Forget Restore Britain – the problem is mainstream politics promoting far-right policies

‘Restore’s extremism is a problem for Nigel Farage,” ran the headline of a Times column by Melanie Phillips warning that Restore Britain “threatens to snatch votes from Reform and hand victory to Andy Burnham”. The votes “being hoovered up by Restore’s oddball door-knockers is thwarting a potential Reform win”, lamented a similarly worried Brendan O’Neill, columnist for the Spectator and Spiked. Votes for Restore, wrote Kathy Gyngell, editor of the Conservative Woman, would be “a killer not just for Reform but for the rest of us”.

There is a whiff of panic within sections of the commentariat at the possibility of Restore Britain, the far-right party founded by Rupert Lowe, MP for Great Yarmouth, preventing a Reform victory in the forthcoming Makerfield byelection. The first constituency poll suggested that Restore could take 7% of the vote, sufficient to deny a Reform win and hand the constituency to Labour’s Andy Burnham.

Lowe was a Reform luminary before falling out with Nigel Farage. Restore accuses Farage’s party of betraying the British people by being too soft on immigration. While Reform “believe that anyone from anywhere can become British”, Restore’s campaign director Charlie Downes insisted in February, for Restore, “Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”. The party promises to “reverse the Islamisation of Britain”, banning the burqa and halal (and kosher) meat.

Even with the vocal support of and funding from Elon Musk, Restore is barely visible on the electoral map. Lowe is its only MP, and there are just 21 local councillors. That a single poll from a byelection should create such panic suggests that deeper issues are at play here.

It is easy to forget how far and fast the discourse on immigration has moved. In 2010, the British National party (BNP) warned in its election manifesto that “indigenous British people are set to become a minority well within 50 years”. To “reverse this process” there needed to be “a halt to all further immigration, the deportation of all illegal immigrants, a halt to the ‘asylum’ swindle and the promotion of the already existing voluntary repatriation scheme”. The party would “deport all foreigners convicted of crimes in Britain, regardless of their immigration status” and “halt the handout of benefits, housing, education and pensions to foreigners”. The BNP took less than 2% of the national vote.

Today, as Daniel Trilling points out in his new book If We Tolerate This, virtually all these proposals are discussed, and many have been adopted, by mainstream politicians and parties. It is not that Britain is on the verge of fascism. It is rather that ideas once confined to the fascist fringe have been made respectable within a liberal democracy. Reform’s success in branding itself an insurgent anti-establishment party, and in capturing people’s rage at the failure of traditional politics, has dragged mainstream politics onto its terrain and helped normalise illiberal policies.

Now Restore is putting pressure on Reform in the same way as Reform has long put pressure on Labour and the Tories. As Farage’s party looks to present itself as a possible next government – “We have to do something to reassure middle England that we aren’t the Nazis”, Tim Montgomerie, Tory adviser turned Reform supporter, told the New York Times – it opens the way for less fastidious organisations to take advantage.

Last week, Robert Jenrick, another former Tory who has embraced Reform, becoming its shadow chancellor, insisted in a TV interview that, unlike Restore, his party would not deport foreign nationals legally in Britain and living in social housing. Within hours, Zia Yusuf, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, slapped him down, insisting that “Robert’s answer is not Reform policy” and that such legal residents could be deported.

The spat reflected a longstanding tension between Reform’s wish to appear respectable and the desire to be seen as rebels challenging liberal norms. Eighteen months ago, Farage claimed on GB News: “I’m not going to get dragged down the route of mass deportations or anything like that… It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people.” After facing derision from Lowe, Reform backtracked. “You’d better believe it,” Yusuf boasted in response to a Financial Times analysis that suggested Reform policy would entail the deportation of at least two million people, many here legally.

At the same time, however far-reaching the recent transformation of the immigration debate, we still live in a broadly liberal society. The visceral racism that disfigured Britain in the 1970s and 80s has greatly reduced and most people are more open-minded on issues of race and belonging.

The paradox of a nation that is far less racist but in which discussions of ideas and policies once confined to the far-right fringes have become mainstream makes it more difficult to understand those ideas and policies as being reactionary. Much of what the BNP once advocated, whether mass deportations or measures to stem white decline, is now regarded as normal and necessary. Little wonder that out-and-out racists, while still a minority, are more assertive, presenting their racism as reasonable.

Many of those who now decry the extremism of Restore are often the very ones who have encouraged what were once far-right ideas to take centre stage. The real challenge we face comes from reactionary ideas not on the fringes, but in the mainstream.

Photograph by SOPA Images via Getty Images