UK far right lines up behind Rupert Lowe in challenge to Reform

On a cold night in a dilapidated theatre tucked away at the end of Great Yarmouth’s Britannia Pier, Rupert Lowe was launching a far-right revolution. “Millions will have to go,” the MP said, pledging a policy of mass deportations, to rapturous applause and foot stamping from hundreds gathered for what had been billed as the launch of a local “Great Yarmouth First” party.But after introducing five councillors who will stand at the next Norfolk county council elections under that banner, the former Reform UK figure went further by announcing that his Restore Britain movement would become a national party.In an electoral battlefield littered with failed startups, Lowe’s new party is, for now, little more than a pebble in the shoe of Nigel Farage’s Reform, from which he parted ways last year after a bitter falling out.However, over the weekend other parties and figures to the right of Reform quickly rallied behind the new party. Advance UK, led by former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib and backed by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, said it would consider a merger.Such a force could cost Reform a number of seats – and potentially even power, in a wafer-thin general election result – by splitting support among those drawn to hard-right anti-immigration populism.“We’ve had a general election with a big Labour win but where a lot of their MPs had margins of around a thousand votes, so you could see small challengers on the right disrupting Reform’s attempts to follow that,” observed one seasoned Tory strategist, who noted the increased number of marginal seats in 2024, including 46 seats won with a margin of less than 2%.The audience for Lowe’s announcment in Great Yarmouth. Photograph: Jason Bye/The GuardianWhile Reform has placed great store in social media, Habib and, in particular, Lowe have significant presences on X, where each have been amplified by Elon Musk, who funded Robinson’s legal bills last year.Musk, who has taken a dislike to Nigel Farage in favour of Lowe, retweeted the latter on Saturday, saying: “Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!”A cohort of young rightwing would-be influencers pushing a more exclusive, ethnically nationalistic view of British identity have flocked to Lowe, who had attained a cult appeal among many Reform members.Among those at his event in Great Yarmouth was Lucy White, an activist and sometime GB News contributor accused of racist tweets. Steve Laws, a prominent activist and “ethnonationalist” influencer, tweeted: “Rupert Lowe is our leader. GET IN LINE.”Other figures such as the millionaire businessman Duncan Bannatyne and the actor John Cleese have also given approving signals.Advance UK, meanwhile, has cultivated street protest. Large numbers of its flags – in some cases handed out to people unaware of the group – were prominent among the thousands of people who marched through the town of Crowborough last month against the use of a former base to house asylum seekers.An anti-immigrant march in Crowborough, East Sussex, last month. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/The Guardian“Reform are vacating the part of the political spectrum on which it was founded. We’re the old Reform, and Reform is becoming the Tories 2.0,” Habib said ahead of the launch of Advance’s first policies at the Emmanuel Centre, a Westminster venue let out by an evangelical church. The former Brexit party MEP says he has put £100,000 into the party and it has raised £600,000 from other sources.“We have people joining us because they’re fed up with the way Reform is run, or because they have an ideological conviction and see Farage changing the message,” he said. “Our original Reform manifesto had rejected the World Economic Forum and yet there was Farage taking an Iranian billionaire’s money to go to Davos.”An early indication will come later this month in the Gorton and Denton byelection where Advance is standing Nick Buckley, who received an MBE for his charity work but who has since become known for his extreme language on race and Islam.Lowe’s party, meanwhile, has adopted a decentralised structure that is likely to show up the top-down approach of Farage’s party. The newly launched Great Yarmouth First party is aiming to win all of the nine seats in the borough whenever postponed county council elections take place. This will be a pilot for Restore Britain, which will act as an umbrella for others.Separated from Reform, Lowe has proven himself able to attract attention. A self-styled “inquiry” that he set up into the grooming gangs scandal attracted the involvement of Tory MPs including Nick Timothy, Esther McVey and Gavin Williamson.The former Reform rising star Maria Botwell at the Great Yarmouth event. Photograph: Jason Bye/The GuardianIn Great Yarmouth, one of the English coastal towns with the high levels of deprivation, which Reform used as a springboard for its 2024 breakthrough, a clash between Lowe and his old party looms at the next general election. “We won it last time and we will win again,” Reform sources said.But Lowe remains a rallying point for others. Rightwing activists and former Reform supporters had travelled from as far away as Scotland to attend the event. They included Maria Bowtell, an East Riding of Yorkshire councillor and single mother who was once regarded as a Reform rising star and who had driven down with her young son.“Reform used to stand for something hopeful but it’s clear they won’t really change anything, plus people like me just weren’t supported,” Bowtell said. “I went on Woman’s Hour and was hung out to dry. I’m attracted now to the idea of independents getting together.”