Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Chapter 2: What is Restore Britain and why is it significant in the Makerfield byelection?
Today, is Restore Britain making politics even more toxic? With the Makerfield by-election only weeks away, many see it as a two-horse race.
Chapter 3: Who are the main political players in the Makerfield byelection?
There's Labour's potential PM-in-waiting Andy Burnham and Reform UK's Robert Kenyon, who's faced criticism over alleged sexist remarks. But there's another player that's worth paying close attention to.
I do think immigration needs sorting out because it feeds into the local area. You know, even just things like traffic. You know, you can't get anywhere.
Rebecca Shepherd, the candidate for Restore Britain, a new party led by Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who famously fell out with Nigel Farage last year.
I've tried to work within the system, but I can no longer pretend that the existing political structures are capable of delivering the scale of change this country now needs. That is why today I am launching Restore Britain as a national political party.
Restore is currently polling third in Makerfield.
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Chapter 4: What extreme views is the founder of Restore Britain promoting?
You told the Daily Mail that you would put illegal immigrants and asylum seekers in, quote, a tented camp with a minimum amount of food. There are islands off the Scottish and English coasts where they can be detained. Put them there and let the midges do the rest. Do you mean that? I did say that, and I stand by my opinion. People who arrive here illegally should be detained and deported.
And though the party was only officially registered this year, its founder has been making headlines for espousing some of the most extreme views in British politics.
We are seeing increasing numbers of people coming here illegally. And equally, I think a lot of them have very low IQ.
Currently polling at 7% in Makerfield, could Restore ruin reform's chances of a by-election win? From The Guardian, I'm Lucy Hough. Today in Focus, Restore Britain, the party pushing British politics even further to the right. Daniel Trilling, you are a journalist who spent nearly two decades writing about far-right politics. And you've just written a new book, If We Tolerate This.
And you trace how since the 2010s, the language of that far-right politics has crept so much into the mainstream. I wonder if you think, if we jump back to that moment, could we imagine that we'd be talking about a party like Restore Britain as we are now in relatively normalised terms?
Yeah, I ask myself that quite often, actually. Like, if you went back to me in 2010 or so, when I was reporting on the BNP, the British National Party, who were, you know, this very extreme party founded by neo-Nazis.
I've shared a platform with David Yidd, who was once a leader of a Ku Klux Klan, always a totally non-violent one, incidentally. LAUGHTER
whose ideas at the time were regarded as completely beyond the pale, certainly in mainstream politics.
Let me show you what happened to the BNP share of the vote. It actually went down here.
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Chapter 5: How does Restore Britain's rhetoric differ from Reform UK's?
But it just seems like in the last few years, there's been this opening of the floodgates where very extreme ethno-nationalist, racist rhetoric is suddenly there right at the forefront of British politics.
So how big is Restore Britain at the moment? Because it's become quite a substantial party already. Yeah.
So Restore began as a pressure group founded just over a year ago when Rupert Lowe left reform after falling out with reforms leadership.
But we need an alternative to reform. the Reds and the Blues, and now the Light Blues, if you want to call them that. A new movement, a new party? And then it was launched as a political party only this February. Here on the farm, I am now launching Restore Britain as a national political party. I'm now going to dedicate...
So for a party as new as Restore and one of its size, the opinion poll is quite provisional, but it looks like at the moment they're polling anywhere between 2% or 3% and maybe 6% or 7%. And Restore claims to have over 100,000 members at the moment, which would make it one of the biggest parties by membership in the UK. I think you have to take those figures with a pinch of salt, frankly.
Because they're saying that's bigger than the Conservative Party, which again we have to be so skeptical about.
Yeah. The important factor actually is that they're this big online phenomenon and Rupert Lowe again is one of the biggest UK politics social media figures now. I mean, he's got just under 800,000 followers on X, which is not the largest amount, but his posts have got a much bigger reach because he's online.
tapping into the far-right discourse that is now very prevalent on that platform, and also earning a lot of money out of it. He earns, according to Parliament's register of MPs' interests, so far £72,000 just from posting on X since being elected as an MP.
So on Today in Focus, in the spring last year, we talked about the figure of Rupert Lowe, his falling out with Nigel Farage and his expulsion from Reform UK with accusations that he denies of bullying. He'd notably disagreed with Farage on a number of issues at that point on mass deportations, but also on Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist who Farage felt was not welcome in reform.
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Chapter 6: What role does social media play in the rise of Restore Britain?
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.
Zero immigration, net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late. The barbarians are already in the gates.
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.
For women and children, that I promise you. If that means millions go, then millions 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...
say and do online is also kind of quite fundamental to them politically i think this act is a wolf in sheep's clothing it it tries to justify itself on the basis that it's acting in the interest of child safety the reality is as you say it's a back door to censorship and to more issues
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Chapter 7: How is Restore Britain attracting support from extremist groups?
He crowdfunded nearly £800,000 to set up his own inquiry into grooming gangs.
Yeah, something that's fundamental to these radical right-wing nationalist movements around the world is that they're always looking for issues that will excite a visceral sense of threat to the nation. And those almost always come down to issues around sex, birth and death. So it's about, you know, the indigenous population or citizens being outbred by immigrants.
or very often you will find right-wing nationalists alighting on issues where there's a mix of crime, sexual abuse and ethnical cultural difference. And so obviously the grooming gangs scandal, there's a very important political debate around what happened, could it have been stopped, what lessons can be learned and so on across the whole spectrum of politics.
But the reason why the radical right-wing latches onto it is because it's got these other uses, you know, it excites this fear and disgust among the people that they are trying to win the support of. And so Rupert Lowe has made that a big campaigning point himself. He set up this independent, self-described rape gangs inquiry.
which is only looking at these grooming cases rather than other issues of systematic sexual abuse or establishment cover-ups and so on. That's been funded by several hundred thousand pounds in donations. They say that they're preparing a report at the moment and Lowe is promising to
use parliamentary privilege because he's still an MP to name perpetrators or people responsible for allowing this to happen. So that's kind of got the form of a more mainstream political inquiry, but that's not what it's about. I mean, essentially, that is, I think, encouraging a form of mob justice and kangaroo courts and so on.
It was a very surreal press conference, wasn't there?
Today we open the hearings of our independent rape gang inquiry. Two full weeks of evidence, testimony and scrutiny.
There's a panel of people, Rupert Lowe at the centre, with rape gangs inquiry behind, sort of replicating a traditional accro.
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Chapter 8: What impact could Restore Britain have on Reform UK's electoral strategy?
So it is true. It is true. But anyway, let's... In 2023, no, I'm going to tell you this. Let's park that. 224 white grooming gang suspects were found compared to 22 Pakistani suspects. Why do you only talk about the Pakistani grooming gangs? That's police statistics from The Times. I've now got on my... It's police statistics from The Times.
If you look at my rape gang inquiry, which you asked me about,
And I suppose to that point, last week Lowe at the launch of Restore's campaign in Makerfield compared the Labour response to the Groman Gang scandal as denial of something equivalent to the Holocaust, which has caused, understandably and justifiably, a huge backlash. What other extreme things are he and others on the record as saying?
So Rupert Lowe has also in the past praised Tommy Robinson. He said he deserves credit for all the work that he's done around grooming gangs.
I think if somebody's done something valuable and has been proved correct, which Tommy Robinson has. you should give him credit for that.
Because Robinson has for a long time agitated around this in an especially unhelpful way, I would say. And there are other figures associated with Restore Britain who have called for re-migration, you know, which is the far-right's euphemism for policies of mass deportation and often is used to apply to legally settled migrants as well as, say, asylum seekers. So,
That could potentially cover very large numbers of people living in the UK. And Lowe even said that he would be happy to send asylum seekers to Scotland in the form of internal exile, I suppose. And in his word, let the midges do their work.
I would send them to Scottish Ireland, give them a bowl of porridge and put them in a tent till they decided to go home and let the midges do the rest. I did say that and I mean it.
And there has been a lot of reporting about the types of people that Restore Britain is attracting. The kind of more extremist, perhaps disillusioned Reform UK voter who feels that reform is becoming too mainstream and therefore there have been a number of people who are identified as being fascist or neo-Nazi who are part of Restore Britain.
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