"We will defund a university because it did not discipline some of its students for refusing to invite one of our MPs to address their society"? Seriously? Education in Wales is devolved, but Reform UK stands a good chance of winning this year's Senedd elections. If it did, then let us see whether or not it defunded Bangor University. Reform's Leader in Wales is Dan Thomas, who led Barnet Council as a Conservative until 2022 when Labour took overall control of it for the first time ever. Thomas is ineligible to stand for the Senedd, since he does not live in Wales. But despite strenuous denials on both sides that any contact had been made, Reform has managed to recruit James Evans, who went into politics specifically to legalise assisted suicide, and who was interestingly made the Conservatives' Shadow Health Secretary.
Back in the land of First Past the Post, it is by handfuls of votes that Reform sought to hold a few seats and win a lot. Yet not only are Advance UK, the Libertarian Party and the SDP all contesting the Gorton and Denton by-election, but Rupert Lowe has just registered Restore Britain as a political party. In his person, that party has the sitting Member of Parliament that his old adversary, Ben Habib, cannot boast. The question is not how Susan Hall and Gavin Williamson, neither of whom is saying anything, could remain on its advisory board. The question is as to the point of a party that at least until a few hours ago was taking such advice.
What Britain would Lowe Restore? What would he renationalise? He is no better than Nigel Farage, who a year ago was talking about reindustrialisation, but who is now reduced to ranting to a room full of well-heeled pensioners about the evils of working from home. There are social and cultural arguments to be made for and against that. Farage did not make any of them. He gave us nothing more than a screed against people who had grown up under a far less generous Welfare State than had obtained throughout his childhood and well into the adult lives of his audience, and who had never experienced the workers' power that those hearers had cheerfully exercised when they were the age of today's "shirkers". How often does Farage attend either the House of Commons, or anything in Clacton? He has nothing say in, to, for or from a country in which the economy grew by only 0.1 per cent in the final quarter of 2025, with no growth at all in the services sector that made up four fifths of it, while construction shrank by 2.1 per cent, its worst performance in four years.
And then there is Lowe. He is unphased by the question of how he could ban halal slaughter but not kosher, since he wants to ban both. The Greens gave up campaigning to prohibit halal when they realised that that could not be done without prohibiting kosher as well, but not our Rupe. Just as no member of Palestine Action has ever been convicted of a violent crime, nor has any ever called for kosher meat to be made illegal. Then again, nor does Lowe. He just wants the slaughter to be forbidden in this country. If that happened, then he would have a pecuniary interest in the importation of its foreign products.
Lowe also wants to outlaw marriage between first cousins. There is a case for that measure, even if it would not be Restoring anything other than, to a very limited extent, a thousand years of Catholic England. But since the intention would be to prevent genetic defects, then it would be pointless without the criminalisation of sex between first cousins. Again, so be it, but that seems highly unlikely, since we have already raised the age of marriage to two years above the age of consent, a literally preposterous arrangement. Pity poor Imam Ashraf Osmani of Northampton, who has been handed a suspended sentence of 15 weeks' imprisonment for having performed a nikah, which has no legal status whatever, so that two 16-year-olds could have a perfectly lawful sexual relationship without sinning. The second time as farce.
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