Ideology is where rubber meets road

One of the reasons I write about the fringe right is because it’s where all the market signals are - and its the place where the ideological battle happen that dictate where the centre-right goes. Even the influence of micro parties is not trivial. Tiny Homeland played a big part in popularising remigration as a concept.

But this is why I still write about Restore Britain, even though my metrics tell me I’m boring my readers to death. It’s where the ideological friction on the right is most evident. There is a generational divide on the right which roughly divides along civnat/ethnat lines, and it’s where Tory free market capitalism clashes with the collectivism of far right fascism.

Personally, I think the game is already over. The civnats are the only thing stopping Restore becoming a far right ethnat party, and the ethnats were the only thing stopping it becoming a full blown boomer slop party. It lacked the skill to manage the contradiction. Conceptually flawed from the outset, it now begins the Habibification process, and its inevitable, torturous demise.

By the looks of it, the base just think its a matter of managing Lowe’s rhetoric, but Lowe’s wunderkinds are not going to resolve the party's internal ideological conflict by papering over the cracks with verbal sleight of hand tricks. There will be fundamental disputes in every major policy area.

Just take defence. On the one hand you have the Tory civnat tendency, and on the other, you have doctrinal nationalists. The former is broadly pro-Israel, pro-NATO, Ukraine sceptical, non-interventionist, but still Atlanticist. The latter is anti-Israel, isolationist, anti-NATO, and in many cases pro-Russia and anti-American.

You can't reconcile these two positions. There isn't a compromise. Any compromise is a deal breaker for nationalists, not least because of the obsessive hatred of Jews. To be pro-America is to be "zionist" (because America is controlled by you-know-who), and the isolationist tendency runs all the way through. All of this runs contrary to what Lowe instinctively believes, and we've already seen divergence on foreign policy between him and his lieutenants.

With such radically divergent approaches to foreign policy, you simply cannot arrive at a coherent defence policy - which is always downstream of your foreign policy posture. You can form up around a concept of armed neutrality, but that’s not going to be sufficiently rabid for either side.

The only way to avert vehement public disagreements is to avoid policy of any depth, or anything that is likely to trigger its own base, at which point you're yet another empty shell of a party, just like Reform, that doesn't know what it will do with power until it gets there - at which point it all falls apart. But you simply cannot present as a serious right wing party if you don't have a foreign and defence posture, not least because there are a lot of boomer veterans in the civnat base.

We can assume that Restore's defence posture will be very much informed by Henry Bolton, who will have a conventional Ukippy Tory mindset, and the moment he publishes anything, Restore's own base will start clucking. Doubtless, Downes/Pitt will attempt to editorialise and remove any of the ideological landmines, but that leaves your policy completely threadbare. If I were Bolton, I wouldn't sit idly by and let Beavis and Butthead scribble all over my policy with their crayons. It would be a resigning matter for me.

You will find similar ideological conflicts on housing, health and many other areas, because the fascists are ethnic collectivists and socialists, which doesn't tie up very well with the free market ideology of Lowe. Consequently, Restore will constantly be trying to appease a cohort of parasitic whingers who are likely to throw their toys out of the pram at any moment for virtually any reason you can think of.

Any attempt to make policy vaguely presentable to normies will set them off. Restore will also find they are unappeasable. You can't ride these two horses at once. Eventually one of them will gallop off in its own direction. Anyone who knows the ideological terrain could see this a mile off, but this lot can't because, Restore is run by idiots and they badly underestimate just how cranky their cranks are.