Advance and Restore

If Nigel Farage thought that Matt Goodwin were even close to winning Gorton and Denton, then he would be there this weekend, and not in the Indian Ocean. Goodwin may yet lose by fewer votes than had been taken by Nick Buckley, who was Advance UK at Close of Nominations, since that was before Restore Britain had become a political party. Restore is growing like Topsy, but it seems to be made up overwhelmingly of very young men who were immensely active online. They are ruining their careers, by no means only in politics.

On Wednesday, North Northamptonshire Councillors Darren Rance and Jack Goncalvez defected to Restore from Reform UK. But by Friday morning, Councillor Rance professed to have been “bombarded with desperate messages from Restore” and to have joined “reluctantly”, only to discover, “From messages I received from both Restore supporters and those opposed, it’s clear that what this organisation stands for is far more sinister than I first thought.” Reform’s Group Leader, Councillor Martin Griffiths, graciously took him back. Expect a lot more of this. Some of us have seen it all before.

Goodwin is banging on that the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, drives a car. She is a plumber and a trainee plasterer, so of course she does. But having done the Green Party a favour that will never be reciprocated, the Workers Party, which took 10.3 per cent of the vote at Gorton and Denton in 2024, and the closely allied Independent Left need to take on the incompatibility of Green anti-car sentiment with the petrolhead culture of British South Asians. Last month, the Court of Appeal struck down Lutfur Rahman’s attempt to implement his election promise to remove three Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in Tower Hamlets. For good or ill, that is where the votes are.

For well over 20 years, there have been expressions of incomprehension at the perfectly logical alliance between a Left that was thoroughly anti-war, and anti-war Muslims who so agreed with left-wing economic policies that they had overwhelming voted Labour long before Tony Blair came along. But the Greens support the inexorable logic of Thatcherism in such forms as drug legalisation, gender self-identification, “sex work”, assisted suicide, unrestricted immigration, re-joining the EU, the war in Ukraine, and all sorts of other terrible things. Do they regret the defeat of the miners in 1985? That is a yes-no question, and the Greens should always be asked it.

This side of a Zarah Sultana takeover of Your Party, the Greens are the only British party in any significant alignment with the political philosophy of Noam Chomsky, making them as much a part of the Epstein Class as the centrists, the right-wing populists, and the right-wing elitists. George Galloway and the Morning Star may have endorsed them this once. But from Friday onwards, they need to take their gloves off. Some of us have never put ours on.