Why Reform UK and Restore Britain are proof we need PR

“There is a piece of history that every defender of first past the post should know. It is the story of exactly how the Nazis rose to power, and it is a story about electoral systems as much as it is about ideology.” - Naomi Smith

I’m going to explain in no uncertain terms why we need PR. But first, I need to lay out the context for my argument and invoke Godwin’s Law to mention the Nazis. Bear with me, it will all hopefully make sense.

There is a comforting story doing the rounds in Westminster right now. Reform is imploding, the argument goes, so the populist moment is passing. Farage’s psychodrama will burn itself out, the froth will settle, and British politics will return to something recognisable.

I would love to believe that. I don’t.

Because waiting in the wings, ready to catch anyone who leaves Reform disillusioned but not deprogrammed, is Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. And if you think Restore Britain is a fringe curiosity, a group too small and too strange to matter, I would ask you to look at who is funding it and cheering it on. Elon Musk may be their most rich and famous backer, but there are others far more sinister.

Take Miles Routledge, also known online as Lord Miles. He is a self-described Restore Britain donor and activist, the kind of supporter the party is happy to have quietly propping it up. Routledge has criticised Steve Laws, a man who wants to deport millions of people from this country, for being too soft. Too “liberal”, in Routledge’s own words, because Routledge says he has “better solutions”. In this worldview, mass deportation is the moderate position.

It gets worse. In a post last July, Routledge wrote that what gives him joy and hope is the prospect that “by 2039 we’ll have another Hitler to lead another great uprising”.

I am not writing this to shock you for the sake of it. I am writing it because this is what sits underneath the political fringe we keep telling ourselves is manageable. It isn’t fringe forever. It only takes the wrong electoral conditions for it to move from the fringe of politics into the mainstream.

Which brings me to the point I actually want to make.