We explore the extremists resurfacing in Restore Britain, including figures who have spent decades immersed in fascist groups such as the BNP, Blood & Honour and much else
Since launching as a party in February, Restore Britain has acted as a beacon to the extreme right.
Headed by Rupert Lowe MP and steered by a circle of young radicals, the group claims to have ballooned to 130,000 members in two months. If true, this would make it comparable in size to the Conservatives, as well as nine times bigger than the British National Party (BNP) and seven times bigger than the National Front (NF) at their respective peaks.
Ideologically, Restore sits far closer to the BNP and NF than the Tories. As we have previously reported, a litany of extremists have lined up behind Lowe, excited by the party’s promise to deport “millions”. The figurehead of this faction is Steve Laws, an ethnic cleansing absolutist who, as we revealed last month, has claimed to enjoy “daily” contact with members of Restore’s top team. The party’s steadfast refusal to disavow Laws and his ilk has been taken as a tacit invitation.
Restore is now attempting to transform online momentum into infrastructure, organising dozens of branch meetings around the country.
In the first of a series of articles, we expose the seasoned extremists now washing up at Restore meetings and actions.
East Riding of Yorkshire is the home branch of Maria Bowtell, Restore’s Head of Local Government and first councillor, and was among the first chapters to organise an offline meeting.
Photographed with Bowtell at a 9 April event was Gary Pudsey, a Bridlington-based neo-Nazi and veteran of some of Britain’s most overtly fascistic groups.
Pudsey, an erstwhile activist for the National Front, was involved in the Blood & Honour (B&H) skinhead scene, which took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth. B&H was entwined with Combat 18, the neo-Nazi terror group that attacked ethnic minorities and left-wingers throughout the 1990s.
In 1995, Pudsey was convicted of threatening behaviour for his part in a brutal attack on a Nottingham bookshop the previous year. The gang of thugs, who were on their way to a B&H gig, stormed the progressive shop, assaulting members of the public and staff and causing £10,000 of damage.
Pudsey went on to become the Bridlington organiser for the BNP, representing the party at local and parliamentary elections. He then defected to the British Democrats, a fringe BNP splinter, acting as security at the inaugural meeting of the fascist group.
More recently, Pudsey has been involved in Patriotic Alternative (PA), currently Britain’s largest neo-Nazi group, recommending the works of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other fascist literature to members.
As recently as last August, we photographed Pudsey at a PA protest in Newark, Nottinghamshire, attended by extreme antisemites and figures with violent histories.
Connor Tomlinson, a YouTuber close to the Restore leadership, recently posted a photo of a meeting in Bromley, Greater London, writing that it was “good to meet so many patriots in a nearby borough”.
Among these “patriots” was Adrian Davies, who has long moved in the elitist and pseudo-intellectual corners of the racist right.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Davies operated in the extreme currents of the Conservative Party. This included a stint on the executive committee of the Monday Club, which pushed race politics within the Tory party before its excommunication, and as secretary of the London Swinton Circle, another fringe pressure group. He also took a leading role in Right Now!, a far-right magazine.
During this period, he attended conferences of GRECE in Paris, the central think tank of the neo-fascist Nouvelle Droite. This movement partly inspired Davies, Jonathan Bowden and Eddy Butler to found the Bloomsbury Forum, a pseudo-intellectual discussion group, in the mid 1990s.
The Bloomsbury Forum established links to the BNP, a party to which Davies offered legal advice. Following a split, Davies launched the Freedom Party in 2000, a short-lived microparty that he chaired and represented in a failed election bid.
A self-described “Devil’s advocate”, Davies has long operated as the go-to barrister for neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and other extremists. Those represented by Davies include BNP leaders John Tyndall and Nick Griffin; David Irving, the UK’s best-known Holocaust denier; Alison Chabloz, another notorious denier and antisemite; Anthony Hancock, who ran Historical Review Press, once the UK’s leading Holocaust denial publisher; the fascist organiser Jez Turner; and Lawrence Burns, a former member of the now-banned Nazi terror group National Action.
Davies registered the British Democrats as a party, and would serve as treasurer for the BNP splinter after its launch in 2013. As the party slid further into obscurity, he remained active in the theory-oriented racist fringe, regularly writing for Heritage & Destiny, the UK’s main racial nationalist magazine, and addressing meetings of the Traditional Britain Group.
Notably, Davies also cultivated links to white supremacists in the US, including American Renaissance (AmRen). Davies has attended AmRen conferences since the 2000s, events where, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists”. Davies addressed AmRen conferences in 2014 and 2018.
Jared Taylor, founder of AmRen, entered the UK to address the conference of the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative last year. Taylor also claims to be a paid-up member of Restore Britain.
On 18 April, Restore organised a day of action in Great Yarmouth to support its candidates at the 7 May local elections. The party drafted in activists from across the country to canvas the town — including well-known ethnonationalists.
Among them was Julian Leppert, a former BNP councillor who has cycled through numerous organisations in a decades-long quest for relevance.
Joining the BNP in 2002, Leppert represented the party in the 2004 London Mayoral race before being elected as councillor in Redbridge in 2006. During this time, he received attention for describing fellow BNP councillor Lawrence Rustem as “OK” because he was only “half wog”, and for turning up at council meetings in a car with the license plate “NA51 ZCY”.
Like Pudsey and Davies, Leppert joined the British Democrats in 2013 after the collapse of the BNP. He resurfaced in For Britain, an anti-Muslim UKIP splinter, for whom he won an Epping council seat in 2019. His election was heralded as “one of the best nationalist election results ever” by Heritage & Destiny, a magazine to which Leppert is a longstanding subscriber.
As a For Britain councillor, Leppert was slammed in the local press for admitting that he would “ideally” like Epping to be a whites-only enclave. During this time, he began campaigning against the use of a local hotel to house asylum seekers; the campaign gained rational media attention after a protest outside the hotel erupted into violence last year.
After For Britain folded in 2022, Leppert sloped back to the British Democrats, which he described as his “true political home”. He duly lost his seat in 2023.
Now, he has jumped ship once again, claiming that Lowe’s mass deportations policy made him “proper sexually aroused” and that activism for Restore is “all [he’s] doing”.
HOPE not hate will uncover more extremists at Restore meetings in future articles.
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