Restore Britain is the enemy of populism

Rupert Lowe clearly hankers after a place in the history books. The leader of Restore Britain seems to fancy himself as a modern-day Crusader – a Soldier of Christ in a Savile Row suit who together with his army of sun-starved digital simps might hold back ‘the swarms’ pouring over our broken borders. I reckon he’s far more likely to end up a footnote in the history of populism. And what’s more, that his bit-part role in the chronicles of our times will be an entirely inglorious one. He looks set to be remembered as the man who put his own colossal vanity ahead of the working-class thirst for change.

Reports from Makerfield in the north-west of England suggest that Restore is polling at seven per cent. Its candidate is local businesswoman Rebecca Shepherd. I’ll admit this is higher than I expected. Makerfield, of course, is the by-election Labour’s Andy Burnham is standing in, as part of his grand plan to clear Sir Keir out of Downing Street. Burnham’s main competition is from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, whose candidate is local fella Robert Kenyon.

According to a Survation survey, Labour is polling at 43 per cent and Reform at 40 per cent. You don’t need to be John Curtice to see what this means: the seven per cent being hoovered up by Restore’s oddball door-knockers is thwarting a potential Reform win. It’s a two-horse race up there, between voters who believe Burnham can resuscitate the corpse of Labour and voters who’ve had a gutful of the entire uniparty and want to put the wind up it by taking a punt on the populists of Reform. Restore, by shaving support from Reform, is giving the listless, dull-eyed horse of technocracy its best shot of winning.

This doesn’t only mean Labour would win a by-election. The Makerfield contest was magicked up as a coronation for the King of the North, as Burnham’s goggle-eyed fanboys in SW1 love to call the Manchester mayor. Labour MP Josh Simons stood aside so that Burnham could get a seat in the Commons and then the throne in Downing Street – the minute he’s an MP he’ll challenge Sir Keir for the leadership of Labour. And right now, the best thing he has going for him is not his own thin, stilted, distinctly sub-Obama ‘I’m a normal bloke’ bollocks – it’s Restore’s nerds nicking votes from Reform and then gloating about it on X because everything’s a fucking joke to them.

There is something so pathetic about these self-styled crusaders for Christendom giving Burnham a leg-up. These are the kind of people who go all digitally onanistic over Richard the Lionheart’s crusade to recapture Jerusalem from the armies of Islam, yet the only ‘king’ they’re ever going to crown is Andy goddamn Burnham, the man who couldn’t even bring himself to say the word ‘Islamist’ about the barbarian who massacred 22 Manchester youths at the arena there in 2017. Online they cosplay as Knights Templar, in real life they’re the accidental giggling facilitators of a yellow-bellied technocracy that’s too shit-scared to name the threat we face, far less do anything about it.

Apologies if this sounds a little ‘class war’, but there is something sick-making about Lowe, a man born into eye-watering privilege, frustrating one of the best chances the working classes have had in years of sticking it to the political machine. Across Makerfield, people are relishing the opportunity to rip the crown from King Andy’s head and deny the zombie uniparty down south the breath of life it thinks Burnham will bring. And yet in swarm Lowe’s dorkish minions, essentially saying: ‘Nah, not this time, oiks.’ And Lowe gloats online, fancying himself as the ‘pure’ voice of the angry right but looking to the rest of us like a privately educated prick robbing the working class of its means of rebellion.

Restore is the enemy of populism. It’s a cult of personality pretending to be a party. Lowe, who’s MP for Great Yarmouth, famously flounced out of Reform UK and said it had become ‘the cult of Nigel’. That’s rich from a man whose online army of tongue-lolling acolytes would make Kim Jong Un wince. Restore is an almost entirely digital phenomenon, having eschewed the hard work of building real networks in real communities in favour of forging a virtual refuge for the socially inept who yelp ‘DEPORT’ on a loop and jizz when Elon Musk retweets them.

Its virtual fanbase is hands down the gayest political movement in Britain. You can’t peruse social media these days without seeing a homoerotic AI meme of a sexed-up Lowe about to do battle with the Muslims. Get a room, lads. It’s the Your Party of the right: it exists more in the digital sphere than the real world; it attracts cranks and misfits who wouldn’t last five minutes in a pub in a place like Makerfield; and it is so far up the fundament of purity politics that it spends more time hunting ‘traitors’ like Farage than it does building new institutions. Working-class voters hate this crap. They want a politics that works for them, not the vainglorious meme-making and treason-hunting of time-rich arseholes on the internet who prize the preservation of their own puffed-up moral vanity more highly than the desires of working people.

The crank right is the mirror image of the woke left. It has replaced the left’s ethnonarcissism with its own ethnonationalism. From a politics that said whites are scum to a politics that says only whites can be Brits and everyone else can bugger off? No normal person wants this cultural savagery that masquerades as virtue. The crank right even wallows in the same cesspit of Jew wariness as the woke left. Restore’s social-media feeds very often swarm with virginal bigots spouting anti-Jewish invective that the overeducated left has at least learned to disguise as ‘criticism of Israel’. When is Lowe going to distance himself from this filth? Or will he just rattle off his favourite slogan again: ‘I don’t care’?

There are so many problems in Britain. Broken borders, withered sovereignty, the ruling class’s abject cowardice in the face of the Islamist menace, not to mention looming economic doom and a dilapidated public square. We need solutions, urgently, but they won’t come from digital saps who have wet dreams about King Athelstan while doing the bidding of King Andy.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.