The schism on Britain’s hard right is no longer gossip; it is formal. Rupert Lowe, reportedly buoyed by encouragement from Elon Musk’s online ecosystem, has launched a rival to Reform. His one-MP outfit is called Restore.
The launch, staged in Great Yarmouth, leaned heavily into hard-line rhetoric on immigration and “national restoration”: mass deportations, drastic population reduction, and proposals framed around privileging a narrowly defined version of British identity. However it is packaged, the underlying message is clear — this is a politics built on demographic anxiety. Ethnic cleansing of a scale Europe hasn’t seen since Slobodan Milosevic.
Lowe himself embodies a certain strand of English reaction: clubland hauteur mixed with grievance. But personality matters less than positioning. While Reform is often lazily labelled fascist, it is better understood as populist-nationalist — disruptive, opportunistic, media-driven. Restore appears to be something different: more explicitly authoritarian in tone, less concerned with retail politics, more comfortable with hierarchy and order. The nearest Britain has got to a Francoist party.
Others to the right of Reform have moved quickly. Advance UK, led by former Reform deputy Ben Habib, has signalled openness to cooperation. Figures associated with street-level protest politics — including networks orbiting Tommy Robinson — provide mobilisation capacity. Lowe and Habib both have large presences on X, amplified within Musk’s algorithmic universe. The division of labour is obvious: social-media outrage meets street activism.
Lowe’s self-declared “grooming gang inquiry” fits this pattern. It generates attention and cultural heat, but sits outside established investigatory structures. However legitimate public anger over past failures may be, parallel “inquiries” risk creating noise that complicates prosecutions rather than strengthening them. Real justice is slow, evidential and procedural. Performance politics is not.
Electorally, this fragmentation could matter. Labour holds a number of seats on thin margins where Reform has polled strongly. If Restore and Advance begin carving up the same pool of voters, the arithmetic shifts. A split right benefits Labour far more than any rhetorical flourish from the despatch box.
All of these parties are fishing in roughly the same pond: older homeowners, economically secure but culturally unsettled; voters who prospered in an era when qualifications mattered less and social norms were narrower; voters who feel mocked by graduates, by metropolitan culture, by change itself. Resentment — particularly intergenerational resentment — is politically combustible. It does not need to be invented. It only needs to be channelled.
The irony is that this is less a surge than a fracture. What looks like momentum may in fact be competition for a fixed base. The “new new right” is not expanding the coalition; it is subdividing it.
For Labour, the danger is complacency. For the hard right, the danger is cannibalism.
Another politician straight out of a Dickens novel. Even Reform wouldn’t have him.
I’ve just read this morning that he’s in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. I reckon Farage would have woke up this morning seething that he hadn’t thought of that one himself, maybe he’ll try to one up him by reintroducing corporal punishment for school kids and stocks for petty crimes – like working from home and not working more 40 hours a week.
Who knows if this is an actual policy proposal or if it is just something to make his fans angry and engaged
You mentioned Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry, but an interesting point in that inquiry’s report is that it includes 20 case studies of “Pakistani grooming gang” victims, but 18 of the individuals involved had already suffered from sexual abuse beforehand, usually at the hands of white men. In 9 of those cases (7 female and 2 male) the sexual abuse began when they were of primary school age or even younger!
Is it even reasonable then to call the Pakistani gangs “grooming gangs” then, when it seems like they were often just opportunistic predators taking advantage of vulnerable teenagers who had already been “groomed” by others to see sexual abuse as normal?
That’s shocking, but sadly believable, I have given Rupert Lowes “inquiry” a wide berth. There are currently lots of historic cases being re-investigated and brought to trial, including several former police officers. The Lowe publication looks like it might prejudice future trials and allow the guilty to go free. Although I assume that Lowe would be OK with that as it would generate more racially charge outrage