Slopulism Strikes Back

The End of Restore Britain and the Coming of British MAGA

The recent peace offer from Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain to Nigel Farage marks a decisive moment in the trajectory of the British right. Restore Britain, launched with hopes of providing a harder edge and genuine alternative, has reached the end of its independent road. The future of the right is British MAGA. By the next general election every significant party and faction on that side of politics will have been folded into one slopulist force.

You’ll never destroy the Tories.

The details of Lowe’s proposal are irrelevant. The details of Farage’s carefully ambiguous response are also irrelevant. Electoral promises are never kept in any case; anything said before or during an election is air – as the past 100 years of our beloved liberal democracy should demonstrate beyond all doubt. There are two matters of great relevance, however. First, the mainstream press immediately framed the exchange between Lowe and Farage as the start of talks, a possible pact, a coalition. Second, GB News and TalkTV began booking Restore-aligned figures again. Most notably, Carl Benjamin appeared on the Daily Express and GB News not as a far-right bogeyman but as another talking head. The media landscape is being primed, and Carl is being welcomed into the ‘family of faces’ as a kind of bridge between the mainstream right and the so-called ‘online right’, which are shorthand for Reform UK and Restore Britain.

Furthermore, Connor Tomlinson, a notable political operator, did not respond to the news with dismay, but rather with this:

Christmas comes but once a year and Rupert Lowe tried to bring it early on Sunday when he dropped the following 12-minute video directly addressing Nigel Farage and proposing that Reform and Restore set their differences aside and work together for the good of the country. And I’m all behind this just to declare my interests. I’m not loyal to one or the other particular party but I do have friends in leadership positions in both parties they’re good men, they’re principally concerned about the fate of the country and they have reached an impasse where Restore has kind of acted like a Reform nudge unit, forcing Reform to take positions of stronger conviction on things like immigration, demographics, and repealing certain laws. And Reform are kind of grateful because they’ve forced them to go to territory they wanted to occupy any way, but they were too worried that there were too many political mines to be swept before they could go there.^[1]

Connor perhaps sees, as I have suggested on recent streams covering this, a bridge back into some semblance of mainstream acceptance for himself and his career without a real loss of face.

None of this is the behaviour of two camps preparing for permanent civil war. It is the classic pro-wrestling storyline in which former tag-team partners feud for a season and then bury the hatchet when the larger narrative requires it. The feud itself was always limited. One can already imagine Carl Benjamin and Raw Egg Nationalist shaking hands and concluding they were always on the same side in any case. Restore never succeeded in opening clear daylight between itself and Reform on the only issue that would have signalled a genuine break with the regime: foreign policy and certain special relationships. This is primarily because there is an American interest in the British right, which comes with its own funding caveats. The overarching project is to remake the British right in the mould of MAGA – more on this later. Beyond personality, there is little to separate Reform and Restore: on immigration rhetoric the two parties have largely converged. On economic messaging, they have both recycled the same classical-liberal platitudes of welfare cuts and bootstraps that the Conservatives have offered for forty years. Without decisive differentiation, Restore remained, in the eyes of most voters, simply another version of Reform and therefore, to be blunt, has no reason to exist.

Here, the iron law of oligarchy operates without mercy. Starting a new national party from scratch requires infrastructure, local knowledge, ground game and money that cannot be conjured in eighteen months. Restore performed respectably in Great Yarmouth and scraped low double digits in places, but in the Greater Manchester mayoral contest it managed only forty-six to forty-nine thousand votes and finished behind the Greens. That is not the platform from which one overturns the system. The party therefore becomes useful only as a temporary vehicle for containing energy that might otherwise have drifted further out. Once the energy is safely inside the electoral arena it can be redirected. Lowe’s offer supplies the golden bridge. Influencers who spent six months attacking Farage now have a respectable offramp: personalities are set aside for the good of the country. Carl, Connor and the rest can rejoin the broader right without public humiliation. The harder nationalists who provided online energy will eventually be discarded; they are not needed once the bulk of the five-to-seven percent of base support has been reabsorbed into the machine.

The wider mathematics of the system make the outcome inevitable. Andy Burnham has united the left. The energy that built up around the Green Party and Zack Polanski is now a distant memory, while the left versions of Carl and Connor, such as Aaron Bastani, No Justice MTG and so on, quietly crawl back to Labour. Bitter and toxic Owen Jones appears to be the sole holdout, but he’ll likely fold as he has dozens of times before. Thus, Labour are back as a serious electoral threat to Farage. First-past-the-post punishes fragmentation. Twenty percent of the electorate still defaults to the Conservatives out of habit. Add Reform’s share and the residual Restore vote and the combined total is enough to defeat Burnham. The only way to realise that total is merger or formal alliance. The Conservatives and Reform were always going to combine, as I’ve maintained from the start; Restore simply accelerates the timetable by removing the last independent right-wing vehicle. Thus T-1000 will reform as an all-singing, all-dancing clown show of big-tent populism that talks tough on boats, performs cultural grievance, and leaves the deeper structures of power untouched as Julia Hartley-Brewer gurns in thumbnails.

The gurning face of Julia Hartley-Brewer.

This is British MAGA. In America, the original MAGA movement was absorbed into the Republican Party. The energy of the base was harnessed, the personnel were rotated, the red lines on foreign policy and elite interests remained intact, and the whole apparatus continued to serve the same underlying order. Britain is now undergoing the same process at an accelerated pace because the margins are tighter and the left is already consolidating. The media ecosystem owned by the Murdochs and Marshalls has long preferred a single compliant right that can win elections and then govern within acceptable limits. They are receiving exactly that. The online right that once imagined itself a disruptive force will find its spokesmen elevated into the family of faces – GB News panels, newspaper columns, perhaps even safe seats – while the underlying policies remain continuous with the previous consensus.

Slopulism is the method. Farage has always been the master of low-cost, high-emotion content that delivers dopamine hits without structural change. Restore attempted to occupy the same space and lost. I said from the start: you cannot out-slop the slop master. The sole shot Restore had was presenting themselves as the serious non-slop, non-clown show alternative to Reform, exposing Farage for the charlatan that he is. They failed to do this and, if anything, went in the opposite direction. My hopes that it might be otherwise were, finally, cope. Oh well.

The unified force that emerges from all this will, I am afraid, be one pure slopulism: constant agitation about the latest migrant boat, endless culture-war skirmishes, performative toughness that evaporates the moment it meets institutional resistance. It will keep the base emotionally invested while ensuring that no genuine threat to the managerial order materialises. It will also have total fealty to the same special interests that the original MAGA has so dutifully served. For those interests, everything. For you, dear voter, nothing. Elite theory predicts precisely this outcome. Organised minorities always absorb and neutralise organised challenges from below. The populist delusion consists in believing that electoral mobilisation alone can alter that reality.

By the time the next election arrives the landscape will be binary again. On one side stands Burnham’s Labour, possibly incorporating residual progressive and Muslim votes. On the other stands the British MAGA formation that has swallowed Conservatives, Reform, Restore and the compliant sections of the online right. The residual genuine nationalists will be left outside, their energy spent, their numbers too small to matter under first-past-the-post. The system will present the contest as an existential choice, the most important election of our lifetimes, the last chance to save the country. Voters will respond accordingly. The winner will govern exactly as every other government has done. The permanent structures will remain. The cycle will continue.

Restore Britain provided a brief and instructive experiment. It demonstrated both the hunger for something harder and the extreme difficulty of building an independent organisation capable of resisting the gravitational pull of the existing parties and media. Once that experiment concluded, the path of least resistance reasserted itself. The future of the right is British MAGA. All parties will be folded into one slopulist force. The dream of a genuine alternative is over.

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^[1] Taken from this video:

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