The civil war for the soul of Restore Britain
As predicted by just about everyone who follows fringe politics, amidst Ukippy infighting, Ben Habib has thrown in the towel and Advance UK is apparently no more. As I understand it, he is now making overtures towards Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, despite having called them racist. Consequently, there’s a row over on X over whether he should be given any formal standing in the party.
That row is rather instructive since Rupert Lowe is being urged to expel the infamous self-declared racist Steve Laws. There's a civil war going on in the ranks Restore Britain and I don't even think Rupert Lowe is aware of it because he doesn't think that deeply about ideology.
The online support base is heavily leaning towards ethnonationalism, while the casual membership is just anti-immigration (c)onservative (hardline civic nationalist ukippery). The former wants Restore to define explicitly as an ethnonationalist party - which the party won't do or it will alienate its casual membership. Meanwhile, the party will turn a blind eye to their worst excesses because it wants their activism. This Faustian pact cannot last.
Political parties can be broad churches. The Tory party has been a successful broad church comprising of libertarians, traditionalists and liberals because while there are some major disagreements, their ideology is still in the same ballpark where it matters. Parties cannot survive, though, when there is a fundamental ideological schism - with factions who actively dislike each other, and do not co-operate.
Ethnonationalists particularly are not ones to cooperate in that their quest for racial purity also requires a certain ideological purity. If you have them in your party, it's basically like having Hezbollah within your borders. They're just waiting to take over and impose their own doctrines. Similarly, they would rather blow it all up and start over than let it succeed without them. Unless you lock them out from the beginning, you've basically wheeled in a Trojan Horse. That's what Restore has done.
The ideological problem, though, is that median civic nationalist ideology only works for as long as minorities are small minorities with compatible culture. The window for that to work has been and gone. It was in ruins before the Boriswave but it's totally gone now. In these circumstances ethnonationalism is the only way to preserve Britain. Without the British peoples, Britain is just an airport lounge where foreign tribes compete for access to the welfare dispensary.
As ever, though, the problem isn't the ism. It's the ists. The online ethnonationalist fraternity are toxic people and for some reason, ethnonationalism walks hand in hand with ethnic economic collectivism, which metastasises into National Socialism with a hefty dose of antisemitism. Anyone vaguely well adjusted will cross the street to avoid such misanthropic people.
Moreover, these people are completely politically illiterate. If you set out what these people actually believe in a manifesto, it would trigger most people's gag reflex. Certainly the working class southern English tribe, who mingle with the Windrushers as family and friends, would find it utterly repellent. Tommy Robinson is their political totem, not Nick Griffin. Britain is not going to elect a far right party.
In fact, Rupert Lowe's wider popularity tells you this. Lowe himself is seen as an old, basically decent conservative gent who, like everyone else, is just at his limits with everything. On that basis, you *can* build a party that goes pretty hard on immigration, just not one pushing racially charged dogma. What's pushed so many people to their limits is seeing their welfare system and NHS abused, violating the basic British sense of fairness. Meanwhile, the clue is in the name of the party... Restore - which means to revert; to undo damage.
The short of it is, while there isn't a national ethnocentric consensus, you can sell the party on the basis of revoking welfare rights, banning foreign customs, kicking out criminals and illegals, and policies such as housing favouring those of British heritage.
While this is the policy shtick of Restore (as far as it goes), all of that gets lost in the noise if the party is represented by cranky extremists addled with American youtuber conspiracy theories. The party has to understand that there are more than 10m native people who are socially liberal conservatives, comfortably off, belonging to a powerful voter bloc who still get their news from the BBC and regards Churchill as a national hero. They're not going to vote for a pack of antisemitic lunatics and Swindonian incels. Reform understands this. Restore evidently doesn't.
Some argue that if Restore were to put policy guardrails up to keep the undesirables out then it would essentially be a different flavour of civic nationalism, much like Reform. That's true. It would be. But it would at least have the slightest chance of being electable - accomplishing most of what we all want. Restore was always going to be muscling in on Reform's turf. The way to compete is not on ideology, but consistency and competence.
That should have been quite easy for Restore in that Reform has no stated definition. It's based on vague populism, and has no codified policies to speak of - and thus cannot be trusted. Its key people are lightweight (often completely risible), and they can't get their message straight between them - and their candidates are crap. They have no plan for government, and they have zero attention to detail.
Restore should be presenting as a serious alternative with policies, message consistency, decent candidates, and a plan. But right now it's just *another* disorganised slopulist party with an emergent neo-Nazi problem that could blow up at any moment. With the party caught up in a dilemma as to whether to embrace Steve Laws or Ben Habib, Lowe’s party is scraping a hole through the bottom of the barrel. Increasingly, it looks like bald men fighting over a comb.