Restore Britain: a party in search of a purpose

The Daily Mail is going all out on attacking Restore Britain, drawing particular attention to the fact that Rupert Lowe is turning a blind eye to a certain cohort within his party who could fairly be described as far right.

Despite the fact that one or two of them are about as close as it gets to being a neo-Nazi probably doesn’t really land because the term “far right” has been so comprehensively abused that it scarcely holds any meaning. Restore can probably weather this line of attack - especially since the influence of the Daily Mail is a fraction of what it once was.

What it does do, though, is make people who have something to lose hesitate to join the party, meaning the party will struggle to find the kind of respectable high status candidates it needs. The effect of these “smears” is more subtle. Certainly, for what it’s worth, I will never be welcomed in civil society now that my name’s plastered all over Searchlight. That kind of innuendo still works.

Restore, though, has more immediate problems. Namely the Makerfield by-election. Some polls put them as high as eight per cent - which could be impressive if the turnout is high, but that isn’t likely to be the case. If turnout goes as high as forty five per cent I will be surprised. In that event, Restore’s vote share will be flattering but the number of votes will fall far short of a respectable number for the energy invested.

Worse still, if the Restore performs as well as some polls suggest, and Andy Burnham wins, Restore will be blamed for it. They can’t spin that one. Restore either ends up being irrelevant, or very relevant for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, with Reform hardening some of its rhetoric, and Farage pledging to evict foreigners from social housing, Restore is left looking too similar, unless it leans more towards completely unelectable positions and panders to its far right online support base.

If you ask me, their best line of attack is that Reform is basically the Tory party in populist drag. They don’t have a plan, they don’t have polices, and you can’t trust them. That would work on me - if I didn’t know that Restore was pretty much the same kind of slop factory, that is.

But that, indeed, is the whole of the problem. Restore came out the gate with its mass deportations paper but since then we’ve seen nothing of worth. All we’ve had is something about legalising pepper spray and abolishing inheritance tax. It says something that, quite shamefully, I haven’t touched the Manifesto Project website for three months and it’s still well ahead of the game. Restore is not producing policy and the policy it has is not informing its strategy. It is rudderless.

We saw an opportunity yesterday where Reform could have been attacked for its policy incoherence. Zia Yusuf launched a half-cocked attack on Serco, after it was reported that Serco would not participate in Reform’s deportation policy. I’m not sure Yusuf actually read the report. It said “The Telegraph approached each of the companies this week and asked whether they would co-operate with a Reform government if the party were elected. All of them either refused to comment or failed to respond. A spokesman for Mears said it did not “comment on political matters”, while Mitie refused to comment on what it called “hypothetical or speculative proposals of this nature”. Serco also declined to comment.”

Responding to Yusuf’s attack, the company said: “As a matter of longstanding company policy, Serco does not take political positions, nor do we comment on the policy programmes of political parties. “Policy decisions are matters for whatever party is in government. Serco’s responsibility is to deliver services as specified by the contracting authority as we have for the past 60 years. “We operate across many parts of the immigration system, including detention and preparation for removals. We would expect to offer and perform such services in the future.”

All this attack actually does is underscore how little thought Reform have put into the operational delivery of their policy. In what amounts to a national security operation, there shouldn't even be a role for private corporations (especially not Serco who would subcontract various functions, themselves relying on cheaper foreign labour).

Were it that Restore Britain were on top of their game they could have pointed out the many deficiencies in Reform’s policy, alerting voters to the fact that ICE style operations will only have a limited effect. You can bag a few thousand in the first few weeks (rather inefficiently), while running the risk of large public demonstrations, or you can look carefully at the reasons why illegal immigration got so badly out of control in the first place.

Had they done the research, they would know that illegal immigrants operate without fear of being caught - working in take-aways car washes, shops, factories and care homes, because we’ve slashed the number of local authority inspectors. The explosion of illegal immigration is symptomatic of a collapsing administrative state which must be rebuilt, not only to detect illegal immigrants, but also to enforce food hygiene, planning laws, and trading standards laws etc.

If we close down the car washes, vape shops, beds in sheds, illegal campsites, illegal sublets, and punish care home owners (and anyone else employing illegals), we will make Britain such a hostile environment for illegals that it is no longer economically viable to stay here. The absence of this kind of structured policy thinking is precisely what makes Reform a slopulist party that will not accomplish anything in office.

Restore alluded to some of this in their paper on mass deportations, but not in any depth, failing to recognise the significance of the local enforcement angle. It is not supplemental. It is pivotal.

As I’ve said from the beginning, the design brief for Restore was “Reform - but not shit”. Restore is not sufficiently different to compete on ideological turf, but virtually anyone could compete on clarity, coherence and competence. But Restore isn’t up to it either. Last I checked, Rupert Lowe’s X account (reportedly run by one of his minions) is churning out slopulist slogans and tropes, while policy development has pretty much dried up completely. Restore’s only ace in the hole is their rape gang inquiry which, sadly, is turning into a dog and pony show.

While there is no single defect in Restore that holes them below the waterline, there are still plenty of leaky cracks caused by faulty architecture that will see them slowly sink. Slowly at first, then all at once.

That then leaves Restore as the sort of nuisance that could cost Reform maybe ten of its hundred target seats. Perhaps even enough to cost Reform a working majority in 2029. Should that happen, nobody will all that pleased with Rupert Lowe. Then again, if Restore succeeds in its aim to shift the Overton Window, dragging Reform further to the right, voters might well wonder what the point of Restore is. They could very easily conclude that it only exists as a means for Lowe to prosecute his vendetta against Farage - and they’re not really wrong about that.