Reality check for the dissident right

I don’t really want to write much more about Restore Britain. I think it’s largely run its course. The people running the party, in a very real sense, do not know what they are doing. It’s following the Reform pattern of electioneering for its own sake because the people running the party don’t know what else to do, and think it’s the primary function activity of a political party.

The objective, though, is not winning elections. The objective is to become a government. To do that, you need the ideas base and the people. The job is to build a platform you can present to the people as an alternative. If you’re not doing that then all you are doing is making noise - and noise does not translate into momentum.

You may recall a few years back when Farage departed Ukip for the final time. What followed was a relatively high profile battle of succession. There was no more political mileage in Ukip, but for some it was worth contesting just for the right to control the intellectual property.

With that came brand recognition (albeit badly tainted) and a sizable social media presence. Even now, the Ukip X account has 216,000 followers (compared to Restore’s 385k). As an online megaphone, that’s pretty big, but it doesn’t mean anything in the real world. Ukip is a spent force and everyone involved knows it.

You can throw a lot of money at building an online platform, but at the end of the day, it’s just a marketing channel. While that is a major asset in politics, it is no use if the product itself isn’t up to anything. As far as the product goes, Restore Britain is still pretty much Rupert Lowe and his largely unknown underlings - and is no more likely to withstand the departure of its leader than Reform is.

As much as the party is not attracting serious people (and, in fact, is actively repelling them), there is no coherent ideas base driving anything they say. As such, everything that comes through the social media megaphone is undisciplined and ill-directed shouting.

The time to address these issues was during the design phase, but Restore Britain didn’t really have one. It was launched on the whim of its leader, and these foundational errors are not going to be corrected. It is now widely acknowledged even by its own members that it will not fulfil its promise of becoming a serious alternative to Reform by 2029. Mostly likely never.

From here, all it can really do is go through the motions until it runs out of steam, in the blind hope that maybe one day Reform will implode, and they inherit the crown as the de facto anti-establishment right wing party. It will limp on because its supporters are too heavily invested (emotionally and financially) to see it for what it really is.

Moreover, it fulfils a certain need in its supporters who need to feel like they are doing something useful with their political energies (even if they aren’t). The alternative is to face the bleak reality that party politics is a non-starter, the right is probably going to lose in 2029, and owing to its lack of competence and coherence, it doesn’t even matter if it wins for all that it actually accomplishes.

I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to face that reality. For many it is preferable to keep your sense of hope hooked up to a political life support machine, or you just end up being a cantankerous misanthropic blogger.

The problem with that is that Restore, much like Reform, becomes displacement activity because the people involved don’t know what else to do. The habit (and tradition) on the right is to start new political enterprises to great fanfare and then slowly watch them die. It never occurs to us to try anything different. The right does not do strategic thinking.

The obvious point for me is that party politics is a dead end. The Tories are sufficiently entrenched in British political life that they will linger on, and hold on to most of the safe shire seats, while Reform soaks up most of the energy to no useful purpose. Sooner or later, Farage will depart, and the party has to strike a bargain with the Tories, resulting in more or less the same kind of right wing rainbow coalition the Tory party was in 2019.

From there, such a coalition probably would win but only on the basis of Labour outstaying its welcome - but again we end up with an ideologically muddled centre right party with a revolutionary rump. We’ve already seen how that plays out - and we don’t have time to re-tread failed experiments.

It is worth recalling, then, that voting rituals are not the only expression of democracy. Protest and industrial action are just as legitimate, and if our votes do not result in the changes we demand, then we must use our collective leverage. This is something I outline in the latest The World Of Momus interview below. We are running out of time to save Britain, and we need to shift it up a gear.