It was a Mail on Sunday headline with all the ferocity of a general election campaign, but the target was not Labour. “Restore Activists at ‘White Supremacy Summit’,” the front page declared, claiming supporters of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain had attended an event that hosted calls for “a white-only Europe”. The vehemently anti-Restore editorial, displayed prominently on its app, was blunt: “Anyone who really cares about Britain won’t vote Restore.” Instead, it urged voters to back Reform UK.
The extraordinary attack on a party that regards Nigel Farage’s Reform as too weak on deporting migrants is a sign of how the fracturing of the British right is playing out in real time. The immediate trigger is Thursday’s pivotal Makerfield byelection, where Andy Burnham is attempting to return to parliament and challenge Keir Starmer for the Labour leadership. Burnham is the favourite, but Reform’s Robert Kenyon is his challenger, and there is a realistic possibility that Restore’s splitting of the rightwing vote could be the difference.
“Mail on Sunday attacks Restore as split right could hand Burnham victory in Makerfield.”
Tactical voting on the left could be fundamental to a Labour victory. Recent polling by Opinium found that more than half of those who said they would vote Green or Liberal Democrat in a general election planned to back Burnham in the byelection. In contrast, only about a third of Restore supporters were willing to switch to Reform. Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, described the arithmetic as stark. “In Makerfield, all of the other parties are so far out of contention that the tactical logic here is stark. You’re not going to get a Green MP in Makerfield, you’re not going to get a Lib Dem MP in Makerfield. So it’s really obvious what you’ve got to do.”
At the last general election, the Lib Dems won 7% and the Greens 4.5% in Makerfield – combined significantly more than Burnham’s narrow poll lead. In May’s council election in Wigan, the Greens won 10.5% and the Lib Dems 3.5%. Byelection polling now puts them at less than 1% and less than 2% respectively. Restore, which did not stand in either previous election, is polling at 6.5% according to Opinium – roughly similar to Labour’s lead.
Ford said Burnham “clearly is popular” in Manchester, adding: “So I’d have to say on balance, polling, context of the race, nature of the candidates, you’d think it’s advantage Andy at this point. But not in the bag by any means.” He described Restore’s campaign as “the opposite of tactical voting”, explicitly focused on splitting off Reform voters. “The tactical voting logic is very obvious that they shouldn’t do that, but clearly there are people who are so discontented that they ignore the logic.”
The next day, the Daily Mail followed up with another blow: “Restore is the ‘new home for neo-Nazis’,” citing Lowe’s claim over the weekend that if the far-right activist Tommy Robinson wanted to join Restore, it was “up to him”. A Reform source supplied the killer quote. Lowe, however, saw the attacks as a sign of success. “Two Daily Mail front pages in a row abusing Restore Britain in the most spectacular fashion,” he said. “We’ve got the buggers on the run.” The question now is whether that run leads straight to a Labour victory.