Why Restore Britain is (probably) already dead in the water

Nigel Farage says he will “defeat far-right ethnonationalism,” insisting that “nobody has done more to defeat the genuine intolerant, abhorrent, extreme far-right than me. We did it with the British National Party and we’ll do it with whoever else follows”.

With this speech Farage is planting Reform firmly in the centre right and by “whoever else follows”, he is referring to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. It’s a canny move on his part. It goes along way to making those who call Reform far right look even more ridiculous than they already do, but it also shifts the burden on to Restore.

This is a sticky wicket for Restore in that its leading figures and its cheerleaders at Lotus Eaters are certainly dabbling in ethnonationalism. That means Rupert Lowe (broadly a meritocratic civic nationalist) will struggle to denounce ethnonationalism as an idea without burning much of his support base. But then if he endorses it, he moves the party into the far right sphere, to become the de facto mainstream far right party. It doesn’t matter how carefully Lowe attempts to disambiguate. It won’t work. If you sup with the devil you must use a long spoon.

Of course a third option exists, where the Restore simply ducks the issue entirely, but without setting down certain boundaries, Restore will become the new home for cranky e-celebs who will trash Lowe’s reputation, and with it any residual clout his grooming inquiry has. This is the first and most obvious ambush they’ve walked headlong into. We have the Homeland experience to see how this pans out.

This is where Restore isn’t worried when they really should be. If you leave the back gate open for neo-Nazis, they will poison your reputation, just as the cybernats did for the indyref. Politics is a reputation game. A party like Restore wants to attract people to the right of Reform but reject all the retarded conspiracy theories of the horseshoe right.

If, though, you're happy to share a stable with them, the very people you need will think twice about publicly endorsing you. This is the reason some fairly influential accounts on here never joined Homeland - including one Charlie Downes. It's not something you can allow ambiguity on because eventually it will blow up in your face. The longer you allow it to metastasise the bigger the implosion when you finally have to put down definitions.

This is why the party needs some sort of formal definition in a constitution. That’s something Ben Habib is right about. You have to be absolutely clear who your party includes, and who it doesn’t include.

The online right, though, is busy deceiving itself, saying that Lowe shouldn’t get into the denunciation game (as Reform has). They have half a point, but only half. Denouncing Tommy Robinson supporters as “that lot” when TR supporters hold fairly pedestrian civic nationalist views is sheer political cowardice. But there’s a big difference between denouncing Tommy Robinson supporters and denouncing the sort of people who dabble in holocaust denial on influential podcasts.

If Restore operates a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on ultra far right views, the party will end up tainted. This is still a country that prides itself on the defeat of Nazism. You can see this every Remembrance Day. For sure, the Zoomers might have been brought up in a different moral universe, but it’s only really the YouTube addled boys who go in for vehement antisemitism. In one stroke, Farage has gone a long way to sanitising his own brand while creating major headaches for Rupert Lowe.

The waters are muddied further in that to the outsider normie (non-political obsessive), it’s hard to discern the actual difference between Reform and Restore - especially when it’s unclear what Rupert Lowe actually thinks. There is a disparity between Restore’s vibe and what Lowe actually says.

This, of course, could be remedied with clear policy and definitions from the outset, but Restore only has Harrison Pitt’s deportations discussion paper, which Lowe hasn’t committed to memory and will end up contradicting - which is another of Restore’s structural problems.

Sooner or later, Restore will be forced to reset and recalibrate its immigration policy messaging but at the same time, Reform is firming up its own rhetoric, which is likely to confuse voters further. If Restore isn’t a full remigration party, when Reform isn’t either, it comes down to which party looks like the more serious prospect. Which isn’t Restore.

I’m of the view that when it comes to management style, Farage and Lowe are peas in a pod. Neither of them are details men, they rule with an iron fist, and in both parties, policy is whatever the leader says it is, and for Restore, it’s whatever pub bore brain fart the leader tweets when he gets out of bed.

This has been a problem for Reform throughout but it’s especially bad for Restore because Rupert Lowe has no message discipline at all. A little birdie who works for Lowe told me his lieutenants are all trying to steer Lowe away from posting boomer slop but he doesn’t listen because he’s obsessed with chasing social media engagement numbers. As such, it won’t matter if Harrison Pitt produces Rolls Royce policy for the party because it will be undermined and contradicted on a daily basis.

What we need to see is a clear party definition, a system of ethics, a vision and research based policy with daily comms that build on that - not least to avoid the obvious ambushes. What we’re getting instead is low effort disposable talking points which are every bit as expendable as Reform policies. You can throw this kind of chum into the water to please the gallery, but not if you are trying to outwardly project an image of seriousness and competence.

Frankly, I’m running out of ways to say this. The people who should care don’t want to know. There’s a strong whiff of personality cult about Restore Britain, but as much as anything else, Restore supporters are so desperate for a party that represents their views that exposing its flaws at this point is viewed as the actions of an enemy - even though I am just as desperate for a viable alternative to Reform.

From here on in, the online right is caught up in a hysteria, and I’m once again public enemy number one. It has all the same dynamics of Ukip circa 2014. I've completely lost count now of the number of creative excuses offered up for their party not doing any basic preparatory work. They’re not going to listen, and even if they were, it’s probably too late already. The die is cast. Lowe is now boxed into a rhetorical corner. At most, Restore Britain might help set the mood music, and hold Farage’s feet to the fire, but any chance of it evolving into a viable party are evaporating by the day.

The sad part is, it did not have to be this way for Restore. Farage’s ambush could have been avoided simply by setting out policy and parameters early. It could have defined itself as a National Conservative party (in line with Lowe’s own beliefs), rejecting the ethno/civic nationalist framing on the basis that robust deportation/remigration policy looks more or less the same from either camp. It could have set out a foreign policy to deter the cranky antisemites too.

The reason you do this is to avoid building in ideological splits into your base. Supposing for a moment that I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about antisemitism, I would still want to deter that lot on the basis that antisemitism is the most reliable indicatory of crankery, and goes hand-in-hand with a doctrinal ethnonationalism which is broadly socialist, anti-NATO, and completely at odds with Lowe’s own conservative values.

These two positions are irreconcilable, and the Tory party shows us what happens when you have a broad church of mismatched freaks. Sooner or later, the leader has to decide which faction they’re going to piss off with their policy decision-making, and then you get breakaway groups and destructive petty vendettas. Sort of like we’re seeing now.