The video of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak at the hands of Vickrum Digwa in Southampton is horrifying. But Nigel Farage’s decision to respond to these events by calling for “pure cold rage” and insisting we recognise that “white lives matter” is a worrying sign of an increasingly racialised turn in the politics of the British right.

This shift has not taken place in a vacuum. For a year now, while progressives have worried about how to beat Reform, Farage’s party has faced a new threat that has come not from the left, but a party even further to the right. Restore Britain, a party founded by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, has been deeply critical of Farage’s outfit for not being radical enough. These criticisms have put pressure on Reform – and they may push British politics even further right.

The roots of Restore Britain can be traced back to Lowe’s bitter departure from Reform in March last year. Soon after Lowe described Reform as “a protest party led by the Messiah”, the party’s chair, Zia Yusuf, alleged that Lowe had made threats of physical violence against him – and several party employees accused the Great Yarmouth MP of bullying within his parliamentary office. Lowe has denied both allegations.

In June last year, Lowe launched Restore as a “political movement” before transforming it into a fully fledged national political party this February. While multimillionaire Lowe is its only MP, a small clique of young activists, including Charlie Downes, Harrison Pitt and Lewis Brackpool, have been some of its most prominent spokespersons.

The launch of the party was met with enthusiasm across large sections of the far right, particularly among those who view Reform as insufficiently hardline on immigration. Last June, during the launch event in his constituency of Great Yarmouth, Lowe drew applause from supporters after promoting a policy centred on large-scale deportations, declaring that “millions will have to go”.

In fact, in recent months Hope Not Hate has documented the deeply concerning array of high-profile extremists who have gravitated to the party, resulting in an important realignment. Restore has drawn together an uneasy coalition that includes figures sitting just to the right of Reform, all the way through to open fascists.

In April, Lowe boasted that Restore’s membership had surged above 130,000. These numbers are impossible to confirm and appear to include some international supporters, but there is no question the party has grown quickly – thanks at least in part to a range of large branch meetings and campaign days all over the country. If this figure is accurate, it would place Restore’s membership on par with that of the Conservatives, making it roughly nine times larger than the British National party (BNP) and seven times larger than the National Front (NF) at the height of their influence.

Initially, Reform sought to dismiss Restore as an unserious annoyance. However, its strong showing in Great Yarmouth at May’s local elections, where it won all nine seats it contested on Norfolk county council, has clearly unsettled many at Reform HQ. Intensifying this concern is recent polling in Makerfield, which showed Labour’s Andy Burnham just three points ahead of the Reform candidate, Robert Kenyon, and Restore Britain in third place with 7%. The heightened stakes of the impending byelection and the new polling have unsurprisingly worsened relations between the two rightwing parties.

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s recent vocal support for Restore has only increased Reform’s concern about its rival. In response to Lowe’s claim on X that “Farage and Reform tried to put me in prison because I backed the mass deportation of Pakistani child rapists and their foreign wives/relatives who allowed it to happen”, Musk wrote: “Only Restore Britain can save Britain.”

A flurry of supportive posts by the South African tech mogul finally forced Farage to hit back, telling the Telegraph: “Elon Musk has decided he will try to split the right of British politics as best he can. This is supporting a party that’s one man with a social media account. Quite what he’s trying to achieve, I have no idea.”

While Reform is primarily concerned with a rival party dividing the rightwing vote, Restore supporters’ objection to Reform is more ideologically motivated. Some have targeted Reform for working with ex-Conservatives associated with the so-called Boriswave of recent migrants, while others oppose the party’s willingness to field what they euphemistically describe as “non-Christian” candidates.

As a result, Reform is being portrayed by Restore as too soft, centrist and therefore unable to address Britain’s problems, especially as they concern issues relating to demographic change. Lowe, on the other hand, is happy to call for mass deportations to “reverse” this trend, and several key individuals associated with the party openly push for “remigration”.

When Restore sprang up last year, the existence of a party to his right enabled Farage to frame Reform as a mainstream and respectable alternative to the Tories. It also allowed Reform to jettison some of its most extreme supporters, though plenty remain. At worst, Restore was a mild irritant, a source of online attacks that had little tangible impact.

However, Restore’s subsequent growth has clearly taken Reform by surprise and the party’s leadership increasingly fears that Lowe’s outfit will eat into its voter base. For progressives, the danger is that Reform will shift even further rightwards, especially on issues like immigration and deportation, in an effort to prevent further loss of support to Restore.

Even if Restore fails to crystallise into a major electoral threat, it may still shape the political terrain. The presence of a large party with a sitting MP so far to the right is unprecedented in British history. Restore’s activists have been given platforms on mainstream media outlets and normalised in ways that the BNP rarely was. This has allowed very hardline rhetoric to seep into mainstream political discourse. The best example of this is Restore’s role in pushing ethnically rooted definitions of British and English identity in outlets such as TalkTV and GB News. Commenting on one such appearance, Restore’s campaign director, Charlie Downes, posted: “Reform UK believe that anyone from anywhere can become British. Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”

In that sense, Restore is part of a broader re-racialisation of the British right. Its politics are more overtly racial than Reform’s and if it gains traction, it will help normalise language and ideas that were, until recently, confined to the margins. The risk is not just that it might win votes, but that it could, even without winning, shift the boundaries of acceptable opinion and push British politics to the extreme right.

Today’s cynical wrangling over the death of Henry Nowak may be an ominous sign of what’s to come.

• Joe Mulhall is director of research at the anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate

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