Britain’s Christian Political Arms Race

Rupert Lowe is fond of reminding everyone that his favourite historical figure is Oliver Cromwell. One can see the resemblance: a farmer, faithfully married for four decades, who sets down his plough to reluctantly take up an office of state in the years preceding imminent civil unrest. Lowe collects commemorative coins and books about Cromwell. A portrait of the Lord Protector hangs in his office. He named his faithful farm dog after him. While I’m more a Guy Fawkes man myself, it is obvious that Lowe is the Old Noll that Britain needs.

Fortunately, Lowe’s new political party, Restore Britain, isn’t planning on bringing back blasphemy laws or banning music, maypole dancing, and Christmas. (Though Britain’s growing number of Muslim candidates might.) After he announced his plan to stand candidates at the next election on Friday the 13th, Rupert’s former home turned rivals, Reform UK, simultaneously said he would split the vote and that nobody has heard of him. But even John Cleese can see this isn’t a squabble between Judean People’s Fronts. Restore Britain is not a heretical sect, formed from splitting hair-shirts over apostolic succession. As Nigel Farage revealed during his shadow cabinet announcement, Lowe was expelled from Reform because he called for deportations of Pakistani Muslim rape gang collaborators. The “bullying” investigation, police raid of his farmhouse, and confiscation of Lowe’s shotguns were all, in Farage’s eyes, a “brutal” but necessary way of “getting rid of him.”

If such tactics are permissible to prevent people who conspired to cover up the gang rape of children being banished back to Pakistan, then we shouldn’t be shocked that Reform’s surrogates spent the week following Lowe’s announcement comparing Restore supporters to the Nazis. What prompted such insults? Restore’s campaigns director, Charlie Downes’ definition of Britishness, being based on “ancestry” and Christian faith. Downes was guilty of stating what was obvious to everybody until the Cool Britannia messianism of Tony Blair reduced our history and heritage to a liberal pluralist Scout’s pledge of “British Values”. 

And Reform were clearly persuaded, because days later, promises to protect Britain’s Christian heritage were lifted verbatim from Restore’s viral launch video and made Reform’s policy platform. According to Zia Yusuf, the man cosplaying as Shadow Home Secretary, Christianity is “core to the history and the DNA of the country”. Our culture is “irrevocably derived” from Christianity, and without it, we’re “just an economic zone.” 

But what may have perplexed Britain’s Christians more than these promises being made by a Sri Lankan Muslim and an Indian Buddhist who leads Reform’s Jewish groups is that there is a political party, let alone two, bidding for their vote. Since Alastair Campbell’s infamous proclamation, the only god government has done is Allah. Muslim ethnic and sectarian voting is increasingly deciding by-elections, with the Greens’ recent victory over Reform in Gorton & Denton decided, in part, by Hannah Spencer’s campaigning in Urdu to court Gorton’s Muslim community. (That, and Matt Goodwin doing his best Alan Partridge impression while sending Boris Johnson’s cabinet ministers canvassing for him.) Reform complained about “sectarian voting”, while unsuccessfully pandering to the <1,800 non-Muslim minority voters in the seat, at the expense of their natural base, the alienated, non-voting white working class.

A predictable but unplanned side effect of sectarian electoral pandering to every identity group except ours has resulted in a raised cultural consciousness among British natives. Young men are returning to the pews and supporting nativist politics. When politics becomes a zero-sum game among tribal groups for resources, you either take your own side or lose. There is now an unspoken recognition by Reform, and an explicit promise by Restore, that representing this neglected constituency is key to victory. Lowe has inadvertently started an arms race with Farage for the loyalty of Britain’s growing Christian voting bloc.

Clearly, Yusuf’s fellow Muslim, Reform’s Laila Cunningham, didn’t get the memo. The London mayoral candidate keeps slandering Downes and insisting Britain is a secular state. I suggest the former Crown prosecutor refamiliarise herself with the origins of the common law she used to practice. England’s first king, Alfred the Great ,prefaced his Domboc with the Ten Commandments and enumerated our laws the same number of years lived by Moses. Trial by jury, Magna Carta, and Blackstone’s formulation find their foundations in Genesis: in the belief that every human being is capable of manifesting moral dignity, and every innocent life is therefore worth preserving. Neither Cunningham nor her fellow progressives in ostensibly rival parties could take ‘human rights’ for granted if not for canon law, common law, and the Bible.

It is incontrovertible that Britain was as born of Christianity as it was from bogs and blue woad. England was given its name by the Venerable Bede. Our parliamentary system and Bill of Rights were produced by contests and compromises between Christian denominations. The Church purged the British countryside of predators and made us stewards over our green and pleasant lands. Our manners, love of animals, respect for public spaces, expectation of free speech, and spontaneous high-trust society, observed by all from George Orwell to Lee Kuan Yew, are products of the Church. St Augustine of Canterbury converted King Æthelberht and established the Cathedral in 597 AD. As our first Archbishop, he proscribed cousin marriage—a ban later formalised by the Fourth Lateran Council. Taboos on consanguinity remained as a matter of custom even after Henry VIII repealed the law to establish his own ecumenical divorce court. 

The family displaced the clan as the primary social and economic unit, and the individual became the locus of universal moral consideration. The resultant uniquely nuclearised families established small farm holdings and an entrepreneurial market economy. From this followed the Industrial Revolution, our humanitarian empire, and the patrimony presently being squandered by successive Tory and Labour governments.

We are frequently told, “Representation matters.” One has to know who the British people are—the pre-political “We” that Roger Scruton wrote about—and how they came to be, in order to represent them. Dare I say, you have to belong to them and share their culture and worldview. But whether by denying our Christian heritage or reducing British identity to being about ‘how you feel’ or having a British passport, Reform UK has proved incapable of doing that. They seem set on rebuilding the Tower of Babel rather than Jerusalem. As author at this parish, Harrison Pitt, has explained: contrary to the progressivism preached from many a pulpit, concerns about demographic security have biblical foundations. So why should Britain’s Christians vote for those cosplaying as their champions, rather than unapologetic practitioners? 

Restore Britain don’t have half a foot in the pews, for fear of alienating fickle religious minorities. “Britain is a Christian country,” Lowe posted on X, “and under a Restore Britain Government—it will remain a Christian country.” He has pledged to prevent our unknowing consumption of meat consecrated for other faiths by banning non-stun and non-lethal stun halal and kosher slaughter. As he said in Restore’s launch video, “This is Britain, and we will do things our way.” The proper response to resultant accusations of racism is “I don’t care.”

Restore’s unwillingness to affirm liberal myths extends to recognising the harms caused by the sexual revolution. Don’t expect them to welcome endorsements from Bonnie Blue anytime soon. Their spokesmen condemn Britain’s record and rising abortion rate—with a third of pregnancies ended by abortion—as “another rotting stain on our national soul.” Restore recognises how it manufactures consent for mass migration to subsidise Britain’s declining birth rate. They have promised to reverse the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth by Tonia Antoniazzi MP’s private members’ bill and repeal the Assisted Dying Bill if it passes. The Society for Protection of Unborn Children has celebrated that “a party with representation in Westminster has committed to reversing these terrible blows to vulnerable life, were they to become law.”

Cultural taboos are codified by censorship laws to keep these myths in place. As Vice President Vance and the Trump administration recognise, the silencing of dissent has put the UK and Europe on the path to “civilisational erasure.” Christianity is targeted as a close-minded incursion on the unadulterated freedoms of others. Meanwhile, a jizya is paid to foreign faiths, and their ‘community leaders’ entertained in Downing Street. Restore Britain will stop this dhimmitude. The Equality Act (2010) and the state’s statutory duty to fund charities promoting “the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity” will be gone. Punitive hate speech legislation, like Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order (2021), will be repealed. Buffer zones will be abolished. Consensual conversations and silent Christian prayer should not be persecuted. 

The insidious grip that Islam has on our political system will be weakened. Foreign nationals will be banned from voting and standing in elections. Postal voting, the burqa, and the niqab will be prohibited. The Muslim Brotherhood and its domestic proxies will be proscribed. Those voting for sectarian Islamic candidates, campaigning in Urdu, will leave, or be made to leave. We will regain possession of our home again.

The purge of Christianity from British public life has been more psychologically scarring than the felling of Thunor’s oak, or three centuries spent by the Saxons under Norman yoke. Our culture has been defaced, our ruling class replaced, and we haven’t any new cathedrals to show for it.

One Reform grandee described the party to me as “the ends of the Cavaliers, with the means of the Roundheads.” Lowe & Co. are promising a restoration of Christianity to its proper place: not as an electoral golden calf, but as our moral North Star. Restore Britain is fast becoming the patriots’ New Model Army. Onward, Christian soldiers.