On the Extreme Left: Your Party. On the Extreme Right: Not Your Party?

In trying to Out-Farage Reform UK, does Rupert Lowe risk wading into dangerous territory? And what does policy based on Ethno-Nationalism look like? We deserve to know

I am a fastidious reader of labels.

Having been convinced by the argument that Ultra Processed Food may be injurious to long term health, I have taken to looking at the ingredients on manufactured goods. Now you may think a loaf of bread is flour, water, yeast and salt, but a quick scan of the average packaging of a pre-made baked good reveals other hidden elements such as the preservative E282 (Calcium Propionate) and emulsifiers E471 (Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), E472e (Mono- and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), E481 (Sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate).

Maybe they are all innocuous. But given I do not know whether there is a connection to the recent spike in colo-rectal cancer, I'd rather not.

The same needs to be asked of our politics. Particularly the brand new fringe right wing parties making a lot of noise online.

One in particular has attracted a significant following, including many trolls and bigots who seem to adore attacking the majority right wing more than the rabid left. I should know, they have come after me. And as a result I have received a dozen private messages today from others subjected to the same bombardment.

I am of course talking about Restore Britain.

After interviewing their spokesman yesterday who set the tone for the interview by pointing out that Nigel Farage does not think being British comes down to birth or ancestry, I wanted to get to the bottom of how this ethno-nationalism translates into policy.

If you are a political party, expect people to ask questions about your intentions.

It is one thing being a commentator. Quite another courting votes.

Because looking at Reform UK policies: Removing welfare from foreigners, drastically cutting immigration, scrapping DEI, putting patriotism into the curriculum, mass deporting illegals and sending foreign prisoners home - I wanted to know what makes Restore ‘radically’ different (their term, not mine).

And the answer seemed to pivot on ancestry.

Now you can have a debate about what makes a Brit a Brit until the cows come home. Knock yourself out. But when potentially basing the enactment of policy on this basis, we need to be clear about who, what and how.

Rupert Lowe himself posted on X

Illegals gone. Legals who refuse to work, can’t speak English, claim benefits, live in social housing, commit crime, hate our way of life. Gone.

Let's put to one side the indelicate language, which in itself betrays a simmering bitterness that alarms me in identity politics, all too common among Woke Left lunatics like the Pronoun Mob who resort to hyperbole and bullying.

But let us drill down on this:

“Hate our way of life. Gone.”

Well, while I would love to see people who seemingly hated the British way of life not live here, if you are going to set up an actual vote-seeking machine, you need to clarify.

Who defines “our way of life”?

How is it monitored and assessed?

And by what mechanism are these people deported if they have been born in Britain and have only ever lived in Britain?

You cannot legally make someone you disagree with, however passionately, stateless.

First of all, some of the most anti-British voices screeching about decolonisation, white privilege, the patriarchy and such corrosive rot, are themselves middle class native Brits. Some of the most ardent Gaza enthusiasts are called Camilla and Tarquin and went to top public schools. They can't be deported, surely.

So then are we doing this by ethnicity?

Secondly, how is this assessed? Via some sort of Spanish inquisition? A door to door interview in multicultural areas demanding to know whether someone eats a Full English breakfast, drinks ale and knows every word to Rule Britannia?

Whether they can recite every word of The Lord's Prayer?

I am an evangelist and would love to see a resurgence of Christianity in Britain. But in the same way I oppose Parliament making demands over Gay Marriage, contrary to Biblical lore, I am equally squeamish about making Christianity some sort of qualifying threshold of politics. Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” - Matthew 22:21

Or does this come down to policing horrible anti-British sentiments on social media and punishing it?

Because if we are talking about criminalising opinions, however vile, then we may as well ask Starmer for his Post-Southport playbook.

Monitoring actual incitement in Mosques is a fundamental security necessity. Fine. Radical Imam preaching hate? Prosecute.

But the ‘millions’ of non-integrated denizens who do not share Lowe's vantage point - how are we identifying, assessing and punishing them?

Or is this merely a vacuous platitude that would be justified with the huffy comment “you know what it means”.

Well, no, I don't.

Because if the approach is markedly divergent from Reform's it suggests a far stronger approach would be taken than anything already announced, that therefore lies somewhere between what Lowe's acolytes might call Farage's “weak sauce” and Idi Amin. And it has not been made clear where on that spectrum Lowe seems to think we ought to be.

Frankly I think Reform's current, and nascent, policy framework goes much further than any political party has even contemplated in recent history. So I want to know where that extra ideological headroom is, and what it entails.

I am well aware we have massive, balkanised ghettos that look nothing like the Britain of 20 years ago. And I wish it wasn’t so.

But if you are young Iqbal, son of Abdul who came to the country 50 years ago to work in the mills, who has a picture of the Royals on the wall and learnt English fluently, but who happened to be born in the neighbourhood with a high concentration of residents who share his parents’ origins, works hard at school and harbours no ill will towards Britain, are you condemned because of your postcode?

If not, how does one separate Iqbal from his neighbour Mohamed who unbeknownst to many, secretly loves ISIS? Are we doing a forensic sweep of every laptop on their street?

Or is it about blood purity? If so much is made of ancestry, then it becomes clear why Ben Habib is not allowed to sit at the top table having been brought up in Karachi and with a conservative Muslim father.

I will tell you this. Having worked in third world countries with sectarian politics and tribal voting blocks, it leads to Post Election Violence. Be careful before unleashing identity politics proper is my heartfelt, grave warning.

Although I think we both know the motivations for both Habib and Lowe, and thus the ensuing friction between the two, is more down to ego.

The entertaining exchange between the two on X about merging parties reflected what I have said from the beginning, knowing the two men personally - as I do - and watching their haughty remarks appear in commonly shared whatsapp groups. It rather reminds me of the Frasier episode when the two brothers compete to be President of their wine club and in a bid to outdo the other, create such extreme rules that being part of the club became wholly unattractive.

You see, I don't think Habib or Lowe ever used to be as Puritanical as they are today.

The scramble to differentiate themselves by going further than Farage has instead become a sort of game of chicken, careering towards an ill thought out, dark version of Populism. A bottomless ideology I don't - or perhaps didn't - believe either sincerely possess, but seem willing to court in order to titilate online algorithms.

And if that is all it is, just clickbait, then the argument stands that if fundamentally their political programme is therefore barely distinguishable from Reform's and its all just rhetoric, what is the point? Why are they trying to siphon off votes and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat when the UK could be on the verge of its first ever ‘populist’ non-legacy Government?

Alas their self appointment as party leaders likely means that they will be forced to go deeper and darker in order to survive, to gain traction or remain relevant. The Candace Owens curve.

And therein lies the problem. Because while carping on about identity and mass deportations without a specific programme of execution, they are stirring up and emboldening a lot of very unpleasant characters who believe they finally have a Max Moseley of the 21st century.

How long before Restore rallies are forced to start looking and sounding like EFF jamborees in South Africa where cries of ‘Kill Kill The Boer!’ boom out of speakers to a crowd of black Africans who do not believe white people should be in their land?

One may scoff and say “never” and that I am ‘shilling for Reform’ - but make no mistake, a significant number of the absolutist advocates of Restore are itching to see this happen - unless of course their less than nuanced comments on my time line were just tongue in cheek quips. Or the work of bots (I suspect some indeed are, created and curated by hostile states that would love to see unrest in Britain).

There appears to be little happy outcome from the emergence of Restore. My prediction is that in a bid to subdue the more extreme elements of support, Lowe will end up on the wrong side of the Far Right frenzy currently drinking up his every sweary post. And then Restore either folds, or has to evolve into something near identical to Reform to dissuade the tastier elements currently drawn to it. If not, he will have to keep throwing raw flesh to those supporters, which is unleashing something very reckless and frightening in Britain.

Or if it somehow becomes a popular, professionalised, polished and pragmatic party (the least likely development it seems), all it would do is serve to split the vote and condemn the country to another 5 years of loony Left leadership. Something I do not think the UK can handle without catastrophic fall out.

The most ironic thing, to my mind, is how much like the very Islamists they profess to detest some elements of Lowe's followers sound. Politicising religion (in its purist form of course) and demanding adherence to it, while extolling attitudes that smack of unfettered misogyny (the amount of outrageous sexist attacks I am now enduring from the Loweites is breathtaking) is Islamist 101.

National treasure Sir Isaac Newton told us in his Third Law that for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Horrific mismanagement of the country has frogmarched some parts of the country towards goosestepping, sadly.

Right now perhaps having a headache over Restore is a waste of time. Only 8% of the public know who Rupert Lowe is (blowing out of the water the frankly ludicrous assertion made by the party that it was on 10% of the vote a mere 24 hours after the launch).

Both Restore and Advance are at present little more than social media accounts attached to websites with donations pages. They don't have executives, constitutions, branches, spokespeople…nothing but bot-soaked bluster at this stage.

But even this reckless hyperbole from Restore as to supposed polling points towards an outfit doing politics like a drunk joyrider - with a fleeting relationship to reality.

We live in febrile times with massive civilisational issues to address. The last thing we need is a Bull-In-A-China-Shop approach yelling expletives at a frankly (although perhaps justifiably) pissed-off cohort of young, frustrated men, teetering on the edge of taking matters into their own hands, now being told that a reasonable political solution via Reform is not possible. That it's all ‘controlled opposition’.

Unless you want to see riots and civil war, that is. And I am increasingly of little doubt that there are groups out there salivating at that exact prospect. And however exercised one may be at the current state of the country, conflict and chaos is horrendous.

Nobody asked for the mass immigration and the Communist craziness that has gripped Europe for the last few decades. And the impact has been deep and painful and feels hard to immediately reverse, and it does indeed feel like a last chance saloon to save Britain.

But the brazen bludgeons of the ex-Brexit Party outcasts and their outlandish overtures would bring unimaginable collateral damage if allowed to explode. And I have many a minority mate I don't want to see harassed, harmed or hurt when a baying mob is unleashed on Britain's streets, tacitly endorsed by grown men who should know better than to gee up the enraged masses for their own digital footprint and sense of importance.

Yes, I know this has for a long time been the shtick of the Left. The demonisation of the right, silencing debate with cries of ‘dog whistle’ and ‘racist’, throwing about hateful accusations to silence and oppress.

But rather like the boy who cried wolf, it does not mean we should become complacent to echoes of Brownshirts when they do appear to be building.

We live in perilous, unprecedented political times.

But when a loved one is being wheeled in for emergency surgery, you want the most experienced, careful consultant. Not a backstreet barber with a hacksaw.