The UK’s far right has been thrown into confusion and bitter recriminations after Rupert Lowe decided to bet the house (or rather the future of his party Restore Britain) on contesting the Makerfield by-election, where Restore candidate Rebecca Shepherd is taking on Reform’s Robert Kenyon.

As earlier Searchlight analysis has explained, British fascism is split in several directions when it comes to elections. Some have always rejected the very notion of electoral politics, though even hardline nazis such as Colin Jordan sometimes saw elections as opportunities for publicity-seeking stunts.

Others have tried to infiltrate existing parties: obvious examples include former NF organiser Tom Finnegan who stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for a winnable seat in 1983 before his past was exposed by Searchlight.

And a third path is to create a more or less openly fascist party, as attempted most successfully at different conjunctures during the past sixty years by the NF and BNP.

Combustible mix

By creating Restore, Rupert Lowe seems to be following a mixture of the second and third paths. It’s proving a very unstable, combustible mix.

Lowe’s project began as his personal opposition to Nigel Farage. A clash of ego, and supposedly Lowe’s principled objection to Farage’s dictatorial and cliquish way of running Reform. But as with many fringe parties, Lowe has developed his own leadership cult based around convincing a range of desperate extremists with contradictory agendas that he is on all of their sides at once.

So which elements of Britain’s far right are keenest to join Lowe and his Restore team?

The lowest hanging fruit are members of another anti-Farage rebel party, Advance UK.

Though its leader Ben Habib is desperately trying to stay aloof from Restore, most Advance UK members seem to be voting with their feet and heading towards Lowe’s party.

Even Habib has now endorsed Restore’s Makerfield campaign, while continuing to make snide remarks about Lowe as well as Farage.

Online politics has fuelled the rise of a cadre of young fogeys: often libertarian Tories who for personal or factional reasons couldn’t see a career path in the Conservative Party. These are now splitting between Reform and Restore.

Much of the split seems to be about personal contacts, not ideology. There’s a vague pattern of more openly racist and Islamophobic but still Toryish types heading to Restore, but in recent days confusion has worsened with some of these same people heading back to Farage.

Homeless fascist veterans

Then there are one or two older fascists who were politically homeless in recent years. Eddy Butler is the most interesting example. He sees himself (in some ways justifiably) as a class above most of his fellow fascists, whom he dismisses as cranks and perennial losers.

The only way Butler was going to become politically active again was if he saw some faction or party as potential winners, and it seems Restore Britain has ticked his required boxes, especially after its success in Great Yarmouth.

Where Butler went, Julian Leppert was always likely to follow. A former London mayoral candidate and councillor for Nick Griffin’s BNP, Leppert followed Butler into the Islamophobic party For Britain, but when Anne Marie Waters closed that group down, Leppert (unlike Butler) stayed politically active by joining the British Democrats.

Epping agitator

Now Leppert and Butler are together again in Restore, and they are joined by a much younger racist activist from their Essex area, former Homeland Party member Callum Barker, one of HP’s lead agitators at the Epping Bell Hotel, who has been in Makerfield campaigning for Restore’s by-election candidate.

If Restore does achieve a respectable result at this by-election, a larger section of the fascist scene will head in their direction. The most imminent move is the likely defection of most of the Homeland Party, leaving only a rump that remains loyal to the mysteriously silent Kenny Smith.

Even the British Democrats would be likely to split if Restore really took off: some of the more pragmatic BDP members such as its co-founder Adrian Davies would be likely to join Butler in Restore at some point on its upward curve, if there is one.

Leading racist

For similar reasons, but personally and politically hostile to Butler, another faction of ex-Homelanders under Twitter’s leading racist Steve Laws and his fellow antisemite Sam Wilkes (“Zoomer Historian”), have signed up with Lowe.

Laws and Wilkes have become Lowe’s leading champions on Twitter together with the platform’s owner Elon Musk.

Also part of their team are a circle from Homeland’s great rival Patriotic Alternative, Britain’s largest nazi organisation. PA’s leader Mark Collett chooses not to register his group as a political party because he doesn’t want an accountable constitution or transparent finances.

PA backing Restore

While arguing that electoral politics is a waste of time (and coincidentally doesn’t benefit him financially), Collett is happy for those of his members who do want to be electorally active to tag along with Restore, and even for some to have joint membership of Restore and PA.

The Makerfield by-election happens to be in a constituency that a PA member contested in 2024, using the English Democrats as a flag of convenience.

That candidate, Tom Bryer, was seen campaigning last weekend with Restore, as was his fellow ex-candidate Craig Buckley who stood in the neighbouring Leigh and Atherton seat in 2024.

But Collett’s own camp is increasingly divided over whether Restore is worth supporting.

Latest row

With their usual keenness to spot conspiracies, some of Collett’s own allies, notably the ultra-conspiracist Unity News Network, have led criticisms of Lowe and Restore.

As Searchlight reported earlier, these criticisms grew after elements of Restore’s national leadership banned a young racist Saskia Wickham from speaking at a Restore youth conference. No sooner had that row been smoothed over than new ones exploded.

Scott Benton is the former Tory MP for Blackpool South. He resigned in disgrace in March 2024 after the Commons Standards Committee found he had committed a “very serious” breach of lobbying rules by agreeing to work for what he thought was a group from the gambling industry, but in fact were undercover journalists.

During his conversations with these undercover journalists, the Committee found Benton conveyed the message that “he was corrupt and ‘for sale’ and that so were many other Members of the House.”

But it’s not those aspects of Benton’s character that upset British fascists when they learned he is now working for Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain.

Rabid hostility

More than ever, Britain’s far right is obsessed by Jews and homosexuality. Though Benton isn’t Jewish, he is on record supporting Israel. And he is openly homosexual.

That’s enough to trigger rabid hostility from a large part of the British far right. The Benton case as well as several other aspects of Lowe’s party have exposed tension between two tendencies in 21st century British fascism: cult of the leader, and obsessive conspiracy theory.

Many of Lowe’s strongest supporters on the far right are people whose main reason for quitting the Homeland Party was their opposition to its leader Kenny Smith choosing to appoint a gay activist to a mid-level organiser post in Northern Ireland.

They also base much of their preference for Lowe over Farage on supposedly principled hostility to Reform’s recruitment of former Tory MPs. Yet those same people are now happy to ignore or endorse Rupert Lowe appointing a gay ex-Tory MP to a fairly senior post in Restore Britain.

Characteristics of a cult

That’s not because fascists like Laws and Wilkes have been “bought”, or because they’ve suddenly abandoned homophobia. It’s because their allegiance to Lowe has all the characteristics of a cult.

When they do eventually break with him (or get expelled if Lowe decides to take the risk of purging the substantial nazi faction from his party), Laws and Wilkes will become bitterly hostile to their former friends and will take their cult mentality with them to their next party or group.

Their enemies on the anti-Lowe conspiracist right are even weirder. Many of these have seized on what they see as yet another “scandal” that broke within days of the Benton saga. Lowe’s son has married a woman of Libyan-Italian ancestry, whose father is an eminent academic working for several thinktanks researching international affairs.

Crazy racists

Neither of this newly married couple seem to be involved in Restore Britain, but that hasn’t stopped the crank racist element seizing on the story. They seem uncertain whether Lowe’s new daughter-in-law is Muslim or Jewish. Or (some argue) she is a Muslim working for the Jews. Either way, she is identifiably “foreign” and therefore a target for their rabid hatred even if she has no political involvement.

Laws and Wilkes seem almost sane by comparison to these “critics”. Until we remember that if this were the son or daughter of Nigel Farage, they would be resorting to exactly the same types of abuse, just as they turned to extreme homophobia during their feud with Homeland.

That’s the evil world of the far right. A world that Rupert Lowe made a deliberate choice to embrace. A world that his biggest backer Elon Musk encourages daily as part of both his business plan and his political outlook.

Vicious hatemongers

It’s this world of vicious hatemongers that lies behind the Reform and Restore phenomena.

Whatever legitimate reasons voters have for being disenchanted with mainstream politics, egotistic millionaires like Farage and Lowe – and the fascists, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists that their parties depend on – aren’t the answer to those problems.

It’s up to anti-fascists to expose these monsters and drive them out of political life.