After the Interview
Rupert Lowe dodged the questions. The people around him did not.
Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.
I was asleep while all this was going on. Night shifts do that. By the time I made a coffee and started catching up, Rupert Lowe had already had his row with Nick Robinson and social media had moved on to arguing about who had won.
I listened to the interview first. Then I started reading what people were saying about it. That took much longer.
Most of the coverage settled on Lowe. Fair enough. He was the one being interviewed in his home, arms crossed for most if it. What caught my attention was everyone else.
I expected people around Restore to say Robinson had stitched him up or that the BBC was at it again. Plenty did. Others went somewhere else entirely.
At first it was the usual stuff. Robinson was biased. The BBC was out to get Lowe. I had expected that.
What I had not expected was how quickly some people left the interview behind. The subject became ethnonationalism, demographic security and whether Britain needed an ethnic definition of nationhood.
Then I opened the Telegraph.
I expected a different mood. The people commenting there are older. They are not the same crowd who spend all day on X. Yet I found much the same thing. Heath was wrong. Robinson was playing games. Lowe was right. Downes was saying what needed to be said.
That was when I went back to Heath’s column.
He had written it as a warning to the right. The response suggested something else. A fair number of people did not think he had misread Restore. They thought he had described it accurately and objected only to his disapproval.
That is a different argument. It is no longer about whether Lowe or Downes have been unfairly smeared. It is about whether ethnonationalism should be treated as a legitimate part of mainstream politics.
I still cannot quite get my head around how quickly that has happened. Ten years ago, a sitting MP going on the Today programme and arguing from this ground would have been extraordinary. The ideas were there, but they were still kept at a distance from respectable politics. Now the argument is over whether they have been described fairly.
I kept asking myself whether I was reading too much into a handful of posts. Then I realised they were not coming from random accounts. They were candidates, activists, organisers and people close to Restore. These were not strangers wandering into the debate. They were part of it.
Before the day was over, Elon Musk had reposted Charlie Downes' attack on Allister Heath with the endorsement: "True. Heath is a traitor" The argument had travelled a long way from the Today programme and a column in the Telegraph.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps in a month’s time nobody will remember any of this.
But I suspect I will remember the replies for longer than I remember the interview.
Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.