Reform UK's Lowe Unveils 'Restore Britain' Deportation Proposal

On a cold February evening in Great Yarmouth, former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe took to the stage at a theatre on Britannia Pier and delivered a message that has since ricocheted across British politics: "Millions will have to go." [1] With those five words, Lowe formally launched Restore Britain as a registered political party — and unveiled a 133-page deportation blueprint that experts say would fundamentally break with 75 years of international human rights commitments Britain helped create.

The plan has drawn endorsement from Elon Musk, condemnation from human rights organizations, and anxiety from both the Conservative Party and Lowe's former political home, Reform UK, whose vote share it threatens to splinter. A month after launch, Restore Britain is already polling at 7–10% and claims over 50,000 members [2][3] — raising urgent questions about whether the UK's political right is fracturing just as it appeared ascendant.

From Reform Rebel to Party Leader

Rupert Lowe's path to launching his own party began with a bitter public feud with Nigel Farage. Elected as one of Reform UK's five MPs in July 2024, representing Great Yarmouth, Lowe quickly chafed under the party's leadership structure. In March 2025, he told the Daily Mail that Reform was "a protest party led by the Messiah" and accused Farage of "watering down" the party's deportation stance [4].

The break was swift and ugly. On 7 March 2025, Reform UK suspended Lowe and removed the party whip, citing allegations of threats of violence toward party chairman Zia Yusuf and complaints from staff about "derogatory and discriminatory remarks about women." The matter was referred to police [4]. Lowe and his parliamentary staff denied everything in an open letter, calling the allegations "false and vexatious" and accusing Reform's leadership of orchestrating a "malicious witch hunt" in retaliation for his public criticism. Leaked WhatsApp messages showed Farage describing Lowe's behavior as "disgusting" and "contemptible" [4].

By June 2025, Lowe had launched Restore Britain as a political organization. On 13 February 2026, it became an official party — though as of mid-March, it has not yet been registered by the Electoral Commission [1][5].

The 133-Page Blueprint: 'Mass Deportations'

At the heart of Restore Britain's platform sits a document titled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, authored by Harrison Pitt and credited with contributions from figures including Carl Benjamin and GB News contributors [1]. The paper estimates that between 1.8 and 2 million people are living in the UK without legal immigration status and proposes removing every one of them.

The plan operates on three fronts:

Legal overhaul. Restore Britain calls for withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) — or, alternatively, passage of a "Great Clarification Act" that would empower Parliament to override specific judicial rulings by majority vote. The party would also repeal the Human Rights Act and suspend the Refugee Convention for five years [1][6]. As the Oxford Migration Observatory's COMPAS unit noted, this represents "a decision to abandon the UK's decades-long commitment not to send people to places where they may face torture or death" [6].

Administrative expansion. The plan envisions massively scaling up enforcement infrastructure: expanded electronic visa verification, stricter Right-to-Work and Right-to-Rent compliance checks, biometric requirements in banking, and reforms to public service access — what the policy paper explicitly describes as a "deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures" [1][7].

Targeted visa bans. In Parliament, Lowe has called for closing visa routes for nationals from "Albania, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and plenty more," declaring, "We will discriminate" [3][8].

The policy also targets legal migrants. Speaking in the House of Commons, Lowe asked whether the Home Secretary agreed that "if a migrant, legal or illegal, can't speak English, claims benefits, lives in social housing, refuses to work, rejects integration, commits crime, is a drain on our society, or even actively hates Britain and wishes to do us harm, they should be removed from our country regardless of how many millions of deportations that will inevitably result in" [9].

The Musk Factor

Restore Britain's launch was turbocharged by an endorsement from the world's richest man. On 14 February 2026, Elon Musk posted on X: "Join Rupert Lowe in Restore Britain, because he is the only one who will actually do it!" [10] The endorsement followed Musk's earlier interventions in British politics, including funding far-right activist Tommy Robinson's legal costs [1].

The Musk stamp of approval gave Restore Britain immediate international visibility and credibility among a certain online constituency. Middle East Eye described the party as "Elon Musk-backed" [8], and the endorsement appears to be influencing polling numbers among social media-active voters [3].

The Numbers: A Right-Wing Vote Split

Source: Find Out Now

Data as of Feb 18, 2026CSV

Early polling paints an intriguing — and potentially consequential — picture. A Find Out Now survey from February 2026 placed Restore Britain at 10% of the national vote, with Reform UK at 25%, the Green Party at 20%, Labour at 15%, and the Conservatives at 13% [3]. A subsequent March 2026 poll placed Restore Britain at 7%, with 13% saying they would consider voting for the party [2].

The critical detail: Restore Britain's support appears to come overwhelmingly from the right. When Restore Britain is included on the ballot, Reform UK drops from its typical 30%+ range to around 25%, and the Conservatives fall from the high teens to 13% [3]. Left-wing party numbers remain stable. This suggests Lowe's party is fragmenting the right rather than broadening its appeal — a dynamic that could paradoxically benefit Labour in a first-past-the-post electoral system.

With 46 seats won on margins under 2% in the 2024 general election [1], even a modest Restore Britain showing could flip constituencies. Bloomberg reported in March 2026 that Farage's Reform faces a genuine challenge from Lowe's breakaway [11].

Context: UK Net Migration and the Political Landscape

Source: World Bank

Data as of Mar 16, 2026CSV

Restore Britain's emergence comes amid sustained public anxiety over immigration levels. UK net migration surged from around 172,000 in 2012 to a peak of approximately 487,000 in 2022, before declining to an estimated 200,000 in the year ending June 2025 — still roughly two-thirds lower than the previous year's 649,000 [12][13]. The Labour government has responded with its own enforcement push: over 58,500 illegal migrants and foreign criminals have been removed since the 2024 election, a 45% increase on the prior period, and a new "one-in-one-out" scheme has seen 377 people returned to France under a pilot program [12].

But these numbers satisfy neither Lowe nor Reform UK, which has its own mass deportation plan — "Operation Restoring Justice" — calling for a UK Deportation Command with capacity to detain 24,000 and remove 288,000 annually [14]. The competition between the two parties has become a race to the hardest possible line on immigration.

Expert Analysis: Can It Actually Work?

Legal and migration experts have identified fundamental obstacles. The Oxford Migration Observatory notes that even Reform UK's more modest proposals would require expanding detention from 2,200 to 24,000 spaces within 18 months — a twelvefold increase [6]. Current removal rates stand at approximately 36,000 annually [6]. Scaling to hundreds of thousands would require an enforcement infrastructure that simply does not exist.

The most intractable problem may be receiving-country cooperation. As COMPAS analysis states plainly: "If a country does not recognise their citizens or refuses to take them back, they cannot be returned" [6]. This was the same obstacle that sank the Rwanda deportation scheme.

Economist Richard Murphy has modeled the economic impact of deporting two million workers, warning of cascading sectoral failures. Up to one-third of NHS staff are first or second-generation migrants; construction "would either slow down or virtually cease"; and the food supply chain is "dependent upon the work of migrants" for harvesting and processing [7]. Murphy characterizes the policy as "economic self-harm" that would trigger inflation, labor shortages, and a shrinking tax base [7].

The LSE's politics department has raised additional concerns about the policy's assumptions, noting that identifying undocumented residents at the scale proposed is itself an enormous logistical challenge [15].

The Opposition Response

Criticism has been broad and sharp. Labour Party chairwoman Anna Turley called the plan "a direct attack on settled families and fundamentally un-British" [14]. Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Max Wilkinson warned that "Trump-inspired plans for an Ice-style force will only bring chaos and disorder to Britain's streets" [14]. Green Party MP Sian Berry condemned the proposals as modeled on Trump's ICE enforcement, warning of "aggressive raids and discrimination" [16].

Amnesty International UK issued a statement declaring: "We are most threatened by those who seek to strip away our basic rights and protections — not the people they scapegoat to justify mass deportations and expanded police surveillance" [14]. Dr. Dora-Olivia Vicol, CEO of the Work Rights Centre, described the vision as "sadistic...UK families and communities being ripped apart" [14].

Hope Not Hate, the anti-extremism research group, has published detailed case files on Restore Britain, flagging the party's connections to far-right figures and its potential to mainstream more extreme positions within British political discourse [5].

What Comes Next

Restore Britain faces immediate practical hurdles. The party is not yet registered with the Electoral Commission, and without registration it cannot field candidates under its own name in elections [1]. Its local pilot, "Great Yarmouth First," has introduced five council candidates for postponed Norfolk county elections [1], but the national electoral infrastructure needed to contest hundreds of seats — as Lowe has pledged — remains unbuilt.

The deeper question is strategic. If Restore Britain consolidates a hard-right base that might otherwise have voted Reform UK or Conservative, it could inadvertently ensure that the very political outcomes its supporters most fear — continued Labour governance, sustained immigration levels — become more likely under first-past-the-post. Some analysts at UnHerd have suggested that Lowe's party could paradoxically "boost Farage" by making Reform look more moderate by comparison [17].

For now, Lowe remains a sitting MP — technically an independent — with a platform in Parliament, an endorsement from the world's richest man, a 133-page plan that would tear up decades of human rights law, and a question that British politics will be forced to answer: how far is the country willing to go?