“Crimes against our people”. Is anyone still in doubt what Restore represents?

On Monday afternoon Rupert Lowe posted this.

By Tuesday morning it had been seen more than 400,000 times. The word to watch is “technically”. The law has no category of technical citizens. You are one or you are not. The next sentence explains what the word is for: “a Restore Britain Government will take the appropriate steps to remove that piece of paper, and then remove them from our country.”

“Them” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let’s dig in.

The case he picked

Let’s start with the example Rupert opens with, because it is well chosen. Nobody wants a terrorist holding a passport he got by lying, and the law already agrees. Section 40 of the British Nationality Act 1981 lets the Home Secretary take citizenship from anyone who naturalised if it “was obtained by fraud, false representation or concealment of a material fact”, even if that leaves them stateless. A second power removes it where that is “conducive to the public good”, which in practice means terrorism and national security.

The power is used. The House of Commons Library counts at least 1,565 orders between 2010 and 2024: 1,342 for fraud and 223 on public good grounds. Most of the fraud cases involve naturalised Albanians. That is about a hundred a year, each a decision about a named person, each open to appeal.

So his case is already covered, twice. (I am leaving aside the arrests at RAF Fairford, which are now a live legal case.) If this were all Restore meant, I would have no article. But it really isn’t. It gets a lot darker.

What he actually promised

Rupert and his party talking about “mass reviews” is not a new thing. Restore’s Philosophy of National Belonging, which I annotated in full earlier this month, says: “Citizenship obtained through fraud or deception will also be revoked. A mass review of citizenships granted will therefore be undertaken by a Restore Britain government.”

It gives no date range, so start with the scale. Britain made 245,520 grants of citizenship in the year to June 2026, 171,435 of them by naturalisation. At the 2021 census, 10.0 million people in England and Wales had been born abroad, and 43% of them said they were UK citizens. That is roughly 4.3 million people before you reach Scotland or Northern Ireland (though some of them were British from birth through a parent).

Then there are the grounds these people talk about. On 2 September they were “fraud or deception”. On Monday things had expanded to “fraud, deception and crimes against our people”. Restore has not said what a crime against our people is, whether it needs a court to prove it, or who “those found guilty” are found guilty by. You are not alone if you suspect it would be Rupert and his faux-intellectual, besuited junior cronies. Either way, keep that phrase in mind. A version of it was written down in 1933.

A piece of paper

This sort of language did not start with Lowe, and it did not start this week. On the day the original “policy paper” launched (that phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting: it is an essay with Uncle Rupert’s name on it), Harrison Pitt, Restore’s senior policy fellow, put it like this.

Note the little nod to our friend Matt Goodwin’s date projections there.

In a second post that morning he said “we cannot afford to regard ‘denaturalisation’ as a dirty word any longer”, and that on the management of public resources “we reserve the right to prioritise and deprioritise in ways that take into account the fact that not all citizens are identical.” In January he had already named the category: “Administrative ‘Brits’ like Alaa Abd El-Fattah who have been wrongly made citizens and pose a plausible threat to us should be denaturalised and deported.” A plausible threat is not a conviction. A plausible threat is whatever Harrison decides it is. Again, we have been here before.

As for who is not an administrative Brit, the party’s spokesman has been clear.

In September Charlie Downes added that “Englishness is an inherited ethnic identity” and that it is “impossible to ‘become English’”.

Put those together and the piece of paper is the only thing standing between a great many citizens and the review.

The reasons keep growing

The formal policy, such as it is, says fraud or deception. Around it, in posts by the people who, let’s face it, would run the review, the reasons have been getting broader all year. Alongside them runs a second word, traitor, aimed at political opponents, including people Restore itself would call native Brits. It is almost as if they are picking the people they hate, isn’t it?

Where this has been done before

Restore’s people are tired of being compared with the 1930s. Downes wrote last week: “Nobody is arguing that the English are an ‘Aryan master race.’” I have not seen anyone at Restore argue it. So this is not a comparison of regimes. It is a comparison of a procedure, and of one sentence.

Democracies do take citizenship away, one case at a time, mostly for fraud, as Britain does now. Britain’s first denaturalisation law, in 1918, required every Home Office order to go before an independent committee of judges. Between 1918 and 1960 the Home Office denaturalised hundreds of people, and the committee, the historians Patrick Weil and Nicholas Handler found, used its power to hold the Home Secretary back. I could not find an established democracy that has reopened all of its grants in peacetime. The states that have done it look like this.

And then there is the language dear Rupert uses in his latest post, which has been written down before. On 14 July 1933 Germany made every naturalisation granted since November 1918 revocable if it was “not desirable”. The implementing ordinance named two groups. The first was Eastern European Jews. The second, in translation, was people “guilty of a serious offence or a crime, or who have otherwise behaved in a way harmful to the welfare of state and people”. No reasons were given and there was no appeal. There were 10,487 revocations, 6,943 of them concerning Jews.

The same shape

Germany, law of 14 July 1933 and its ordinance, in translation

Naturalisations granted between 9 November 1918 and 30 January 1933 may be revoked if not to be regarded as desirable. Among those named: people guilty of a serious offence or a crime, or who have otherwise behaved in a way harmful to the welfare of state and people.

Rupert Lowe MP, X, 28 September 2026

A mass review of citizenships granted will be undertaken - we will forensically root out fraud, deception and crimes against our people, and those found guilty will be stripped of their British passport and deported.

• Blue reopening citizenship already granted
• Red a ground about harming “the people”

The same shape: reopen the grants, then add a ground about harming “the people” that only the reviewer can define. That is not a claim about what Restore intends. It is a point about what a ground like that has been used for, by the people who wrote it first.

And then remove them

Lowe’s post ends: “New bilateral agreements will be forged to make this a legal reality.” Which concedes that it is not one now. Removals to Afghanistan are paused: the Taliban told Britain it would not accept travel documents issued by the Afghan embassy in London, Free Movement reports. Many Palestinian refugees hold no other nationality, so stripping theirs leaves them stateless with nowhere to be sent.

And a family that will not go? Connor Tomlinson, a Restore supporter who has said its leaders are his closest friends, answered that last week. He was rejecting Maajid Nawaz’s claim that he wanted whole neighbourhoods under house arrest, which he called impossible. This is what he did propose.

He has the humility to say he does not have the answer, but the confidence to be sure his friends do.

So, in summary

The terrorist with the fake passport can already lose his citizenship. That has been true for decades. About a hundred people a year do. So that is not the policy. The policy is a review. Of citizenships granted. Which ones? Not said. Since when? Not said. On what grounds? Fraud. And deception. And crimes against our people. Which are what, exactly? Found guilty by whom? Also not said. Meanwhile the people who would run it think you can be a traitor for canvassing for the Greens, and that a Home Secretary born in Birmingham belongs in Pakistan.

Which leaves the question. Which of us is only technically British, and who gets to decide? Because if it is Restore Britain, we are heading down a very dark path, and I think many Restore voters would reject it if they realised what was being said in their name.