There is no rule of common sense as such in politics: but when a movement devoted to restoring Britain cannot quite decide whether the King is British, it may be time to inspect the restoration plans.

Restore Britain has lately provided plenty of reasons to do so. Its campaign director and co-founder, Charlie Downes, has raised a red flag by arguing that Britons are “a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”.  When Allister Heath objected to this racialised conception of nationality, Downes called him “a traitor to the British people” and an “agent of the anti-white establishment”. He then appeared to insinuate that Nigel Farage had been bought by Jews, responding to Farage’s declaration that he could not be bought with an image of him standing before Jewish communal branding. Downes has also accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, reiterating the modern blood libel recasting the Jewish state as uniquely murderous.

Resulting criticism has come from Allister Heath, Stephen Pollard, Gideon Falter and Melanie Phillips, among others. Phillips identified the intellectual problem precisely: Restore is flirting with an ethnostate while calling their stance British patriotism.

For British Jews, however, this is more than an argument about the finer points of nationalism. Rupert Lowe has repeatedly advocated banning kosher slaughter. In a Commons debate in June 2025, he was admirably unambiguous: “We should ban non-stun slaughter, we should ban halal slaughter and we should ban kosher slaughter.” Hansard records the statement. Restore subsequently made abolition of both part of its politics.

The problem is not that Lowe has strong views about animal welfare. Parliament is entitled to debate slaughter standards. The problem is the political habit revealed by the formulation: halal and kosher, Muslim and Jew, placed together as interchangeable manifestations of foreign religion requiring identical treatment. Britain’s existing law makes a deliberate accommodation for religious slaughter precisely because religious liberty sometimes requires distinctions rather than administrative neatness. The Government reaffirmed in 2025 that it respected the rights of Jews and Muslims to eat meat prepared according to their religious beliefs.

This habit of crude........

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