Many of us admired the way the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe highlighted the terrible problem of Rape Gangs in Britain and the way that Mr Lowe donated his monthly MP’s salary to good causes in his constituency. This was both good and admirable behaviour and conduct that is not shown by many of Britain’s other MP’s.

However, his decision to turn his group Restore Britain from a think tank into a political party has in my view been a wrong one. Whilst Mr Lowe may have all the talents when it comes to running a think tank or a pressure group or a campaign, he’s clearly got no idea about how to run a political party.

Mr Lowe has forgotten one of the basic rules of setting up and running a political party, especially one that wants to get the votes of the average Briton, which is to create structures for the party that keeps out nutcases and especially the sort of nutcases that might turn people away from your new party. According to various bits of scuttlebutt that I’ve seen online, Restore has not done anything to keep out neo-Nazis or extreme ethnonationalists and these recent entryists are now becoming the de facto public image of the Restore Britain party.

I believe that Mr Lowe has been extremely unwise in not setting up his party in such a way that those individuals and political currents that may damage the party’s electoral prospects could have been excluded. The result of Mr Lowe’s mishandling of who is and who isn’t included in the Restore umbrella is that what’s coming out of the party’s communications is little more than populist slop such as free parking at hospitals and banning Halal and Kosher slaughter. Mr Lowe himself has personally blotted his copybook by coming out against the military action against Iran and has promoted an isolationist line regarding this conflict. None of what Restore is coming out with is in any way thought through or is coherent. Restore has sadly become the right wing analogue of the leftist ‘Tooting Popular Front’ meme.

I’ve been around various groups for many years, some of these groups have been political and some have not. Some of these groups or causes I’ve been involved in but many more are those I’ve observed in action whilst being personally uninvolved. One of the major things I’ve learned from my experience is that any organisation whether political or not, needs to keep out extremists and nutcases. If you are running a Left wing group then it’s imperative that you keep you the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) as the SWP has its own agenda and has a record for taking groups over. If you are running a Right wing group then you need to keep out neo-Nazis and those adjacent to them. If you are running a group for Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals you need to keep out the extreme libertines, the Trans cultists and those who agitate for stuff that is beyond the pale. If you are running a Pagan group then you need to be wary of the Eco-terrorists who may glom on to your cause because of the environmental bent of Neo-Paganism and if you are running a Christian or Jewish group then you need to be active in keeping out those who will want to use your religious group for political ends. Every group whether political or non-political is at risk of entryism and this problem needs to be dealt with from the get go. Sadly it doesn’t seem that Mr Lowe and those around him have done anything like protecting their organisation from entryists.

The results of not kicking out the entryists could be dire. To give but one example let’s look at the UK Yellow Vests group of about seven or so years ago. This group took its inspiration from the French Yellow Vest protests and took enacting Brexit completely as its primary cause. Unfortunately whoever was behind the UK Yellow Vests group didn’t do much to keep out the nutters. This group eventually imploded amid the laughter of the general public when one of their demos in London turned out to be fraggles all the way down. There were those who were afflicted by tragic events who’d been misled about the law and who had taken refuge in pseudo-law and ‘sovereign citizen’ nonsense, those who believed that Britain was being influenced by ‘Zionist plotters’ or similar from a business mailing address in North London and the supporters of a cancer quack who was gaoled for using his own blood in a useless cancer ‘cure’. This wasn’t just a minority of those attending this demonstration, something that could be excused because all demos whatever they are attract fringe elements, but were the majority of it. Maybe if the UK Yellow Vests had made an effort to attract more ‘normies’ in order to dilute down the nutter contingent then they would not have ended up as the shitshow that they became but they did not.

By not having systems in place for weeding out and sidelining nutters and extremists Restore Britain looks like it’s going to go the same way as the UK Yellow Vests group. By saying this I’m not as some may accuse me, of ‘playing the games of the Left’ but merely acknowledging electoral reality. If your party looks like it’s full of extremist nutters then it is likely to turn voters away. Britons have rarely chosen extremists as their representatives and this shows in the electoral record. Even when Britain and Britons were suffering immensely in the 1920’s and 1930’s Britons did not vote in large numbers for extremists and there were only a few self declared Communists who got sent to the Commons during this time and none since. Even those who were avowed Fascists back in the 30s in the Commons were mostly floor crossers from other parties. Extremism really doesn’t sell well in Britain and maybe it’s time for Mr Lowe to realise that?

Restore Britain is currently riding high on social media with lots of people who may be frustrated with Reform’s ‘softly softly catchee monkey’ policy and who want a party that is more ideologically uncompromising. The problem is that when a party is uncompromising they lose the support of those who know and understand that politics is the art of the possible and that sometimes compromises are necessary.

I very much doubt that Restore Britain will be able to turn its social media support into seats in the House of Commons. I don’t think that they have a broad enough appeal to the public to be able to do that. I try not to make political predictions on here as I’ve been wrong in the past such as thinking that Boris Johnson was competent, but the signs do not look good for Restore. If they don’t completely implode as a political party then they may well end up as just another small pressure group similar to those groups on the Left who contribute to the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition and becoming a perennial deposit loser at elections, before sinking into irrelevance sometime between now and the next General Election.

I could be wrong and Restore will not implode but I’m afraid that implosion and future irrelevance looks like the path that Restore is on. Mr Lowe is a clever man who understands that Britons want change from the appalling way we’ve been governed for decades but he needs to employ that cleverness in how he runs his party and I don’t think he’s currently doing that. Maybe if Mr Lowe and the leadership of Restore change course and make themselves look electable they might do reasonably well in those seats where Reform are not favoured, but he’s got to do a lot of house cleaning in Restore to be able to do that.