Some of the most active British nazis of the past twenty years (including convicted criminals) are rallying behind Rupert Lowe’s newly registered political party Restore Britain.
The virus has spread beyond a handful of online celebrity extremists and includes people with experience in the real political world as well as the virtual one. Lowe now faces a decisive political choice: is he prepared to be the figurehead for a party harbouring the very worst elements on the extreme right?
Dictatorial
On 20 March the Electoral Commission officially registered Restore Britain as the latest split from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Farage has a long history of alienating colleagues with his dictatorial, “my way or the highway” approach.
The semi-respectable wing of the British right (or what its fascist rivals call “civic nationalism”) has followed an earlier tradition set by their very unrespectable, openly jackbooted equivalents on the fringe and nazi right (who call themselves “racial nationalists”).
It’s more than a century since a group of reactionary conservatives and uniformed eccentrics, led by WW1 veteran Rotha Lintorn Orman-created what they first called the British Fascisti in 1923. They openly emulated Mussolini’s movement that had recently seized power in Italy.
But the BF’s political agenda (like some in Reform UK and Restore Britain) was little more than the saloon bar authoritarian chatter of florid businessmen after too many pink gins.
During the following century, the far right’s many splits have been due not so much to ideological minutiae (as tends to be the case on the left) but developing from a constant tension between two structural tendencies.
Typically, far right activists display what some see as a psychological as much as a political need to follow a “strong leader”, and this affects the internal politics of their own movements as well as their prescriptions for authoritarian government.
Great dictator
Yet at the same time (and often expounded by the very same ultra-rightists) there is a marked tendency to express any number of fringe obsessions, even at the risk of undermining the movement’s core message.
Anyone wishing to become a “great dictator” at the top of a fascist movement has to contend with any number of “little dictators” (whether eccentric or ambitious) across the party’s regions and branches.
An obvious comparison is between John Tyndall’s experience with the NF and BNP, and Nigel Farage’s with UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Reform UK. Both Tyndall and Farage came up through the ranks of parties (the NF and UKIP) that were created quite deliberately with “democratic” constitutions trying to balance contradictory ideological strands and avoid being controlled by a “dictator”.
The NF was a fascist party, while UKIP was an odd mix of libertarians and authoritarians united only by their obsession with leaving the EU, but what they had in common was internal “democracy”.
Factional devotees
In each case dominant personalities with their own factional devotees emerged to seize control of their parties (Tyndall in the NF and Farage in UKIP). But having done so, they then faced years of struggle with factionalism on the ruling committees of their respective parties, which their constitutions blocked them from overriding.
Consequently, both Tyndall and Farage had spells in and out of leadership. Tyndall led the NF from 1972-74 and 1976-80. Farage was at the helm of UKIP from 1998-2000, then again from 2006-09 and 2010-16.
Then in each case, these respective “dictators” of the fascist and reactionary right broke away to create parties that openly disdained any pretence of internal democracy and were run on the “leadership principle”, by what we might as well honestly call Führers. In Tyndall’s case the New National Front in 1980, followed by the BNP from 1982; and in Farage’s case the Brexit Party in 2019, followed by Reform UK in 2021.
And in each case the new authoritarian party constitutions failed to quell factionalism. Just as there were breakaways from UKIP when the endless talking shops of party committees were unable to resolve personal and political tensions, so there have been from the Brexit Party and Reform UK.
Twitter titan
The difference now is that (for the first time) Farage is faced by a splinter party led by someone who is an MP and who has demonstrated an ability to attract financial support and backing from the likes of Elon Musk.
Support from Musk is obviously valuable. The titan of Twitter has shown that he can encourage wild extremism on his platform from racists and fascists without facing any serious consequences from democratic governments and parliaments, who have been shockingly feeble in failing to defend the values they claim to represent and have repeatedly given in to social media behemoths.
The problem for Rupert Lowe is that outside the social media world, associating with extremists has consequences. Where do you draw the line once it’s no longer a matter of retweets and “likes”, but of party membership?
Once someone has a party membership card, at one point does the leader step in and put a limit to the influence of a nazi within his ranks? When he becomes a branch official? When he becomes a council candidate? When he becomes a parliamentary candidate?
Notorious recruit
Most notorious of Lowe’s recruits so far is Steve Laws, who is an unusual case because he started out in UKIP then became increasingly radicalised. Laws was for a year or two inside the leadership cadre of the Homeland Party, led by ex-BNP official Kenny Smith as a breakaway from Britain’s largest nazi movement Patriotic Alternative.
Since leaving Homeland in a row that was linked both to Laws’ strangely obsessive homophobia as well as his inability to be a team player, Laws has associated with PA. He has spoken several times on PA platforms as well as extending his online celebrity to real world appearances at European marches and conferences.
Most recently Laws poses as spokesman for the mainly online movement Remigration Now that he set up with fellow militants including the Guernsey-based Holocaust denier Sean Wilkes (aka “Zoomer Historian”) and fellow ex-Homeland splitter Callum Barker.
Personalised disputes
Though regarding himself as a “leader” of the militant anti-immigration movement and having more than 140,000 followers on X, Laws can’t resist getting personally involved in online rows that sometimes include extremist language and problems with the law (though not troubling his ever-indulgent racist sugar daddy Elon Musk).
Laws’ opponents in these personalised disputes include Pete North (an autistic intellectual from Yorkshire who has been a one-man think tank for parties ranging from UKIP to Homeland), and Alex Bramham (an ex-Tory who has shuttled within a year from the SDP to Homeland and now to Alek Yerbury’s National Rebirth Party).
Inside the online machine promoting Lowe, there have been two discernible groups, the nazis and the “young fogeys”. One set of people you might expect to see on a march with Mark Collett’s PA and including convicted racists fresh out of prison; the other wearing tweed suits, struggling to grow beards, and whose natural habitat would once have been a Tory student conference or a seaside fringe meeting trying to catch a shadow minister’s attention.
Battle lines
Last weekend the battle lines were drawn up, and some of the young fogeys seem to be falling out with each other over whether the nazi right should be accepted.
Max Stenner is chairman of Christian Democracy UK and was for a short time in the SDP before joining Farage’s Reform UK. Last week he switched to Restore, and was quickly promoted to North Dorset branch organiser.
Yet unlike many of his new friends in Rupert Lowe’s party, Stenner is on record describing Steve Laws as “nazi scum”.
We quite agree, but in that case why is Stenner happy to join a party that has welcomed Laws and other nazis?
Laws’ online fan club has been quick to jump on this contradiction, and within days of Stenner joining Restore they were calling for him rather than Laws to be kicked out.
Youth wing
Dylan Smith, the 19-year-old founder of “Young Restorers” who sees himself as head of Lowe’s youth wing (though probably without official acknowledgment) wrote in support of Laws:
“To be fair, I wasn’t a fan of Steve Laws at first either. I saw him as too extreme, especially back when I was in Reform, and I knew that supporting him would have been an instant expulsion from the party.
“But now? I’m a supporter, and I can say that without being judged or facing a suspension. I’ve grown and changed my mind, but Max clearly has not. If Max cannot move past these labels and change his view on people like Steve, then he needs to go. Simple as that.”
For Dylan Smith and no doubt others in Restore, it’s a good thing to be able to endorse nazis without facing any disciplinary action from Rupert Lowe’s new party. And if faced by a choice between nazis and “Christian Democrats”, some of Lowe’s adherents say he should choose the nazis.
The problem has now moved well beyond Laws and his over-hyped social media circus. It’s now obvious that Mark Collett’s nazi movement Patriotic Alternative will no longer even pretend to attempt registration as a political party.
Collett doesn’t want the Electoral Commission to have any scrutiny over his dictatorial control of PA, and especially not over its finances.
Virulent material
Instead, Collett is encouraging his followers to join Restore Britain. One such recruit is the Welsh nazi James Allchurch, better known online as “Sven Longshanks”, who recently returned from a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for broadcasting some of Britain’s most virulent racist and antisemitic material on his online show Radio Aryan.
Like several other founders of PA, Allchurch was closely connected to the banned terrorist organisation National Action and worked with the mysterious ex-BNP organiser Larry Nunn and his now defunct organisation Western Spring.
Due to physical disabilities, Allchurch didn’t himself take part in the paramilitary training sessions that Nunn organised in the Welsh countryside, but he was part of the structure behind the scenes (together with veteran nazi Michael Woodbridge) that facilitated these events.
Nazi hooligans
Allchurch is now another of the proud nazi owners of Restore Britain membership cards. He has been joined by ex-BNP councillor Adrian Marsden from Halifax, once associated with Combat 18 and other nazi football hooligans, and Julian Leppert, who was BNP candidate for Mayor of London in 2014.
Leppert recently defected from the British Democrats to join Restore. There are rumours in ex-BNP circles that two of his old Essex nazi chums, Eddy Butler and Tony Lecomber, might also get involved with Rupert Lowe’s party if it takes off.
We very much doubt that Rupert Lowe is a closet nazi. It’s very unlikely that he secretly harbours an admiration for Adolf Hitler or denies the Holocaust.
But he has shown that he is perfectly happy to welcome into his party a host of well-known Hitler-worshippers, Holocaust deniers, virulent antisemites and other blatant racists.
Political immaturity
The problem with Lowe is political immaturity, not covert nazism. Though he’s now 68 years old, his political stances resemble those often encountered in student rugby clubs where the scions of wealthy families think it’s a jolly game to sing racist songs and upset feminists, ethnic minorities, and anyone left of Margaret Thatcher.
It’s long past time for Rupert Lowe to grow up. It’s not big and it’s not clever to indulge nazis. If Lowe wishes to lead a party that’s the natural home of antisemitic propagandists and racist jailbirds, then that’s his choice.
But he can’t then complain if the rest of us see him as the new Nick Griffin, and campaign against him and Restore Britain in the same way we would target a revived BNP.