The political landscape of Britain changed significantly on February 13, 2026, after Rupert Lowe MP launched a new party to offer the British population an option on the right.
The launch video, which featured Lowe on the grounds of his own farm donning traditional British country clothing, broke records as it amassed over 40 million views, and was promoted by Elon Musk.
Polling at 10 percent from day one, Restore Britain’s launch has caused a sensation on the political stage and has significantly – and e uniquely in the context of British politics – emphasized a Christian and civilizationally-restorative political stance.
I am today launching Restore Britain as a national political party.
— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) February 13, 2026
Join us.https://t.co/RMtEuHopgV pic.twitter.com/jQMAOjQJ5A
The launch of the party comes after Lowe was controversially expelled from the Reform UK party by its leader, Nigel Farage, due to Lowe’s advocacy for mass-deportations – and amid supporters’ disaffection with Reform’s leftward realignment.
The day after the launch, Lowe stated on X: “Britain is a Christian country, and under a Restore Britain government – it will remain a Christian country.”
Restore Britain’s campaigns director and spokesperson, Charlie Downes, who is a traditional Catholic and convert to the faith, similarly drew fire from center-right figures involved with Reform UK for insinuating “Restore Britain believe that Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith.”
Downes agreed to speak to LifeSiteNews about his new party, what it can offer faithful Christian voters and supporters, and why its leaders believe their policy platform aligns soundly with a faithfully Christian worldview.
“Christianity is inextricable from Britain’s history and our national identity,” Downes told LifeSiteNews.
“In my view, a civilization is a series of covenants,” he added. “First is marriage – the permanent union of one man and one woman before God. Marriage is the foundation of the household, which is a married couple with children and property. The household in turn should be considered the fundamental economic unity of society (as opposed to the individual, as liberals argue, or class, as socialists argue).”
Downes revealed he thinks the individualist bent contemporary liberals and most politicians hold leads to a fatal flaw where they refuse to recognize the foundational importance of the family. Sub-replacement fertility and cheap labor imported by big businesses which see all as individual economic units of production are downstream from this, he believes. All of these issues Restore Britain aspires to help ameliorate.
“From the household comes the tribe,” he continued.
“We see this with Abraham,” Downes added, situating his understanding within the Biblical context, the classical philosophy of antiquity, and Catholic scholasticism.
Downes extended this to explain that subsequently, “from tribes come a nation,” citing the examples of ancient Israel and Judea from the 12 tribes of Genesis, and England from the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons.
“The nation, like marriage, is a covenant whose purpose is to glorify God. Mass migration undermines this, and so mass migration is necessarily anti-Christian and immoral. Reversing it is therefore the Christian’s duty,” he explained, arguing it threatens to upend covenant as a basis for social order.
Downes also acknowledged that not all forms of migration are of equal threat or value. Migration from certain nations, where historically hostile religions such as Islam dominate, the party believes ought to be heavily restricted. Lowe proposes to block entirely routes to entry and citizenship from nations such as Somalia and Afghanistan, Downes explains.
Restore Britain will not merely pay lip service to vague notions of “Christian values,” Downes said, but will not be afraid to wade into religious matters legislatively and politically where necessary. A substantive policy paper Restore Britain has already drafted and supported advocates the ban of halal and kosher meat. Restore also intends to outlaw the burqa, the Islamic dress worn by women to cover the body and face.
“What liberals don’t understand is that religious convictions, when sincerely held, aren’t malleable and flexible like mere political beliefs,” Downes said.
Downes believes this is why the notion millions of Muslims are likely to integrate into British, Western, or European culture, which is essentially shaped and informed by Christian faith, is naive – and for this reason political leaders cannot ignore tenets of certain religious worldviews which are hostile or antagonistic to Christian Westerners as a people.
For Downes, although religion and politics are distinct, contemporary political actors scarcely realize or understand how these necessarily and unavoidably intersect.
“People often say Islam is a system of political control rather than a religion. But those two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive,” he says.
Downes points out, “Christianity certainly has a political shape” and this is one he thinks is mostly incompatible with Islam, as well as a number of other deeply-ingrained cultural practices and attitudes found around the world.
In Britain, Downes insists, “we are a Christian state,” something he points out is less a matter of opinion than a “matter of fact,” both “constitutionally” as well as “historically.”
Asked whether migration and religious demographics, however legitimate a concern, might be reduced to a panacea for all political problems for some on the right, Downes did agree this could be a danger.
He quoted another traditionalist Catholic friend of his, who argues: “Britain is not dying because she is being invaded. She is being invaded because she is dying.”
Restore Britain seeks, instead, to stoke a far broader social, cultural, economic, and fundamental revival.
Downes argued that Lowe and Restore are unique in the landscape because they break the mold of profligacy in politics, where leaders promise plenty and are dishonest about fiscal challenges or strain caused by policy implementation.
“We believe in an economy that rewards hard work, prudence,” he adds.
Though the party is not in favor of the “nanny state” or “big government,” and wants to “take the boot off the neck of smaller sized businesses,” he explains neither is the party “free market fundamentalist.”
Restore intends to “use state power” in a manner which, rather than merely to “shore up the interests of big business,” would “safeguard the institutions that make our country feel like a home.”
One of the things which makes Lowe a leader, Downes said, is his frankness. Necessary and desirable policies are often initially “painful,” and Lowe, he argued, is the only figure with the fortitude to acknowledge and confront this.
The mass deportations of the 2 million illegal migrants, which Restore Britain has committed to carrying out quickly once in office, as well as pursuing a policy of net negative migration, meaning more people leaving or being repatriated from the country than new arrivals settling “for the foreseeable future,” they recognize is something which will be financially and politically difficult. Although, they are insistent that it is possible.
Restore Britain would repeal the assisted dying bill and reverse recent changes which decriminalise abortion up to birth.
— Restore Britain (@RestoreBritain_) February 23, 2026
British Christians now have a political party that represents their views, and will act on it.
After the launch, one of Downes’ fiercest critics was Reform UK’s Muslim candidate to be Mayor of London, who accused his position of resembling “neo-Nazism.”
Elsewhere, Downes spoke alongside Harrison Pitt, Restore’s senior policy fellow, and Lewis Brackpool, who leads the party’s formal investigations into a rape gang scandal which involved Pakistani Muslim crimes against European and Christian girls. On the Lotus Eaters podcast, these senior spokespersons explained that, as Christians, the claim that wishing to defend Britain’s indigenous people and its religion is Nazism is absurd.
They argued instead that they merely recognize that nations are real entities, comprised of particular peoples often bound by ancestry and religion and history or creed, and that safeguarding indigenous peoples from hostile ones or a civilization from replacement by its adversaries is warranted and reasonable; something not in any way “hateful” or extreme.
“I can see how it might be scary if people were to imbue ethnic identity with a sense of quasi-religious or messianic significance and regard it as the measure of all things. That’s really what the Nazis really were guilty of – viewing it as the measure of all things, including moral values,” said Pitt.
“Given that our framework is Christian, and is explicitly Christian, we regard the existence of ethnic difference as simply a feature of God’s creation. And therefore we want to act as stewards over it. In just the same way that we want wildlife to flourish. It’s not a matter of wanting to stamp out alternative forms of organic life,” he continued.
“And given that our moral framework is much more Christian than it is informed by a quasi-religious sense of blood and ethnic significance, we are not going to mutate into any kind of Nazi fever dreams or anything like that, because it would be inconsistent with our Christian perspective of the good.”
“This is really important, because we are a Christian party,” added Downes. “One of the key principles of Christianity is not to worship idols, and to make an idol of the nation or the race, is by definition anti-Christian, so the idea that’s the direction we’re going to go is absurd.”
Downes confirmed to LifeSiteNews that Lowe would “absolutely call himself a Christian” and that most of the top positions at the top of the party are occupied by people who are both confessional and observant.
