RUPERT Lowe has claimed his far-right Restore Britain party has surpassed Reform UK, Labour, the Tories and the Greens in Scottish membership numbers.
The Great Yarmouth MP, who wants to shut down the Scottish Parliament, announced on Sunday his Reform UK splinter outfit had overtaken his former party in paid-up members.
The National could not independently verify this number, as membership details are not publicly verifiable or externally regulated.
There is also no legal obligation for parties to publish audited membership statistics.
In a social media post, Lowe said: “Restore Britain has just overtaken the Reform membership in Scotland – more than Labour, the Tories, the Greens.
“Restore Britain is now the second largest party in Scotland – historic. We are going to take the fight to the SNP.”
It is thought that Reform UK, from which Lowe was suspended last year, has around 12,500 members in Scotland.
Labour have lost a third of its members in Scotland since 2021, Michael Marra announced during the leadership election earlier this year. That took the party down to around 11,000 members.
The Scottish Greens say they have 10,000 members while the Scottish Conservatives have not given membership figures in recent years.
The SNP remain the largest political party in Scotland with 51,000 members reported in their annual accounts at the end of last year.
This is down from a high point in the aftermath of the independence referendum where the party recorded 110,000 members.
Restore Britain have been described as an ethnonationalist party and campaign on promises of a mass deportation programme if the party came to power.
Lowe has previously refused to say whether King Charles is a “white Briton”, having previously defined that category as someone whose parents were both born in the UK. The King’s father, the late Prince Phillip, was born in Corfu.
Restore have just one councillor in Scotland: Tommy Macpherson, in Argyll and Bute.
Lowe announced that the party would stand a candidate in the Mid Argyll by-election at the end of this month.
He came in for sharp criticism earlier in the year when he described the Dunblane massacre as “one murder” in an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast and complained about how his father’s pistols were taken away under the tough gun control laws introduced after the tragedy.
