Restore’s membership is reported now to have topped 100,000, and continues to soar. At just £20 a year and with no sort of activism test of commitment, there’s not exactly a high bar, but the figure is still testament to ‘far-right’ disillusionment with Nigel Farage’s love-in with failed and recycled Tories. It also reminds us of just how much good Mr. Lowe could achieve if he put his growing army to effective work building a really solid base.

I have already commented on the potential for the Reform/Restore split to inadvertently hand us over to a Labour/Green/SNP/Marxist/Islamist coalition until 2034 (and, given the number of Brits who would emigrate, while open borders immigration replaces them, in perpetuity thereafter) so I will not rehash this. I’ve pointed out this very dangerous elephant in the room.

Instead, let us look at the other giant pachyderm in the living room – the fact that Restore still hasn’t even been registered with the Electoral Commission, without which it cannot stand a single candidate.

This poses Rupert and his supporters with one very obvious problem, and one which is less obvious, but even more dangerous.

My guess is that Lowe is putting off registering the party so that he has a good excuse for not standing in May’s local council elections. This is a wise move. Restore candidates would suffer the same catastrophic results as afflicted Advance in the Gorton and Denton by-election. Their hardworking and very credible candidate, Nick Buckley, running on a Restore-style platform headlined by the grooming gangs issue, was beaten even by the Monster Raving Loony Party as voters faced the stark choice of Reform or the watermelon Greens.

Rupert’s problem, however, is that every day in which he puts off registering his party is another day in which someone else can do it instead. In which case, he would be forced to come up with a new name, which would set his brand recognition meter back to zero and make even worse the current confusion with Reform, Advance, Restore, Reclaim and UKIP.

Still, provided no-one else bothers to beat him to it, this first hurdle will be cleared very easily. The second, by contrast, could well lead to an extremely expensive legal battle which would prevent the registration of Restore – or indeed any other party – by Rupert Lowe.

This is the fact that, after the Equality Commission’s lawfare operation against the BNP, the Electoral Commission declared itself to have the power to refuse to register any new party whose constitution or political aims were in any way ‘discriminatory’. The ban on the registration of such parties was explained very clearly on their website, and was supported by the Equality quango.

Several ultra-far-right parties have been refused registration under this purported power, despite having aims and objectives much more vaguely and moderately worded that Rupert Lowe’s “millions must go” stance. Take another look at his X post illustrating this article. Yes, of course I agree with it, but do you really think the liberal quangocracy will reward this with party registration – unless it suits them?

Several years ago, however, the anti-discrimination ‘guidance’ vanished abruptly from the Electoral Commission’s website, which probably accounts for the fact that Mr. Lowe doesn’t even seem to be aware of the problem.

This happened after a pro-indigenous lawyer and I wrote to our MPs, providing legal chapter and verse as to how the Electoral Commission’s position was an abuse of power and, in itself, discrimination against the rights of indigenous Britons in general and of the English in particular. Since both the Electoral and Equality Commission were set up by Parliament, they remain within the purview of the Parliamentary Ombudsman.

We urged our MPs to submit our points to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, requesting that he review this outrageously anti-democratic power grab by these unelected quangos. This isn’t really a matter in which the parliamentary authorities have any wriggle room, their errant quangos have drastically exceeded their proper powers, so they should be brought to heel.

Both MPs made reassuring noises, but in the end neither approached their Ombudsman. We then approached several MPs on the far-right of the Tory party (I know it’s not exactly Genghis Khan territory, but beggars can’t be choosers).

These, however, replied by saying that, while they sympathised with our points, they were unable to do anything because MPs are only allowed to put matters before the Parliamentary Ombudsman on behalf of their own constituents. We were thus referred back to people who had already refused to take action.

Contacted about the vanished claim to the power to prevent the registration of politically incorrect parties, the Electoral Commission have said that “the matter is under review”. They claim to know nothing and to be unable to provide guidance. We’ll all just have to wait and see.

Mine’s a Pint of Woodfordes Wherry, Rupert

Now, it might just be that the work which my legal eagle friend and I did on this has already done the job. The EC may have taken on board the fact that they overstepped the mark and would ultimately lose in court, so have already decided to drop their claim to power which parliament never intended them to have. If Rupert is allowed to register Restore without any fuss, then he owes me a couple of pints – because getting that himself from scratch would have incurred enormous legal costs.

On the other hand, they may still be up for a fight to retain their purported power of life and death over anti-immigration dissident parties. If and when Mr. Lowe does get to submitting an application to register Restore, he may well still be rebuffed with a refusal, on the grounds that Restore’s stated policy aims are incompatible with the Equality Laws, and the Electoral Commission’s legal duty to abide by them.

At that stage, of course, Mr. Lowe, as a sitting MP, can go to the Parliamentary Ombudsman and complain. After the usual delays in such bureaucratic matters, he may get a ruling in his favour, or he may not. In the former case, the Electoral and Equality Commissions are likely to hot-foot it to the High Court. In the latter case, that will be where Mr. Lowe will have to go.

That would spark a court battle costing huge sum of money and likely, by the time appeals take it all the way to the Supreme Court, or even the ECHR, to remain unsettled until after the next general election. Which would at least mean that hundreds of Restore candidates – being unable to stand – would be spared the humiliation of losing their deposits, or the less likely knowledge that their 6% – 7% ‘successes’ handed us over to the Coalition from Hell.

That said, there is a possibility that Starmer & Co would fast-track Mr. Lowe’s appeal, and have words with the liberal-left quangocrats or activist judges to secure Restore’s right to register and to stand. This would not result from any sudden enthusiasm for democratic principles, but in the hope that Restore’s activist base and online popularity will indeed translate into enough actual votes to save a number of Labour seats, or at least hand them to their Green future coalition partners rather than Reform.

The fact that neither Mr. Lowe nor any observers of the Reform/Advance/Restore circus have spotted this gigantic elephant shows just how ill-informed and amateurish this whole populist right scene really is. They all claim to stand for revolutionary change in British politics, and that they must and will usher this in by 2029, or Britain will crash and burn in civil war.

Actually, they may well finally have got something right with that last claim; their counter-jihad allies are certainly working very hard to help make it happen, and even many liberal commentators now acknowledge that the country is divided and tense as never before.

But really, if you think the country is headed for civil war, is hoping that a fanatical, shameless and totalitarian elite will let an old age pensioner come from nowhere and win a general election really the best you can do? People who do, need to get a grip. Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.

https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/the-second-elephant-in-mr-lowes-living