Restore Britain: Revenge of the slopulists

Rupert Lowe has launched Restore Britain as a political party. I can certainly see why an alternative to Reform is necessary. Reform is going far off the boil and the party has essentially conceded that nothing much can be done about immigration.

All of the mainstream parties (Reform included) talk about illegal immigration as a proxy for more fundamental deep-rooted problems with mass immigration which can only be addressed by conceding the obvious: There are millions of people in this country who have no business being here, should never have been admitted, and they are here entirely legally. It requires us to stand up and assert that Britain is our homeland and we are within our rights to send them back. The only debate now is how we go about it. Anything else is cowardly evasion.

The question on my mind, though, is whether Restore is up to the job - and I guess it’s down to me, as usual, to discuss the potential problems.

Here it must be noted that however much we might like Rupert Lowe, he is essentially the same basic Reform type populist. You can take the man out of Reform but you can’t take the Reform out of the man. Lowe is a decent bloke but he’s hopelessly naïve.

The first major obstacle is the all-pervasive amateurism on the British right. The British right is very good at setting things up on a whim. There’s a long history of disgruntled figures starting up their own enterprises only for them to wither on the vine. There is an initial flurry of activity and enthusiasm but they always lack staying power.

There is more reason this time to believe it has a chance of working being that the time is right, and that Lowe is in the right ballpark politically, but many of Lowe’s critiques of Reform apply (or certainly will apply) in equal measure to Restore. This I’m quite certain of.

As usual, I’m told to hold off criticism because they’re a new party, but it should be recalled that Restore Britain as an entity has been in operation for several months now. I recall when it launched I was less than impressed. In fact, it was that very lack of substance that spurred me to produce the manifestoproject.org. It was as much a challenge to Restore to up their game - but in the months since, nothing was done to improve their intellectual platform - and it has not gone unnoticed.

This betrays more of the same “it’ll do for now” mindset on the right. We saw this last week with Ben Habib hosting a policy launch event, only to publish a draft twelve page PowerPoint presentation with four bullet points per page.

This is the sort of thing that should have been addressed before launching Restore Britain as a party, but again it’s being done on the whim of Rupert Lowe. Many people tell me this simply doesn’t matter but Rupert Lowe certainly used to think it did. Last April he wrote “I have received countless questions on my recommendation for who to vote for this Thursday, and I have thought long and hard about the answer. Here is my honest assessment:

For months, I pushed Reform to propose radical, but credible policies. To detail it, with substance and costings. Write it down, produce policy documents. I was mocked and ignored. I hoped that there might be some form of plan for these elections, maybe a well-thought out policy or two? To even go as far to write a proposal - not thrown together on a flashy social media graphic, but in properly constructed sentences on an actual document. None came. Nothing.

All we get, day after day after day, is glossy pictures of Nigel Farage. No manifesto, just an empty promise that ‘Reform will fix it’. HOW? Please, tell me how? If I have to watch another overproduced video of Farage, I’ll vomit turquoise coloured confetti. Sweeping shots, backed by booming dramatic music, of the man going about mundane campaigning activities. It’s a parody. Where is the policy?! All we get is vacuous bull, piled on top of more vacuous bull - purely designed to pump up Farage’s ego at a time when British airspace is already dangerously full.

I’m not interested. I want numbers, detail, substance. A plan.”

He went on to say “I simply cannot endorse a party that has put so frighteningly little thought into what it would actually do with power. Reform’s plan is to ride the protest wave, faced with two obscenely unpopular mainstream parties, but offer absolutely nothing constructive - chasing power for the sake of power. To ‘win’ the game, and it is a game to them”.

This is pretty much what I’d been saying for the previous ten years about Ukip, the Brexit Party and Reform. The consistent theme throughout has been the pathological amateurism that’s native to any Farage-led enterprise. We now need to see real evidence that this new party is a genuine departure from that - but time after time these people demonstrate they do not know what policy is or the campaigning utility of it.

Many have told me to shut up and not criticise Restore, but if Lowe’s criticism of Reform was timely and necessary then Lowe should be held to his own standards. If Restore doesn’t rise to the standards demanded by its own leader, then we’re yet again embarking upon another fool’s errand - like the dozen breakaway parties that came before it.

Depressingly, though, there is a high tolerance among Restore supporters for this amateurism, many of whom don’t even see the problem, but it is noticed by casual observers, and any reputation for seriousness and credibility is easily squandered. Much of it is remedied with a little attention to detail, but in organisations like Restore it gets neglected because nobody thinks to do it. That’s how your end up with cringe-fest press conferences like Reform. This will be even harder to weather for Restore, because they’ll be judged by their own critiques of Reform.

There are already a lot of avoidable mistakes Restore is making, some of which they’ve been warned about, but they’re still getting down to business making them - and as with Reform, constructive criticism will be met with hostility, defensiveness and denial.

While I cautiously welcomed the creation of Restore Britain I can already see the many ways it could easily hit the rocks. Restore now has a difficult choice to make as to whether it serves up rabble-rousing slop to keep its supporters happy, or whether it produces serious policy. For personality cult parties there is always a price for the latter - because a lot of the Restore online support base will demand an ever more extreme stance, and like the spoiled toddlers they are, they will turn on Lowe if they don't get it.

Leaders always have to choose between electability and keeping their fringe lunatics happy. That's the dilemma Farage has always faced and Lowe will face it too. The waters are then muddied if Habib and Advance are brought into the fold since Habib is at the far right of civic nationalism which includes support for Israel, as per Tommy Robinson's leanings. This is a deal breaker for the ethno-right.

This is something where you cannot duck the issue with ambiguity. Factions within the party will try to force a definitive position. If Lowe has any sense, he will have to ensure he doesn't go too deep down the eth-nat rabbit hole otherwise the party has the ick factor associated with far-right parties that will deter normies.

This is what Steve Laws never understood about Homeland. There are normies whose views on immigration are quite robust who can easily be sold on the notion that millions must leave, but they won't rub shoulders with holocaust deniers and edgelords who praise Hitler, and they won't vote for a party whose basic sentiment is that all brown people must be deported regardless of their family background. These are the people who will shit the bed for Restore just as they did with Homeland.

Then there's the outward conduct of supporters. Lowe will not want to vet activists according to their past affiliations or their online conduct because he's called out Reform for doing that. But that means his supporter base will be quite toxic and an electoral deterrent in their own right. They'll end up like cybernats and Corbyn bots and trash the party's reputation. Lowe could very easily become a geriatric mascot - to become little more than a right wing Jeremy Corbyn - and Restore will be the Your Party of the right, riven with factionalism.

These are all the growing pains any new party has to endure and very few actually survive them. Reform swerved this by having no philosophical foundation but that brings problems of its own. Lowe will soon find himself guilty of many of the things he accuses Reform of because making decisions that piss people off goes with the territory - and there is a game to be played whether Lowe realises this or not. Lowe thinks it will be different for him but eventually, he will have to choose which faction he's going to disappoint.

You can, of course, head this all off at the pass. The lessons are there to be learned, and at risk of boring you all, much of it is contingent on setting out your policy stall before taking on board the very disruptors who will end you. You can leave it ambiguous for a while to avoid internal bickering, but then you're projecting an image of a party that's intellectually compromised.

As such, while I probably will vote for Restore if there's the opportunity to do so, I don't see much of a future for it. The best time to fix the problems was weeks before launch. The second best time is now. But I know I will still be witnessing the exact same problems in another six months.

Restore supporters will, of course, abuse me in public for saying so but will privately concede I'm right eventually - just as they did with Reform. Ultimately the slopulist mindset destroys everything it touches, and it's in Rupert Lowe's nature, regardless of how sincere he is. We keep watching it play out time after time, so there's no real reason to expect different results. Lowe may have some good people working for him, but even they can’t babysit Lowe all hours of the day.

I’m always told not to be unduly negative about these things but it’s hard not to be when you’ve been around the block a few times. There are patterns of behaviour that reveal the mindset. Again we see an enthusiastic blow up on the online right, where again they believe they’ve found their new messiah, but the lack of an intellectual foundation and basic diligence is always their undoing. They soon get cocky and abusive (just as the kiptards once did) only to watch all their hopes turn to ash. I’ve seen it play out too often to get my hopes up again.