Last week, Rupert Lowe launched his new “Restore” party. Restore what, exactly? Strip away the branding and the flag-waving and what you’re left with isn’t renewal. It’s resentment. It’s grievance politics dressed up as patriotism.
To me, it looks like a diet BNP the same division, repackaged for the social media age.
And I’m tired of pretending it isn’t dangerous.
Circling this movement are voices openly advocating “re-migration” the idea that British citizens like me should be sent “back” somewhere else. Steve Laws has pushed exactly that kind of rhetoric. According to this worldview, my place in this country is conditional.
I was raised in Bolton, making me a Boltonian
My accent is Northern. My upbringing was working-class. I grew up around graft, shift work, tight budgets and pride in standing on your own two feet. I support England in the football. I complain about the weather. I queue properly.
But because I am brown and Muslim, there are people who believe I don’t quite belong.
That should alarm anyone who believes in equal citizenship.
Alongside “Restore” sits the so-called “Advance” party. Advance where? Because this feels like reverse gear. Even Ben Habib, who aligns himself with this hyper-nationalist energy would, by the cold logic of “re-migration,” eventually find himself on the wrong side of the same purity tests. Ethno-nationalism does not stop at one target. It keeps narrowing the circle.
History has shown us that, again and again.
I am Northern. I am working-class. I am British-Pakistani. I am Muslim. Apparently that makes me suspect in certain political circles. What angers me most is that these movements claim to speak for the working class.
They do not speak for the people I grew up with.
Working-class communities understand struggle. They understand payday loans, zero-hours contracts, cold homes and feeling ignored by Westminster. What they don’t need is to be told their hardship is caused by the family next door who pray differently.
Yet that is the message being pushed.
Blame migrants for stagnant wages.
Blame Muslims for cultural decline.
Blame minorities for housing shortages.
Blame “woke elites” for everything else.
It is always someone else’s fault.
Fascism never introduces itself loudly. It creeps in through grievance. Through slogans like “Restore” and “Advance.” Through the constant suggestion that something pure has been stolen and must be reclaimed.
And when billionaires with global platforms amplify this rhetoric, it stops being background noise. It becomes fuel.
But here’s the truth: people are angry because they are struggling. Wages have stagnated. Housing is unaffordable. Public services are stretched thin. In towns across the North, young people feel locked out of opportunity.
That anger is real. What is dishonest is where it’s directed.
It is easier to blame a refugee than to confront corporate tax avoidance. Easier to rage about halal meat than to fix a broken housing market. Easier to shout about “cultural threats” than to invest in skills, transport and regional growth.
These are snake-oil salesmen offering culture wars instead of economic reform.
I refuse to let them hijack the identity of the North.
My story, the brown Muslim lad from Bolton is not separate from Britain. It is Britain. My family worked hard here. I built my life here. I serve my community here. I pay my taxes here.
And I will not accept that my Britishness is conditional on the approval of men who think “re-migration” is policy rather than threat.
Let’s be clear about what that word means. It means telling millions of citizens they are guests in their own home. It means reducing nationality to ethnicity. It means turning belonging into a racial test.
That is not patriotism. It is insecurity masquerading as strength.
The North does not need this politics of division. It needs investment. Decent jobs. Affordable housing. Properly funded public services. Real devolution of power.
Working-class people deserve dignity, not to be weaponised as foot soldiers in someone else’s grievance campaign.
The far right wants to frame this as ordinary people versus minorities. But I am ordinary people. So are the nurses, the builders, the pensioners choosing between heating and eating.
We are not enemies. We are neighbours.
I will not be told to “go back.” I will not stay silent while working-class frustration is twisted into racial division.
Britain is stronger than this politics of blame.
And I am not going anywhere.
* Mo Waqas is a vice chair of the Liberal Democrats' Racial Diversity Campaign and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
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29 Comments
Thank you for a timely, much needed article!
Bravo! I stand with you and many others across the Party and beyond do so too..Keep Hope Alive!
An excellent article. Very moving too.
I really do feel that as a party we need to be much more feisty.
We saw this in the 1930’s when all of Germany’s problems were blamed on the Jews, and know where that led.
Unfortunately memories are short, which is why dishonest political actors are again using racial and religious bigotry and hatred to advance their cause. They are disgusting people who should be ostracised.
Brilliant article Mo. Thank you. I hope we can share this as widely as possible.
Point this post out to Ed Davey AND the MPs and those who surround them. This is the sort of article that should be SHOUTED out laud and clear to people on the doorsteps,leaflets ,a defiant cry against the ever increasing division that is being sold by those who wish to divide FOR THEIR BENEFIT not the people.,
I agree with the article and the comments, but our Party needs also to be pointing out how we grow the economy and help low income people with cost of living. Reform UK are not only talking about immigration they are also hugely claiming they support those on low incomes and economic growth. Thus I saw on facebook a fake video showing Farage challenging the governor of the Bank of England the main message being the unfairness of the economic system. The propaganda of Reform UK is very effective with all their money and effort outside Parliament. All progressives need to work much harder to combat them; our good work in Parliament is nowhere near enough; we need to become a grass roots movement among the people.
This is a pertinent and moving article and provides some of the material we need to project a strong, focused and moral campaign in future elections. Congratulations on a great piece.
Hard-core racists are, fortunately, a small minority in this country – we need to prevent this from growing. One way we can help the hard-core racists add to their number is by labelling as racist anyone who expresses opposition to illegal immigration or who expresses support for reducing the rate of immigration. We may disagree at what level legal immigration should be set, but those who believe in a low, or even zero, net immigration figure are entitled to their views and not automatically racist for having them.
In the 19th century, after potato blight and the Irish famine led to large-scale Irish Catholic immigration to British cities, there was nativist agitation against these foreigners with their nasty cooking and foreign religion. In the early 1900s there was a ‘Chinese scare’, as well as agitation against immigrant Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russia. It’s worth reminding people that attacks on ‘outsiders’ have continued from one generation to another, but with the targets changing.
Are “Hardcore Racists” a tiny minority ? At their peak Reform were Polling between 29% & 36%. At their peak The Nazis were getting around 30% in General Elections -Not a direct comparison I know but Reform did get around 30% last May.
I accept that the most extreme Racists are a minority but we are kidding ourselves if we think its a “Tiny” one.
Great post, Mo.
It is a sadly common experience that during economic downturns society looks for scapegoats and anyone who can be othered is a potential victim.
During the 1930s my grandfather was a mining engineer in the South Wales Valleys. At one point 90% of all the men in the town, including him, were unemployed, so he moved to England and managed to get himself a job as a road sweeper. The Welsh were marginalized and I can just imagine the taunts he had to face – “Taffy was a Welshman etc”.
Mette Frederiksen Danish Social Democratic PM..
“For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes.
Immigration greatest internal threat to the Nordic region”
Some on the left get it – some continue to bury there heads in the sand …
Paul Barker/Joan Summers
Please could you define what you mean by “hard core racist” and “tiny minority”?
For my part I think that very few people are hard core racists by any reasonable definition and that label all or even a plurality of Reform voters as racist let alone hard core racist is reckless.
I also agree with Craig Levene, except that I would use the term progressive rather than left
@paul barker
In your post, you appear to have made the assumption that most, if not all ReformUK voters, are racist. I don’t think that is true…unless you conflate racism and belief in low levels of immigration. I have a couple of friends who are considering voting ReformUK in May and neither is racist in any way – one strongly objects to what he regards as a growing benefits culture, and his wife expresses concern about boatloads of mainly young men being allowed to cross the channel in small boats. Neither position is racist.
Brilliant article Mo. So right. To respond to Joan reform are bound to have some reasonable and realistic policies but underlying all their efforts is a strong immigrant blaming stance for virtually all the countries ills.
Reform have questions to answer on Epstein.
According to the papers, Nick Candy of Reform was mentioned in the Epstein Files.
So Reform have appointed someone who was on some sort of terms with Epstein.
When we condemn political approach of Reform UK we need to repeat that the Liberal Democrats do believe in controlling immigration because so many assume we believe in letting them all in.
“……when billionaires with global platforms amplify this rhetoric…..””….. while working-class frustration is twisted into racial division.”
For ‘billionaires’ we can read ‘ruling class’ in Marxist terminology. So, to understand what is going on, we need to look at it from their POV.
On the one hand, they need immigrant labour to fuel the economy and so provide the profits that supports their position in the status quo. So, normally, when times are relatively good, they are receptive to the kinds of the arguments put forward by LibDems such as: “The North does not need this politics of division.”
However, when times are not so good, when they are concerned that it’s they who are being held accountable for society’s problems they’ll be looking for ways to deflect that blame, in order to safeguard their own positions.
Incidentally, on the question of housing, here’s a link from the Bolton News about 13,000 empty houses in the town. All privately owned according to the BN. Bolton is also my home town!
The article quotes “At the same time, there were 208 families having to live in temporary accommodation in Bolton, 131 of them with children……”
https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/25846385.empty-homes-across-bolton-triples-12-000/
Hi Mo,
Apologies for having only just seen your great article expressed straight from the heart.
From the stand-point of a second generation immigrant (I’m Chinese) I can agree and disagree with some of the many comments expressed. Regrettably, on the whole, I still feel our party has a long way to go to understand the experiences and psyche of the non-white Lib Dem membership. This is important if we are to grow as a party.
@ Craig Levine,
There’s a demographic problem in both the UK and Europe. To put it simply, we aren’t having enough children to provide the number of young workers needed to support an ageing population. We’re down to about 1.5 children per family.
So despite what those on the political right may say to try to gain some political advantage they aren’t going to follow through with their “immigrant numbers must be cut” rhetoric. Economic necessities will trump anything else. We’ve already seen this with our own Tory Party. It won’t be any different in Denmark.
I’d be interested to know what your Mette Frederiksen (Danish Social Democratic PM) is proposing. Raising the Danish retirement age to 80?
What are you suggesting we should do here?
@Peter Martin
“we aren’t having enough children to provide the number of young workers needed to support an ageing population. We’re down to about 1.5 children per family.”
Please expand on what you mean by supporting an ageing population and why ‘support’ can – apparently – only be provided by ‘young workers’
Are you implying that the population should go on increasing for ever?
@ Nonconformistradical,
If you advocating for a reduced population at the same time as we are all living longer you might want to explain the economic implications of this.
The key parameter is the dependency ratio (workers/non workers) as explained in the link below. Of course the workers don’t have to be young. But it’s better if they are. They’ll stay as workers for longer. We can increase the ratio, or at least stop it reducing by forever increasing the retirement age. The recent increases would only be the start of what was necessary.
And/or we curtail retirement pensions and health care so that our elderly don’t consume so many resources!
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_structure_and_ageing
@Peter Martin
Aren’t you assuming that the dependency ratio will always remain the same?
There seems to be plenty of speculation about robots doing some jobs better than humans can – particularly repetitive ones. Implying not so many human workers doing repetitive jobs might be needed in future.
Not so far in the future…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgjm5x54ldo
“Car giant Hyundai to use human-like robots in factories”
@ Nonconformistradical,
The thing is: you can’t tax robots.
So if you have a low dependency ratio of human workers, say 3:1, you’d have to remove 25% of the real earnings of each worker, just to provide each retiree with the same gross income. This would have to be reduced by 50% or so to each retiree to pay for their health and social care.
Then there’s all the other stuff that the workers will have to pay for. Education, defence , their own health care, etc etc
@Peter Martin
“Of course the workers don’t have to be young. But it’s better if they are. They’ll stay as workers for longer.”
I’m a very long way past retiring age but I perceive some ageing people would be happy to go on working if only they were given the chance. But all too often they appear to be thrown on the scrap heap.
Yes – there will be people who have been doing manual jobs who may become unfit to do those jobs even before reaching normal retirement age through the nature of the job. But some older people might be doing some jobs much better than younger people.
Good night.
@ Nonconformistradical,
Yes I agree that retirement shouldn’t be compulsory. Elderly workers may well prefer to switch to part time work rather than retire completely but this may not be an option if their employer doesn’t agree. If an employer wants to lose an elderly worker it usually doesn’t cost them anything if they wait until retirement age.
Prematurely thrown on the scrap heap as you suggest. It’s a waste.
There has been some initiatives by govt to promote this idea but there needs to be more.
Sleep tight!
@Peter Martin
“Elderly workers may well prefer to switch to part time work rather than retire completely but this may not be an option if their employer doesn’t agree”
Isn’t that one of the problems? Employer attitudes? Part-time working may be difficult in some roles but in other roles why not consider e.g. 2 elderly workers sharing one job so that one works on some days and the other works on the other days of the week, between them making one full-time job?
All contributions to splitting the right wing vote should be welcomed.