Restore Britain: Promise Without Preparation

I initially greeted the arrival of Restore Britain with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. I do think the real centre of the right is somewhere between Reform and Homeland, and that Rupert Lowe is in the right ballpark on immigration in ways Reform is not. I cannot, though, offer my unequivocal support. What I don’t want to see is another shouty, obnoxious protest party. I’m still in the market for seriousness.

As yet, we can only really guess what the policy platform of Restore will be. We know that Lowe is committed to remigration in some form, but we can safely assume it goes with all the restorationist shtick, roughly in line with Habib’s Advance party.

What all of the populist right have in common is their propensity for daydreaming. One thing we can all agree on is that repairing Britain is going to take a minimum of a decade, and that some areas of policy will be slow going. Energy in particular will take ten years or more to sort out thanks to three decades of policy neglect.

As such, any party of the right needs to be thinking in terms of a ten year agenda, and that means not doing anything so disruptive and unpopular that they don’t get re-elected. This is why I have such reservations about leaving the ECHR.

One thing that is not widely understood is the extent to which the ECHR is embedded in our constitution, and leaving it also requires a number of other repeals. It will also require amendments to the devolution acts. There have been several reports looking at the legal feasibility of this but none of them take into account the political reaction of even attempting it.

I’m already working on the assumption that any meddling with the Northern Ireland settlement will be contested every which way, and when it comes to amending the equality act, you’ll activate the unions, NGOs and the civil service. This would all be politically challenging for a normal government, but restorationists want to do this with a single great repeal magic wand bill, which will be absolutely mauled in the House of Lords.

When it comes to these delusional agendas, it really helps to as “what could possibly go wrong?”. When you start asking that question, particularly about ECHR withdrawal, the answer is... quite a lot. The worst case scenario is that it collapses the GFA and the precipitates an exit from the Windsor Framework, imperilling the TCA itself. That reopens all of the toxic politics of both Northern Ireland and Brexit, when there isn’t even majority support for leaving the ECHR. Even if it’s done well, it’s no small undertaking.

This is where the right comes unstuck in that they believe they are the silent majority in Britain, but the country is still split roughly along the Brexit referendum lines. The more far-reaching the agenda, the more chances for sabotage and self-sabotage. Also bear in mind a lot of the other necessary but wildly unpopular policies the right wants to implement - not least abolishing minimum wage. This puts them on thin ice.

The prevailing attitude on the right when it comes to these complexities is much the same as in the days of Article 50 talks, where any technical dilemma is dismissed as problematising. This is and always has been a cavalier approach to detail. I also assume that without a clear idea of what replaces the systems we’re abolishing, the system ends up in gridlock. The right believes it can do everything all at once when in fact, it needs to look at what gives us the most bang for our bucks with the limited political capital we’ll have.

I doubt, though, that this kind of pragmatic thinking is happening anywhere. there are plans to win in 2029, and plans to do things on day one, but none of them are informed by the need to get re-elected in 2034. That then sets us up for the worst leftist government of all time.

A more measured approach would be to identify surgical amendments, and to do the groundwork of reforming the judiciary, the civil service, and the unions before even attempting anything radical, the the populist suicide squad will steam in and screw everything up so they’re a lame duck government within two years. As much as policy matters, so does the order of execution. If I was going to do something as daft as leaving the ECHR, I’d table it for the second term when there’s more political capital to spend. Sadly, though, the right is wedded to the idea of magic wands and absolutely power, thus their policymaking (insofar as it exists) simply isn’t informed by reality.

I regularly voice these thoughts on X and unsurprisingly, it doesn’t get much traction. Now that X is monetised there is a perverse incentive to post rabble-rousing slop and serious debate slips through the cracks. That’s ok though. I don’t really expect the average grunter to invest that deeply in policy - but I do demand it of political parties.

That’s where Restore Britain is singularly unimpressive. In the eight months Restore Britain has been in operation, it has only produced one policy paper written by Harrison Pitt's on the matter of deportations. The paper is good as far as it goes (not least because a few of my points are adopted), though there are some problems with it which are non-trivial.

But then we get to the second problem. All parties and think tanks are guilty of this. They get their dogsbody juniors to compile PDFs which they then launch to great fanfare for a couple of days, and it's retweeted thousands of times by people who didn't really read it, then it's allowed to sit and gather dust until everyone forgets about it.

As such, they get into the habit of producing policy for its own sake without realising the utility of it. Your research-based policy document should inform all of your subsequent comms and tweets, and your party literature should summarise it and promote it, and your top people should take the time to study it and commit it to memory. But they don't so they end up contradicting their own policy and each other. We've watched Farage and Tice do this countless times.

If you have a decent policy document, it essentially serves as a database of reusable rhetoric and data which can be fed by supporters (whom you've trained) into daily blogs and Substack articles, so you can then build a reputation for knowing what you're going to do and how. Policy does not exist for the consumption of the masses. It is there as a campaigning aid and a later instruction manual to civil servants once you reach power. That is what makes the difference between a serious party and a populist rabble.

It is also insurance against making promises you cannot keep, or committing to seemingly popular but foolish policy tropes. But that's not what we're seeing. We see parties going through the motions churning out lightweight crap, producing no subject experts and making themselves look like clowns. This was my main critique of Reform around the time I started this Substack, but it applies in equal measure to Restore.

Since the launch of Restore Britain, rather a lot of people have told me to shut up about this or at least reach out to Restore and “get on board” but I don’t think it would do any good. It's very clear that zero preparation has gone in to this enterprise, and some very obvious lessons have not been heeded, and so Restore is on course to make all of the exact same errors as Reform. Everything's being done on a whim, on the fly, with no thought to infrastructure or intellectual architecture, and there's that all pervasive "it'll do for now" mentality, where we're promised substance later down the line which never materialises.

That its website is in more or less the same state as it was when they launched all those months months ago, tells me all I need to know about the level of attention to detail. The grooming "inquiry" was also instructive. It had a static webpage with no updates, no transcripts, no press releases, and what it produced was two weeks of meme fodder, and pending some private prosecutions that they could easily lose, it's already buried.

All the important foundational administration is treated as an afterthought and everything is funnelled through Lowe's personal X account. It looks like a cult of personality - and even though I like Pitt and Downes, they're not going to be able to stay on top of the workload Lowe's amateurism creates for them, especially when they're also tending to their own public personas.

Ultimately, there are some things that needed attention before launch that probably can't be salvaged now. It's like launching a glider off a mountain with the intention to build the wings on the way down. Some of this could be remedied by merging with Advance in that Habib has at least built party infrastructure, but neither are especially hot on intellectual foundation or policy. Habib doesn't really know what policy looks like, while Pitt is prone to Restorationist daydreaming.

As such, what you're left with is an aggressive online pumping operation that generates lots of X revenue but doesn't translate into votes. We've seen a dozen times how rapidly such operations can evaporate.

You also have to bear in mind that Lowe's hang ‘em and flog ‘em boomerism has limited appeal even if the zoomerwaffen (a catastrophic liability) backs him. Every party has an inherent ceiling on appeal, so you have to be clear from the outset where you're going to make the compromises to grow. If you don't set that out early on, you eventually have to turn on your base the way Reform has, and you see splits opening up. I can already see the fault lines because this ain't my first rodeo.

Pointing this out has not made me very popular over the weekend. As with the Kippers of yore, there are aggressive demands for conformity or silence. Meanwhile, to all those people saying I should pitch in and offer my services, I will say this...

The intellectual vacuum on the right is not a new thing. It was particularly acute in the run up to the 2024 general election, around the time I was going down to London on a regular basis to meet with various think tankers, known pundits and luminaries.

At two CPS gatherings I suggested to the dozen or so policy people around the table that they could each write a couple of thousand words in their lunchtimes, the culmination of which would amount to something quiet weighty. I offered to edit and compile it into a manifesto for NCF which Ben Habib could then adopt, either in full or in part. Peter Whittle said it was a good idea. Nobody in the business disputes the basic need for quality policy.

I made this offer on two occasions, with (if memory serves) messrs Pitt and Tomlinson in the room - and both have agreed with me that there is a policy gap on the right. It didn’t have to be me doing the work if they collectively didn’t think I was the right person (and there’s good reasons why I might not be), but it could have been done by *someone*. But it wasn’t. That material could have been reproduced for Restore at any time in the last nine months of its operation - or new material commissioned independently. But no.

As such, the excuse that it’s only been forty eight hours doesn’t really wash with me. This isn’t a sudden requirement. Policy was a part of Restore’s remit before it was a party - and the requirement existed long before. There’s plenty of brain power available to them, there’s been more than enough time, and I even went to the trouble of producing a model for them to pilfer if they wanted it. Still nadda.

In the meantime, Restore took it upon themselves to host a policy consultation (duplicating the work of GB PAC) which predictably produced nothing, and was never going to because ordinary members just regurgitate GB News talking points back to them, (which Restore should already know off by heart).

The job of policy people is to take those tropes and add substance to them. That work was not done. On both counts it was a pointless window dressing exercise, culminating in Habib publishing a sloppy PowerPoint presentation in place of policy.

Some have accused me of just being sour because I haven’t been invited into the fold but those people don’t know me at all. I don’t really want to be involved on that level not least because I’d have to go to London all the time which I seriously hate. A round trip to London wipes me out for days. l just want to see that the right is taking policy seriously, and thus far there is zero evidence that it is.

But to say that I haven’t attempted to engage is a flat out lie. I simply gave up flogging a dead horse (at considerable personal expense). Similarly, to say that all I do is criticise is another lie. Very few people have worked harder, for so little recognition or reward (and I don’t even care about that). I’m always having to say what people don’t want to hear while others lavish praise on the people who consistently fail to deliver. If you want another personality cult, fill your boots. Just don’t expect me applaud it.