr Galloway, who returned to the Commons in the Rochdale by-election in February, said the party was speaking to three Labour MPs about their possible defection.

“We will have the same impact on Labour as Farage and the Reform Party has on the Tories,” Mr Galloway told a press conference held with dozens of Workers Party candidates in Parliament Square.

Stalwart support for the Palestinian people and opposition to British complicity in the Gaza genocide is the party’s rallying cry, but Galloway stressed that it would also campaign “from the NHS to the economy to crime to immigration, on all the issues that vitally concern the British people.”

Asked why candidates would be stood against those Labour MPs who broke the whip to support a Gaza ceasefire last November, the Workers Party leader stressed that they could not countenance backing anyone who would “put Keir Starmer into Downing Street” since he was “co-responsible for crimes against humanity.”

The Workers Party will however support a small number of independent candidates of the left, including Claudia Webbe in Leicester East and Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, though Mr Galloway expressed a measure of bemusement at the latter’s delay in declaring his intentions.

“I hoped that Mr Corbyn would lead an alliance, a united front for a new politics,” he said, acknowledging that this would not happen this side of the election at least. “I do hope that he does not miss the boat.”

Mr Panesar said that he was standing to “represent the working-class people of this country” and to close the gap between rich and poor.

The party’s aim is to fight every seat in England at the election, and has already adopted candidates for most London constituencies, as well as many in Scotland and Wales.

The precise number will be affected by the timing of the poll, but 500 candidates are already in place. It seems that candidates are going to be expected to be largely self-funding in most cases.

As well as the three MPs, who Mr Galloway conceded were “not nailed on” to join up, a “significant number of local authority defections” from Labour were expected next week.