Rupert Lowe’s racist cheerleaders can no longer hide their despicable extremism

These reprobates’ central belief is that Britishness is a closed shop, determined by blood. It is impossible for anyone to become British, even if you speak perfect English, embrace our customs, love this country, contribute selflessly and have acquired citizenship: your fate is to remain a perpetual other. Only those for whom Britain is their ancestral homeland, who can trace their lineage to these islands for as long as anybody can remember (the Normans are probably OK), can be classified as white British, and, according to this reprehensible taxonomy, only the white British can be truly British. When they speak of the British nation, they only mean its white British component.

The despicable implication is that more recent arrivals – Jews, Europeans, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs as well as mixed-race families – cannot be truly British, regardless of how well integrated they are.

This amounts to a rejection of civic nationalism, the idea that a nation is defined by shared political principles, values, customs, language, loyalty and legal citizenship, in favour of a purely ethnic and genetic conception of Britishness. There can be no British dream, no assimilation, just an ever worsening nightmare.

Such activists, in other words, are racists: horrible, disgusting racists. It is to describe these kinds of attitudes that the word was invented.

They are not merely white nationalists, but specifically white British identitarians, obsessed with genetic background. They are the kind of people who wouldn’t have been uncomfortable with the Nuremberg race laws and apartheid South Africa’s Population Registration Act. They are far-Right racial essentialists, mirroring far-Left woke obsessions with racially defined identity.

Mired in a similarly pathetic cult of victimhood, imbued with nihilism, they misuse terms such as “genocide” to describe the decline in what they consider to be the proportion of real British people on our islands. As far as they are concerned, white British people have been robbed of agency: welfarism and indolence are only problems if they afflict ethnic minorities. The woke Right is even worse than the woke Left.

The implication of this hideous ideology is that the proportion of non-white British people in the population must be pushed down, the clock turned back, perhaps to the 1970s or some other arbitrary date. How exactly this would be achieved they usually do not specify, though they scream that “millions must go”, by which they do not always mean merely deporting illegal immigrants or legal immigrants who refuse to work. Ethnic cleansing, here we come: it’s properly sinister.

One of the big lies at the heart of this racialist worldview is that the world is divided into two camps. You either accept their hideous, racially exclusive conceptions of Britishness, a fringe view supported by a few percentage points of the public, or you are deemed to support open borders, the unchecked rise of Islamism, being soft on rape gangs, wokery and the destruction of nation-states. It’s a fake dichotomy, a device to prevent scrutiny, to discredit critics in the eyes of the mainstream.

Fine, you may think, but these people are tiny in number. Why bother fighting them? The reason is that many of these extremists appear to have informally congregated around Rupert Lowe’s Restore, a party that obtained a higher share of the vote than the Tories in Greater Manchester’s mayoral election. They defend him on social media. They clearly have high hopes of him.