Daniel Trilling

And those are being voiced by a range of different groups who they don't necessarily get on with one another, but they're all fishing in the same waters.

They're all proposing ways in which to redraw the politics

boundaries of national identity, and they set themselves in very strong opposition, not only to certain groups they label as outsiders, but traditional political elites.

And within that, there is always this tension between moderation and radicalism, though the most hardline bits of this loose movement, someone like Tommy Robinson, for instance, it's in their interest to sound as frightening and intimidating as possible, because someone like him is primarily engaged in street activism and online

Anytime anybody tries to build a successful electoral project with some of these elements, they've got this problem that, you know, to win votes and to move beyond your core support, you have to sound more moderate.

You have to not scare people.

For 15 years, really, Nigel Farage has monopolised the space.

Yeah.

reform has grown way beyond any previous project of that sort, you're seeing that tension really come to the fore.

So low split with Reform UK over what looks like a mix of personality clashes, which are always very common.

Totally unsurprising.

Exactly.

But also a feeling that Farage was being too moderate.

Restore have positioned themselves as a harder line alternative to reform, where they're pushing for an even more extreme policy of deportations for unauthorised migrants.

But the rhetoric around that, I think, is quite shockingly extreme as well.

So launching Restore Britain as a political party, Rupert Lowe said millions must go.

We're constantly told... They're also very strongly against the Online Safety Act, which there's a debate about more broadly in politics, but I think because they're a party that thrives on this unregulated social media environment and particularly the environment on X, which has been deliberately allowed to turn into a cesspit, I think agitating for less restrictions on what you can...

The other area in which they're different rhetorically from reform is their idea of what national identity is and their particular form of nationalism.

So a successful right-wing populist project in Britain has always had to align itself very carefully with civic nationalism.

So the idea that national identity is not primarily ethnic, you might want some sort of