Rupert Lowe claims that his party has set up 550 constituency branches already. His party is even more of a one-person band than Nigel Farage’s Reform, under whose colours Lowe was originally elected to parliament, but the latest poll in Makerfield, by Survation, suggested that 8 per cent of the voters there will back Rebecca Shepherd, the Restore Britain candidate, in the by-election next week.
This is high for a new party with only one MP, especially one whose central message overlaps with that of another, more successful new party. But Restore’s national support is now high enough that four pollsters (YouGov, Ipsos, Techne and Find Out Now) have started to report it separately. Its average support across Great Britain is running at an average of only 3 per cent, but its strength in Makerfield is such that Reform are clearly worried that Shepherd could take enough of their votes to hand the seat to Andy Burnham.
Lowe’s main focus is immigration, which he wants to reduce to net zero or below. It is hard to compare details of Restore’s policies with those of Reform, because many of Reform’s policies are unclear – and Restore’s are even more so.
The Restore Britain website declares that its aim is to “reverse mass immigration”, and it says: “If a legally resident foreign national is unable to speak English, lives in social housing, claims benefits, refuses to work, fails to integrate, commits crime or actively hates our way of life and wishes to do us harm, they will be deported.”
The party also wants to cease granting asylum to anyone, and to house existing asylum seekers in tents rather than in hotels or permanent accommodation. These policies all go further than those of Reform.
Lowe’s rhetoric is also more extreme. His response on X to the Belfast knife attack, by an alleged Sudanese refugee, was: “Millions must go.” His post was “liked” by 100,000 people.
It may seem strange that, just as Nigel Farage has established his dominance of the right-wing bloc in British politics, he should start losing support to a competitor further to the right.
Those voters who are most opposed to immigration might be expected to coalesce behind the anti-immigration party that is most likely to win, in a by-election or a general election.
But Scarlett Maguire, the boss of pollsters Merlin Strategy, says the Restore vote “isn’t as simple as wanting something to the right of Reform”. She says that some Restore voters think Reform “will turn out to be like other politicians that have let them down”. And she adds that “many Restore supporters think they are less extreme or less racist than Reform”.
This is the problem that Farage has walked into by accepting defectors from the Conservative Party, and it has been shown up in sharp relief by the Belfast knife attack. Reform now includes former Conservatives who were implicated in the failure of the last government on immigration. Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick were home secretary and immigration minister at the time when the Belfast assailant was allegedly granted refugee status.
If Restore stays at around 3 per cent in national polls, it is likely to be squeezed. Reform and the Greens managed to break through in the first-past-the-post voting system only because they overtook some of their competitor parties in some places.
Lowe’s party has a local base in Great Yarmouth, where he is the MP and where his Great Yarmouth First party, a sort of franchise of Restore Britain, won all 10 local council seats last month. Their win denied Reform outright control of Norfolk County Council. But elsewhere, the party will struggle to make a mark.
This is despite the rocket boosters provided by Elon Musk, Lowe’s most important supporter, who isn’t even British, but whose personal following on the social media platform X, with its ideologically biased algorithm, amplifies Restore Britain.
Part of Lowe’s support is homegrown, in that he has 1.3 million followers on Facebook, but part of it is artificially inflated by X. However, even with this level of interference from abroad – which may well be stopped by the British government – it is hard to see how Restore Britain can be anything more than a spoiler for Farage.
