Restore Britain began as a pressure group set up by Rupert Lowe in mid-2025, months after Reform UK suspended him. Reform withdrew the whip in March 2025 over what it said were threats of violence towards its chairman and bullying of staff, and referred the matter to the police; Lowe denied wrongdoing and the Metropolitan Police examined the claims. He turned the group into a party in February 2026 and registered it with the Electoral Commission on 20 March. He remains its only MP, holding Great Yarmouth on a majority of 1,426, and is still the subject of a parliamentary standards investigation into his conduct that he asked the High Court to halt.
Its membership numbers have been its own headline and are impossible to check. The party said it had 50,000 members on 16 February 2026 and 70,000 two days later; by June it was citing figures around 96,000 and then more than 125,000. None of the totals has been independently verified.
The core policy is mass deportation. Restore wants everyone living in the UK illegally removed, a population it puts at close to two million, and it has put more work into this than anything else: a 133-page paper, "Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics," written by its policy fellow Harrison Pitt with contributions credited to figures including Carl Benjamin. The paper sets out removals on a scale the UK has never attempted, backed by a much larger number of "voluntary" departures driven by hostile-environment measures, and it accepts openly that the programme could not run lawfully unless Britain first left the European Convention on Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention. That is the constitutional price the party's own document puts on its flagship policy.
In June 2026 Lowe published a separate, crowdfunded "Rape Gang Inquiry Report," a 219-page document funded by public donations and unconnected to the statutory inquiry the government had already announced. It claimed at least 250,000 mostly white girls had been subjected to rape, trafficking and abuse across scores of towns, a figure the report itself described as an extrapolation rather than a count.
The rest of the platform is broad. Restore would leave the ECHR, the Refugee Convention and the Human Rights Act and repeal the Equality Act, replacing Strasbourg's authority with a "Great Clarification Act" letting Parliament override its judgments by simple majority, a change larger than most of the policies it is meant to enable and one that would need Labour or Conservative votes neither has offered. It would scrap the 2050 net zero target for domestic oil, gas and nuclear, tie benefits to community service, limit disability and sickness payments to citizens, defund the BBC, ban the burqa and niqab, outlaw kosher and halal slaughter, hold a referendum on the death penalty and write Christian principles into the constitution. A party that markets itself as a single-issue campaign on immigration is, on its own published positions, running on something much wider.
Who has gathered around it has become a story in itself. In April 2026 The Times reported that "prominent neo-fascist leaders" were backing Restore over Reform, and Hope not Hate documented support from the leadership of Patriotic Alternative and former officials of the British Democratic Party, the BNP and For Britain. Georgios Samaras, a public-policy academic at King's College London, told Al Jazeera that "Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain are the expressions of neo-Nazism in this country." Lowe says he is indifferent to being called far right and rejects the charge that the party is racist. The pull has not been only from the fringe: Susan Hall, who leads the Conservative group on the London Assembly, sat on the group's original advisory board. But the strain is real even among potential allies. Ben Habib, who wound up his own rival party Advance UK in June 2026, refused to merge into Restore, called Lowe a "dictator" and said the party had gone "full tilt racist," demanding its fascist faction be expelled.
On the ground the party is real enough to win. Its Great Yarmouth affiliate, Great Yarmouth First, swept the town's divisions at the May 2026 local elections, and seven Reform councillors defected to it on Kent County Council, enough to make Restore the third-largest group there, with further defections elsewhere.
Set against all this is the moment that captured the gap between the party's posture and its judgment. On 8 August 2025 Lowe posted that a boat was approaching the coast at Great Yarmouth, 110 miles from where Channel crossings actually land, and said he would use "every tool at my disposal" to see any illegal migrants deported. The boat held charity volunteers rowing from Land's End to John o' Groats for a motor neurone disease appeal. Lowe said he made "no apologies over being vigilant" and donated £1,000.
What Restore has not produced is as telling as what it has. There is no worked fiscal plan behind the deportation and tax pledges, no schools or higher-education policy beyond opposition to expansion, no defence position, and, for a party proposing to rewrite the UK's constitutional settlement, nothing on Scottish or Welsh devolution. The documents it has invested in are the ones that name enemies: the migrants to be removed, the conventions to be left, the institutions to be defunded. Whether that is a governing programme or a campaigning posture is the test Restore faces at its first general election, and the rowing-boat episode is the reason the question is fair.