How Restore are Hurting Farage

For the better part of the last year, a lot of attention has been paid to reforms rising the polls, and the possibility of a Nigel Farage premiership.This is because, for the first time really since the SDP -Liberal alliance in the early 1980s, a party other than the Conservatives and Labour were topping the polls.As time went on, this began to look less and less like a one -off, and more like an indication that Britain may be on the verge of a quiet revolution, one which could see the collapse of the main parties and the election of Reform UK to government.In the last few weeks, though, this narrative seems to be shifting somewhat.While Reform still tops the polls, we've already seen their lead start to drop off.The fact that Andy Burnham appears poised to replace Starmer as Prime Minister, alongside the quiet rise of the even further right -wing challenger party Restore Britain, further threaten to hurt reform's polling lead even further.

As we've already discussed Burnham in other videos on this channel, and we'll discuss him further as we get closer to the Makerfield by -election, we haven't really discussed Restore Britain that much.Given that some pollsters, for example Findout now in April, have Restore as high as 9 % nationally, given that polling has showed that Restore could actually cost Reform the by -election in Makefield, and given that Restore seems to be dragging Reform to the right, in this video we thought we'd have a look at whether Restore Britain is actually starting to replace Reform.

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Now, let's start this video by having a look at a very brief history of the party.Unsurprisingly, Rupert Lowe started his parliamentary career in the Reform Party, being elected as the Reform MP for Great Yarmouth in 2024.Initially, Lowe appeared close to Farage, becoming his business and agriculture spokesperson.However, clearly by March 2025, things had started to go awry.Lowe criticized reform as being a protest party led by the Messiah, and that it was too early to tell whether Farage would be a good Prime Minister.The very next day, Lowe was reported to the police by reform after Zia Youssef, another senior member of the party, claimed that Lowe made verbal threats against him.

As a result of this, the Great Yarmouth MP had the whip removed.While Lowe denied the allegations, he never returned to reform and claimed that the allegations against him were vexatious.In the end, the CPS didn't press charges.Nonetheless, rather than sit as a backbencher in the Commons, Lowe opted to start his own political organisation, Restore Britain.From the very start, it was clear that Lowe would try to position the organisation to the right of reform.Which made sense, given that Lowe always appeared to be to the right of Farage, with Farage historically arguing against mass deportations, suggesting they were a political impossibility.

Even when Farage backtracked on this, Lowe suggested his plan still didn't go far enough, with him arguing in favour of the mass deportation of every single illegal migrant and the abolition of the entire asylum system.In many ways then, Lowe is trying to out -Farage Farage.He's flanking reform to the right and trying to sweep up voters that are frustrated that reform isn't going further on policy.On the surface, this appears to be something of a strange strategy, given that polling shows that reform not being right -wing enough isn't actually that common a criticism of the party.YouGov polling from January 2025 shows that only 1 % of those considering voting for reform claimed that them not being right -wing enough was their biggest reservation about the party.Conversely, 7 % said them being too right -wing was their biggest reservation.

In fact, the same poll showed that reform's policies on immigration was the second biggest draw to the party, behind only the fact that it represents a change from Labour and the Conservatives.Taken together, this indicated that a right -wing challenger party might not actually hurt reform all that much, and that reform seemed to have calibrated their ideological positioning pretty well.However, interestingly, there are signs of the Restore Britain ascendancy.Nationally, Restore is polling at between 3 and 6%.While this might not be enough to usurp Reform, it is enough to hurt them.This is best shown in the upcoming Makerfield by -election, where Restore are polling at 7%.

Given that Reform is currently only 3 percentage points behind Labour, it's entirely possible that Restore could be the reason that Reform lose.Moreover, according to polling guru Professor Sir John Curtis, Reform has already lost about 1 in 8 of their 2024 voters to Restore.So, what's going on here?Why are Restore hurting Reform so much, despite polling last year indicating that a party like Restore probably wouldn't be able to make that much of an impact?Well, there were a few things going on.First, it's worth commenting on the limitations of that YouGov poll we mentioned earlier.

The poll was conducted before Restore Britain was even established, and before reform had taken the lead.This means that they were unaware that a viable party to the right of reform was an option, and therefore had less reason to be frustrated that reform's policies weren't more right -wing.It also meant that reform still looked like an insurgent challenger party taking on the political mainstream.Since then, though, they've topped the national polls for more than a year, won a small number of by -elections, and now control a number of councils.Or, to put it another way, reform are becoming more established, and Restore are now looking like the insurgent challengers.The second thing behind Restore Britain's rise is the increase in

While this is at least in part down to the support of Elon Musk, who has posted his support for Lowe and Restore Britain on X on multiple occasions throughout the last year, and has helped Lowe garner more than 750 ,000 followers on the platform, it's also in part down to Lowe's success on other platforms.Lowe has more than 1 .3 million followers on Facebook, for instance, more than Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch combined.The result of this is that Lowe is starting to make a name for himself.Ed Shackle, a director of the Public First Research Agency, has pointed out that Lowe has started being brought up by focus groups organically, and has even suggested that it's people in our focus groups who were the most enthusiastic Faragebackers a year or two ago, who are now the ones gently mentioning Restore's name.Now, before wrapping this video up, we should point out that we are aware that Restore isn't exactly topping the polls.However, it is likely that they'll put pressure on Reform to move to the right, which will force Farage to make a decision to yield to this pressure and try to win back voters lost to Restore, or hold the line and continue trying to win voters over from more mainstream parties.

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