We will prosecute any medical professional or anyone in ANY position of authority who has deliberately mutilated a young child in the name of gender ideology.

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

I do like someone who speaks their mind, clearly.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DUiPrqDYHD/

Restore - Rupert Lowe

"Important news. The sick puberty blocking trial has been stopped, for now.

A real win for everyone who has campaigned against it.

Our petition sent a strong message, but it is definitely not enough.

Restore Britain is clear here. We will prosecute any medical professional or anyone in ANY position of authority who has deliberately mutilated a young child in the name of gender ideology.

That will apply retrospectively.

We must keep this filth away from young children. We are sending a message that will hopefully make them think twice now.

Well done to all involved who have fought this - particularly James Esses and Rosie Duffield.

Heroes.

A good win. But the fight has just begun."

(FWIW Rupert says plenty of things I agree with, so does Zack , I hold a spectrum of views and I refuse to get involved in the polarising omnicause attitude both "sides" appear to have)

I am however, for reasons that may be clear if you have followed my exploits, not to mention the ones I have not yet shared, a single cause voter. ... not that they're going to win in Brighton...

That makes even less sense.
Q. Define "young child"
A. We use the word 'children' to refer to younger children...

So what? "Young child" is younger than "younger children" which is younger than "children"? So what age is that?
The whole thing is completely meaningless, probably intentionally.

I am not a fan of Rupert Lowe, for multiple reasons too tedious to get into, but it's well known that he doesn't operate the "Rupert Lowe" social media accounts. He's an elderly man who isn't very digital savvy and has outsourced that to his team, who are, let's say, an interesting group of young men.

When it comes to Rupert Lowe, the actual man who sits in Parliament as the member for Great Yarmouth, Rosie Duffield reports that he has been supportive of her efforts around things like the PB trial. So I give him credit for that.

I'm less keen to embrace the "Rupert Lowe" on X, almost certainly Charlie Downes, who is currently chudding out on this issue. I suppose if Charlie is chudding out on trans, at least he's got less time on his hands to chud out about banning contraception, or Jewish conspiracies, or black men's todgers.

If I were to speak to Lowe, I'd like to draw his attention to how the Rupert Youth are defining his image, but then this is a man who fans hung in effigy when he was chairman of Southampton FC, so he probably doesn't care too much about how he's perceived.

He may give that impression but Rupert Lowe is not an "elderly man" by any stretch of the imagination as he is only 68. Old school Tories always appeared like fogies when young.

He is an irrelevance who will not get re-elected even if his young social media crew keep promising impossible things. In 2029 when we next have a general election Reform UK Party Ltd will put up a candidate against him which will mean the right wing vote is split three ways allowing the Labour candidate to win.

I think there's probably a good argument that what has been done has been illegal all along. This isn't retrospective.

However for a government to push for prosecution decisions in this way sounds dangerously illiberal. Government should set the law clearly and leave prosecutions to the CPS.

The Jennings family aren't relevant here because the legal landscape in the US is not that of the UK.

Can you unpack the argument for illegality? Not having a dig, if there's something you've identified that I've missed, I'm understandably keen to know what it is.

That’s what the left does.

the right however tends to have a big Barney and then coalesce. Because they have their eyes on power not purity spirals. There will be a three way coalition with voting pacts between Conservatives, Restore and Reform.

there is no way Labour is winning anything for an election cycle or two.

I would be surprised if Restore lasts until the end of the year in any meaningful form, though Lowe himself is from what I've heard a good constituency MP and locally popular in Great Yarmouth.

One problem is that it's transparently a Conservative Party op, Rupert is chummy enough with the Tories that they gave him one of their seats on the Public Accounts Committee. He's out to get his own back on Farage, and the Tories are happy to facilitate him if he knocks a point or two off Reform in the polls.

The second problem is that there seem to be two very different demographics in Restore, and weirdly, they don't seem to be aware of each other.

The first demographic is basically 60+ conservatives who think the Tories are a bit wet, agree with Reform policy but don't trust Farage and think Rupert is a better man. I suppose it's a constituency, but I'm not convinced it's a big one.

The other demographic is the 20something Lowe fans you find on X, and... well, let's just say that they get very annoyed at people thinking they're wannabe nazis, and if you annoy them one of the first things they do is call you a Jew.

I don't think this is sustainable, especially because British voters are allergic to extremism, and if you allow people like Charlie Downes or Harrison Pitt or Connor Tomlinson to represent your party, voters are going to think your party is full of loonies. Watch some clips of these jokers if you don't believe me.

The final problem is that a lot of Restore's buzz depends on Musk boosting them on X (I suspect most of their online following is actually American) and the promise of Musk investing loadsamoney into the party. Even if they can find a way to do that legally, a Musk investment will come with strings attached and one of those strings will be Tommy Robinson in a leadership role, and we all know what happens to any movement that allows Tommy to join it.

What is 'chudding out'?

Behaving in an exaggeratedly trollish way, especially when you've forgotten that you're not on the internet. The left has its chuds too, but it's a chronic problem with extremely online right wing young men.

An example might be if some 18 year old lad has been told for years by his parents and teachers and the media that racism is bad, but he's been secretly indulging in edgy humour on 4chan or somewhere, and he enters a strange mental space where he imagines that, if he triggers the snowflakes by being cartoonishly racist, everyone will be cheering and high fiving him and he'll be really popular with hot girls.

This behaviour never seems to work out the way they expect, and I don't think it's going to make Rupert Lowe prime minister either. Rupert seems to attract them, which is weird for a 68 year old farmer with mostly generic 1980s Thatcherite opinions.

UKIP have said they will end same sex marriage.

I wouldn't trust any of the far-right extremist parties. Yes it's true they hate trans people and will do everything they can to spite them, but it will also mean an end to gay rights, women's rights and race discrimination. It will be 1926 again.

I'm not seeing Restore and Reform unite - Lowe has been pretty rude about Farage and unlikely to work with him (again).
I am not seeing the Tories with Reform either, although I think they might work together to get into power.

It’s a fundamental difference between right and left. The right fight like dogs then coalesce, the left fracture. Typically anyway I can’t see the future.

I’d rather have Lowe in charge than Polanski though…

Gonna need some more evidence for that. UKIP aren’t really a going concern either are they? Not on any polling radar at all

Which parties do you consider to be far right extremists?

There's also what we might call the Zarah Sultana problem, which is that the UK has a law on political parties (the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009) and you can't just set them up in a half-assed way, sign a few forms and the Electoral Commission will recognise you. There are fairly strict rules on membership, donations, accounts and so on.

I would hazard a guess that Lowe is only dimly aware of these rules, and his approach will be to throw some money at the problem and let his bright young men sort it out. But maybe that's me being cynical, so let's move on.

Restore (via X) are claiming 110,000 members. I'll be extremely generous and not assume they're just making the number up. The problem is that these are people who have signed up to a mailing list run by Restore Britain Ltd, the private company set up by Lowe last year. They aren't members of a political party, because legally the party doesn't exist yet. The people who have donated £20 for the title of "member" because they want to support Rupert are in roughly the position of subscribers to a Patreon.

Once the "Restore Britain Party" is recognised, it will not be possible to simply port over the list of donors to Restore Britain Ltd and make them party members.

Even if it were possible, many of them wouldn't be eligible for membership. Lowe's popularity is largely on X, where the majority of his followers are American, and many of the rest seem to be European (judging by the strange idea many of them have that, if Restore gets 10% of the vote, the UK electoral system will give it 10% of the MPs) - this will fall foul of the rules against foreign donors, which will also be a problem for the idea that Elon Musk is going to bankroll the thing.

So there's quite a bit of complicated paperwork to be sorted out - remember all the trouble KJK had getting the Party of Women registered - and Lowe will have to rely on his clever young men not fucking it up and accidentally doing something illegal.

That's just the legal side, before mentioning things like no sign of any attempt to build branches, or his inability to get existing small right wing parties (Advance, UKIP, Heritage) to merge with him.

What exists on the other side of the ledger is a lot of SM noise (mostly from people you wouldn't want representing you), and a few private polls purchased by Lowe that prompt respondents for his name, which purport to show he's got support in the country, but where the pollsters feel they have to add a disclaimer saying "this doesn't follow our normal methodology so please don't compare it with our regular voter intention polls".

You can't meme a political party into success.

And the most recent example of a party being started on the back of a personal vendetta isn't very encouraging, especially since Alex Salmond was a much bigger deal than Rupert Lowe:
GUESTPOAST: Is Restore going to be like Alba?

Gotta be honest, I haven't followed Lowe enough to have a strong view. It's good that he is speaking out on gender butchery, but antisemitism is a red line for me.
Also, why is it that the Right are so much better at getting gender ideology than the Left?

That’s why I’m in favour of this. For thirty years the government hasn’t been setting and enforcing the law clearly in social areas, but because it’s always been trending the other way politically—not enforcing drug laws, legislating for rights without specifying their content, outlawing speech according to subjective offence—people have got used to law and policy as a ratchet always in favour of progressive outcomes.

This (hand-in-hand with funding and lack of accountability) is what created the situation where it didn’t seem mad that Stonewall, or in this case actors within the NHS, could write the rules themselves and people went along with that. If they were wrong, and I see no overwhelming argument for gender practices on young people having been lawful, then they should be tested on that and prosecuted if the behaviour was criminal. We have the rule of law and it must apply to everyone.

I think antisemitism is a redline for the vast majority of people but I have certainly not seen Lowe make any antisemitic comments or policies. The previous poster makes accusations without evidence.

Back to the point in hand - the value of Lowe's very strong comments is that it moves the window of conversation and all of a sudden clearer statements about the terrible harm being done to children and indeed adults, can be spoken about by a wider set of politicians

Absolutely. If there is no case law to say this IS lawful, then it could easily be unlawful under proper examination. With luck we will get that.

It's poor form to compare to the US, as we are not there, and they have 51 different types of law - BUT - they are seeing cases being won that are based around things that happened a while back and were waved through.

None of this is ideal, but it might be what has to be done to rein in a permissiveness that has (literally) got out of control. Where I thought we might see this kind of move is euthanasia, if that becomes law. It couldn’t be criminal liability as it would have been made lawful by statute – but restore could commit to introducing hefty retrospective civil liability upon practitioners towards the relatives of people killed, which would certainly make people think twice before setting up a clinic.

The previous poster makes accusations without evidence.

I don't believe Lowe personally is antisemitic. He's a big Israel fan, for one thing.

His bright young men are another matter. You don't have to spend much time observing them before you notice the casual antisemitism.

And at least one of his policy writers keeps interesting company. Would you like me to explain who Martin Sellner is?

My worry is the language used The sick puberty blockers trial and We must keep this filth away from young children.

No matter what the cause or how much I might agree with the principles, I do not think it helps anyone to support an organisation that finds such language acceptable. I've always thought that the more you know about something, the better the arguments. They clearly know nothing.

There are now plenty of supporters who are reasonable, intelligent people, we at last, can pick and choose. We don't have to support those at the bottom of the barrel

I’m a huge proponent of assisted suicide personally- but the point about any legislation on that subject that is passed and I sincerely hope it is , is that it would be bulletproof in a way that gender affirming medicine isn’t in the slightest

if any gender affirming pathways were subject to the same scrutiny that assisted dying is being (as it should) there is no way it would exist at all.

Nobody talks about those people though….

I think if the main concern is language used to describe harms to children not the actual harms to children then we have a problem.

At what point are we allowed to use the language 'sick' or 'filth'. Can we use it about paedophiles raping children? What's the boundary, just so I know.

The people who've pushed gender 'medicine' which has no evidence base are educated enough - including about normal medical protocol - to know it was wrong and deviated quite massively from best practice in all other areas of paediatric medicine. They chose to look away due to profit mainly and not wanting to be cancelled - they chose that over protecting children. They deserve to be called out and if we don't, it will happen again. There need to be consequences.