Restore Britain party’s links to Europe’s far-Right

In order to share the spotlight with Europe’s most famous anti-immigration influencer, Rupert Lowe , the leader of Restore Britain , had to dust off his passport and fly to Italy. The MP for Great Yarmouth had no choice: his host had been banned from the UK for being a “threat” to society. “Millions have to go,” he would go on to tell Eva Vlaardingerbroek , Dutch hard-Right activist, during their interview, before attacking migrants’ “clannish cultures”.

Mr Lowe founded Restore after a bad-tempered split with Nigel Farage ’s Reform UK, which he now outflanks on the Right. It cemented his unlikely transformation from 1980s Thatcherite to modern ethno-nationalist, a term he disavows. Neo-Nazis and Holocaust-deniers lurking in Restore’s membership have already been exposed by The Telegraph . Less well known are the party’s links to European white nationalists demanding the mass deportations, or “remigration”. of foreigners.

They have formed a network of politicians and social media stars who are dragging hard-Right parties even further to the extremes. Ms Vlaardingerbroek, 30, is behind the Save Europe Act, a petition for an EU-wide halt on immigration and forced expulsions of both legal and illegal migrants. It warns “native populations” are being replaced by “non-European migrants” threatening the “long-term survival of European civilisation”. It has secured almost 800,000 signatures of its one million target after being relentlessly promoted online by its smartphone-savvy supporters.

These supporters include Martin Sellner , 37, an Austrian former neo-Nazi who is also banned from Britain, and Toni Estevez, a chiselled 24-year-old remigration activist from Spain. Mr Lowe has signed the Save Europe Act, and the former Brexit Party MEP’s photograph is prominently displayed on its website. “I think everybody in the European family should sign up,” the 68-year-old Mr Lowe told Ms Vlaardingerbroek, who has 1.2 million followers on X and 1.3 million on Instagram.

Mr Lowe was unapologetic when contacted by The Telegraph. He said: “Restore Britain has made our position clear on immigration – we will deport the entire illegal migrant population, along with those foreign nationals who refuse to work, commit crime, can’t speak our language, claim benefits, live in social housing, hate our way of life and are a burden on the British people. “Citizenships will be reviewed, and stripped where fraud or deception are uncovered.

The era of mass immigration will end, and more importantly – it will be reversed. That is our position. This is where we stand.” Mr Lowe has promised that under a Restore government, “north of five million” foreign nationals “both legal and illegal” would leave Britain. “Restore Britain entirely rejects the idea that concern for the demographic future of Britain’s historic populations is somehow inherently racist. If the establishment wants to call us that, let them – we do not care,” he has written.

Ms Vlaardingerbroek was stripped of her right to visa-free travel by the Home Office in January before she was scheduled to speak at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march . “They are demanding the sacrifice of our children on the altar of mass migration. Let’s not beat about the bush – this is the rape, replacement and murder of our people,” the conspiracy theorist told the rally the previous year. The Home Office said her presence this year was “not conducive to the public good”.

Unlike other EU citizens, she must now apply for a visa to enter Britain, which is unlikely to be granted. She claimed it was punishment for accusing Sir Keir Starmer of allowing the rape and murder of “British girls by migrant rape gangs”. Mr Lowe said he would invite her “as a MP” in an attempt to shame to shame the Government into granting her entry. Ms Vlaardingerbroek suggested she could easily enter Britain on a small boat but “of course they would stop me because I’m white.”

She said she would be “very happy to see a Great Britain led by Rupert Lowe”. Ms Vlaardingerbroek co-founded the Save Europe Act with Martin Sellner. He has more than 200,000 followers on X, the platform owned by Restore supporter Elon Musk , but has been banned from YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. He is an influential proponent of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that people are being intentionally replaced by migrants as part of a globalist plot.

Mr Sellner styles himself as a political campaigner, but when he was 17, he admitted sticking a swastika poster on a synagogue. He came to the authorities’ attention when Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist behind the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting , donated €1,500 (£1,300) to his hard-Right party. Austrian authorities later cleared Mr Sellner of having any prior knowledge of the terrorist attack. The anti-Islam activist is banned from the US, Canada, Germany and Switzerland, as well as Britain, where he was barred on security grounds in 2019.

On Friday, he attempted to enter France for a remigration conference to be held on Hallowe’en, having posted repeatedly in the lead-up about his attendance. But he was deported on arrival after being stopped at the airport, he said on social media. Mr Sellner has hailed Restore as a “patriotic party” that has a “historic opportunity” to stop the so-called Great Replacement and one that can be part of “a remigration alliance”. Charlie Downes , Restore’s campaigns director and spokesman, was one of the speakers listed for Saturday’s conference, which was ultimately stopped by the French authorities.

Mr Downes has called remigration the “most important idea of our age” and said he wants to see “an ethnically homogenous Christian Britain.” “We are the greatest people to ever have walked the Earth,” the 25-year-old wrote on X last month. Fellow Briton Lucy White also travelled to Paris, after attending a “Remigration Summit” in Portugal earlier this year with Mr Sellner and Ms Vlaardingerbroek. The Restore Party activist, who calls herself Britain’s Save Europe Act representative, previously attended a remigration protest where she was pictured alongside Mr Estevez.

“In just a few decades, Spain will have ceased to exist,” Mr Estevez, who has nearly 20,000 followers on X and 33,000 on Instagram, has said. “And our politicians, instead of preventing it, dedicate themselves to pursuing and silencing the cries for help from those who do not want to capitulate.” Ms White, who has 63,900 followers on X, is every bit as uncompromising on social media. She has accused Shabana Mahmood , the Home Secretary, of having the “audacity” to “live-action roleplay” being English.

Ms Mahmood is the child of immigrants from Pakistan. Last week, she said: “Britain is not ‘multiracial’. We have always been White. Britain is not ‘multi-faith’. We have always been Christian. Britain is not ‘multicultural’. We have always been culturally homogeneous.” In another social media video of a man in Paris, she claimed “an African” was speaking into his mobile phone, which was on speaker, because of “low literacy levels” in the “third world”.

She said The Telegraph was descending into “Left-wing irrelevance” and accused its journalists of taking time away from writing about “deers and laundrettes” to do a “hatchet job” on the Save Europe Act. She pointed to recent coverage in this newspaper of migrant sex crimes and asked: “Was it racist of The Telegraph to publish this. Or does it only become racist when someone offers a practical political solution to the problems you profit from complaining about?”

Within Restore, Harrison Pitt is its senior policy fellow and the author, with Mr Lowe, of its paper on mass deportations. He has labelled Kemi Badenoch , the Conservative party leader, as “an ethnocentric fraud who attacks the reasonable desire for self-preservation and demographic security among Britons as ‘racist.’” Earlier this year, the 28-year-old interviewed Mr Sellner and Renaud Camus , the French philosopher who coined the Great Replacement term.

Mr Sellner paid tribute to Mr Pitt for his idea of a Nato-type alliance of European nations to repel migrants and put pressure on countries refusing to take them back. It was evidence of the cross-pollination of ideas between Restore and the fringes of the European hard-Right. There are echoes between the Save Europe Act and Restore’s policy paper, which styles itself as “a comprehensive plan for detaining and deporting every single person who has broken illegally into our national home”.

Restore claims it will take three years to deport the 1.8 million illegal immigrants it estimates are in Britain, once the law is changed to allow for faster expulsions and an end to “third world” immigration as part of a policy it says was inspired by the second Trump administration. It also calls for many legal migrants to lose their status and be deported. Anyone who had entered Britain from a safe country neighbouring the UK, effectively all of them, would be deemed illegal under Restore’s plans.

A legally resident migrant could also be deported if they committed a crime, claimed benefits or were unable to speak English. Legal immigration in Britain dropped by 19.4 per cent to 703,000 people in 2025. Illegal immigration increased during the same period by 7.4 per cent to 46,508 people. Almost 90 per cent of those arrived by small boat. However, small boat crossings have dropped by up to 43 per cent this year, compared with last year.

Restore is polling at an average of 4 per cent. Reform has dropped to a low of 22 per cent as of Oct 26. The Tories have climbed to 21.1 per cent, closing the gap with Reform. Labour still polls the highest at 28.1 per cent and the Greens and Liberal Democrats each have more than double Restore’s support. As even Mr Lowe admits, he is a long way from achieving his ambition of becoming prime minister. But there are European hard-Right parties far closer to power that have adopted remigration as policy.

The Freedom Party of Austria, Italy’s League and National Future, Spain’s Vox and Germany’s AfD have all brought remigration from internet phenomenon to something closer to reality. League is already part of Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government. Vox is expected to be the junior partner in a coalition after Spanish elections at the end of November. The Freedom Party is the largest in Austria’s National Council. The AfD is Germany’s main opposition and its most popular party.

After it won two state elections in September, Mr Lowe celebrated the historic victories. “A huge congratulations to our friends in the AfD – an inspiration for what Restore Britain can achieve,” he wrote on X. After those twin defeats, embattled Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, went on the attack in the Bundestag, declaring the AfD’s call for remigration to be “Nothing but a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin colour.”

The AfD dismissed his comments as “completely unacceptable” and said their proposals target failed asylum seekers, criminals and illegal migrants, while incentivising legal migrants to voluntarily return. But in January 2024, high-ranking officials allegedly held a secret meeting with neo-Nazis in a Potsdam hotel. They reportedly discussed a master plan for remigration that went far further than the AfD manifesto and involved the forced deportations of millions of people to Africa, including “unassimilated” German citizens of foreign descent.

Among those reported to be present at the Potsdam meeting was Mr Sellner. Prof Frank Furedi is the executive director of the Freedom and Sovereignty Initiative think tank in Brussels and is an expert in Europe’s “patriotic” parties. He told The Telegraph that some on the hard-Right were “almost embarrassed” to disagree with the influencers but would not go to their extremes. “Remigration is a way of demonstrating that you take a hard line.

So it’s principally a performative policy that’s gradually gaining traction among sections of the European Right.” It was not a realistic or practical policy for even the medium term, although further incidents such as the Ceuta migrant crisis could change that, he said. ‘Restore embrace extremist policies’ Prof Furedi said AfD insiders knew there had to be a “reality check”, but Restore had