More fragmentation on the right

As an observer of politics on the right, I can’t let it pass without comment that Ben Habib has started a new party. This comes on the same day as Rupert Lowe launching his own venture - which appears to be a policy unit and pressure group, not unlike Habib’s GBPAC.

There is apparently no coordination or cooperation between the two, so one is given to wondering why they both launched on the same day. It cannot be a coincidence. One is seeking to upstage the other perhaps? It does underscore, though, that any Habib-Lowe political alliance on a new venture was a figment of the right’s imagination.

So what to make of it? First off, launching any new political venture on a Monday in blistering hot Summer weather is rank amateurism. Conference time is the time to do it. Unsurprisingly, neither venture has made a big media splash. Neither Lowe nor Habib have the Farage factor, so the wider media outside of the Daily Express and GB News will not be the remotest bit interested, now or in the near future.

This is the first hurdle for both, but especially for Ben Habib, whose reach is largely confined to TalkTV and GB News. He has a large and loyal fanbase, but it doesn’t go much beyond social media.

Cutting to the chase, the real question is whether his outfit is any more serious than Reform. To great fanfare Habib took issue with the lack of democracy within Reform, and its top-down approach to everything. He is now obliged to ensure his party is authentic, democratic and coherent.

So will it be any good? The short answer is no. I don’t doubt his intention to form a more transparent and accountable organisation that Reform but he still has to put policy meat on the bones. This is something he should have done before launching. Since he went to the trouble of setting up his GBPAC for the development of policy, he should at least have waited for it to produce at least something. Instead we get yet more lightweight bulletpoints that tell us little about the underlying philosophy, and nothing about the political vision.

This defies explanation. I actually went to the trouble of setting out a loose template for him over a year ago which seems to have influenced his subsequent thinking. He didn’t have to use that, but he could have come up with at least something. Without more substance, we cannot even say Habib has launched a party. He’s merely uploaded a website to register his intent to start a party.

It is reasonable to assume that when this enterprise does adopt policy, it will be the work his of GBPAC, so we know what ballpark it is likely to be. Habib routinely speaks of a Great Repeal bill, and restoring sovereignty, essentially resetting the constitution back to 1997. As I understand it, he has Martin Howe KC working on this.

I am not, however, filled with confidence. I’ve looked closely at GBPAC and the people involved and, I’m afraid to say, they are mediocre intellects - and their entire approach to policy is wrong. As with Ukip back in the day, they’re canvassing the support base for suggestions and I know from experience that it does not yield results. You actually need serious in-depth analysis and a functioning ideological framework.

This is something I attempted to do with the manifesto I wrote last year. As a starter for ten, it’s not a bad effort, though I now see there are major gaps and scope for improvement. The point of it, though, was to provide a basic template which could be expanded upon. To do so would require some investment because ultimately, the job is too big and too complicated for any one person. All the same, I thank it stands as a decent stab given the time constraints and the budget of zero.

Given, then, what was achieved by one person in under two months, I have to ask why Habib’s well-resourced team has taken six months to produce absolutely nothing. One gets the impression that all these people seem to do is launch things with mediocre websites.

The stage, I think, is now set for Habib to bomb out of politics. He clearly isn’t included in any of Rupert Lowe’s calculations and if Advance UK doesn’t pay off then he’s pretty much done. This is his only chance at staying relevant. But it won’t work.

As remarked above, while Habib does have a public profile, he’s still a political pygmy next to Farage, and the media simply isn’t interested in anyone but Farage as the face of the insurgent right. It would take a very public endorsement of Elon Musk, and some very big donors to suck the wind out of Reform’s sails. While Habib’s effort has been noted by Musk on X, this does not translate to an endorsement.

Were it that Rupert Lowe were poised to join, perhaps with a few significant Tory defectors, there might still be something in this venture, but right now it’s looking like another Veritas style one man band. Meanwhile, though many will be sympathetic to Habib’s cause, and appreciate his efforts, there is the fear that yet another party will split the vote.

Ultimately, this party doesn’t shoot anybody’s fox. It doesn’t hurt the Tories, it’s not really going to impact on Reform, it’s not going to deter Homeland, and most of the disaffected Reform set are waiting to see what Rupert Lowe does. I think Habib would be well advised to quietly row back from this enterprise. But that’s half the problem. He isn’t well advised. He is surrounded by sycophants egging him on, and there is no injection of realism.

So what about Lowe? Lowe has today launched Restore Britain - which isn’t a political party - but that then begs the question of what is it actually for and what will it do? As yet there is little to go on in terms of what it stands for, but the messaging thus far is in line with what we have come to expect from Lowe. It favours a burka ban and "net negative immigration". This is encouraging.

My expectations of these initiatives usually aren't high. It takes a certain intellectual architecture to deliver coherent policy and it's rare as hen's teeth on the populist right. I do, however, have confidence that it will be better than GBPAC. I am encouraged to see Charlie Downes is involved. He is bright, articulate and has pretty sound judgement. He has good instincts. He's at the right end of the argument on immigration, without resorting to crass edgelordism.

The test of whether it's serious or not will be whether it considers to practical implications of of policy. Lowe has expressed support for the idea of Channel pushbacks, and I simply do not believe such a policy would survive more than six weeks in reality before it descended into farce.

Similarly, there's the ECHR question. There are two approaches here. You can take the pragmatic road where we remain in the ECHR, recognising that the HRA and the British judiciary are the more immediate problems, or you can take the principled approach that Britain should not recognise any foreign court.

I actually have no preference on this just so long as there is a recognition that leaving the ECHR, of itself, accomplishes very little, and that there are far-reaching consequences to doing so, not least unravelling the political settlement in Northern Ireland. Only fools rush in.

In Ben Habib's mind, we would leave the ECHR, rip up the NI protocol and dump the TCA if we had to. Again, I have no strong feelings either way, but I would want to see a technically proficient plan as to what replaces it. Ben Habib thinks it's sufficient to roll the British constitution back to 1997 and everything will function as before. Delusional.

What troubles me about Lowe's venture is the policy page, where it doesn't really go into detail yet. Though there isn't much to go on, it does give us some insight into how they think. One section reads "End Woke" - "DEI ideology has consumed our institutions. Men are not women. No more anti-white racism. We must return to truth, biology, and equal treatment. We must restore reason and common sense".

We've all seen this shtick before but "carpet bombing woke" is no small undertaking. It requires a complete overhaul of the civil service, a complete clear out of the CPS, a purge of the police command tier, and an all out war on Britain's bloated university sector. That latter factor may be the most important. The worst woke drivel comes out of British academia. Oh and let's not forget the unions. To that end, I want to see detailed plans, with direct testimony from people in the know, rather than whatever is stuffed into the online suggestions box.

To date, not a single one of these enterprises has produced anything of substance. I would like to be proved wrong this time, but I don't think the populist right is up to the job. Going back to the very beginnings of Ukip, there has always been an vehement aversion to policy and planning, believing it to be superfluous. Nothing in recent months persuades me that the penny has dropped.

Meanwhile, the right-leaning political outsider might then find it bizarre that Lowe - the politician - is forming a "non-political" movement, while Habib, the non-politician, is planning on creating a political party. They could well conclude that the dissident right as a whole is an egotistical trainwreck, and shuffle back to the Tories.