Keir Starmer’s imminent departure from 10 Downing Street means Nigel Farage is about to lose his most useful asset in Parliament.
That is bad news for Reform UK, because Restore Britain is trying to steal his base.
Farage has long dominated the political space to the right of the Tories, but that is changing. He is losing his grip on the press and looking increasingly defensive.
Worse still, he may have finally found an opponent he cannot easily trounce.
That man is none other than Rupert Lowe, a former Reform UK MP turned renegade, who is taking the fight to Farage from the right.
Now Farage and Lowe both face pressure to take ever harder positions to satisfy the radical factions they have mobilised.
Burnham’s victory in Makerfield showed that the far right’s disparate coalition can be outmatched. He won 55% in a high-turnout by-election. By contrast, Reform UK finished with just over 34.5% of the vote in Makerfield, while Restore Britain received a mere 6.8%.
Many analysts expected Burnham to win, but the idea he would surge past the far-right vote was far from certain. Clearly, many voters still yearn for something better than a choice between managed decline and total collapse.
The Makerfield results have turbo-charged the battle for who will lead the United Kingdom’s populist far right.
The most striking aspect of the aftermath has been how swiftly right-wing media pivoted to attacking Reform. It’s not just GBNews now, but most formerly Tory newspapers from The London Standard to the Daily Mail.
Farage and his allies can whine about Lowe splitting the vote all they like. But Burnham would have won in Makerfield even if the far right had been consolidated into one bloc.
The Reform UK leader must go to war with Lowe to keep his base. Just as Farage set out to devour the Conservative Party, Lowe is out to devour him. But the far right’s unstable nature promises to make both tasks very difficult.
Searching for Purity
It’s increasingly clear that Restore Britain faces the same problem afflicting Reform UK.
While Lowe has successfully positioned himself as a more uncompromising alternative to Farage, appearing too radical could limit his appeal to voters.
The purists to Lowe’s right want “total remigration”, meaning the expulsion of everyone who has come to the UK since 1948, including all descendants of immigrants.
This is the old demand of the National Front and the British National Party.
Many Restore activists talk about deporting three million people just for starters. Even this “moderate” proposal would require a far more authoritarian state than anything we’ve seen in Britain for centuries.
Lowe has said in interviews that it’s not right to strip people of their citizenship. He understands that this is a dangerous road to go down and that it would destroy Britain’s reputation worldwide.
Compare this pragmatism with the fantasies of Restore officials like Harrison Pitt. He wants to deport 10 million people—most of whom are British citizens or people with indefinite leave to remain—as part of a radical social engineering project.
Lowe caused a minor furore on Instagram, in an interview with Bret Weinstein, of all people.
“I detest far-right, sort of ethno-nationalist or neo-Nazism,” Lowe said. “I’ve never been driven by that. Equally, I’m not driven by what I call the malign left.”
Although Lowe went on to claim that the left is capable of “equal evil, if not more evil”, his charming supporters were more aggrieved by his harsh words for ethno-nationalists and wannabe SS members.
Lowe angered even more of his supporters by saying that multiculturalism is fine provided foreigners integrate. The outrage was so significant that Lowe and his team of Gen Z extremists addressed the issue in a YouTube discussion.
Many of Lowe’s supporters are self-described ethno-nationalists (“ethnats” for short), who have nothing but disdain for so-called civic nationalists (“civnats”). The problem is that Lowe is more civnat than ethnat, despite advocating for mass deportations.
The Lowe project is Faragisme purified with ideas drawn from Ayn Rand and Austrian economics. The class politics of this should be obvious: the welfare state must go.
Much like Farage, Lowe is a conservative free-market libertarian at heart. Naturally, he wants to abolish the inheritance tax, cut corporate taxes, and slash financial regulation, while slashing support for domestic violence services and child abuse screening to pay for it.
It’s no coincidence that Restore’s mass deportation policy—estimated to cost more than £60 billion—would require massive austerity. The idea is to convert the welfare state into a regime that deprives many people living in Britain of the services they need.
Mass deportations are a class strategy for reorganising state power against a divided working class. This elite populism is ultimately a way to reassert the ruling class and strengthen its dominance over British society.
What should scare us isn’t so much the talk of deportations. It’s what these people—who openly fantasise about civil war in many cases—will do once they realise they can’t get what they want peacefully.
Exiting Modern Britain
Neither Farage nor Lowe can turn the clock back to a white past when traditional values dominated. There is no electoral road back to an all-white Britain. Nevertheless, the dream of conservative revolution dies hard.
While Burnham will have to play his cards very well to avoid crashing and burning over the next three years, there’s a chance that the split on the right could keep him in power.
After that, the future could be grim. The next election could give Britain a far-right government led by Reform that will shred civil liberties and ramp up deportations. But it will be hard to satisfy the hardcore base it has built.
The same would be true if Lowe takes over Reform’s position in the polls by the time of the 2029 general election. He will have to decide whether he can work with the Tories because he most likely won’t be able to absorb their vote.
Growing numbers of young nationalists don’t care if they destroy Britain through a purge of real and imaginary enemies. Many Restore supporters openly say they will accept living in a poorer country if they have “demographic security”.
Now, Restore’s spokesman, Charlie Downes, has said he wouldn’t mind returning to the European Union. This is because Brexit recomposed immigration, replacing European migrants with non-European migrants.
So much of Brexit support was about stopping non-white immigration to the UK. It was never going to work because it would mean labour shortages and a more level playing-field between non-EU and EU workers.
It turns out the problem has always been racial. The ethnats, causing so much trouble for Farage and now Lowe, are just white nationalists who want to build a racial state that excludes anyone deemed foreign.
Many of Lowe’s supporters would deport British Jews to Israel, along with black British and Asian British people to the Caribbean and South Asia. None of this has majority support in this country, but the far right will keep chasing the fantasy.
What these nationalists don’t understand is that Farage and Lowe are competing to build coalitions.
Extreme nativists are only one constituency they need to target. Both politicians face the same challenge: uniting the nationalist far right with mainstream centre-right Tory voters.
Whether Nigel Farage or Rupert Lowe wins this battle, the nationalist far right will face the same fundamental problem: its political goals are impossible to fulfil without tearing apart what’s left of Britain. A decade after Brexit, it casts a long shadow.
The nationalist search for a definitive exit point from liberal modernity is no longer directed at the European Union’s external enemy.
It has shifted to an internal search for a way out of the multicultural United Kingdom.
But the goal is just as perverse: to make Britain smaller.
Photograph courtesy of House of Commons. Published under a Creative Commons license.
