UK Tax Policy Mid-Terms: #6 Restore Britain

UK Tax Policy Mid-Terms: #6 Restore Britain

Part 6 of 6 | The Radical Flank

 

Introduction

Every political movement eventually produces its own splinter faction.

The faction that thinks the original either isn’t pure enough, radical enough, committed enough to the cause.

For Reform UK, that faction is Restore Britain.

Founded by Rupert Lowe MP, the former Southampton FC chairman and briefly a Reform UK parliamentarian, Restore Britain launched as a “movement” in June 2025 and registered as a political party in February 2026.

The pitch is that Reform has lost its focus. Farage abandoned the £90 billion tax cuts. Reform now talks about “fiscal credibility” like a bunch of Treasury mandarins. Someone needs to hold the more radical line.

Enter Rupert Lowe, stage right.

The Backstory

Rupert Lowe won Great Yarmouth for Reform UK in 2024. By June 2025, he was launching his own movement. By February 2026, it was a registered party.

The official line is that Restore Britain is a “democratic revolution” with grassroots activism to restore British sovereignty, identity, and prosperity.

 

The tax platform (it appears) is explicitly designed to appeal to the Reform voters who feel betrayed by Farage’s fiscal pivot.

In other words, ‘if Reform won’t promise to abolish inheritance tax anymore, Restore Britain will’.

The Tax Policies

Restore Britain’s tax platform reads like Reform’s 2024 manifesto before the accountants got involved:

Abolish inheritance tax entirely. Not reform it. Not raise the threshold. Abolish it. Lowe calls it a “death tax that violates fundamental moral principles.”

The rationale is that you’ve paid tax on income throughout your life. The state taking 40% when you die is double taxation. Family farms and businesses shouldn’t be broken up to pay death duties. Etc.

This is emotionally compelling and fiscally expensive. IHT raises approximately £7 billion annually.

Where does that come from if abolished?

Scrap IR35 on day one. The off-payroll working rules, or IR35 to its friends (correction – it has no friends), are a perennial target for right leaning parties. Reform promised to abolish them. The Conservatives promised to review them. Restore Britain promises to scrap them immediately.

For the uninitiated: IR35 determines whether a contractor is genuinely self-employed or effectively an employee for tax purposes. It’s complex, unpopular with contractors, and beloved only by HMRC’s compliance teams.

Abolishing it would cost the Treasury several billion pounds annually in lost NI and income tax.

But contractors vote, and they donate, and (anecdotally) they’re disproportionately represented in Reform/Restore Britain circles.

Corporation tax: lowest in Europe. The explicit aim is Ireland-style rates, currently 12.5%, combined with tax holidays for new small businesses.

The theory is that low taxes attract business, business creates jobs, jobs generate tax revenue by encouraging the lesser-spotted economic growth. The Laffer curve in action.

Ireland’s low corporation tax required decades of EU structural funding, English-speaking workforce, and strategic positioning as a gateway to Europe. Of course, simply arguing for economic copy pasta is not necessarily going to repeat the success of the Irish tiger. But it is a radical idea.

Remittance tax. The proposal is a new tax on money sent abroad, specifically targeting remittances from workers sending wages back to their home countries. The framing seems to  explicitly discourage economic migration by taxing the outflow of capital.

Of course, this would not be without its legal and practical difficulties.  But it is something quite different from anything that Reform or the Conservatives have proposed.

The Positioning

Restore Britain positions itself as “rewarding the nation’s grafters and protecting the nation’s vulnerable.”

This sounds nice. The policy implications are:

Workfare for able-bodied benefit claimants. If you’re capable of work, you work, whether in community service, public works, whatever. Benefits are not unconditional.

This isn’t new. Versions of workfare have been proposed by Conservatives and Reform for years.

But Restore Britain is more explicit about the stick than the carrot.

“High street investigation unit.” This is a proposed enforcement body to investigate businesses suspected of tax evasion, illegal working, or trading without proper licences.

The Electoral Question

Restore Britain is very new. Rupert Lowe sits as an independent, having left Reform.

What it does is occupy the space Reform has vacated.

When Farage announced that £90 billion in tax cuts was “not realistic,” he created an opening. Voters who believed those promises, who wanted those tax cuts suddenly had nowhere to go.

Restore Britain is that somewhere.

The IHT Divide

It’s worth noting how inheritance tax has become the dividing line on the British right:

Each position is more ‘radical’ than the last.

Restore Britain has staked out perhaps the extreme on IHT: no death tax at all, ever, for anyone.

This is electorally potent, of course, in certain demographics. Older voters with assets to pass on, farmers, family business owners.

The Reform Comparison

It’s instructive to compare Reform UK’s current position with Restore Britain’s:

Restore Britain is, essentially, Reform’s 2024 platform without the 2025 retreat.

It’s what Reform would be if Farage hadn’t decided mainstream fiscal respectability mattered.

Verdict: Uncompromising (For Now, Anyway)

There’s no 2024 manifesto to compare against as Restore Britain didn’t exist. So we can only assess what they’re currently promising.

Restore Britain has expressed its values as: lower taxes, reduced immigration, and a smaller state. The fiscal details perhaps secondary, at this stage, to the messaging.

Whether this translates into votes will, in part, depend on Reform UK’s trajectory. If Farage continues his pivot to ‘fiscal credibility’, Restore Britain may pick up some of its disaffected supporters.

If Reform crashes and burns, Restore Britain could inherit the entire base.

For now, they might be written off by many as the more radical right flank. But so was Reform UK, once. And so was UKIP before that.

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Series Conclusion: Coming next week… What the Mid-Terms Tell Us