NIALL MCCRAE
Rupert Lowe, leader of the upstart political party Restore, came to my mind while I was sheltering under a hedge during a heavy rain shower. The street was a river in the torrential downfall, the only escape being a line of Leylandi overhanging the pavement. I stood in the dry while the raindrops bounced around me, but after a minute or two I felt water dripping on my head and down my neck. Eventually the bush above me was saturated, and I would have got just as wet under this leaky canopy as anywhere else.
This reminded me of Lowe, a businessman who became a Reform MP in 2024, had a very public spat with Nigel Farage, and left to start a new party. Many patriots and social conservatives flocked to Restore, seeing it as their last great hope. They showed a tendency among the disillusioned and desperate citizens of demographically imperilled Western countries to seek a saviour. But Lowe will not bring them salvation.
He showed as much in an interview with American commentator Brett Weinstein last weekend. The conversation was happening while unpopular prime minister Keir Starmer was on the brink of resigning, leading to a likely general election as his successor Andy Burnham would want and need a mandate from the people.
Weinstein was aware of Lowe and Restore because this sudden movement was given worldwide publicity by the controversial figure of Elon Musk. Until recently Musk had made supportive comments about Nigel Farage, but he turned against the Reform leader soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Farage was not the man, Musk opined, to lead Britain out of its chaos, giving his blessing instead to Lowe.
This support has been vital to Restore, as Lowe told Weinstein, because the party has come from nowhere to draw well over a hundred thousand members. Much of this momentum has been achieved through supporters’ virulent postings on Musk’s internet platform X (formerly Twitter).
The mainstream media are inclined to take the first tactic of Ghandi’s progression of ‘first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, and then you win’. Starving right-wing political parties of the oxygen of publicity keeps them out of electoral contention. Restore, however, has had some attention. First, a few months ago, Michael Mosbacher wrote an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph vilifying Restore for its policy to ban not only Halal butchery but the equally barbaric Kosher practice too. Know who controls you by who you are allowed to criticise….
The party was on the front page of the Daily Mail before the Makerfield by-election (won by Burnham, en route to 10 Downing Street). A home for ‘neo-Nazis’, the headline screamed. Weinstein had a copy of the newspaper beside him, and asked Lowe how he responds to such attacks.
First, Lowe did not deny that there are extremists in his party. But they are not in positions of policy-making power, and Lowe said that no major party conducts audits on members’ beliefs and attitudes. This is true, and it is readily apparent that while right-wing parties are scrutinised and harassed by Hope Not Hate, left-wing parties are left to themselves. But Lowe’s problem is that Restore has drawn a large number of ethnonationalists who realised that Farage’s Reform was becoming just another multiculturalist operation. For them, drastic intervention is needed to prevent white Britons becoming a second-class minority in their homeland.
Lowe has promised to deport millions of migrants, but on what basis? Not ethno-nationalism, that’s for sure. In words he might regret, he told Weinstein: –
I detest far-right ethnonationalism and neo-Naziism.
In isolation, such a statement seems entirely appropriate for a politician in modern Britain. But the context is changing. While no Restore members enthused with white consciousness would accept the label ‘Nazi’, ethnonationalism is not a beyond-the-pale ideology nowadays. Nobody with eyes and a brain can deny that the indigenous are being replaced by Asians and Africans, as can be observed outside the school gates in any town or city. Do white Britons have a right to defend their identity, culture and habitat? The likes of the Daily Mail would interpret that as Lebensraum for an Aryan race, indicating the perpetual value of the Third Reich to the multiculturalist project.
There are degrees of ethnonationalism. Most adherents simply want mass immigration to end and to stop ‘two-tier’ discrimination against white Britons. But Steve Laws is at the sharp edge, calling for anyone not of purely white European ethnicity to be deported. Not much of a vote-winner, as Lowe knows. But will such people stay in the party, now that the leader has disassociated himself from their viewpoint? As David Clews posted on UNN yesterday, a leaked internal social media group posting showed panic amid a spate of membership cancellations, with excuses made for Lowe’s wording.
Lowe’s major limitation is that he sees the symptom but not the disease at the root of mass immigration and ideological subversion. To the naïve listener, his interview with Weinstein was full of nationalist talking points, but he lacks the depth of analysis needed to develop an effective political remedy.
He spoke of the establishment’s obsession with freedom of movement and denigration of the nation state. But why did our ruling class embrace left-wing ideology? ‘There seems to be a greater design to try and destroy everything’. But whose design? A ‘malign post-war philosophy’, which since the Sixties has been a ‘culture fed into our schools’. Again, these things don’t just happen. Someone must be making it so.
On this apparent destructiveness, Lowe implores right-thinking people to ‘get together and fight it and restore common sense and fairness so that what makes us great can continue to flourish’. But he sits in parliament surrounded by MPs who lack common sense, observing the dominance of ‘Fabian Party ideology, which is embedded in the Labour Party now’. Well, he’s getting somewhere, but the world is not run by Fabians – they are mere accessories, like the Cultural Marxist race and gender subversives and ‘woke’ youth behaving like Chairman Mao’s Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution.
He went a step further in the interview, alleging that the country is run by ‘organised crime’. The judiciary and police are ‘captured’, but who is their master? Lowe dubbed the supreme court, established by Tony Blair, a ‘woke quango’, but what was the real purpose of this constitutional move?
For Lowe, most of this morass is due to the ideology of statism. Whereas the state has no conscience, individualism is grounded in human reason and emotion. The system has gained a momentum of its own, but there are still (before AI takes over) people in control.
Declaring himself an ‘Austrian school economist’ who wants a minimal state and a free market, Lowe cannot see that the market is not really free or fair, and that if anything radical needs to be done, it will require state intervention (deportation, for example). The reality today is that while right-wing nationalists are accused of fascism, the real fascism is in the corporate-state alliance that is deployed to build a global technocracy. Mass immigration is one of the principal methods of undermining the conventional state and its institutions to create a neo-feudalist mass controlled by predatory elite.
As a Thatcherite Tory, Lowe is blinkered. Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly one of the most important prime ministers in history, and she made many significant and positive changes to a country that was in the doldrums, largely caused by socialist wreckers. But her cabinet was filled with internationalist Jews. ‘Yes, dear Margaret, but we need immigrants for labour, and they will work harder and not go on strike like the unionised working-class workforce’. While Thatcher was a little cautious, certain ministers told her that nothing should be sacred, offering the country’s assets to global investment. And ‘this climate change problem, Margaret, can be useful to us, because we can get rid of the miners’.
‘There are crazy people in any party’, Lowe remarked. But some of them may be acutely aware of why the migrants are here in such staggering numbers, why the economy is being curtailed by Net Zero puritanism, why we have Pride and transgender propaganda forced upon us, and why we are being fleeced at every turn.
Lowe is an intelligent man, but there are none so blind as will not see. That includes his loyal followers who regard him as the answer to our existential crisis.
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End of the road for Rupert?
PETE NORTH
Regular readers might want to skip this one. Even I’m bored of it. I’m not saying anything new, but there are certain markers I must log for my own purposes. Rather predictably, the infighting has intensified. There’s considerable disquiet on X among Restore Britain supporters. They are slowly coming to terms with the fact that Rupert Lowe is not whatever they assumed he was.
Earlier this week he denounced ethnonationalists, and another interview has emerged where he makes it clear that he is a boomer conservative civic nationalist. This is counter to the direction his lieutenants are taking his party in.
Consequently, the party as a whole is incapable of settling on a consistent message, where the leader, largely unaware of what is being done in his name, undermines the efforts of his top people who are always in damage control mode. They can’t get Lowe to stick their script. As with Reform, the party ideology is whatever the leader says it is, and however hard Restore activists attempt to project an alternate interpretation, they can’t get away from the fact that Rupert Lowe is what he is.
Already the hardline ethnonationalists are taking their bat home, and thus the party is gradually shedding its most vocal, but most fickle online support base – who’ve spent the last three months telling us that Lowe is really the real messiah this time. Charlie Downes can no longer keep up the pretence that his party is something that it isn’t, and nobody would believe him if he did.
Readers will know that this is precisely what I predicated many times over. A party that sets out without a nailed-down definition will end up with an internal space race to define it, having to fend off entryists who want to turn it to their purposes – who will wreck the party rather than allow it to proceed on any terms other than their own.
The problem for Lowe now is that he has set the parameters, parking the party alongside Farage ideologically, and is now a direct competitor, with no obvious unique selling point. He now has Reform attacking him as well as the online right, and not even Lotus Eaters can paper over the cracks for him.
Ultimately, Restore was only ever going to succeed by presenting as a more serious party than Reform. It was for Rupert Lowe to demonstrate that Restore met Rupert Lowe’s own criteria for seriousness. What we’ve seen instead is the exact same low effort populist slop, just with a Daily Mail comments section tinge. To my mind, if there was a role for Restore, it was to demonstrate what Reform should be doing in terms of messaging and policy content – but you’re dealing with people who simply don’t want to put in any serious effort or thought.
As to whether Restore can survive in some form, I really don’t know. They’ve put up a candidate for the Manchester mayoral race, a father of a grooming victim, but the issue simply doesn’t have the electoral traction they think it does across a whole metropolitan area. It should, but it doesn’t. They are not set to perform well, and will struggle if their activist base is already disillusioned.
Ultimately, the hardline ethnonationalists will have to learn that if they want a party that sings their tune; that wants full remigration, and is explicitly “anti-zionist”, then they will have to start one. Being a home for the largely self-discrediting figures of the far right, it is unlikely to gain any traction outside of a small corner of X.
It is notable that even with deep pockets, major US attention and an endorsement by Elon Musk, Restore still isn’t able to gain ground. These pathological losers have nowhere else to go. They either have to shut up and accept Restore for what it is, taking what they can get, or watch another ill-conceived venture fail.
To my mind, there was never much mileage in building another party around a messiah, especially not an old irascible tyrant. If you’re going to do that, the first mission is to build an organisation on an intellectual foundation that can withstand the departure of its leader. Without Lowe, the party is little more than a fraternity of angry zoomer men without adult supervision.
The sad part part is that this has been a huge waste of an opportunity. The rationale for creating an alternative vehicle on the right was sound. While Reform has firmed up its rhetoric, there is no basis to trust that it will do what it says in office. There is even more ideological contradiction in Reform, and it is still a completely unserious rabble. But now we’re stuck with it. It is the de facto protest vehicle of the right.
For my money, the next three months will be decisive. Any which way you spin it, Reform is not yet an election winning machine. It is not winning by-elections, and its polling has been stagnant for some time. Much is contingent on just how bad Andy Burnham will be as Prime Minister. Labour can expect a short-lived polling bump just for ridding us of Starmer. It might just be enough to keep Reform at bay if Burnham calls a snap election. Right-leaning voters might very well conclude that we don’t have the luxury of any more psychodramas on the fringes.
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(UKR)