What qualifies as too rightwing these days? It’s a question I’ve considered often in recent years. But it takes on even greater urgency when contemplating the rise of Restore Britain. Founded by multimillionaire businessman and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, the party enjoys the active support of far-right tech bro Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. If Nigel Farage strikes you as a wet liberal, then Restore Britain may be the party you’ve been waiting for.
Its mission, it says, is to “reverse mass migration”. That means deporting not just undocumented migrants but “legally resident foreign nationals” who live in social housing, claim benefits or supposedly “fail to integrate” – a strikingly elastic category. Lowe himself declares that “millions and millions” need to leave or be made to leave. Officials and politicians “who knowingly placed dangerous third world savages in our communities” will be imprisoned.
You should hardly be surprised that among Restore’s prominent supporters are those with links to neo-Nazis who support the “total remigration” of any Britons with non-white heritage.
It may feel comforting to dismiss them as fringe wackos who have always existed. Surely they’re only louder because social media gives them a voice? Musk is certainly doing his best to boost his pet British cause on X. But whether Restore Britan’s claimed 130,000 membership is real – which would mean the party is bigger than the Conservatives – Labour canvassers on the ground for the Makerfield byelection report that it is finding an audience.
The party may ultimately split the rightwing vote and help deliver victory to Andy Burnham. It would be deeply unwise for his camp to feel gratitude. Restore Britain is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the latest chapter in a much bigger story unfolding across Britain and the wider west.
After the fascism of the second world war reduced Europe to rubble and exterminated 17 million people, a political consensus emerged. A cordon sanitaire would be established to the right of democratic politics as a sort of ideological ring-fencing. The far right were deemed politically illegitimate, an existential threat to democracy. No deals or pacts could be made with them, of the sort that Italian and German establishment parties struck in the 1920s and 30s with ruinous consequences. The far right must be eternal pariahs.
The first serious breach came in Austria at the turn of the millennium, when the far-right Freedom Party entered a coalition government. Then there were mass protests and EU sanctions. Since then far-right parties have been normalised across Europe with no such response. When Germany’s centre-right Christian Democrats passed an anti-migrant resolution last year with the support of the far-right AfD, the Social Democratic leader told him: “You have broken this basic consensus of our republic.”
The Dutch far-right was the largest party in a coalition government until it collapsed last year. In Spain, the mainstream conservatives strike regional coalitions with the far-right Vox.
Surviving centre-right parties have increasingly adopted the anti-migrant agendas of their more extreme rivals. Others have simply been taken over by the far-right altogether: notably the US Republicans. The result is the same: the old consensus about what lies beyond the pale has collapsed.
After all, the president of the United States can call Somalis “garbage” and say that “we don’t want them in our country”, that “their country stinks”, and that is now normal. Such language would once have ended a political career. Today it barely registers. If the president of an admittedly declining superpower can pardon the far-right insurrectionists who attempted a violent coup in 2021, and appoint senior figures who have a long history of spouting white supremacist views, talk of any cordon sanitaire sounds rather quaint.
Britain is following the same trajectory. Farage now speaks of “anti-white prejudice” and “anti-white discrimination”, rhetoric long associated with the far-right fringe. Reform advocates the deportation not only of undocumented migrants but also lawful foreign residents, including those living in social housing. As Reform comes under pressure from Lowe’s insurgency, it moves further right. The Conservatives respond by shifting rightwards in pursuit of Reform voters. What emerges is a conveyor belt of radicalisation.
And that raises an unsettling question. If it is now mainstream to claim that white Britons are victims of systemic discrimination, what comes next?
And there is the problem. There are no roadblocks on the rightwing frontier. Beyond today’s position lies an expanse of open territory, with politicians competing to occupy ever more extreme ground.
The same permissiveness does not apply on the left. Progressive movements continue to be subjected to incessant scrutiny and moral panic. Witness how opponents of Israel’s genocide have been relentlessly smeared as extremists. History suggests this imbalance is hardly trivial. The demonisation of the left is normally a precondition for the advance of authoritarian politics on the right.
It has also hobbled resistance to the far-right surge. If mainstream parties raid the rhetoric and policies of the extremists, while directing their own fire to the left, a coalition against the far right cannot be built.
How exactly does this end? You increasingly fear that the poison will leave the system only when the system itself becomes sick enough to reject it. Perhaps support for these movements will recede once people experience the consequences of rightwing extremism in power. But once in office, these authoritarians will surely rig the game in their favour, and make minorities and dissidents suffer.
The alternative is a politics capable of directing public anger towards concentrations of wealth and power rather than towards migrants, minorities and other convenient scapegoats. But for now we face an existential menace: nothing is too rightwing any more.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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