Endless Restoration and the Soviet Clasp of Blairism

There’s a new wave of hyper-nostalgia for a mythical ‘Britain’ that needs addressing, because it’s based on a number of false, and often rotten assumptions, as the state decomposes in itself and its adherents become hysterical in rancid bigotry.

Here’s Rupert Lowe, the leader of something called ‘Restore Britain’ (and a figure too toxic and festering even for Farage’s party) here trying to exploit young mens alienation :

My message to the millions of young white British men who feel increasingly ignored, insulted and alienated. pic.twitter.com/j6beJlKOKo

— Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10) December 27, 2025

Rupert addresses “the young white British men” arguing: “The cancer of DEI, along with the legacy of Blairism must be eradicated and erased from society.”

It’s a splurge of Trumpian nonsense with Blair as Biden and the enflamed rhetoric looking even more pathetic from a man who looks like he couldn’t eradicate a Worthington’s Original.

“Being a British citizen doesn’t make you British” thunders Lowe in a confused flourish, echoing that most British of figures, Adolf Hitler.

A People without History

Here’s David Starkey (CBE), who writes merrily: “Merry Christmas and thank you to all those who have followed my work over the last year. While celebrating at my home in Kent, I’ve been thinking about what this season really means, and how it might relate to the ideas I talk about it on David Starkey Talks.”

In a potpourri of nostalgia for Britain, Christmas & Boxing Day Football, Starkey puts his shoulder to the wheel in the struggle for the endless restoration of something:

“I hear the echoes of Christianity when I walk in Churches, or visit Oxbridge, reflecting on those wonderful lines from T.S. Eliot in his poem ‘Little Gidding’:

A people without history, is not redeemed from time, For History is a pattern of timeless moments, So while the light fails on a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel, History is now and England.

Let’s think about that for a moment [Yes let’s – Ed]. A people without history. Who was it, back at the turn of the millennium, who told us here in Britain, that we, whose politics stretched back for more than a thousand years, were a new country? A country, in other words, without a history.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Shaking the Kaleidoscope

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that Starkey seems to be confusing (while crying out for a correct and proper History) England and Britain. Even more confusing, he references a politics that stretches back ‘1000 years’. Britain has existed for a few hundred years. He means England, or rather, he just conflates the two.

It’s instructive that, for both Rupert Lowe and David Starkey, it is Blair and his cohort who are to be put to blame for whatever the unspoken catastrophe that has struck England/Britain. We’ll return to that trompe l’oeil in a moment.

Starkey rambles:

“It was Tony Blair, and indeed he sought to make it so, imposing upon us an alien constitution under which we still labour, and actually changing the population into an amorphous blob of world citizens; loyal to nothing, grateful to nothing, sharing in nothing. And yet what does T.S. Eliot go on to say, that even a people without history are NOT redeemed from time. You see, having studied history my entire life; having indeed, made my life out of history, one realises that even in those periods when we think nothing is happening, history marches on. Even for those who think they’re controlling events, shaping the world, “shaking the kaleidoscope” as Mr Blair would put it, history is busily working away behind them, marshalling its forces, slowly working its course as a river does. We here in Britain are not redeemed from time. It might have taken a quarter of a century, but the terrible effects of the changes imposed upon us by Tony Blair and New Labour have become clear for everyone to see. And the reaction to those changes is growing every day. I’ve spent this year trying to spread the word about those effects. And, if it’s not too grandiose, I do regard it as evangelisation.”

To be honest David, it is a bit grandiose.

And here comes Christmas:

“But if there’s one point of the year uncorrupted by the Soviet clasp of Blairism and New Labour politics, then surely it must be Christmas time. The Christmas season here in England is an accumulation of tradition that even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown dared not interfere with. Of course we got the shallow reinterpretations of the season by court playwrights like Richard Curtis. But nothing to compare with the great suffusion of meaning we feel when we decorate the Christmas trees (introduced to this country by Prince Albert), enjoy Boxing Day football, a time for the working classes to relax and attend sports – indeed codified as such by the 1871 Bank Holidays Act – or listen to the carols which have filled the Churches of this land going all the way back to before there was an England. Christmas is a time when we see the traditions of England alive and well, and for a moment we can imagine a country animated by its own spirit, not a foreign one; a country at ease with itself; a country of shared pleasures and obligations.”

It’s easy to see much of this as just more sub-Truss, slightly naff, Christian Populism. While figures like Farage and Robinson, Lowe and Jenrick openly spout racist tropes, figures like Starkey’s purpose is to sugar-coat the pill. It’s Christmas Wrapping to the toxicity of advanced Islamophobia and the clearly fascist agenda of Reform UK [This is Not Normal – Bella Caledonia]. Such characters are important in the transition from ‘mainstream conservatism’ to hardcore radical fascist politics. These figures are important storytellers, making what’s coming more palatable.

Christmas Wrapping

This softer British nationalism is quieter but it’s also important to prop-up a disintegrating state. You can see it everywhere, and because of a sort of constitutional Shifting Baseline Syndrome (SBS) we end up defending institutions that are well past their sell-by-date. Here’s Tony Hall on the attacks on the BBC and how to defend it [The BBC tells the story of Britain in a way Netflix simply cannot. In the year to come, please remember that ]:

“I think people understand the importance of the BBC to our democracy in providing high-quality, accurate and impartial news.”

“The BBC gives cultural definition to more specific communities too. When I was running the BBC, I talked to the people at Radio Cumbria, for example, who told me how their work helped define a community that is geographically very widespread, especially at times of crisis. These local services, whether in small areas or serving the nations, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, at their best report the stories that matter to their audiences and celebrate the characteristics that make them what they are. Taking this forward is an important role for the BBC.”

“All in all, the BBC is the largest producer of stories about our isles, the people, the places, the communities that make up this diverse and creative nation. Of course, that has a value. The BBC is the largest single investor in UK-made programming, contributing about £4.9bn to the UK economy each year, half of which is spent outside London.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

There’s the complacency and the complete ignorance. The idea that a figure like Hall really thinks that people in ‘small areas or nations’ feel that the BBC “report the stories that matter to their audiences and celebrate the characteristics that make them what they are” is laughable. But you’ve got to love the idea that the payoff: “The BBC is the largest single investor in UK-made programming, contributing about £4.9bn to the UK economy each year, half of which is spent outside London” – is the great statement he thinks it is.

This is hubris and anglocentrism off the charts.

This story of the death-knell of Traditional Britain saw its most recent expression in the now seasonal tale of ‘rural Britain’. Here, Will Bryer, Master of the Duke of Beaufort Hunt, serves a ‘warning’ to the elected government about their intent to ban trail hunting:

Sir Keir Starmer has been warned he faces a considerable task in rebuilding trust with rural communities, as Boxing Day hunts gather under the shadow of a looming government crackdown.

The Labour administration’s intention to ban trail hunting, announced just days before these… pic.twitter.com/wi0WQCK3LI

— The Independent (@Independent) December 26, 2025

This is the heart of the sleight of hand by the forces of Anglo-British ‘Nationalism’. But this idea, that Farage & Co represent the common man of Merry Olde England faces some problems, not just the notion of the Master of the Duke of Beaufort Hunt as rebel. As Patrick English from YouGov puts it: “All evidence we have points toward the public being strongly in favour of outlawing fox hunting. Hunting wild animals is not something the average Brit considers to be part of British identity, nor part of their culture Supporters of The Hunts are in a very, very small minority.”

“The latest @YouGov data suggests that the British public are in favour of banning trail hunting by a margin of 50%-29% What’s more, this crosses urban-rural divides: 50% of people living in rural Britain want trail hunting banned.”

The Ship of Theseus 

Equally, the much-celebrated (and ongoing) defections from the Tory party to Reform UK present Farage’s party with a real dilemma we can call the Ship of Theseus paradox.

How can a group that has made their name as outsiders and ‘insurgents’ mansplain their makeup as a party chock full of the very Tory establishment they have railed against for twenty years? Having inherited both the funders of the Tory project and the dregs of the parliamentary party it’s going to be impossible for them to campaign against the very people that will now represent them.

The same problem faces MAGA over-the-sea, who had ridden to power on a tide of conspiracy about a secret elite hiding a paedophile conspiracy, only to turn aside from the Epstein reality of a secret elite hiding a paedophile conspiracy. 

That none of this is supposed to make any sense, and that none of it does, doesn’t matter when you are just cruising the tv studios and threatening to burn down hostels, but when you have to campaign, or run for office, it does. Even the most pliant media, manned by the most pathetic sycophants [Admiring Malcom Offord’s Jaguar] will be forced to join the dots, not because of any moral compass, but just because, as with Liz Truss, eventually the Men in Grey Coats will come for them.

The Soviet Clasp of Blairism

The attempt of Lowe, Starkey & Co to lay the blame squarely on Tony Blair’s watch (18 years ago), neatly sidesteps fourteen disastrous years of Conservative rule under David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak. This was an era of tumultuous change, austerity, a hard Brexit, a Hostile Environment and catastrophic economic self-harm. But for those lamenting England/Britain’s demise and decline, along with Bloodsports and Christmas, the period needs complete evasion, because the position of extreme victimhood needs to sit alongside latent supremacy.

When Starkey talks (vaguely) of Blair creating an ‘amorphous blob of world citizens’ he knows full well that Farage’s solution is, literally, women and children locked up on arrival; huge detention centres in military camps; uniformed officers raiding Britain’s towns and cities, disappearing people off the street for rendition to countries they’ve never been to, with no recourse to legal protections, and mass deportations.

Describing Blair’s continuity-neoliberalism as a ‘Soviet clasp’ is a giveaway to how detached from reality these people really are, but it is at least consistent with the scapegoat politics that have led us into this dark time. These people, and their bleak and ridiculous ideas, need to be defeated. The year ahead will see if we are pulled further into this vortex of absurdity, endless ‘restoration’, hyper-nostalgia and deranged Christian Populism in the desperate search for a mythical past, or attempt to step forward into a difficult but reality-based future.