Restore’s last moonshot?

It’s been a challenging few days for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party - beset with internal bickering over the ideological direction of the party. I’ll skip the gory details. It’s unimportant. Regular readers will know this was predicted. All of it stems from Restore’s fundamental definition problem, and if you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said Restore was circling the drain.

This morning, though, it would seem that the penny has dropped at Restore HQ. The party has published a paper entitled Restoring our Identity. Now we're getting somewhere. It's muddled, not very well structured, and poorly written (probably in a serious hurry), but it does set out a few basic parameters.

To understand the document it has to be read between the lines. It need not go into constitutional minutia. The document has an explicit purpose. It is a longwinded declaration that Restore is not an ethnonationalist party. Read in conjunction with their deportations paper, the party now looks like a cultural conservationist party - which is an adequate accommodation with ethnonationalism - and therefore supportable (if it can improve the quality of its policymaking). It is a less than subtle “fuck off” to the grotbag tendency, which makes it safe for more sane people to defect from Reform.

More crucially, this is the closest we've seen to an actual party definition. It is not optimal but it does adequately serve its function. It's somewhat ironic that I should welcome it given my usual demands for precision and detail, but it does what it needed to do. The intended recipients of that message are hearing it with full clarity, and are making their choices accordingly.

What it does is removed the ambiguity that's been present from the outset, making the party a target for the actual far right - which Lowe foolishly elected to ignore. Consequently, the party has a lot of reputational damage to undo which was wholly self-inflicted. Today's declaration may be too little and too late.

But it does neatly illustrate the point I've been making ad nauseum for the last year. Parties without an explicit definition are the authors of their own misfortunes - and this applies in equal measure to all of the parties of the right. Just the tiniest bit of ideological direction makes a whole heap of problems go away virtually overnight.

Of course, you can pick holes and split hairs with what Restore has written, and I may even get around to doing it myself, but to do so is largely to miss the point. A strategic compromise has to be made on the right to build a coalition. A clever one is one that requires some compromise from all sides - to unite the sane people who recognise the need to obtain power.

For those who think it's too much of a compromise, you would do well to recall that a purist nationalist party has been attempted several times and each time has imploded - sabotaged by people who are never satisfied. Even Homeland wasn't extreme enough for them so I don't understand why they ever thought a party led by Rupert Lowe would ever cater to their ideology.

This move from Restore, though, does not solve all of their problems. Many of the divisions hinge on foreign policy which has to be very carefully calibrated. It must also steer clear of the Danny Kruger variant of trad-Toryism and small state dogma. We do need to reform the state, but we also need it to do a lot of things of we want to repair Britain. It also needs a vision beyond twee agrarian nostalgia.

Whether or not there's the makings of a viable and credible party remains to be seen because a lot of the Slop Right's thinking is based on the same old cliches and mantras that bear little relation to the real world, and tends toward impractical and undeliverable macho soundbites.

As some have noted, this minor course correction puts Restore in the same ballpark as Reform - which is problematic, but not if the party chooses to compete on seriousness and competence grounds. For that it needs better people and better research.

For some time now, I've had a reputation for trashing Restore for its own sake, not having anything positive to say about it. But that's because all of its errors have been downstream of its definition problem. Just think of all the times Charlie Downes could have avoided making a complete prat of himself had they published this declaration at the beginning. How many unnecessary and unproductive Twitter spats could it have avoided?

With Restore having brought some remedy to that existential question, it is now likely that its messaging will be much more coherent, especially if they make greater use of their own policies rather than letting them gather dust. If they start getting it right then I will say so. It just angers me that it's taken all this wholly predictable bickering and bed-shitting for the penny to drop.

What is not known, though, is the extent of damage these months of philosophical incoherence have caused. While the grotbag tendency is but a minor faction within Restore’s support base, it is also the loudest and the most online of the Very Online Right. Today Restore has made an enemy of them and they’ll spend most of their days tearing Restore down - to no useful purpose. The next few months will be a test of their influence. Having spent so many months pandering to the very cohort they are now seeking to shed, Restore have created a rod for their own backs.

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Meanwhile, for those who have asked what I mean by "grotbag nationalist", it refers to those who are openly antisemitic, dabble in Holocaust denial, and are comically bigoted in every respect - many of whom don't even think women should be allowed to vote - and would deport people exclusively on the basis of skin colour (though they'd emphasise deporting Jews first).

Moreover, they are ideological puritans, politically inept, and naturally predisposed to wrecking things when they don't get their own way. You could give them a party that was 95% aligned with their own ideology and they would still burn it to the ground in a tantrum. These are people for whom Homeland wasn't extreme enough. There is zero recognition of the need for strategic compromise. They are nihilistic idiots.

They're the ones who complain about "cringe civnat boomers" then rushed in to join a party led by Rupert Lowe - and have spent every waking moment agitating for Restore to become its ideological opposite - not least because they are incapable of starting and maintaining their own party. If your party panders to these people then it is hard-wired to self-destruct. They enjoy the infighting more than activism because they are pathological losers.

The grotbag nationalists complaining about Restore are the same ones who wrecked the Homeland Party. Kenny Smith, to his enormous credit, recognised the need for a new "sensible nationalism" that was sane and humane - which is the very reason I agreed to join. What that required was clinical precision in policy and terminology, and the website did a pretty good job of that. It also required a great deal of message discipline and self-discipline from its activists. Probably its greatest error was recruiting loudmouth egocentric e-celebs.

They were the ones who simply didn't recognise the value of carefully crafted and calibrated messaging and instead wanted the party to get its proverbial dick out in public, and demanded that the party was explicitly antizionist as a sine qua non - because that's their primary preoccupation.

It wasn't good enough that the party was explicitly nationalist with a well-constructed remigration policy (much of which is replicated in Restore's mass deportations paper). As such, they were looking for any excuse to wreck it, and when they found one, they did.

But they didn't start their own party - because none of them have that kind of organisational talent. Running even a small party is a lot of tedious unpaid administration, which would have interrupted their shitposting. They just waited to parasite off a new one - and Restore was the first viable vehicle that came along. Rats in a sack have more organisational ability than these people. Herding cats is relatively easy compared to managing a party with these people on board.

Worst of all is the abject failure to recognise that a party completely in line with their own demented politics would be terminally electorally insignificant. Do they seriously believe that Restore would be thumping ahead in the polls if only it were openly antisemitic and comically racist? If these people have decided to fuck off out of it, then Restore members should be celebrating today.