Rupert Lowe’s Powellite revolution. By Rob Lownie in UnHerd.
Rupert Lowe deals in the politics of return: illegal immigrants are going back, and so is Britain. The Great Yarmouth MP, formerly of Reform UK, has now launched Restore Britain as a new political party, and on Wednesday evening claimed that it had passed 70,000 members. …
Lowe sums up his political outlook: “I think the state is bad, and I think the individual is good.” …
Immigration:
One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While [Nigel Farage’s] Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt.” The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”
The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticise quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain.” And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.”
Like Enoch Powell:
In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. …
Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. …
Yet, in his beliefs as well as his rhetoric, Lowe is a more obviously Powellite figure than Farage. He’s more interested in reducing the size of the state, is resistant to Reform’s nationalising impulses, and is less vulnerable than his rival to charges of “socialism”.
In many ways, Restore is the more conservative project, given that its central mission is to return Britain — in more explicit terms than Farage has dared — to a glorious past from its Blairite present. When it comes to presentation, Farage and Lowe — tweed-clad former public schoolboys with past lives in the City — are far closer to one another than they are to the intense, prodigiously academic Powell….
Where Lowe differs from Farage, though, is that he has done less to distance himself from figures and ideas which might be classed as far-Right. While the Reform leader has condemned Tommy Robinson for “stir[ring] up hatred” and stated that the activist has no place in his party, Lowe has praised Robinson’s campaigning against grooming gangs cover-ups. …
Who is British?
In an interview in December 2024, Lowe said that “I don’t care about people’s religion or their colour,” but Restore has taken a far more robust approach to Islam than Reform has.
Lowe is set on “resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam”, and his new party’s platform includes policies on outlawing the burqa, sharia courts and halal slaughter. Some of its senior figures also champion an especially muscular Christianity. For instance, Lowe’s campaigns director Charlie Downes, a Catholic convert, declared this week: “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.” …
Starved of publicity by the legacy media:
Capturing wider support, of course, is a different proposition. According to polling from this week, 92% of Britons are unable to name Lowe when shown a picture of him. He is popular among his constituents, viewed as a committed and unpretentious champion for Great Yarmouth, but he has a majority of less than 1,500….
Many Reform people are crossing to Restore, and alliances might e made:
Lowe could receive extra ammunition from an alliance with another of Farage’s jilted exes: Ben Habib. Having served as co-deputy leader for Reform, Habib was demoted in favour of Richard Tice, and quit the party in November 2024. The following spring he referred to Lowe’s treatment by Farage as an “injustice”, subsequently setting up a new party of his own, Advance UK, in June.
On Saturday, Habib extended an open offer to Lowe to merge their two parties. Lowe politely demurred by suggesting that Habib join Restore, which “would be stronger with you in it”. …
Elon Musk likes him:
Advance [received] outsized publicity thanks to endorsements from Robinson and Elon Musk. But the Tesla mogul, as well as boosting Habib’s party, has in recent days cheered on the progress of Restore Britain. On Wednesday afternoon, he went so far as to accuse Reform of being “Nazis” because “THEY are the ones who want race extinction.” As the world’s richest man, armed with 234 million pliant X followers, Musk’s overseas influence is considerable; his amplification of posts about the grooming gangs helped push the Government into ordering a national inquiry.
Musk is widely reviled among British voters, but his support — both X-based and financial — could boost Restore’s international profile and increase the chance of collaboration with like-minded parties such as Alternative for Germany and Spain’s Vox. Farage endorsed the AfD in 2017 but has, in recent years, kept a deliberate distance. There is a gap here for Lowe to exploit as anti-immigration groups build ties around Europe: these are parties which are gaining influence but which are still considered too dangerous by Reform and the Tories.
Is Farage just a lighter strain of globalism?
While Farage might think he flies in the face of such squeamishness, and that he is dismantling the “uniparty” consensus, Restore supporters believe he instead represents little more than a continuation of the New Labour-inflected order which has governed Britain for the past three decades [and that] Reform’s senior figures “basically agree that the vision Blair had for Britain was admirable and desirable” … “it will come to pass that Farage is the Regime’s lifeline, not its nemesis.”
Overton window on the run:
The UK’s Overton window has undeniably shifted on immigration. … Almost half of Britons say they would support an agenda in which no new immigrants are admitted to the country and large numbers of recent arrivals are required to leave. …
It’s easy to forget that, even after “Rivers of Blood”, Powell was immensely popular. Polls carried out shortly after the speech demonstrated that a majority of the British public agreed with his assessment of race relations. In 2002 he was voted one of the 100 greatest Britons ever. On his death, the Telegraph wrote that he “would survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill”.
Restore’s launch video. Rupert Lowe is not charismatic, or an everyman like Farage.
40 – 80 million views already
Restore Britain is clear here. We will prosecute any medical professional or anyone in ANY position of authority who has deliberately mutilated a young child in the name of gender ideology.
That will apply retrospectively.
UPDATE: Even Reform polls are being won by Rupert Lowe:
