There are no guardrails now on the right of UK politics: where Restore Britain goes, others will follow | Owen Jones

In the UK – and across the west - incendiary language and white supremacist policies are entering the political mainstream

W hat qualifies as too rightwing these days? It’s a question I’ve considered often in recent years. But it takes on even greater urgency when contemplating the rise of Restore Britain. Founded by multimillionaire businessman and former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, the party enjoys the active support of far-right tech bro Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. If Nigel Farage strikes you as a wet liberal, then Restore Britain may be the party you’ve been waiting for.

Its mission, it says, is to “reverse mass migration”. That means deporting not just undocumented migrants but “legally resident foreign nationals” who live in social housing, claim benefits or supposedly “fail to integrate” – a strikingly elastic category. Lowe himself declares that “millions and millions” need to leave or be made to leave. Officials and politicians “who knowingly placed dangerous third world savages in our communities” will be imprisoned .

You should hardly be surprised that among Restore’s prominent supporters are those with links to neo-Nazis who support the “total remigration” of any Britons with non-white heritage.

It may feel comforting to dismiss them as fringe wackos who have always existed. Surely they’re only louder because social media gives them a voice? Musk is certainly doing his best to boost his pet British cause on X. But whether Restore Britan’s claimed 130,000 membership is real – which would mean the party is bigger than the Conservatives – Labour canvassers on the ground for the Makerfield byelection report that it is finding an audience.

The party may ultimately split the rightwing vote and help deliver victory to Andy Burnham. It would be deeply unwise for his camp to feel gratitude. Restore Britain is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the latest chapter in a much bigger story unfolding across Britain and the wider west.

After the fascism of the second world war reduced Europe to rubble and exterminated 17 million people, a political consensus emerged. A cordon sanitaire would be established to the right of democratic politics as a sort of ideological ring-fencing. The far right were deemed politically illegitimate, an existential threat to democracy. No deals or pacts could be made with them, of the sort that Italian and German establishment parties struck in the 1920s and 30s with ruinous consequences. The far right must be eternal pariahs.

The first serious breach came in Austria at the turn of the millennium, when the far-right Freedom Party entered a coalition government. Then there were mass protests and EU sanctions . Since then far-right parties have been normalised across Europe with no such response. When Germany’s centre-right Christian Democrats passed an anti-migrant resolution last year with the support of the far-right AfD, the Social Democratic leader told him: “You have broken this basic consensus of our republic.”