Does UK’s new far-right party, Restore, pose a threat to Farage’s Reform?

Restore Britain’s manifesto has pledged to implement the ‘most ambitious programme of mass deportations ever seen in Britain’.

When Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right, anti-immigration party Reform UK, addressed the nation while bizarrely standing in a field this week, he was a man on a mission.

Farage was speaking about the fatal stabbing of a white teenage boy, Henry Nowak, in December 2025 by a Sikh man armed with a ceremonial knife. When police arrived at the scene, instead of arresting the attacker, they took his (false) word that Novak had racially abused him and refused to believe the 18-year-old when he told them he had been stabbed.

Footage from the incident – which Novak’s family have allowed to be released to the public – shows a devastating scene in which the dying boy is handcuffed, uttering his last words, “I can’t breathe.”

Many politicians have since leapt on the opportunity to reap political capital from the tragedy. “I just kept thinking, that’s someone’s boy. That could be my boy,” Kemi Badenoch, leader of the former governing – now floundering – Conservative Party, told The Times newspaper on Tuesday.

Farage seized the chance to rally Reform supporters against what he has framed as an appalling example of extreme racism towards a white boy – even going so far as to liken the tragedy to the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in the US.

But his real message, observers say, was to former supporters who have deserted his party in droves in favour of a new far-right group, Restore Britain, which is arguably even more anti-immigration than Farage himself. Since its launch less than four months ago by disgruntled former Reform member Rupert Lowe, Restore has amassed more than 96,000 members and 13 councillors who have mostly defected from Reform.

As a single parliamentary seat in the north of England prepares for a critical by-election that could ultimately determine the United Kingdom’s next prime minister later this month, the far right is preparing to do its own battle for the constituency.

In Makerfield, Greater Manchester, a by-election is expected to take place on June 18, following the departure of current Labour MP Josh Simons to make way for Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to contest the seat. If he is successful, Burnham will re-enter Westminster after an absence of nine years to stand for the leadership of the party against Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has been badly damaged by disastrous local election results last month. Burnham was last an MP for the constituency of Leigh until May 2017. Since that year, h