What Did Makerfield Reveal About Restore Britain's Threat To Farage?

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Following defeat in Makerfield, Nigel Farage has urged Restore Britain supporters to "think again" about voting for Rupert Lowe's party, warning that they risk making a Labour victory at the next general election more likely.

Speaking on Friday morning, the Reform UK leader said: "There's a couple of thousand voters there [Makerfield] who would normally have gone out and voted Reform that voted Restore, and I would say directly to them: 'What do you want?'.

"We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again."

In the run-up to Thursday's by-election, there were suggestions that Restore Britain, set up by Lowe after he was kicked out of Reform, could effectively cost his old party victory by eating into its vote, allowing Labour candidate Andy Burnham to come through the middle.

Restore Britain candidate Rebecca Shepherd came third with nearly 7 per cent of the vote in Makerfield.

In the end, this figure was academic in terms of the impact on Reform's chances of winning the seat, as Burnham's landslide victory saw him comfortably outperform Reform and Restore Britain's combined vote share. As pollster Peter Kellner noted this morning following the result in Makerfield, he reached this benchmark "with 6,000 votes to spare".

But, as the University of Manchester's Professor Rob Ford explained, Restore Britain's current polling is significant because if it holds up until the next general election, it could cost Farage victory in other constituencies.

Ford told PoliticsHome that while the hard-right party would be unlikely to win seats outright based on current polling, apart from perhaps Lowe's Great Yarmouth, it could take key votes from Reform in seats they must win to have a chance of winning power.

“Reform has got to win up of 300 seats to form the next government," he said. “They really would like to be able to say X and Y seats are in the bag. Restore Britain adds this additional element of uncertainty."

Ford argued that the best guidance for where Restore Britain could grow elsewhere in the country is to look at where the British National Party (BNP) attracted support two decades ago, pointing to areas like Barking in east London, parts of northwest England, and former villages in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire.

“I suspect what Lowe and Restore Britain attract is many more non-voters," he said, in places where there is "deeply disaffected, alienated, anti-system, anti-politics" sentiment.

There were early signs of Restore Britain's threat to Reform in Lowe's Great Yarmouth at last month's local elections. The party won all nine seats it contested, meaning Reform fell short of winning full control of the council.

Jon Wedon, the leader of the Restore/Great Yarmouth First group on the council, told PoliticsHome that the party’s strategy in Great Yarmouth in the run-up to 7 May was “really quite straightforward: a local election campaign on local issues", claiming that Farage's "get Starmer out" message didn't work locally.

Julian Gallie, head of research at Merlin Strategy, said Restore Britain is likely to be most successful in places with high levels of support for Reform, potentially setting up more battles between Farage and Lower for that chunk of the right-wing vote. He pointed to so-called 'Red Wall' seats in the North and the Midlands, as well as parts of Essex.

In focus groups, when Lowe comes up naturally and unprompted, Gallie said, “it's normally this boomer age group, and it's the prime Facebook users who are the most tempted by Restore. They come across Restore and Rupert Lowe on there.”

However, he said that Lowe seems to be breaking through with "more leafy Conservative voters" in a way that Farage has not managed up to now.

“Lowe in his aesthetic, his farmer look, it's seen as maybe less tacky than Reform, and can actually appeal to those more middle-class who are more right-wing on immigration and areas like that," he told PoliticsHome.

Ford said that Restore Britain appears to be already influencing Reform by pushing the party into "more hardline" positions in a bid to shore up its right-wing flank.

"The irony in all this is that Farage's whole political strategy was pulling parties to the right. Lowe is now using the same strategy against Farage," he said.

Ford told PoliticsHome that while this might not hurt Farage's standing with his own core voters, it could hurt his electoral prospects by "motivating anti-Reform voters" to set aside their differences and do whatever it takes to stop him winning.