“How good they were, and how brave is the minority, in a once great country who keep alive the tribal essence,” Tory MP Alan Clark mused to his diary back in the 1980s, after inviting two local National Front activists into his Plymouth constituency office.
Clark day-dreamed about defecting to the National Front but was confident the NF would give him a free run locally “because they know that I’m the nearest thing they’re ever likely to get to an MP”.
But that prediction may have run its course. The far right now has a new favourite parliamentarian in Rupert Lowe. Having quit Reform UK a year ago, Lowe has turned his pressure group Restore Britain into a new national political party. It is pitched primarily at those who find Nigel Farage suspiciously wet and too woke to be trusted to get enough immigrants, Muslims and ethnic minorities out of this country.
Lowe believes he can become prime minister, a prospect that caused Elon Musk to comment: “there is no other way to save Britain”. Yet just how far to the right Lowe is pitching his new party has not yet been widely acknowledged.
Lowe has an electoral understanding with the far right. Paul Golding of Britain First, an overtly fascist group, said of Lowe’s party: “We wish them every success. We won’t stand against them in elections. They have got a clear run now. We don’t see them as rivals. We see them as complementary.”
In Golding’s view, his party and Lowe’s are “all pushing in the same direction” on mass deportations. So Lowe has emulated Clarke’s tacit local arrangement – but at a national level, in plain sight.
When Hope Not Hate labelled Lowe as the most extreme MP in Britain, he responded by saying he would be “devastated” if they had given that accolade to anyone else. If we take Restore Britain’s policy agenda seriously, then Lowe could stake a claim to be the most right wing MP since 1945.
His party’s overwhelming priority is mass deportation. Lowe consistently argues that “legal migration is a bigger problem than illegal migration”, pledging not just to stop mass immigration “but to reverse it”, under the slogan “millions must go”.
Lowe’s published mass deportation plan is, objectively, significantly more hardline than that advocated by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in 1968. Both want to maximise the outflow and abolish anti-discrimination laws.
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But Powell and his Monday Club acolytes accepted that repatriation had to be voluntary for Commonwealth migrants who had come to Britain legally. Lowe insists on compulsion – removing legal status, including from those granted permanent settlement.
Compulsory repatriation was the policy of the National Front and BNP under John Tyndall, though Nick Griffin shifted to incentivising voluntary repatriation to try to modernise the party’s image. Restore Britain’s deportation policy is more hardline than that of Nick Griffin’s BNP.
Yet being the former chair of a premier league football club can give Lowe a shield of middle-class respectability which obscures his extremism. Because Lowe has created his new party from within parliament – after getting elected on Nigel Farage’s Reform ticket – there has been limited scrutiny of how much further he wants to move the goalposts.
Restore has not yet faced anything like the national media scrutiny that led to Matthew Goodwin’s high-profile failure the Gorton and Denton by-election.
The scope and scale of the mass deportation plan is not the most extreme thing about Restore Britain. Restore campaign director Charlie Downes says the foundational difference is about whether ethnic minorities are really British. “Reform UK believe that anyone from anywhere can become British,” but “Restore believe Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”.
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Restore’s unprecedented position – for a party with parliamentary representation – is that it sets no boundaries on whether the most overt racists and antisemites can be party members. This includes Restore members who insist that “total remigration” must include all British-born ethnic minorities and Jews.
This has created an extraordinary twist in Restore Britain’s effort to fuse the fragments of the traditional far right and its new online support. The last month has seen a vicious online civil war within that target market about whether Restore really should remain open to accepting the most overt racists, Nazis and antisemites as party members.
Even Nick Tenconi, leader of Ukip, who hoped to agree an electoral pact with Restore now rejects what he calls their “morally and politically disgusting” calls for total remigration.
Ben Habib, who had recruited the extremist agitator Tommy Robinson to his own hard right party, Advance UK, proposed a merger with Restore, but has now pulled out, over Restore going “full tilt racist”. Lowe called this a “very serious allegation” yet the breakdown was celebrated by Restore Britain members who want Ben Habib himself deported, given his Pakistani heritage. Even Tommy Robinson says he is keen to advocate for Restore’s deportation agenda but wants it to exclude those who want to deport all ethnic minorities.
The advocates of total migration say they are “ecstatic” at Restore Britain’s refusal to disavow them – calling this “vetting from the right, not the left”. They celebrate the fact that Rupert Lowe never criticises them publicly, saying that he values the role of the most extreme voices in the online right’s effort to shift the “Overton Window”. Restore’s supporters often say that they have “smashed in” this window already.
And yet, despite these online right fever dreams, Restore Britain’s electoral prospects are weak. If Elon Musk donated millions, the party would have the capacity to stand everywhere, but Musk’s toxic public reputation would make that a mixed blessing.
Lowe would probably be able to draw in around a million votes, a similar number to Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, which spent a fortune during the 1997 election to put up over 500 candidates, one of whom was none other than Rupert Lowe.
Goldsmith’s party averaged only 3% where it ran, offering a far more mainstream Eurosceptic narrative than Restore’s “send them home” pitch. The BNP itself peaked at around 2% in 2010 and there is good evidence that a quarter of those who voted for Nigel Farage’s Reform party in 2024 would prefer something more like the old BNP. Nigel Farage’s projection of Zia Yusuf and other ethnic minority colleagues as a conscious reputational shield against accusations of outright racism turns off the most extreme voters.
But a party with no limits on the racism and prejudice it will accept will struggle to get beyond a 5% ceiling. Beyond Lowe defending Great Yarmouth as an incumbent, Restore will struggle to find even a dozen credible target seats.
Progressives feel ambivalent about this Restore versus Reform clash. Some even wonder if Restore might be a put up job to sanitise Farage, though the animosity between Farage, Lowe and Zia Yusuf is genuine.
Whether Restore splits the Reform vote significantly, helps Farage position himself as a more moderate populist, or drags him further to the right may be hard to predict.
But it would be a mistake for progressives to think solely in terms of political tactics. The real threat of this new politcal racism is to the social norms of our society. That is what must be resisted.
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