Kent always was deepest Farageland. It sums up Farage’s political vision and persona: close enough to London to understand it, far enough to be in touch with the provincial commonfolk. In this, Farage differs much from his rival on the Right, Rupert Lowe. Though both cut their teeth in the City, Farage still presents himself as a wheeler-dealer, the tribune of the petit-bourgeoisie. Lowe, on the other hand, has reinvented himself as a farmer. His concerns are basically rural, including his preoccupation with self-defense. Inveighing against “metropolitan attacks on rural Britain” in his gilet and wellies, always flanked by a flock of sheep, he claims the old mantle of the Countryside Alliance.

The contest between Reform and Restore has reached a stalemate. There are murmurings of a rapprochement. It seems probable that, if there is a general election soon, there will be some kind of pact. That would involve Restore standing down in places like Kent. It might also involve Reform leaving Lowe’s Great Yarmouth, and rural constituencies, to Restore. Farage, the “cheeky chappie”, can appeal to Kent and Essex’s Cockney diaspora. Lowe, meanwhile, can rattle off the farmers’ list of grievances.

It would be a natural division of territory. Farage is shaped by the South East, especially the Greater London periphery, at least as profoundly as Andy Burnham is by the North West. Kent was part of the South East England constituency that Farage spent 21 years representing in Strasbourg and Brussels. He spent just as long sniffing around for seats at Westminster, always favoring Kentish ones — even if they fell outside Kent proper. In 2001 he stood in Bexhill and Battle — a de facto Kentish constituency, since much of its electorate comprised pensioners from Bromley. In 2006 he contested a by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst. Twice he stood in South Thanet. Clacton, in Essex, was the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, so it’s only natural that Farage, after so many bruises, should have pitched his tent there in 2024. It has many similarities with Farage’s Kentish power-base, not least in its Reform-friendliness; but perhaps he would have been happier somewhere farther south.

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It’s ironic, of course, that Kent is in some ways the most European part of Britain. On a clear day, you can see Calais from Dover. This has been known sometimes to stimulate a certain fellow-feeling with the people over in the distance. That might have been its effect on the Kentish prime minister who took us into Europe, Ted Heath. But, as so often, the closer one gets to a boundary, the more one fashions one’s identity against the other side. Where Heath saw in the Channel a European stream to be bridged, Farage finds proof of England’s insularity. In 2016, more people in Kent agreed with Farage than with Heath.

Kent’s long Channel coastline also leaves it exposed. It is both England’s watchtower and its soft underbelly. Wordsworth wrote “To the Men of Kent” amid the Napoleonic invasion scare:

Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent,
Ye children of a Soil that does advance
Her haughty brow against the coast of France,
Now is the time to prove your hardiment.

In 1588 Philip II directed the Armada to land on Kent. It is no accident that Farage was one of the first to sound the alarm over the small boats crisis: he could witness it firsthand from the Kentish coast. “Another huge armada”, he tweeted in 2021, “has hit the Kent beaches”. Just this week, Reform has announced that it would deploy the Royal Navy to stop the small boats.

Like Farage, the South East has a radical streak. As far back as 2014, a young political scientist by the name of Matthew Goodwin was comparing Farage with the region’s most famous upstart, Wat Tyler. It is actually unknown whether Tyler came from Kent or Essex; both counties claim him as theirs. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter: for here, in their rowdiness, Kent and Essex combine. The counties which gave UKIP its pair of MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless; the county of Farage’s seat, and the one that is his home — these were, throughout English history, the most potent sites of insurrection. Other counties could gnash their teeth and cause trouble on occasion: the peasants of Norfolk also rose up in 1381. But, unlike Wat Tyler, they were too far from London to make any difference. It is difficult, as the Norfolk MP Lowe may discover, to make parochial rural concerns impress themselves on the metropole: the closer one gets to the centers of wealth and power in Britain, the less people care about farmers and guns. Only places like Kent and Essex can encircle the capital and exert deadly pressure on it.

The trailer for a forthcoming film about the Peasants’ Revolt presents it as one fought against the King. In reality, the ideology motivating Wat Tyler and his collaborators was a loyalist one. They wanted to rescue the king from his wicked counselors: Wat Tyler claimed to act on behalf of “King Richarde and the trew communes”. When the rebels demanded the heads of the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, this was because they had been traitors to the crown. The Peasants’ Revolt also, of course, involved xenophobic violence against London’s Flemings and Lombards. In short, Kent and Essex look to London for their salvation. But they can also take it upon themselves to set things in London right.

The cause of revolt in 1381 was simple: the people of Kent and Essex were sick of paying so much tax. That spirit has never really gone away. Six centuries later, Kent and Essex were the heartlands of Thatcherism. Unlike much of the country, their proudly individualist, enterprising, and petit-bourgeois denizens welcomed Thatcher’s laissez-faire agenda. Farage, if not quite Essex Man, was at least a Kentish wide boy. Unlike Lowe’s farmers, they feel deeply that their fortunes are bundled together with London’s.

Farage was happy on the open-outcry trading floor of the London Metal Exchange after the “Big Bang”, fueled by adrenaline and a never-ending supply of drink. He always envisioned UKIP as a libertarian party cast in Thatcher’s image. The line separating it from the BNP was that “they’re authoritarian, we’re libertarian”. Farage is, indeed, a liberal at heart. His political awakening came when, aged 14, he picked up a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Dulwich College library. He was inspired to join the Conservative Party as a teenager by a visit to the school by Thatcher’s libertarian guru, Sir Keith Joseph. Interviewed in the New Statesman in 2014, he was asked whether he was part of the “‘small c’ conservative family”. “God no!” was his answer.

Farage is, instead, a 19th-century liberal. Certainly, his libertarian instincts are at odds with Lowe’s new-found agrarian, protectionist ones. When Farage joined UKIP, it was called the Anti-Federalist League; its name evoked the Anti-Corn Law League, the 19th-century liberal campaign against Britain’s entrenched farmer class. The Anti-Corn Law League defeated the farmers, and the farmers, as a political force, never really recovered. Lowe’s efforts to champion them are unlikely to meet with much success. Lowe, the modern-day tribune of the class that the Anti-Corn Law League took on and defeated, was never involved in UKIP. Under Farage, UKIP continued to model itself on the 19th-century campaign for free trade. In a speech to the UKIP conference in 2013, Farage set out the 19th-century liberal case for Brexit: if Britain were to leave the EU, it would “get back the ability to strike free trade deals”. He even suggested “abolishing tariffs on African produce” to “do more to raise living standards there than any amount of aid”. Peace and prosperity through free trade: this was pure Manchester Liberalism, worthy of Richard Cobden.

These days, “Manchesterism” has acquired a rather different meaning. It is, we are told, the opposite of neoliberalism, the opposite of Thatcherism. The ascendancy of Andy Burnham may now put paid to Reform’s hopes of making inroads in the North. Burnham’s victory in Makerfield was held up as “proof of concept” that, with a Northerner in No. 10, and one willing to disavow Thatcherism altogether, Labour could keep the “Red Wall” standing.

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Now, Patrick Maguire claims in The Times, Farage is inspired as much by “the Eurosceptic Labour minister Peter Shore’s vision of state control of strategic industry” as he is by his liberal and libertarian idols, Enoch Powell, Sir Keith Joseph, and John Stuart Mill. But one has to wonder: was his heart ever really in it? It was awfully expedient for Farage to move in a big-state direction at just the moment he wanted to curry favor in the post-industrial North, when talk of “realignment” was filling everyone’s ears. The rise of Burnham might therefore come to him as some relief. Now, he can revert to his true, Southern, Thatcherite self. In Clacton he can also, for good measure, defeat his only serious rival in the byelection: the Shoreite SDP.

Recently, as though anticipating the Burnham shift, Reform has dropped some of its more Shoreite posturing on nationalization. Having long fantasized about a union of “socially Right” with “economically Left”, Reform appears to have surreptitiously drifted back into Farage’s small-state comfort-zone. The Reform-adjacent think tank, the Centre for a Better Britain, is singing from this hymn sheet. Its first paper was published with the imprimatur of the Thatcherite Spartan John Redwood. “What to do if the UK faces a sovereign debt crisis?”, it asks. Its prescription is a classically liberal one: slash benefits, push for growth with supply-side reforms, cut red tape, trim the state. And, above all: “Do not raise taxes unless absolutely necessary”. There is not much room here for Lowe’s more agrarian vision. The next election is far more likely to be Burnham’s Manchesterism versus the 19th-century kind.

Reform may now be staking out a new path to victory, a “Southern strategy”. It probably would require some compliance from Lowe: he reaches a different kind of Southern voter (albeit a much less significant group) than Farage does. Either way, the strategy would look like this. Forget about Gorton and Denton; forget about Makerfield. Leave the North now to its “king”. Brush aside the ex-Labourite Lee Anderson, the “Red Wall” made flesh: Farage was never a likely tribune of the “left-behind” Northerners, anyway. Offer the South a kind of populist liberalism, with its recognizably Kentish precepts: sovereignty of the people, suspicion of the state, hostility to taxation, vigilance on the border. Throw some bones to Lowe’s band of angry farmers, while steering clear of full-scale protection. Do it well enough to force the Tories, the other Southern party, into a merger. And then, at the next general election, Farage can run the campaign he has always secretly wanted to, the kind of campaign that served Thatcher well enough on three occasions. The North never was Reform’s heartland. Farage’s heart always belonged to Kent.

The worry today among Englishmen is less that the King of England will break down their castle’s door, than that he will look on passively when others do. The 21st-century Englishman doesn’t just fear that the state cannot defend his property; he fears that the state will punish him if he has the temerity to defend his property. Here is the essence of one of those celebrated mots du jour, “anarcho-tyranny”: the state is idle, even indulging, when violent criminals commit violent crimes; yet somehow it whirs into action when those crimes are resisted by upstanding, law-abiding citizens.

This is the diagnosis made by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain: the country nowadays, we learn from their recent policy paper, is “more coddling to the wicked than it is safe for the virtuous”. The “castle doctrine” used to be as dear to the heart of every freeborn Englishman as those other palladia of liberty, Magna Carta and the jury trial, and the “anarcho-tyranny” which reigns today is proof that it has been chipped away. The paper makes five concrete policy proposals for reversing this catastrophe, all, presumably, oven-ready in the unlikely event of a Restore Britain government. It is more likely that bits of it will be poached by Reform or the Tories in the run-up to the next election. Both parties are probably already sympathetic to the paper’s arguments, and the cause of beefing up the “castle doctrine” had already been taken up by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada, which even after its defeat remains for them a source of inspiration. Therein lies the paper’s claim to our attention.

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Its proposals are as follows. Pepper spray should be made legal, as it is in several other European nations, in order to give ordinary people a fighting chance against their assailants. The jury trial should be preserved for all criminal cases, as is already being urged by the legal establishment, because jurors tend to look more favorably than judges on violence committed in self-defense. The attorney general should be personally required to greenlight prosecutions brought for excessive force in self-defense (presumably it is envisaged here that future attorneys general will be of a higher caliber than Lord Hermer). Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which makes possible the prosecution for speech crimes even if the speech is uttered in the privacy of one’s home, ought to be repealed by Westminster forthwith. All these sound like good ideas. The last, especially, is essential for securing the boundary between public and private life that is at risk of breaking down completely.

The Restore Britain paper also calls, however, for “retaking the English castle” by establishing that householders have no duty of care to trespassers if the trespasser has criminal intent. No duty of care? Any criminal intent? Would it be fine, if some ruffian tries to make off with a £10 Amazon parcel from your front porch, for him to be killed? Some response, even a violent response, might of course be appropriate under such circumstances. But surely we owe people — even trespassers, and even trespassers with criminal intent — some basic duty of common humanity, and some principle of proportionality.

The report purports to set out, much in line with the new party‘s name, a grand project of restoration. It presents the theory that Britain has undergone a “silent regime change”: Blair and his band of Jacobins, an “unrooted ruling elite” of “card-carrying members of the Fabian Society”, razed the English castle to the ground; they “abolish[ed] our inherited folkways and common law traditions through a campaign of stealth”. There is, of course, a knee-jerk tendency on the Right — usually not without reason — to blame New Labour for any perceived deviation from Britain’s constitutional traditions. Here, however, matters are complicated by the fact that one of the report’s examples of an injustice produced by the legal status quo — Ted Newbery, who wounded a burglar with a shotgun, getting sued successfully for civil damages — occurred in 1988. Indeed, the law which Restore Britain wishes to amend was put on the statute books in 1984. If a precious English birthright has been sold for a mess of pottage, it was sold by Margaret Thatcher, not a stealth cadre of Fabians and Blairites.

Has a precious birthright been sold, though, and do we need wholesale legal reform to return us to the days of Entick and the Elder Pitt? The status quo, unusually in this instance, doesn’t seem all that bad. For one thing, home burglary, and other types of crime targeted by this proposal, are in decline. For another, there are already substantial protections for law-abiding individuals who are unlucky enough to end up in these predicaments. In 2018, Richard Osborn-Brooks, a pensioner, was attacked at his home in London by a pair of armed burglars; he stabbed one of them, Henry Vincent, with a kitchen knife. Osborn-Brooks was arrested on suspicion of murder. But he was, in the end, released without charge: the law is clear already that killing in self-defense is not murder.

The cause célèbre, mentioned in the Restore Britain report, is Tony Martin, who in 1999 killed a 16-year-old burglar with an unlicensed shotgun. He became a sort of martyr among the country gentry, around the time the fox hunting debate and foot-and-mouth were already radicalizing them against New Labour. He was convicted of murder, later reduced to manslaughter. Ironically — given the claims made in the report as to the natural sympathy of jurors, endowed with their earthy English common sense, towards Englishmen who defend their castle — it was a jury that convicted Martin of murder, even when the option of a manslaughter conviction was on the table. The reduction in his sentence was made, meanwhile, by three high court judges.

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In any event, Martin shot the burglar while he was already fleeing, and there are good reasons why such action should not be legally permissible. In 2008 Munir Hussain was attacked at home by three masked intruders, in what was possibly an “honor” crime avenging some alleged infidelity; he and his family were beaten and tied up. After Hussain freed himself, he and his brother chased one of the intruders, Walid Salem, down the road, and attacked him with a cricket bat. Hussain was found guilty of GBH and given a 30-month prison sentence, which was later reduced on appeal.

Anybody can understand what motivated Hussain in those moments, and anybody can feel some of the concomitant revulsion that he was charged and convicted at all. But on closer inspection one realizes that this has nothing to do with the castle doctrine, or with self-defense, after all; and, indeed, that the whole drama serves as a good advertisement for the law being the way it is. As the judge said, in sentencing Hussain: “The prosecution rightly made it plain that there was no allegation… in respect of the force you used against Salem in defending your own home and family or of the force used by either of you in apprehending Salem.” In other words, the judge was as deferential to the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle as the people at Restore Britain would want him to be.

So, too, as it happens, was the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, noted card-carrying Fabian Keir Starmer QC. “There are many cases,” he said, “some involving death, where no prosecutions are brought… We would only ever bring a prosecution where we thought that the degree of force was unreasonable in such a way that the jury would realistically convict.” Everybody is agreed, it appears, that, if Hussein had killed Salem while breaking free, or while otherwise embodying the principle that the Englishman’s home is his castle, no legal action would have been forthcoming. In fact, though, Hussein, when he bashed Salem’s head in with a cricket bat, was embodying a very different principle of justice.

What happened to Salem was, said the judge, a “very violent revenge attack on a defenseless man”: and we do not want to live in a society where revenge attacks can go unpunished, and where the family feud supersedes criminal law. We want to live in a society where all justice is the King’s justice — what could be a more ancient and venerable principle of English law than that? — and for such a society to exist, we recognize that the state must have a monopoly on violence. We need restrictions on the principle of self-defense, because we know that the line between self-defense and vengeance is easily blurred. We need also to drag people — often, indeed, people who acted nobly under horrifying circumstances — over the coals of legal investigation in order to establish, to the satisfaction of the state and of the jury, that they acted out of one set of motivations and not the other.

The Restore Britain proposal, seen in this light, has the air of defeat. It takes the view that the state has already surrendered its monopoly on violence, and that, this being so, the best thing to do is to empower ordinary people to take their security into their own hands. It cannot be extricated from the burgeoning idea that the country is on the precipice of civil war (it is interesting that David Betz, the KCL academic who has gained prominence for propagating this view, appears in the acknowledgements to Restore Britain’s last policy paper). As Joe Gargery says in Great Expectations: “Still a Englishman’s ouse is his Castle, and castles must not be busted, ‘cept when done in war time.” Home burglaries may be down; the status quo may be fine; proportionate self-defense, even to the point of killing an intruder, may already be permitted. But, when war time comes — and perhaps it’s already here — an Englishman’s castle may be busted at any moment, and he must prepare himself accordingly. As such chatter grows louder on the Right, it’s not hard to imagine Reform or the Tories arriving at similar conclusions.

Such a view rests on the idea that the future promises more anarchy than tyranny. In reality, though, we should more fear tyranny than anarchy. The castle is under threat: by overbearing bureaucrats and petty police officers who feel empowered to arrest you for the things you say and do in private. Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act is, as the authors of the Restore Britain paper recognize, a case in point. So too might we think of the encroachments on privacy that accompanied the lockdown: the ban on visiting second homes, restrictions on whom you were allowed to invite into your house, Matt Hancock’s dictate that only those in an “established relationship” are allowed to have sex. We ought to recover the original meaning of the castle doctrine, in the sense that Pitt the Elder understood it and Entick and Carrington experienced firsthand. Intruders and burglars should know already the risks to which they are exposed if they cross your moat and drawbridge. It’s the King of England, now as ever, who has to be kept at bay.

One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt.” The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”

The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticize quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain.” And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.” 

In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him. 

Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country. 

Yet, in his beliefs as well as his rhetoric, Lowe is a more obviously Powellite figure than Farage. He’s more interested in reducing the size of the state, is resistant to Reform’s nationalizing impulses, and is less vulnerable than his rival to charges of “socialism”. In many ways, Restore is the more conservative project, given that its central mission is to return Britain — in more explicit terms than Farage has dared — to a glorious past from its Blairite present. When it comes to presentation, Farage and Lowe — tweed-clad former public schoolboys with past lives in the City — are far closer to one another than they are to the intense, prodigiously academic Powell. Former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan found him unsettlingly zealous, complaining: “Powell looks at me in Cabinet like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes.”

Where Lowe differs from Farage, though, is that he has done less to distance himself from figures and ideas which might be classed as far-Right. While the Reform leader has condemned Tommy Robinson for “stir[ring] up hatred” and stated that the activist has no place in his party, Lowe has praised Robinson’s campaigning against grooming gangs cover-ups. In 1974, Powell rejected the chance to stand as a candidate for the far-Right National Front, having left the Tories because of their stance on the European Economic Community. 

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Lowe would be wise to take such an approach with some of the groups and activists now attempting to tie themselves to Restore. Paul Golding, the leader of the far-Right Britain First, has said he won’t stand candidates against Lowe’s party at local or national elections. Steve Laws, a prominent ethnonationalist who advocates for the expulsion of everyone who is not ethnically British, has committed his vote to Restore Britain and called Farage a “traitor”. On Monday, he posted to his 140,000 X followers: “I fully endorse Rupert Lowe to be PM. He will implement the majority of what I want to achieve in terms of remigration over the next 6-7 years.” 

These activists are unlikely to appeal to swing voters. Lowe, if he follows conventional electoral logic, is therefore presented with a dilemma: how to attract smart collaborators committed to immigration restrictionism, without also drawing in the cranks? The problem is that a cruder vision of nationalism pervades even the upper echelons of his party. Harrison Pitt, a writer who has been a key figure in devising policy for Restore Britain, has previously referred to mass immigration as the “ethnic cleansing” of white Britons, as well as highlighting the “erasure of [Britain’s] host population”. Additionally, he has appeared to suggest that Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose parents were born in Pakistan, should return to her “homeland”, and vowed in December to make 2026 “the year of mass denaturalizations” for those who presently hold British citizenship. 

In an interview in December 2024, Lowe said that “I don’t care about people’s religion or their color,” but Restore has taken a far more robust approach to Islam than Reform has. Lowe is set on “resisting the relentless creep of radical Islam”, and his new party’s platform includes policies on outlawing the burqa, sharia courts and halal slaughter. Some of its senior figures also champion a notably muscular Christianity. For instance, Lowe’s campaigns director Charlie Downes, a Catholic convert, declared this week: “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”

Both Downes and Pitt are still in their twenties, and Lowe has a notable following among a particular group of politically engaged, digitally-savvy young men. There’s even a collective term which can be used either pejoratively or affectionately: Lowemosexuals. The online sphere has become a battlefield between the Restore leader and Farage, who boasts more TikTok followers than the other 649 UK MPs combined. Lowe last year labeled the Reform boss’s leadership style “messianic”, yet his own role in Restore follows similar contours, the party’s profile relying largely on his social media reach.

Capturing wider support, of course, is a different proposition. According to polling from this week, 92% of Britons are unable to name Lowe when shown a picture of him. He is popular among his constituents, viewed as a committed and unpretentious champion for Great Yarmouth, but he has a majority of less than 1,500. He is expected to stand at the next election under the banner of Great Yarmouth First, which he established as a political party in December, yet his personal appeal may count for less when divorced from a Reform UK platform. 

So the question remains: is Restore a credible Right-wing movement — able to distinguish itself both from Reform and from the crowded field of nationalist groups on the more radical fringes — or just Lowe’s revenge project? County councillors are already moving over from Reform, providing some local infrastructure. Even if Restore doesn’t win seats at the next election, it will surely still prove a spoiler for further Farage gains. 

Here, Lowe could receive extra ammunition from an alliance with another of Farage’s jilted exes: Ben Habib. Having served as co-deputy leader for Reform, Habib was demoted in favor of Richard Tice, and quit the party in November 2024. The following spring he referred to Lowe’s treatment by Farage as an “injustice”, subsequently setting up a new party of his own, Advance UK, in June. 

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On Saturday, Habib extended an open offer to Lowe to merge their two parties. Lowe politely demurred by suggesting that Habib join Restore, which “would be stronger with you in it”. But Habib, who was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK as a teenager, is not widely popular among the hardcore Lowemosexuals. David Kurten — who leads the Heritage Party, another bit-part player in Britain’s hard-Right scene — summarized the dynamic thus: “Ben loves Rupert. Rupert’s fans would deport Ben.” Richard Inman, a prominent Advance UK member and organizer for Tommy Robinson, has accused Lowe of being “driven not by love of country, but by a massive ego”, adding that many of Restore’s supporters are “ethno-nats”. 

Advance has built up a respectable profile: it now has more than 40,000 members, nine councilors through defections from Reform, and outsized publicity thanks to endorsements from Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk. But the Tesla mogul, as well as boosting Habib’s party, has in recent days cheered on the progress of Restore Britain. On Wednesday afternoon, he went so far as to accuse Reform of being “Nazis” because “THEY are the ones who want race extinction.” As the world’s richest man, armed with 234 million pliant X followers, Musk’s overseas influence is considerable; his amplification of posts about the grooming gangs helped push the Government into ordering a national inquiry. 

Musk is widely reviled among British voters, but his support — both X-based and financial — could boost Restore’s international profile and increase the chance of collaboration with like-minded parties such as Alternative for Germany and Spain’s Vox. Farage endorsed the AfD in 2017 but has, in recent years, kept a deliberate distance. There is a gap here for Lowe to exploit as anti-immigration groups build ties around Europe: these are parties which are gaining influence but which are still considered too dangerous by Reform and the Tories. 

While Farage might think he flies in the face of such squeamishness, and that he is dismantling the “uniparty” consensus, Restore supporters believe he instead represents little more than a continuation of the New Labour-inflected order which has governed Britain for the past three decades. According to Downes, Reform’s senior figures “basically agree that the vision Blair had for Britain was admirable and desirable”. In his view, “it will come to pass that Farage is the Regime’s lifeline, not its nemesis.”

Lowe’s calculation may well be that he doesn’t need to expunge the less savory elements from his party’s message, and that the electorate will instead move closer to him. The UK’s Overton window has undeniably shifted on immigration; Labour’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is taking a harder line than her Tory predecessors, even as the polls are led by a party with a plan for mass deportations. Almost half of Britons say they would support an agenda in which no new immigrants are admitted to the country and large numbers of recent arrivals are required to leave. British voters’ conception of national belonging remains chiefly civic, but some of Lowe’s most influential cheerleaders believe there is further room for that ideological window to move. 

Either way, the Restore leader is not one for apologies. On Wednesday, he wrote that he is “entirely uninterested” in “being called unpleasant names”. He has repeatedly made clear that being labeled racist is no deterrent for him. Pushed to recant a suggestion that illegal immigrants should be sent to remote Scottish islands for the “midges to do their work”, he doubled down. Lowe, evidently, has a thick skin. In his previous life as chairman of Southampton Football Club, disgruntled fans used to sing about hanging him from the Itchen Bridge. 

It’s easy to forget that, even after “Rivers of Blood”, Powell was immensely popular. Polls carried out shortly after the speech demonstrated that a majority of the British public agreed with his assessment of race relations. In 2002 he was voted one of the 100 greatest Britons ever. On his death, the Telegraph wrote that he “would survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill”. Just as Powell’s fears around integration proved prophetic, Lowe may now find himself a 21st-century equivalent — an emissary from a future Britain whose decline has been contingent on its tolerance.

Ferdinand Mount, who headed the No. 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, wrote of Powell that “always, he is restlessly pursuing the ultimate safe haven: the nation.” Nationalism’s great strength, for Mount, is its “iron framework” — the “insistence that the nation is the supreme political fact”. The very act of restoration inherent to Lowe’s project is its own safe haven, as inarguable in its logic as “Make America Great Again”. He, like Powell before him, has recognized the British state as the sclerotic, rulebound husk it is. And now, as Powell was, he is filled with foreboding.

This robust approach to criminal justice was duly backed by Lowe: “Now you’re talking”. In truth, though, the broader political currents Hussain represents are likely less pleasing to his fellow backbencher. For in his enthusiastic declaration of Islamic values, especially as a balm for the nation’s woes, he is the avatar for an increasingly prominent kind of British Muslim: educated, self-confident, political. Echoed across the country’s cultural life, and indeed in its birthrates, men like Hussain could soon shape life far beyond the internet, with vast consequences for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Perhaps the best place to understand the rising power of Britain’s Muslims is not Westminster, or even Hussain’s Blackburn — but my hometown of Luton. It’s safe to say the place that hosted the Islamist “Butchers of Basra” demonstrations, and is the birthplace of the EDL, does not have the finest reputation. Over recent years, in fact, it’s become a kind of negative poster boy for the terminally online Right, what with its Islamic schools, halal butchers and peri-peri chicken joints. Its once-thriving pubs, meanwhile, are becoming a thing of the past, and though there’s a Christian revival of sorts, it’s mostly immigrant-inspired.

That’s hardly the best news for people like Rupert Lowe, anxious over ethnic and racial change. Yet the fact is that where Luton leads, the country is heading. According to the most recent census, after all, 3.8 million Muslims now live in England: a sharp rise from 2.7 million in 2011. From 2001 to 2021, England’s Muslims have risen by nearly 150% in terms of number of people, and grown by 116% as a proportion of the national population. A sharp decline in Christian identification has only hastened these trends, as have Muslim birthrates. Think, again, of Luton. It’s now a majority-nonwhite town where one in three residents are Muslim. More than that, it’s the baby capital of England, with Slough, Oldham and much of East London following closely behind. Judging by the recent data, the demographic trajectory of England will be increasingly shaped by Islamic social conservatism.

Behind the headline growth, however, or the vivid streetscapes of towns like Luton, Britain’s Muslim population remains strangely complex. Studies suggest that the country’s Muslims believe in the richness of Britain’s opportunities — yet aren’t particularly impressed with the society they live in. Once again, the numbers here are telling. Though over 85% think this is a good place to live, over three in five feel that most Britons put themselves over their families or communities. Strikingly, this number rises even higher among British Muslim millennials.

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That last figure strikes at the heart of the so-called “integration paradox”: the idea that as ethnic and religious minorities become more integrated into the economic and social mainstream over the generations, they will do away with their ancestral and faith-based identities. This optimistic theory has been blown to smithereens by the British Muslim experience. Just like Adnan Hussain, a former solicitor born in Burnley, younger Muslims are not only more likely to be born in the UK, educated at British universities, and work as white-collar professionals than their elders — they are also more inclined to identify with their faith.

Compared to their elders, younger conservative Muslims are generally more aware of the excesses of social liberalism in mainstream Britain, even as they fail to share their cultural connections with ancestral homelands. It’s in Islam, not Kashmir or Sylhet, that they find a true sense of belonging, a trend that will only continue as Muslims from different ethnic communities intermarry. All the while, younger Muslims tend to have greater expectations and demands of the nation’s politics, certainly compared to foreign-born elders who were often just grateful to escape conflict or corruption.

That shift, in turn, makes younger British Muslims more prone to disappointment with the nation’s institutions, especially over issues with an implicitly religious character, notably Palestine. There is also the ironic possibility that by being more integrated — economically, educationally — younger socially conservative Muslims are more exposed to secular trends not to their liking. Young Muslim YouTubers shaming the social mainstream over perceived forms of moral degeneracy are hardly in short supply, even as figures like Hussain are tougher on deportations than many white liberals.

All this works to reinforce the religious identity of British Muslims. And if that encourages many to “selectively” integrate — being decent neighbors and working hard without fully immersing themselves in the country’s culture — that still leaves a stark divide with the non-Muslim majority, especially around women’s rights and mixed-sex interaction. Consider the case of Maheen Kamran. An aspiring medical student who won the seat of Burnley Central East in last year’s local elections, she ran on a platform which not only called for an improvement in school standards and public cleanliness — but also encouraged public spaces to prevent “free mixing” between Muslim men and women. More recently, the East London Mosque organized a fun run which barred female participation.

The mosque’s decision caused predictable outrage from liberal politicians. But that still leaves the question of how eager British Muslims are to take advice from the mainstream on matters of gender equality, especially given its struggles over even defining what a woman actually is. That’s broadly been Hussain’s own line. More than that, British Muslim traditionalists, whether in Luton, Blackburn or elsewhere, may well argue that Western-style empowerment has contributed to the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family unit, and has fed the fertility crisis which means Britain now faces an economic timebomb. And all this in a country where a fifth of people routinely report that they have an unfavorable view of Muslims as a group.

These tensions may even get worse, as upwardly mobile British Muslims begin to hold more positions of influence in business, the public sector, and larger civic associations. Indeed, there are growing signs of religious co-ordination across sectors, with the new Muslim Impact Forum (MIF) having a central mission of “uniting Muslim leaders and institutions across politics, charity, and business to move ideas into collective action”. This hints at a broader point. While the ever-growing British Muslim population has been caricatured by some as an undereducated and welfare-dependent monolith, one which has colonized Britain’s social housing stock, the reality is somewhat different.

In truth, it’s a relatively youthful population, one defined by its upward social mobility — and which is increasingly assertive across national life. Young British Muslim sportspeople, notably England’s Pakistani-heritage cricketers Shoaib Bashir and Rehan Ahmed, have not shied away from expressing the centrality of their Islamic faith. Something similar can be said of Tottenham Hotspur’s Djed Spence, who in September became the first recognized Muslim to play international men’s football for England during their 5-0 win in Serbia.

Hussain aside, the most obvious recent example in politics is Shabana Mahmood’s appointment as home secretary. Her arrival in Marsham Street was met with disquiet by some on the Right due to her religious background, and the fact that she was allegedly the first Muslim to take up the post. Not quite: Sajid Javid, who was the first home secretary of Pakistani Muslim origin, appears to have been memory-holed — which tells us much about changing attitudes. It almost feels as if, as a “hyper-integrated” Muslim, one with a white British wife and who once said that Christianity was the only faith practiced in his home, Javid didn’t count as a real Muslim. Yet if Javid was the kind of “sanitized” Muslim more acceptable to the political mainstream, he is far from the norm. Echoing Hussain and other Muslim MPs, Mahmood has told The Times that Islam is the “centerpoint” of her life.

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Faith aside, Mahmood has plenty on her plate. Consider the small-boats crisis, a thoroughgoing national emergency, and one largely down to the unchecked importation of younger males from Muslim-majority countries: exactly the kind of person Hussain and Lowe would like to send back home. At the same time, Labour recently announced a national statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal, with Mahmood finally announcing Baroness Anne Longfield as the chair. That’s a start, but as a minister of Pakistani-Muslim heritage herself, Mahmood will be under pressure to make sure the inquiry thoroughly investigates the cultural and societal drivers behind the abuse, especially when men of her own ethno-religious background are disproportionately involved. Then there’s the looming threat of Islamism, with antisemitism partly promoted by Britain’s segregated Muslim communities.

Whether fair or not, anyway, Mahmood will be under extra pressure to deliver as home secretary because of her ethnic identity and religious affiliation — which exposes the growing tendency to hold British Muslims “collectively responsible” for problems surrounding security and integration. Mahmood, like many of her peers, has another major headache too: the rise of religio-political mobilization within traditionally Labour-voting British Muslim communities. In her seat of Birmingham Ladywood, she was run close in the last general election by pro-Gaza independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who also performed well in the last West Midlands mayoral election. British Muslim voters have deserted Labour in droves under Starmer’s leadership; before being elected as an independent, Adnan Hussain was a Labour activist.

Here’s yet another irony: British Muslims have become so socially integrated, and politically disillusioned, that they’re now mobilizing along religious lines, electoral shifts which be devastating for Labour in Muslim-dominant parts of the country. That’s especially if Your Party, the Greens, and George Galloway’s Workers Party for Britain, as well as the wider pro-Palestine independent movement, are all able to organize coordinated electoral pacts. All this varied activity could transform British politics, particularly if backed by traditional ethnic-minority habits that pool resources for community projects.

It’s clear, then, that the country is entering uncharted territory, with several of England’s provincial towns effectively becoming political battlegrounds between traditional British nationalists and Islamic social conservatives, with the only thing they share being a hatred of the so-called “legacy parties”. Some of the results from the local elections earlier this year provide a flavor of what is to come. Despite Reform UK taking control of Lancashire council, its candidates were beaten by independent Muslim candidates across Burnley and Preston. Whatever way you look at it, Britain is changing — and not necessarily in a direction Rupert Lowe will welcome.

This week not one but two Right-wing notables launched new initiatives taking aim at the Tories from the Right. Ben Habib, former Reform UK deputy leader, launched Advance UK — and for a few hours, rumours circulated that Rupert Lowe, former Reform MP for Great Yarmouth but now independent, might join him. But instead he launched Restore Britain, another new initiative.

Habib’s launch video opened with doom-laden music and a montage of Right-wing trigger images, followed by a curiously bland opening offer that pledged to uphold free speech, exit international law, abolish quangos, return power to Parliament and uphold equality before the law. All for a discounted fee rate of only £10 per annum! “We’re relying on the best of British,” Habib intones as the video ends. “We’re relying on you.” The vibe was odd: more like a pyramid scheme than a political party.

By contrast, as a sitting MP Lowe has considerable clout. He is high-profile and outspoken in Parliament and — equally important, today — on social media. His crowdfunded grooming gangs enquiry swiftly attracted more than £600,000 in donations. Though no policies have been published on the new website yet, Restore Britain appears to be not so much a political party as a cross-party pressure group, to convene and articulate popular electoral support for the kind of policies generally screened out of Parliament.

Will Lowe succeed? Will Habib? More to the point: why can’t they all be in the same movement? Or indeed with any of the other radical Right-wing movements? There are so many of these now it’s hard to keep track, beginning of course with Nigel Farage’s ascendant Reform, whence Lowe and Habib exited after falling out with Farage. But there’s also the rump UKIP, remarkably still going without Farage. And there’s the Reclaim Party, fronted by actor turned broadcaster turned anti-woke maverick Laurence Fox.

Only a very dedicated fringe politics enjoyer would be able to tell you the policy gradations between these ventures. As for the litany of other hard-Right parties further out on the fringes, include the relatively venerable far-Right British National Party (also still going) plus the Heritage Party, the British Democrats, the Housing Party, and the somewhat younger and more net-savvy Homeland Party. All of these feature a sort of nationalist Musical Chairs of each other’s members and leaders.

What can we infer from this? On paper, the opportunity for an insurgent Right would seem never to have been greater. The Tories are shattered and humiliated, and, a year into office, Keir Starmer is discovering both his own lack of vision and the obdurate refusal of the system to conform even to his tepid attempts at change. So why can’t the Right get its act together?

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There are several possible explanations. One is the Judean People’s Front challenge: namely that it takes a particular personality type to be a political maverick at all, and groups with a preponderance of mavericks tend to be fissiparous. Relatedly, there’s the tendency of radical groups to purity spiraling, which is to say escalating internecine conflicts that turn on whose ideology is the most free from the taint of compromise.

Another possibility is that there just aren’t enough radicals to go round. That is: while a majority of the British electorate has voted repeatedly for lower immigration for decades now, on each occasion to no avail, this doesn’t translate into a nation of ethnonationalists. For most in Britain, even on the Right, hardline identitarianism does not come naturally.

By and large, my sense is that once you get offline, most normie Brits don’t care very much about politics unless they absolutely have to. To the frustration of hardliners, national political instincts remain maddeningly moderate. Most just want things to work, and don’t even feel particularly strongly about migration, provided it’s managed and the inflow doesn’t include spongers, criminals, or sex pests. It is telling that the only party to the Right of the Tories that looks anything like a serious electoral proposition at present is Reform, which has achieved this prominence by — among other things — carefully scrubbing the party’s public presence of anything too aggressively nativist.

But we’re currently in a situation where even these modest normie expectations are consistently disappointed. A growing number of things (and people) visibly do not work. Meanwhile migration is palpably too high, and seems to include a great many criminals and sex pests, who then somehow can’t be expelled again and often seem to end up (one way or another) housed at taxpayer expense. The resulting popular dissatisfaction is real, and growing. And, yet despite the public’s numerous attempts to vote their way to improvement, beginning with Brexit, nothing ever seems to change. All of this points in turn to the third possibility: that the Right keeps proliferating ineffectual political parties not because the Right lacks energy, but because party politics as such is no longer an effective means of gaining a national mandate.

Much ink has been spilled, especially since Brexit, on the seemingly irreconcilable gulf between the interests and capabilities of technocrats and the often very different sensibilities of the population at large. Here, the party political system itself increasingly feels less a solution than an aggravating factor. Before the local elections, pollsters More In Common conducted a focus group in Lincolnshire that included Gary, a sales manager. Gary declared himself so fed up with the situation that “You almost need a coup d’état”. 

Gary told More In Common that what seemed missing was decisiveness and authority: “somebody to come in and say, ‘Right, this is what we’re doing and you will conform.’” Of course it doesn’t follow from this that what Gary wants is a Homeland Party government, or indeed that he is representative of the nation. But if ordinary sales managers in Middle England are speculating about coups d’état and authoritarian rule, something is very wrong.

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And things may be about to get still more febrile: new research shows that since the launch of ChatGPT, entry-level jobs have fallen by a third. The AI jobs cataclysm has begun. If this persists, political competition and economic resentment will grow still more bitter, as well as likely more tribal. In a polity that already feels like an ethnopolitical tinderbox, the window for avoiding major upheaval is shrinking — if it hasn’t, as Kings College War Studies Professor David Betz suggests, already closed.

This invites the question: what if Britain’s current boil of radical Right-wing groupuscules is currently radical in the wrong way? What if their mistake is trying to form new political parties as such, within a system that has so comprehensively insulated the governing class from anything beyond its own bubble? All evidence suggests that addressing the managerialist turn will require managerial insiders — and these tend to regard “populism” with scorn, and the system’s resistance to it as a feature, not a bug. The same goes for party political machines. In effect, then, the system is designed to ensure radical politics never reach the House of Commons. Britain could elect the Homeland Party tomorrow and they’d still somehow end up delivering a Cameroon Third Way program, because that’s all the machine is willing to deliver.

That’s perhaps for the best, under normal circumstances. But what if, in fact, radical change is desperately needed? The manifest failure of assorted Tory leaders, and latterly of Keir Starmer, to make the machinery do what he wants, or even anything at all, suggests that the first target of any transformative program has to be these structures themselves. In response, with painful slowness, even the wonk class is spawning a subset of (relative) dissidents, with their focus less on eye-catching headlines than retooling the systems of governance. 

For example, last week “Fix Britain” launched: a technocratic photo-negative of Habib’s and Lowe’s populist efforts. An “avowedly non-party” think tank, led by former Cabinet Office insider Munira Mirza, it promises to convene those who understand how the system works and want to improve it, with a focus on improving governance. As Mirza puts it, the aim is to “do the heavy lifting of preparing a prospectus for government” including detailed plans, costings, and even personnel lists. The venture stands in contrast to (say) Advance UK, which proposes to campaign as a conventional political party and then, once elected, to retool all these recalcitrant systems. Instead, Fix Britain proposes to route around the electoral element of the political process, and take direct aim at these entrenched bureaucratic obstacles to change.

Will it work? The risk is that this approach reproduces the same split as ever, with a wonk class insulated from and contemptuous of the plebs. Nothing will change until this split is reconciled. So given party-political machines no longer seem to do this effectively, and opinion polls function mostly as PR tools, some new channel of communication seems needed. But we might read Lowe’s Restore Britain in this light: for it seems to be taking a different approach to most extant Right-wing would-be parties. Restore Britain seems intended less as an entrant in party politics as usual, than a means of short-circuiting its sclerotic legacy networks. It feels easily the most net-native of current Right-wing offerings: a kind of rapid-feedback plebiscite machine, intended to surface and focus nationally salient issues on a swifter turnaround than general elections.

With the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn, the “Judean People’s Fronts” of Monty Python’s day mostly didn’t make it into the House of Commons. But many of their activists ended up shaping public policy by other means, for example via NGOs and cultural institutions. It will be surprising if today’s Right-wing underground does not end up exerting some equivalent future influence, even if this does not quite take the revolutionary form envisaged by some. But where this takes concrete political form, my hunch is it won’t be party political on the 20th-century model. It may be, perhaps, some kind of wonk program of the sort Mirza is developing, plus new mechanisms for convening and focusing popular assent: perhaps even via the vehicle just launched by Lowe. On its own, after all, a populist opinion funnel cannot do much. But as a legitimacy tool for aligned technocrats, it might be very powerful.

The combined result would be unlikely to deliver the more outré policies demanded by the more fringe members of the radical Right. Nor, indeed, would it be “democratic” in the party-political sense Britain has embraced for the last century or so. But it might feel sufficiently legitimate and capable of action to persuade Gary from Lincolnshire that we can get out of this mess without needing still more radical measures. As ChatGPT devours the hopes of a generation of debt-laden elite aspirants, and the Channel migrants keep coming, we had better hope so.

In a sense, the desolation at the dogs tells its own story of Great Yarmouth. Famed for its Golden Mile seafront and sandy beaches, visitors first flocked here with the coming of the railways in 1844. Its port once overflowed with so many herring trawlers you could walk across the river by boat. Harry Houdini would perform daring feats of escape from the stage of the Hippodrome. These days, comics still play for laughs at the Britannia Pier, and tourism remains big business, but this is a town battling decline.

The numbers are stark. One study noted Yarmouth had been left reeling by twin upheavals — a 220% increase in EU migration since 2004 and the austerity years — with the borough council fearing it might run out of cash. Today, the borough is listed as the 32nd most income-deprived local authority in England, while 34% of its children live in poverty. Little wonder locals took their chance to poke the powers-that-be in the eye over Brexit, with seven in ten voting to leave the European Union.

And, in July 2024, Great Yarmouth again turned on the establishment, electing Reform UK’s Rupert Lowe as its Member of Parliament. Over the past fortnight, Lowe and his party have tumbled into turmoil amid a very public spat between him and Nigel Farage, involving a Met investigation and social media-fueled claims and counter-claims. Yet beyond the bickering, in its economic struggles, and the way that blends with rising fears over migration, Yarmouth is a warning to politicians of all parties of the political consequences of ignoring those who feel left behind.

For a novice MP, Rupert Lowe has been remarkably outspoken both inside the Commons and on social media. His calls for mass deportations for foreign criminals, and his attack on the “madness” of paying universal credit to refugee households, have attracted delight and derision in equal measure. Whether he’s been politically effective on the ground is a matter some of his local opponents are willing to dispute.

Yet many of those I meet in Yarmouth admire their MP’s trenchant style. “He isn’t afraid to upset people,” one market trader tells me. This 37-year-old has far less time for Lowe’s former boss, dismissing Farage as a “snake” who’s “shat his ass off” in fear of competition. Nor is Lowe’s manner the only draw here. Speaking in rapid bursts while replacing watch batteries, my trader says he likes how Lowe mixes with the locals. While he never saw Brandon Lewis — Yarmouth’s former Tory MP — he’s spoken to Lowe three or four times. That seems to set him apart from Farage, who’s more likely to be fundraising for Donald Trump in Mar-A-Lago than hobnobbing in his Clacton constituency.

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And not only that. When Lowe won his Westminster seat in July, the multi-millionaire former businessman promised to donate his salary to local good causes. It’s proving a popular move locally. One of the first to benefit was Great Yarmouth Town FC. A few days after my trip to the dog track, I pass by the home of The Bloaters at the Wellesley Recreation Ground where a group of boys is training on a newly installed artificial pitch. I get chatting to their watching moms and, though she didn’t vote for him, Caroline explains Lowe sorted out an issue she had with local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. “You get the impression that he cares,” she says.

Rachel, for her part, asked Lowe for help with housing. “I’ve had horrendous issues with mold and water coming through the electric circuits,” she says of her two-bedroom privately rented home. The local housing team are aware of the problem, Rachel concedes, but tell her they simply have nowhere to put her. As she pauses to vape, she reflects for a moment beyond her own struggles. The 31-year-old is increasingly frustrated by what she sees as the unfairness of the system. “I’ve tried everything, Citizen’s Advice. Then you walk through the town and see Romanians given flat keys, and you think ‘what’s going on here?’” Cassie, another mom, agrees. “This is where a lot of people kick off with Rupert because they say it’s being racial. But it’s not. It’s more like we need to help people we have got here first rather than everyone.”

And if that hints at another source of Lowe’s popularity — he took his seat with a majority of 1,426, pushing the Tories from first place into third — it’s certainly true that Yarmouth is familiar with migration. That’s obvious far beyond the raw numbers. In the old days, workers from Scotland came to work as the herring boats arrived. As fishing stocks dwindled, the Sixties saw the arrival of a Greek-Cypriot contingent, many setting up seafront restaurants with names like Columbia Tonyponis Taverna and Othello. During the New Labour era, meanwhile, a lively Portuguese community developed. Great Yarmouth has Bernard Matthews to thank for that: the well-known Norfolk turkey producer opened recruitment offices in Lisbon. Because of its colonial history, others from the Portuguese diaspora in South America, Africa and Asia were also entitled to come under freedom of movement rules. These days, it’s Poles, Lithuanians and Romanians who predominate, with newcomers making up nearly a fifth of the population in parts of the constituency.

If it sounds like a multicultural melting pot, the trouble is the communities don’t mix. And quite aside from the question of housing, some locals suggest the influx has sparked other problems. “The issues with the Romanians at King Street are bad,” says Cassie, referring to one of Yarmouth’s main thoroughfares, its dilapidated Georgian townhouses flanked by charity shops and takeaways. “I hate going down there. It’s quite intimidating.” It’s people congregating in large groups around the town center that locals seem to find most unsettling, but there are other issues too. In September 2023, to give one example, a former Romanian soldier was arrested for drunkenly firing an air rifle at bottles on the beach.

All the same, Yarmouth is far from a town where migrants run wild. “There’s a very strong perception that Yarmouth is overrun with immigrants, but it’s actually more complicated than that,” a Tory councillor tells me, speaking anonymously. “An awful lot of people seem to think it’s people who have come off the boats, but that’s certainly not true. But there have been quite a lot of migrant workers in the hotels who were working for the agricultural companies.” Those workers are often bussed over an hour away to work 12-hour shifts in chicken factories or to pick and pack fruit and vegetables. Many are put up in former seaside guest houses repurposed as houses of multiple occupation, and with nowhere else to go when not on shift they gather in town instead.

Interesting, too, is how locals distinguish between different migrant groups. One good example is Paul Howlett. He runs Jack’s Flower Stall on Market Place, a business first established by his great-grandmother. Though he’s skeptical of Romanians in Yarmouth — “shoplifting is a problem” — the greying 53-year-old grandfather is full of praise for the “good following” he enjoys from Poles and Albanians. “They are about 70% of our trade,” Howlett adds, “because they still use the markets.”

This blend of commerce and culture hints at something else. For if immigration clearly worries locals, these concerns can’t be separated from the broader economic picture. Since 2019, the town has secured more than £300 million of investment to improve its prospects by transforming rundown homes and derelict commercial warehouses into new business districts, enterprise zones and living quarters.

Yet the benefits may take years to be felt — and right now many feel the outlook remains as dark as the sky over the dog track. Perched on a mobility scooter and wearing an Ipswich Town bobble hat, Neville has watched the area languish. A market trader for 47 years, he recalls a town whose wealth was built on fishing and offshore oil and gas.

Tourism mattered too. “There were so many people here it was untrue,” Neville recalls. “It would start from the first week of July, which was Glasgow Scottish weekend, through to the last horse racing meeting in the second week of September.” Yarmouth was especially popular among coal miners and steel workers, who saved up their wages to splash out in the summer. Neville evokes the boarding houses and holiday camps they filled. But though visitors still bring in millions to the local economy, for Neville it’s no longer the same. “It’s all gone,” he laments, blaming package holidays on the Med for the decline.

So what does lie ahead? In some ways, the past may yet hint at Great Yarmouth’s future. In 1837, Garwood Burton Palmer opened a linen and drapery shop which grew to become Palmers: reputedly the largest independent department store in the UK until its closure in 2020. Today, though, the former four-storey store is being reimagined as “The Place” — a £17 million project encompassing a library and registry office, as well as an education hub delivering courses from the University of Suffolk and the nearby East Coast College.

The idea is to keep young people in the newly minted university town by giving them access to better training and skills. That makes sense: a quarter of people in Great Yarmouth have no formal qualifications, and the numbers with higher educational qualifications is one of the lowest in the country. Staying local also means they’ll spend more here too. Over at Jack’s Flower Stall, certainly, Howlett has first-hand experience of these pressures. He may run a fourth-generation family business, but there’s unlikely to be a fifth. Though he’d love his two daughters to join him, they’ve moved away to work in finance and the NHS.

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At least the local area is being improved. Great Yarmouth Market recently received a $5.2 million overhaul, and today you can enjoy Thai food and jerk chicken alongside your Cromer crab, fries and mushy peas. Around $6 million is also being spent on doing up the surrounding area, with new pavements, lighting, planting and seating. That’s shadowed by other investments. One example here is a third crossing across the River Yare. Another is a redevelopment of South Quay to support offshore businesses. That’s twinned with action elsewhere. Two years ago, the authority secured a High Court injunction banning asylum seekers from being housed in seafront hotels, while on 20 March it agreed to establish a new Public Spaces Protection Order to tackle anti-social behavior. Among other things, the new rule will allow police to deal swiftly with drunk and disorderly behavior in the town center.

Such moves may please Rupert Lowe: in November he submitted a written question to Home Office Minister Angela Eagle asking if other areas with hotels housing “irregular migration” should be encouraged to do the same. Not that Great Yarmouth’s MP always looks so aligned with the local council. In October, it unanimously agreed to build 4,350 new homes over the next 15 years. Lowe, for his part, said he’d fight the plans, arguing that the real problem was uncontrolled immigration.

Whatever happens nationally, and despite his bust up with Reform, Lowe seems to have won favor for now among many I speak to. They feel untroubled about him becoming an independent — though they’d also quite like him to patch things up with Farage. A recent decision to postpone May’s county council elections means there’s no way to test whether Lowe was the first wave in a broader anti-establishment surge, but some suggest to me that, on a turnout of 56%, a large chunk of the Tory vote sat on its hands in 2024.

All the while, some here suggest Lowe could secure his long-term political future by joining the Conservatives. Two local sources point out that when he stays in the constituency, he’s a guest of Lord Agnew, the former Conservative Treasury and Cabinet Office minister, who also backed Kemi Badenoch as party leader. “Reform aren’t going to take him back,” the unnamed councillor adds. “Personally, I’d be happy to have a conversation, but some of my colleagues might need a bit more time.”

Back at the stadium, my five-dollar bill proved ill-spent. Loverly Jubley was squeezed into second just before the finish line. Despite myself, though, a sense of Del Boy optimism takes hold, and I wonder if a five-dollar bet on Lowe to join the Tories might be worth a flutter instead.