Forgive my mischievous use of a Rupert Lowe picture…
Answer: Reform.
I hope that doesn’t lose me too many subscribers. Please read on. I’m going to give a nuanced answer!
Why Reform? Several reasons. Not because they’re perfect (they’re not).
Recently, for instance, I was sent into a moderate whirlwind of despair by Nigel Farage announcing that they would keep the triple-lock on pensions. In one sense, this announcement is madness. In another, it isn’t.
It is mad because it is literally unaffordable in the long term. It will bankrupt the country. Because how could an ever larger amount of people (pensioners) getting a hike in income higher than the shrinking amount of people (workers) paying for it possibly be feasible over decades? It can’t be.
It isn’t mad in electoral terms. This is because most people are not good on economics; because people look after their own interests, and what’s rational for the individual is often not rational for the wider group; and because there are loads of pensioners, and pensioners tend to vote. As a strategy to get votes, maybe it’s reasonable. Then again, wouldn’t many pensioners vote Reform anyway, and doesn’t the party need to attract the support of younger voters? Wouldn’t more sensible pensioners realise that the triple lock is unsustainable? Maybe some would, maybe not enough of them.
Then there’s Reform’s policy on the similarly unaffordable not capping child support paid to families with more than two children. Actually, what is Reform’s current policy on this? I lose track. They seem to have been in favour of the cap initially, and then in favour of removing it, and then saying they would only pay out to British families. But the concept of a ‘British’ family means little now, following decades of unfettered immigration. So how would that work?
Reform’s partial retreat from Thatcherite economics – which, contrary to what the likes of Paul Embery or Rod Liddle say – is wrong. Never have we needed welfare reform, private enterprise, less regulation, tax cuts and incentives to build businesses more, along with trade unions and HR departments reined in.
Reform policies I like include deporting illegal migrants, leaving the ECHR, scrapping Indefinite Leave to Remain, scrapping Net Zero, cutting foreign aid, supporting farmers and slimming down the civil service.
When it comes to Restore, I agree with most of their policies too. I agree with most of what Rupert Lowe says. But here’s the thing: they won’t get any MPs at the next election. It’s a wasted vote. It will split the already split Right and let in a coalition of the most unhinged Leftist lunatics this country has ever seen.
Lowe strikes me as an egotist who had his nose put out of joint by Farage. The two were always unlikely to exist in the same party for long. Possibly Lowe sees Restore as Revenge.
As bright as they are, young bucks like Restore cheerleaders Charlie Downes and Harrison Pitt seem to be gripped by a Gen Z kind of thinking that says ‘if it’s not perfect, it’s not right’. They are too fussy. They have been brought up in a consumerist world where they can get pretty much anything they like in an instant. Perhaps they think that way about political parties too. Young Downes told Nick Dixon he’d never seen such a rush of support for a political party before. Yep. I can believe that.
It should be remembered that the 1979 Conservative Party manifesto only gave a hint of the radicalism that was pursued in the following decade. Also that many of Mrs Thatcher’s more radical policies were not enacted until after a second General Election victory, in 1983. Patience is a virtue. There is no way Reform would be able to say before the election everything they want to do. Don’t forget that the legacy media and the political class will do everything they can to stop them.
I’ve written before that Britain is probably beyond saving, but Reform would offer a sliver of a chance. To fetishize Restore, and imagine that they will win seats and not fragment the Right’s vote further, is the deluded view of the Online Right. To repeat: I support most of Restore’s policies – such as reversing mass immigration, rewarding the nation’s grafters, safeguarding election integrity, promoting a pro-British education system, and more – but to imagine they could be implemented without a supernova of civil resistance that even Reform won’t face, is for the birds.
One possible benefit to Reform of Restore’s existence is that many voters might regard Restore as too extreme and plump for Reform as the more ‘acceptable’ option. I personally don’t regard Restore as extreme but they are considered so by most mainstream opinion-formers. We are where we are. It’d be good if we still had sane, small-C conservative education, media and political establishments and for Restore to thus seem ‘normal’, but we don’t.
Restore should – but won’t – pack it in and be accommodated into Reform. I’d give the same advice to Advance, Reclaim, the SDP, Ukip, the Heritage Party and others. As Mrs Thatcher said, a party is like a bird, it needs two wings to fly. And it’s not as if the policies of the two parties are wildly different. They are slightly different in some respects.
We need the articulate, well-known and astute Farage in Downing Street. Maybe, just maybe, he could move the country Rightwards, as Orbán did in Hungary. It’d be a start.
Russell David is the author of the Mad World Substack.
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(Photograph: ©House of Commons / Laurie Noble, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Nigel is prepared to lose the country to islam, Tice doesn’t care about the white natives becoming a minority, because he will be dead by them … if they are the answer, somebody is asking the wrong question
I’m for Restore even paid my £20 BUT this next election it will be Reform that gets my vote because they are the only option to destroy the Uniparty at present. I actually like what I believe is Restore’s way of advancing. Starting small and local in Great Yarmouth area. Where I there, Restore would get my vote.
I don’t think Mr Farage and Reform understand just what they will face IF they take power next GE. The Warwickshire Council’s CEO shenaningans over a flag are an pointer.
The Teaching Unions have already said they will fight any changes Reform may make AND it will cascade across ALL the Civil Service, the legal system etc.
At least MR Lowe understands that the Long March of the Left through the Institutions is complete and pushing them out is basically a Cromwellian task. The whole edifice of the UK State is going to have to be destroyed and either never rebuilt or rebuilt where it cannot be avoided.
The irony is that the Pensions triple lock on State Pensions could probably be affordable IF Net Zero and Public Sector Pensions (Which according to IFA Magazine now exceed the size of the UK economy) were targeted,
Cap AND backdate Public sector pensions at the Median wage PLUS a % maybe 20%. There’ll be much gnashing and grinding of teeth by ex-Admirals (~£101K a year IIRC) , MPs, PMs (Starmer gets two pensions if I’m not mistaken – so also stop that, only one pension from the state at a time!) That would need more thought on hopw to enable the rich and retired to adjust, but they should suffer some consequences of their profligacy and incompetence at best, corruption at worst periods in power.
I also read somewhere that the 440+ Quangos Blair effectively created with his constitutional reforms eat up 1/3rd of Govt spending – scrap them and maybe pensions are affordable!
Milei could lend us his Chainsaw.
A shrewd assessment of the impasse that the highly disunited centre-right movement faces. There are certainly far too many egos involved. ‘Patriotic Britain: The Right, organised.’ by Donna Rachel Edmunds [March 2026] neatly sets out this unresolved problem and the broader and longer-term background to it (along with a suggested strategic solution): https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-right-wins-arguments-but-loses-the-country-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it/
I quite agree. Good advice. The centre-right movement has had and still has far too many precious individualistic egos who won’t cooperate and who may easily lose the day to the left. Attention should also be paid to recapturing institutions, not just trying to temporarily win elections. ‘Patriotic Britain: The Right, Organised’ by Donna Rachel Edmunds [3 March 2026] sets this out clearly.
We need Restore knocking on Reform’s door in order to keep Farage’s toes to the fire. Farage is at his best sniping from the sidelines. If PM he simply couldn’t handle the stresses of the job. Look out for him to declare his job is done after a few months saying he needs to get his life back as he did after the referendum. He is a showman not a Thatcher, Orban, Fico or Trump.
‘Lowe strikes me as an egotist who had his nose put out of joint by Farage’. That’s hilarious. You are telling us that Nige is NOT an egotist? He can talk the talk, but he’s fake. The ‘man of the people’ persona is not real. He has more in common with the mega wealthy ‘elite’ that those he purports to be fighting for. I don’t dislike him, and would obviously do almost anything within my power to get rid of the shower of traitorous wrong ‘uns who are ruining the country and us at the moment. But the mask has slipped a few times, he has been publicly vile to people when it was not necessary, and it has made me like him less. To me it shows a lack of empathy, judgement and character. I feel that if a situation arose where it was advantageous to him to jump ship – a job in the US for example, which is where he was bound if Rishi had waited a few more weeks – he would be off like a shot. The country probably IS beyond saving if we have three more years of this, and whoever gets elected will be faced with a SNAFU of epic proportions. Shock, horror, my vote goes to Kemi. I want my politicians to be better than me – smarter, stronger, decent, hard working and fearless. She is the only one I respect and believe. Shoot me down.
The Tories NEVER do what they say they will do so I’ll never vote Tory again. There were more Just Men in Sodom and Gomorrah than conservatives in the Tory party AND we need conservatives so I want to see the Tories and Labour suffer destruction on a scale of Sodom and Gomorrah!
Reform is next for me even though I am a paid up member of Restore – IF Lived
in Great Yarmouth I’d vote Restore but I don’t so it’s Reform to smash the Uniparty for me. Restore may work better in the slow growth tactics Mr Lowe has proposed.
BUT Mr Lowe is right, the UK state is so infected with the Left it will be a civil war between any Reform/Restore Govt and the institutions of State AND the State has to be dismantled and SOME , very little, rebuilt.
Do voters understand just how cataclysmic the future is going to be? I doubt it. Even if the Uniparty win, the state will fail because Islam and Net Zero are BOTH existential threats to the UK and both parties support both!
Net Zero the most imminent. NESO is warning of potential grid failure this summer over too many solar farms IF it is a very sunny summer. Go ask your local supermarket if they can keep the freezers going if the power fails! Mine has gerators that canonly power lights and tills to empty ther store safely. Then they call for an emergency backup for the frozen foods. You think there is one emergency backup team poer supermarket?
Then look up what the Mayor of Kiev has planned if Russia were to bring down their grid fully. He will evacuate 4 million people because water and sewage fail. To where do we evacuate 8 million in London, Bradford, Birmingham?
A grid failure of a week will cause such p[problem in the UK we’d have to call out what’s left of the Army to help cope and even then how do we feed the 80-90 Million the Govt refuses to believe live here if Supermarkets can’t keep shelves filled and freezers and fridges stop working?
We live a JIT lifestyle AND it is massively underpionned by electricity. Net Zero is insane and when it fails IF we don’t scrap it first, the results will NOT be pretty.
Forgot to add, yes, when all else fails, dump on those ‘millionaire’ pensioners again. The oft repeated ‘we have the problem of an ageing population’, which has taken over as the mantra, ‘The Ones to Blame For Everything’, (it used to be ‘Unmarried Mothers’ but they are celebrated now, along with ‘Absent Fathers’), soon won’t be a thing, when GPs can officially not treat us, but offer us Assisted Suicide, instead of making it Assisted Suicide by the back door by simply refusing to see us. Being old sucks, trust me. We don’t sit at home cackling evilly and rubbing our hands over the ‘Triple Lock’. The young have a huge advantage over us – YOUTH. I would rather be young and working than be old and worried that if I should become infirm, that will be the end, because I am a nuisance.. Of course the end comes to everybody, but not everybody is prepared to quietly roll over and make way for those snapping at our heels. Those with children looked after them and kept them alive and from harm at the beginning of their lives when they were helpless, but somehow this doesn’t work when we are the vulnerable, helpless ones, (obviously some less than others) and have outlived our usefulness. I am sick of hearing about the blasted Triple Lock – take it if you must have it, and give it away to somebody who doesn’t need it. I wish you joy of it.
I agree with this assessment of the situation. I don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Lowe may win his seat again but there will be no other Restore MPs (and no Advance ones at all). They will just split the right wing vote. The only hope is a Farage-led Reform Government which will scrap some of the most damaging policies (ECHR, welfare for immigrants etc) and start to implement other sensible policies.