Restore Britain activists don’t like me. They’ll need to join the queue, behind the far left, who got there first. It is now so long that it must be snaking down streets and out of town. If anything it is encouraging.
The two ends of the queue have more in common than either would admit. Neither can take criticism. Both descend on their critics en masse. And when their own words are put back to them, neither disowns them. They reach instead for a devious Jewish plot, and complain that they are the ones who have been betrayed.
Restore's activists were sufficiently upset that an entire episode of the Lotus Eaters podcast was given over to defending the party and attacking the journalists responsible, most of them Jewish. Lotus Eaters was founded by Carl Benjamin, a YouTuber with a history of racist slurs, and rape “jokes” about Labour MP Jess Phillips. It is not a fringe operation. It is one of the biggest political podcasts in Britain, with more listeners than many shows with established brands behind them.
Wearing an ill-fitting suit, the presenter Connor Tomlinson read out my entire quote from the front page of the Telegraph, where I described Restore as a home for the far right. The Telegraph has now joined what Tomlinson calls the “enemy outlets”. Critics, he says, are guilty of “stochastic terrorism”.
Tomlinson called me an “ethnic” partisan. I plead guilty. I am partisan when it comes to neo-Nazis who want to “remigrate” me and wish to appear respectable. He was cross that I had blocked a merger between Reform and Restore. I would love to take the credit but the damage was done by Restore's own racists. Even Reform kept its distance.
The whole thing had the feel of the Two Minutes Hate from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Party members are gathered to watch the face of the enemy of the state, Emmanuel Goldstein, and let the hatred out. Orwell gave that face a Jewish name on purpose, four years after Belsen.
Then the episode turned to Israel, and reminded me of the other thing the far left and the far right agree on. Both are convinced Israel is a racist, ethnically pure state. The difference is that the left hates it for that and the right would like to build one here – while, for the most part, still despising the original.
It is a fantasy, and a demonstrable one. Proportionally, Israel has almost three times as many Muslim citizens as Britain does, with Arabic in protected official status, Muslim MPs, Muslim judges and religious courts. If that is the ethnically pure state they describe, then so is Britain, and so is everywhere else – which rather ruins the blueprint.
None of which matters to people who only see through one lens. In the imagination of Restore supporters like Tomlinson, the suffering of white Britons is “exactly the same” as the persecution of the Jews. He seems to have forgotten which ideology did the exterminating. On the far right, immigration is a white genocide, and the Jews are running it.
Rupert Lowe has denied the party is neo-Nazi and says that he detests ethno-nationalism. Pressed repeatedly in an interview on whether King Charles was ethnically pure enough for Restore Britain, he would not answer. Presumably His Majesty is to be deported with the rest of us.
The links have been documented by multiple outlets. Searchlight revealed that Chris Mitchell, a former organiser for Britain’s largest neo-Nazi group who calls himself the “Nazi-Buddhist”, posted that he does not believe six million Jews died. He was convicted of hate crime offences in 2023. He has been recruiting fellow ethno-nationalists into Restore. A prominent Restore supporter told Jewish interviewer Andrew Gold that he was foreign and that Britain would be better off without people like him.
Restore dismissed the reporting as a smear. When one branch did expel a member photographed giving a Nazi salute, head office overruled the expulsion and he remains an activist. But this is not only about who Restore tolerates. The party's own spokesman and co-founder, Charlie Downes, and its Liverpool branch have both suggested in social media posts that Jewish and Israeli money supposedly control British politicians.
Restore is the mirror image of the sectarian politics that have grown up on the other side along religious lines. For all that divides them, they agree on the essential point – that real membership of a nation runs through a religious community rather than through citizenship, and that everyone outside it is here on terms other people set. Jews have lived under that arrangement before. It is called protection, and it lasts exactly as long as the protector finds it convenient.
This is no longer a fringe that can be ignored. Restore took seven per cent in Makerfield in June. Six weeks later it took 9 per cent in the Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, finishing fourth – ahead of the Conservatives. No wonder Downes has called the editor of the Sunday Telegraph a “traitor”. They are furious about having the mask pulled off, because of what is underneath it.
The Lotus Eaters founder, Carl Benjamin, said of the antisemitism scandal in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn that “he didn’t deserve the absolute pasting he got in my country.” He absolutely did. So does Restore. Now get to the back of the queue, Carl.
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