There is no cure for Restore Britain's schizophrenia
Restore Britain seem to be in hot water with much of the British press today in the wake of Charlie Downes’s remarks about Israel committing “genocide” against “Muslims”. While Charlie Downes is entitled to his own views about the conflict in Gaza, the party leader is not entitled to be coy about it. Lowe must clarify his own position on the matter because it is not trivial.
The party slant on this issue has major implications, not least for foreign policy posture and defence. Is the party headed towards a position of armed neutrality, and if so how does that sit with NATO membership and our Ukraine posture? All of these concerns have implications for defence procurement. These are fundamentals we really need to know about a party.
I ask this because I recently updated my defence policy on the Manifesto Project. I had to re-write a lot of it because it was originally written for the Homeland Party, designed to be more in keeping with their neutrality stance. Doctrinal British nationalism calls for a more isolationist position.
My own view, though, is less dogmatic, and I do see events unravelling in such a way that Britain will find it necessary to deploy peacekeeping forces to Africa with a view to stemming massive displacements of people. I also have a less orthodox outlook on Ukraine, all of which makes for a massively different defence procurement programme, placing the emphasis on MRAPs over MBTs, and surface fleet ships over land forces, while maintaining a credible amphibious capability.
The bottom line is that if your defence policy is an extension of your foreign policy posture, and your foreign policy objectives. As such, it helps to work out first what they are. If you're specifically taking an anti-Israel line, that has ramifications for intelligence sharing, necessitating an expansion of our own overseas intelligence operations.
This matters because Restore's defence spokesman, Henry Bolton, is an old guard boomer who would design defence policy around the Russia/Ukraine conflict, with a favourable eye towards Israel, probably favouring a continuation of drone defence sorties against Iran.
That kind of fundamental inconsistency cannot stand within a political party. As with many other policy areas, if the basic stance is not agreed first, everything that follows will be disjointed and incoherent - just like Reform.
This also has fundamental ramifications for Restore as a whole. There's a spectrum of opinion on the right regarding the Gaza conflict, but remarks from Charlie Downes cannot be taken in isolation. It is now highly probable that he's bought into the full blown doctrine of British nationalism which is isolationist in nature.
For my part, I find plenty of cause to disagree with, not least the ethno-collectivism that goes with it, and I don't think dogmatic neutrality serves our interests. You may disagree. You may even be pleased to see a doctrinal nationalist in the senior ranks of Restore. It is at least an alternative to conventional British right wing thought. But it does not bode well for Restore as a party to have such a massive ideological gulf at the top of the party.
As we’ve seen many times over, Libertarian Toryism cannot coexist with doctrinal British nationalism, and for as long as this schism exists, Restore will never be a functioning party with a coherent and unified position. You can gloss over the internal ideological conflict, but it will rear its head at every critical juncture until the Faustian pact can no longer be sustained. Parties can withstand differences of opinion on minor points of policy, but not on major ideological fault lines. They cannot hide behind Rupert Lowe forever. The mask has to come off one day.
On that basis, I’m of the view that it’s time for restorers to give up on Restore Britain. It is a waste of everybody's time. If you have any ambitions of being a serious party, there are certain cans of worms you don't open because they absorb a lot of time and energy to no productive purpose, yet Restore chose to open them all at once. That's not shifting the Overton Window. That's choosing to be stupid - and in such a way that it is now irrecoverable. Restore will now have to spend much of its time explaining its ideological discrepancies, not least those between Downes and Lowe. They will keep fumbling and making avoidable errors.
Because Restore was always going to be in direct competition with Reform, building with a view to stealing Reform's crown (as the counter-establishment party), it had to be manifestly better at playing the game. But it isn't. By every single measure of competence, Restore is just crap.
It started out with a halfway respectable stab at policy (albeit deeply flawed in my view) but it was still more serious than anything Reform attempted. Sadly, it's been all downhill from there. Everything they've produced since has been unmitigated garbage. Their policy prospectus can be summarised as mass deportations, legalising pepper spray, bringing back hanging and abolishing inheritance tax.
As pathetic as that is, they don't really grasp the utility of policy rooted in a solid foundation. If they did, they wouldn't be getting into these stupid spats. They could simply make the case that Britain's survival is contingent on the removal of people who shouldn't be here, then reiterate what's in their actual policy. Have a script and stick to it.
What's abundantly obvious now is that the people running Restore have zero political skill and no maturity to speak of. The main accounts look like they're run by teenagers. There is no nous or wisdom, thus they'll continue to make fools of themselves, just as Reform does.
There is a very large overlap between my politics and those of Restore Britain, and of the widely known parties, it is the party that best represents my views on immigration, but it only stands a chance of achieving something if it's run by adults. Unless it's more serious than Reform, there is zero point in investing any energy in it. There is no point in it existing if it cannot present a more professional face than Reform.
It could have been that. That was Lowe's intention last April. His critique of Reform wasn't wrong. He's just proven beyond all doubt that despite all the resources at his disposal, he simply lacks the ability to pull it off. He's entrusted the running of his organisation to fools, and now Restore is a foolish and stupid party, pandering to foolish and stupid people - becoming more obnoxious and crass all the time.
When Lowe announced the launch of Restore as a party, I was initially enthusiastic, albeit very cautious. But it didn't take more than a day to work out the direction of travel - that it would be yet another lazy shambolic populist party. There was a short window to regroup and reset the messaging but every warning was ignored, and now it can only exist as a small and shouty clan of misanthropes. Maybe that will serve a function, but any hope of it evolving into something impressive is stone dead.