1997. National Restoration. AC/DC. Britain. “We knew who we were.” Double decker bus. Fox hunt. POPULATION WAS STABLE. Red squirrel. Immigration. Cliffs of dover. Glenfinnan Viaduct. STATE IS BAD. Glastonbury Tor. INDIVIDUAL WAS GOOD. “Proper Britain.” Sheep and Cricket. Pint of ale. Sausage roll. RESTQRE BRITAIN. HMS Broadsword. Hawker Typhoon. Big Ben. BBC Test Card F. “Activation Code: Walmington-by-sea.” Dad’s Army. James Bond. Mini cooper. DETAIN. DEPORT. Red Arrows. Zulu. “A united English/British people.” Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe. Grandstand. This is Restore Britain.

The previous paragraph was an attempt to describe a surreal promotional video that appeared on the official Twitter/X account of Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe’s new political party, Restore Britain. The video copied its format from a 2024 post shared by the vaporwave QAnon influencer National Revival (and retweeted by Elon Musk) after Donald Trump’s electoral victory.

In one frame, the ‘O’ in ‘Restore Britain’ is replaced with a ‘Q.’ This is not a misspelling; it is a signal to what’s left of the QAnon community. Just as QAnoners believed that Trump was fated to ‘drain the swamp’ of elite paedophiles and ‘woke’ bureaucrats, Restore Britain’s membership (which reportedly numbers 70,000) hopes that Lowe will deport millions of ‘illegal immigrants,’ punish Muslims and LGBTQ+ people, and reinstate the death penalty. “Step aside, Nigel, there is a new British Trump in town…”

Restore Britain is the latest addition to the ranks of what I call ‘the British far far right.’ This is not an academic classification; it is an impressionistic rule-of-thumb term for those political forces who are mobilising to the right of Reform UK. It is the product of a peculiar conjunctural situation: Farage is eager to gatekeep Reform UK as much as possible to avoid accusations of being far right.

He refuses to admit former members of the British National Party and the English Defence League. He has publicly renounced ex-Reform UK figures, such as Ben Habib and Lowe, who hold extreme positions on immigration. He may promote far-right policies and discourses, yet Farage has been incredibly successful – with the complicity of the mainstream British press – at packaging himself as nothing more than a ‘populist.’

For the British far far right, Farage is not a true right-winger. He has abandoned them and joined ‘the Uniparty’ that has ruled over the UK since New Labour’s landslide victory in 1997. The British far far right can even name the exact moment that Farage betrayed them: The Edginton Interview. In 2024, the GB News journalist Steve Edginton asked Farage whether he supported mass deportations. Farage dismissed it as politically “impossible.”

Viewed dispassionately, Farage’s answer was the work of a savvy political operator who knows that – in terms of media optics – it would be too risky to commit to such a bold and extreme policy long before he holds the keys to No. 10. However, through the warped ideological lens of the British far far right, Farage’s response revealed that he was not serious about combating ‘The Great Replacement’ or reversing the ‘Islamisation’ of the UK.

Instead of undoing the legacy of the ‘Blairite Consensus’ (the British Right’s codeword for a more liberal immigration policy and multiculturalism), Farage had seemingly surrendered to it. Those who were now disillusioned with Reform UK turned to other electoral forces who championed the British far far right’s main preoccupation: remigration (the mass deportation of ‘illegal immigrants’ and non-white populations from European countries). 

The British far far right may share the same political goals—remigration, repealing ‘woke’ equality laws, reversing Net Zero, banning the Burka—but, like the socialist left, it is organisationally fragmented. The list is ever-growing: Advance UK, UKIP, Britain First, Heritage Party, Reclaim Party.

Advance UK, which was founded by Ben Habib in June 2025 after he had quit his position as Reform UK’s Deputy Leader (motivated by disagreements with Farage on the issues of party democratisation and mass deportation), was – before the launch of Lowe’s party – the largest grouping on the British far far right, with 40,000 members and 9 councillors.

Farage’s former outfit, UKIP, is now led by Nick Teconi, a Turning Point UK activist who stands for fundamentalist Christian nationalism, supports remigration for the British Muslim population, and pledges to deport communists and socialists. Britain First – a splinter from the British National Party – is basically a ‘counter-Jihad’ street movement, with limited electoral appeal, that opposes ‘Islamisation’ and promotes ‘British and Christian morality.’

The Heritage Party and Reclaim Party are pitiful vanity projects that essentially operate as vehicles to support the careers of their leaders – David Kurten (Heritage) and Laurence Fox (Reclaim) – who spread misinformation about COVID, climate change, and Islam. The launch (and sudden popularity) of Lowe’s Restore Britain party, which was originally founded as a pressure group alongside Advance UK, raises a problem for those on the British far far right: do we stay in our separate organisations or converge under a single banner?  

Currently, it looks like Lowe may succeed in uniting the forces of the British far far right. In his announcement speech, Lowe urged ‘patriotic’ Conservatives, Independents, Reform-ers, and Advance-rs to defect to his project. As of writing, Restore Britain currently boasts 12 councillors, mostly ex-Reform, and is growing. (Ironically, just as Reform is turning into a refuge for failed far right Tories, Restore Britain is slowly becoming a dump for Reform rejects.)

Habib – who, behind the scenes last year, had actually asked Lowe to be Advance UK leader – is negotiating a merger with Restore Britain. Teconi, after initially telling his followers to “ignore the noise,” is now calling for unity on the far far right.

Britain First’s leader, Paul Golding, has said that they will not stand in elections against Restore Britain. Laurence Fox has been approvingly retweeting Restore Britain’s posts. However, Kurten – as one of the few figures on the British far far right whose antisemitism trumps his Islamophobia – remains critical of Lowe over the issue of Israel and holds that the Heritage Party is Britain’s last hope. 

Since Restore Britain was announced as a political party on February 13th, Lowe has received multiple endorsements from major far right figures. Elon Musk, who has been open about preferring Lowe to Farage, has boosted Restore Britain’s posts on Twitter/X. Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary blogger whose ideas have influenced the U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance and techno-capitalist Peter Thiel, tweeted in support of Lowe. And, most importantly, Tommy Robinson voiced his enthusiasm for the new project and encouraged Advance UK to unite with Restore Britain.

Although anything could happen in the coming months, it seems that Restore Britain is set to become the electoral wing of the Robinson street movement (which has always been the ambition of British far far right parties, as Farage has repeatedly declined to be associated with Robinson). 

There are urgent questions about the nature of Restore Britain that need to be answered. What are their policies? Who is helping Lowe to bring his political vision to life? And what is the ‘Britishness’ that they want to restore? Restore Britain’s policy platform is a classic British far far right to-do list: mass deportations, a ban on Halal and Kosher slaughter, a Burka and Niqab ban, an immigration red list, a repeal of the Equality Act and Gender Recognition Act, the scrapping of foreign aid, welfare cuts for non-citizens, and the abolition of Indefinite Leave to Remain.

To appeal to wealthier Britons, it also includes a promise to lower corporation tax and abolish inheritance tax. Lowe crafted these policies with the aid of several young reactionary influencers and activists. Harrison Pitts, Lowe’s Senior Policy Fellow, is also a fellow at the 55 Tufton Street-based think tank New Culture Forum. Connor Tomlinson, another figure in Restore Britain’s inner circle, is a far-right YouTuber and co-host of the New Culture Forum’s “Deprogrammed” series.

Lowe’s Campaigns Director, Charlie Downes, argued in a recent interview that “ancestry” and “Christian faith” are the key requirements for being British and that non-Christians were “less British” – a line of thinking that leads to absurdities. (Is a Quaker more British than a Catholic? Aren’t druids British? When did someone’s family need to move to the UK for them to be considered to have British ancestry? Is the cut-off point 1947 or 1655?) What these reactionary Zoomers share, as revealed in Downes’ statement, is a commitment to ethnic rather than civic nationalism.

Whereas civic nationalism promotes adherence to a common set of values, ethnic nationalism emphasises heritage and ethnicity. Under this ethno-nationalist framework, Britishness cannot be expanded to incorporate someone who looks non-white, speaks with a foreign accent, or doesn’t believe in God. Such a restrictive definition means that the line between those who can remain and those who will be deported can potentially be redrawn to include larger and larger groups of people.

Arguably, this ‘Britishness’ is just a euphemism for Englishness. After all, there is nothing on Restore Britain’s website about Scotland or Wales, or anything that recognises the real regional divide within the UK. They say nothing about devolution or the need to preserve the Gaelic and Welsh languages.

Instead, Restore Britain promotes a vision of Britishness that, like its QAnon-inspired promotional video, is nothing more than an incoherent mishmash of random cultural signifiers and political obsessions. It is, as Walter Benjamin once said of fascism, the aestheticisation of politics, nationalism as AI slop, a flashy patriotism for Americans on Twitter/X.  

What is the wider social function of the British far far right? As Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter point out, the sensationalised image of the ‘far’ or ‘extreme’ right often plays “the functional role of illiberal scarecrow” for conservatives and right-wingers who wish to deny the racist, misogynistic, and transphobic undertones of their rhetoric.

Farage needs them to exist, so he can argue that Reform UK is not actually ‘far right.’ Keir Starmer needs them to exist, so he can pretend that his government’s policies on immigration are reasonable rather than racist.

Yet, if anything, Restore Britain – and the British far far right at large – is simply a more radical expression of the general rightward drift in British politics over the past few decades. As the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste writer Thierry Labica explains, the British far far right “can […] content themselves with continuing and prospering the work of political formations that have long been hegemonic and are now both in the grip of a crisis of legitimacy of unprecedented gravity.

The debt is therefore great to the Labour-Tory tandem, its multi-recidivist anti-foreigner legislation, its attacks on civil liberties, its ‘anti-woke’ moral panic, its genocidal complicity and normalization.” In other words, Restore Britain is the logical consequence of the UK’s slow descent into barbarism. It cannot be dismissed as an aberration or as a mere import of US-style Trumpist politics. Rather, it must be firmly opposed as a part of a larger campaign to challenge and overturn the ongoing brutalisation of British society. 

As Farage’s project fails to realise the far right’s racist fantasies (and simply struggles to deliver material improvements to people’s lives through local councils), many ex-Reform voters may feel drawn to the nationalistic bombast of Restore Britain. Some of them may be seeking a protest vote, a way to express their discontent with the existing system. They want something different. Starmerism does not appeal to them; the Labour Party is not an alternative. Although Labour is seemingly anti-Farage, it also perpetuates state racism, enacts transphobic policies, and dabbles in far right rhetoric.

It does not offer lasting solutions to the multiple crises that we face. As socialists, it is our responsibility to tell a different story about what is happening, a story that does not cast migrants, Muslims, and minorities as villains. We must show that Restore Britain’s promise of a ‘better life’ is little more than a racist fantasy that works to maintain the same old hierarchies that have historically divided the working class.

Whereas Restore Britain venerates a purely fictional ‘Britishness’ that separates a small subsection of the population from the rest of us, we must work to unify diverse groups around the common goal of abolishing class society. We must show that ‘bread-and-butter’ and ‘culture war’ issues cannot be separated from one another, and that the struggle for socialism includes the struggle against social oppression and discrimination.

Instead of clinging to the partial gains of a ‘progressive neoliberalism’ or conceding ground to Starmer’s ‘progressive patriotism’, we need to elaborate a socialist conception of culture that will expand the capacity of people to do more for themselves and with others in the places where they actually live (the real towns and cities of the United Kingdom, not Restore Britain’s AI-generated New Jerusalem).

National Restoration is not the answer; only an internationalist revolution can bring us closer to this better world. 

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