Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday we wrote that the feud between Restore’s nazi faction and its conservative wing was erupting into open warfare. And today, the nazi group’s leader Steve Laws, has announced that he is resigning from the party.
Laws posted this afternoon that after “the last few weeks of horrendous decisions and refusal to defend the membership”, he was “officially resigning from the party”.
“It has been one failure after another and at this stage it’s just a humiliation ritual,” he added.
Laws is the leading figure in the hardline faction, repeatedly attacking Restore figures whom he regarded as insufficiently committed to ethnic nationalism.
Public clash
Recently he clashed publicly with Howard Cox, the former Reform and Advance UK figure whom Lowe appointed as Restore’s transport spokesman.
Laws demanded that Cox leave the party, telling him that “none of the membership wants you involved” and threatening to ensure that he was never elected under the Restore banner.
He subsequently accused Lowe of “terrible fucking leadership”.
The immediate trigger for the latest crisis was a speech by Restore spokeswoman Orla Minihane in which she said that girls from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali and other minority backgrounds also needed protection from sexual exploitation.
Furious reactions
The remarks provoked furious reactions from Restore’s neo-Nazi faction. Sam “Zoomer Historian” Wilkes, a Holocaust-denying antisemite, described Minihane’s comments as “abysmal horror coal”.
Wilkes, however, has posted that while he understands why Laws has quit, he won’t be leaving himself. Restore is the only thing they have at the moment, he argues.
How long he will cling to that view remains to be seen.
The other member of the nazi triad – Cal Barker – has yet to declare his intentions.
Laws’ resignation therefore represents a key moment in the battle over Restore’s political direction.
Driving early support
He was among the far-right activists who helped drive support for Lowe when Restore was established. They believed they had secured influence at the top of the party, despite Lowe’s attempts to present a more respectable public face and his explicit rejection of ethnonationalism.
As Searchlight reported yesterday, Laws and his allies have been discussing whether to turn Remigration Now into a more independent organisation, potentially providing the nucleus of another far-right political project.
