Restore Britain: is new far-right party a threat to Farage?

Restore Britain received its latest high-profile endorsement last week when former Chelsea captain John Terry replied “100% yes” to an Instagram post by party founder Rupert Lowe wanting to “ban foreigners from claiming benefits”, “remove migrants who are incapable of financially supporting themselves” and “put our own people first”.

Lowe, the Great Yarmouth MP, set up Restore Britain last year as what he called a “political movement” after he was suspended by Reform UK. It was then formally launched as a political party in February. Despite being just a few months old, the party is polling at 4%, according to YouGov.

It might have been “conceived as a pressure group”, said LBC, but Lowe has since “stepped up his ambitions and appears willing to challenge his old party for the space on the right”.

What are its policies?

Curbing immigration is a key Restore policy. Its official website says: “Mass immigration has been a disaster for Britain. It has left us poorer, less safe, and less culturally and socially cohesive.”

It plans to “reverse mass immigration” by deporting all illegal migrants and introducing a “red list” of countries that “face far stricter security checks, limited visa categories, and higher barriers to entry”. Restore would use tents, not hotels, to house “so-called asylum seekers” before abolishing the asylum system altogether. It would end benefits for those on indefinite leave to remain, “deport rape gang collaborators” and foreign criminals, and end election campaigning in foreign languages.

On tax and benefits, it promises to “reward the nation’s grafters” by scrapping IR35 for freelancers, abolishing inheritance tax, establishing the lowest corporation tax in Europe, and getting “able-bodied Britons on benefits back to work”.

It proposes a “Britain First energy security strategy”, which would mean repealing net zero goals, requiring developers to fund local infrastructure before building housing, ending hosepipe bans for good and automating the London Tube.

Restore wants to scrap foreign aid, rearm Britain by spending more on defence and end diversity and inclusivity programmes within the Armed Forces.

It would “defund the rotten BBC”, “strengthen the teaching of our Christian heritage” within national curriculum history modules, ban the burqa, restrict halal and kosher slaughter, and repeal the Online Safety Act.

Perhaps most controversially, Restore would hold a binding referendum on restoring the death penalty in a bid to “make Britain safe again”.

What impact could it have on Reform UK?

While it shares many of the same policies as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Lowe’s party has sought to present itself as the true voice of the right.

Despite lacking the name recognition of a leader like Farage, Restore has successfully used social media to amplify its anti-immigration rhetoric. Helped in no small part by the backing of X owner Elon Musk, Lowe is now one of the most followed UK politicians on social media.

By adopting a decentralised structure, effectively serving as an umbrella for local far-right political partners, Restore hopes to show up the top-down approach of Reform. Other far-right figures such as former EDL leader Tommy Robinson and former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib have also rallied behind the new party.

Such a force “could cost Reform a number of seats – and potentially even power, in a wafer-thin general election result – by splitting support among those drawn to hard-right anti-immigration populism”, said The Guardian.

Is it just a flash in the pan?

For now, Restore remains “really very small fry”, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, told Politics Home. “They’re gnats, not mosquitoes” at the moment, but the party’s impact will be determined in large part by how Farage reacts. “On the one hand, it’s always helpful for Farage to be able to point to outfits on his right that he can differentiate himself from and suggest that because they’re more extreme than he is, he’s therefore not far right and actually quite mainstream”.

But political parties can be encouraged to talk about policies promoted by parties further to the fringes, which runs the risk of Farage “moving too far out of the kind of what is sometimes called the zone of acceptability, as far as most voters are concerned”.