The party's supporters in Makerfield should understand the un-British nature of what they may be empowering.
My Times (£) column last week, which I expanded upon here for my Substack readers to explain why the Restore party was not, as it presents itself, the rescuer of British society but its nemesis, has unsurprisingly provoked a furious pushback from the party’s supporters.
Much of this has been offensively personal, distorted and defamatory, seriously misrepresenting what I’ve written or said in other articles or presentations. It’s also riddled with anti-Jewish bigotry.
So what’s new? This goes with the territory in today’s degraded public sphere. But the response in this case is worth noting for two reasons. It illustrates that Restore is deeply unpleasant and toxic. And it illuminates a fissure among nationalist insurgents that threatens to poison British political debate.
At the core of these objections to my article lies a quite comical perplexity about my supposed views.
Heads are being scratched over the fact that what I wrote about the need to push back against predatory Islamism seems to accord with Restore’s own agenda. Yet I described them as a tamer British version of the movement in America of Jew-hating conspiracy theorists and isolationist head-bangers headed by Tucker Carlson.
That provoked derision, since I referred to that movement as the Groypers. Apparently I didn’t even know that the Groypers were actually led by the Hitler fanboy, Nick Fuentes. Horrors! Well duh, of course I did, and have written about them here and elsewhere. But in countless discussions I’ve been having in America in recent months, “the Groypers” has been used as a generic term for this whole unsavoury crew of whom Carlson, who normalised Fuentes in a public love-in (whatever their subsequent apparent falling out), is the most prominent face.
The outrage over this elision bears an unmistakable resemblance to the priceless standoff in the film Life of Brian between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.
Not that these Restore types would likely have got this reference, let alone laughed. Any reference to Judea would probably bring them out in hives. They seem to have a bit of a — let’s use the word properly for once — phobia about Jews. They appear to regard Britain’s Jews as not properly British, and strangely not even as white-skinned.
In seeking to resolve my apparent contradictions, they decided these were due to the fact that, as a “Zionist” Jew, I’d prioritised my own people and had my own country in Israel to go to but didn’t want people like them to do or have the same thing. My crime was therefore a double standard. For me but not for thee!
This was not just deeply offensive but laugh-out-loud ignorant — and most revealing about why there is indeed an unbridgeable chasm between what they and their ilk represent and what I stand for.
I have done more than all of them put together in fighting for decades against the systemic destruction of Britain’s historic identity and core values by the intellectual and political mainstream, and arguing passionately for the British to uphold and defend their identity and values against this process of creeping cultural suicide.
For years, I fought this almost alone. In 1996, my book All Must Have Prizes exposed the destruction of education as the transmission of British identity and western culture through the promotion of multiculturalism and moral relativism.
In The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (1999) I analysed the impact of radical, man-hating feminism which was destroying the traditional family and putting the basis of society itself at risk.
In Londonistan (2006) I warned against the establishment’s surrender to the creeping Islamisation of Britain. In The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power (2010) I explained how progressive ideologies were destroying the nation state and western culture. And The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It (2025) was my urgent plea to the west to understand the crisis of civilisation that was threatening to destroy it and to wake up to the threat before it was too late.
The Restore camp don’t even understand what British identity and core western precepts actually are.
I have repeatedly argued for the defence of Britain’s historic national identity whose core values — currently threatened by the mass, uncontrolled immigration of people, many of whom hold those values in contempt — include one law for all, political freedom and civic equality for all its citizens.
Citizenship is the bargain through which those values are cemented and upheld in the nation. But Restore doesn’t respect citizenship. It means so little to the party that it would deport dual nationals — that is, people holding British citizenship along with another one.
Moreover, British citizenship is a particularly priceless asset. A principal reason why Britain has led the world in combining a strong indigenous culture with an exemplary tolerance of minorities is because Britishness is a civic rather than an ethnic or cultural identity.
The constituent nations of the United Kingdom have their own distinct cultures, but are united under the overarching umbrella of Britishness. Cultural and ethnic minorities accordingly don’t need to identify with the ancient cultures of England, Scotland or Wales to be British. As soon as they become British citizens, they are equal to all the others.
But Restore want to turn Britishness into an ethnic identity. They say Britain needs to return to its Anglo-Saxon and Christian roots— and it must once again be white. So no place in that for black or brown-skinned Brits, then — and no place for Jews. What Restore want, therefore, is not historic Britain but an ethno-state based on blood and soil racism.
That should be repudiated by all decent people. It’s not what Britain is or ever was. It isn’t just poles apart from my view — shared by millions — that mass immigration and Islamisation must be stopped to protect Britain’s historic identity and core values. Restore’s agenda would destroy that identity and core values.
Given where these people are coming from, their egregious misrepresentations of what I have said or written come as no surprise. Thus some of them have cherrypicked my presentation at Jerusalem’s Begin Centre last month to accuse me of promoting a sinister agenda of psychological warfare and using language as a weapon against Israel’s enemies.
This was a manipulative distortion, since what I was actually calling for was an appropriate defence against the psychological warfare and hijack of language being used to demonise Israel and harm the Jewish people, by turning those weapons into a boomerang based on truth rather than lies.
They even objected to my ironic aside in my new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, that diaspora Jews should keep a suitcase packed. This demonstrated, they said, dual loyalty, of all things — because it showed that these Jews always had one foot out of the door!! Zero grasp that the bitterly famous “suitcase packed” remark arises from the need for Jews to defend ourselves against people like them.
Because of their ignorance of Britain’s cultural history, and because they think of the Jews as a foreign body inside Britain, they have no idea that Judaism played a key role in forming Britain’s core values. British monarchs going back into antiquity admired the Hebrew Bible; the 17th century framers of Britain’s constitutional monarchy explicitly drew upon its revolutionary concepts of limited government, a united kingdom and law rooted in the consent of the people.
Instead, these Restore types view the Jews as the enemy of Britain. They harp on about “Jewish terrorism” in Mandate Palestine. They fail to acknowledge that this was a desperate response to Britain’s tearing up its binding treaty commitment to resettle the Jews in their ancient homeland of the land of Israel. The British thus caused thousands of them to be murdered in Nazi Europe by refusing them entry to British-controlled Palestine, offering the land instead to Hitler’s allies, the Palestinian Arabs, who had pledged to murder every last Jew in the Middle East if Hitler won the war.
Because these Restore types come from a very dark place, they are eaten up with resentment that, in the State of Israel, the Jews have their own country while the British have nowhere else to go to escape the destruction of their culture. “The Jews have their own ethno-state”, they rage, “so why don’t they support us having one of our own?” But that comparison falls at the first hurdle.
Israel does not correspond to Restore’s desired ethno-state. Most Israeli Jews are brown or black skinned; a majority are from refugee families ethnically cleansed from Middle Eastern or African lands, with just under half having come from Europe. Plus around 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and there are also Druze and others.
In addition, Judaism itself is not just an ethnicity but also comprises a religion and a people. There is no other people, religion or ethnicity like it. It is unique.
Most people in the non-Jewish world fail to appreciate that Judaism constitutes a unique fusion of the people, the religion and the land. Many diaspora Jews fail to grasp that, too. Unless they do so, they can’t properly understand their own Jewish identity; and if they can’t do that, they can’t adequately defend themselves and the Jewish people against the hideous war of demonisation and delegitimisation being waged against Israel, with its corresponding attacks on Jews across the west.
That’s why I told an audience of American Jews at Shurat HaDin’s Rage Against the Hate conference last year that they need to stop thinking of their Judaism as an add-on and place it instead at the forefront of their identity. Such is the abject ignorance and bigotry of the Restore crowd, however, that they have grotesquely misrepresented this as an expression of Jewish supremacism or “Israel First”.
They don’t understand real love of a people, culture and nation. They don’t love historic Britain; they love instead what they want it to become — transformed in their own repugnant image.
The true Restore mindset has been illustrated by the experience of Jewish Chronicle reporter Jane Prinsley. As she has written in the JC, she triggered a staggering firestorm of abuse by reporting on something said by Restore’s leader, Rupert Lowe, about Britain’s “grooming gangs” scandal.
This is a horrific and still unresolved issue, involving the pimping, rape and other abuses of thousands of vulnerable, under-age white girls by overwhelmingly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men over more than two decades— and it’s still going on.
Referring to this, Lowe accused the government of covering up “something the equivalent of the Holocaust”. However appalling the “grooming gangs” scandal undoubtedly is, it most certainly does not compare to the industrialised, genocidal slaughter of six million Jews.
But when Prinsley noted on X that this followed an off-colour joke Lowe had made about Jews as well as his intended policy of banning kosher and halal slaughter, she was attacked by an online mob subjecting her to a flood of vile Jew-hatred including remarks such as: “It’s much worse, the grooming gangs actually happened,” that Lowe should “deport Jane with the browns,” and calling her a “Goebbels disciple”.
Prinsley wrote:
Another account, using the cartoon toad that has become a mascot for sections of the online extreme far-right known as “Groypers”, wrote: “Let’s make you famous, Jane.” And sure enough, the so-called “Groyper army” descended. According to these trolls, I am a “sickening creature” and a “Jewish parasite,” a “dumb b*tch” who is “pro rape” and “the absolute worst kind of filthy piece of sh*t you can imagine” and also a “vile f***ing c***” who will “burn in hell”.
This is the true face of Restore. The party is apparently going down a storm in Makerfield, where a critical by-election is due to take place in a couple of weeks’ time and where many voters are desperate for a political party that will hand their culture back to them. They should realise they may be empowering something rather different.
*** My new book, Fighting the Hate: A Handbook for Jews Under Siege, can be bought on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other Amazon sites.
My previous book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk and other Amazon sites.
You can access all my blogposts on my website, melaniephillips.substack.com
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