“Are you the Judean People’s Front?” enquires Brian. “Fuck off,” comes the retort. “We’re the People’s Front of Judea.” Monty Python’s Life of Brian was released in 1979, at a time when radical political groupuscules tended to be Left-wing. Today, though the groups are still small, radical, and fractious, their politics are very different.
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?
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 spiralling, 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.
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 programme, 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 programme 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 round the electoral element of the political process, and take direct aim at these entrenched bureaucratic obstacles to change.
“The risk is that this approach reproduces the same split as ever, with a wonk class insulated from and contemptuous of the plebs.”
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 programme 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.
