We know politicians can make ambitious promises in manifestos that later prove impossible to deliver, and yet there is no mechanism to remove them from office simply because they fail to achieve them. We also know that when you ask a politician a question, that they will hedge and filibuster, and hardly ever give a straight answer, and the answer they do give will not be in answer to the question you asked! In this article I talk about a podcast Rupert Lowe MP did with Joe Rogan, and what crossed my mind when listening to it.
Rupert Lowe, Restore Britain, MP for Great Yarmouth, appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, after an introduction to the podcast by billionaire Elon Musk. He spoke about a variety of topics, and the first brought up the subject of Grooming Gangs, which he called “Rape Gangs”, which are a big problem in certain areas of the UK. He waved a big report which detailed the recent crowdfunded inquiry. Mr Lowe said “We raised not a huge amount of money. We raised about £600,000” (the crowdfunding actually raised £802,000, however, only £586,172.81 was withdrawn and added to the Rape Gangs’ fund).
Mr Lowe said crowdfunding was necessary because the Government “will not have a statutory inquiry”. That might have been the case when his project was launched but by the time of the podcast the Government had established the statutory Independent Inquiry into Grooming Gangs, chaired by Baroness Anne Longfield following Baroness Casey’s audit. Its final report is due by 31 March 2029, although it may only publish interim findings.
As important as this inquiry is, Lowe presented immigration and demographic change as the result of a deliberate plan by British elites. I have found no credible historical evidence of a coordinated scheme of the kind Lowe describes. The historical record shows post-war migration was driven by labour shortages, Commonwealth citizenship arrangements and economic demand.
What actually happened after the war is well documented and has far more straightforward explanations.
Britain lost a huge number of working age men in the Second World War, and needed to rebuild its economy quickly. Employers and government bodies recruited workers from the Commonwealth to fill serious shortages in transport, textiles, the NHS and other sectors.
The British Nationality Act 1948 gave Commonwealth citizens the legal right to live and work in Britain. This was a tidying up of citizenship following decolonisation, not a demographic engineering project, and it was under this framework that the Windrush generation arrived from the Caribbean to work in public services, including the newly formed NHS.
Around the same time, the partition of India in 1947, combined with recruitment for British textile mills, led many Pakistanis to migrate to cities such as Bradford and Birmingham from the 1950s onwards.
Far from an open scheme to encourage any of this, subsequent governments tightened immigration law repeatedly, including the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962. That is the opposite of what you’d expect if there had been a deliberate long term plan to increase immigration.
Britain’s later involvement in Europe, particularly after joining the EEC in 1973, is a separate strand relating to European free movement, not to immigration from Pakistan or Muslim majority countries, which predates EU membership by decades and stems from Commonwealth and colonial ties rather than European ones.
Rupert’s argument that Britain’s relationship with Europe was a key factor in creating the conditions he describes, therefore seemed to me more about triggering anti Europe, pro Brexit sentiment than a realistic representation of facts.
Rape Gangs
The existence of rape gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford is well documented. Baroness Casey Audit’s findings (on behalf of the Government) on overrepresentation of Pakistani heritage men in these specific networks, none of that is in dispute.
But the way Lowe presents them in his narrative, that they are the predictable result of a deliberate elite plan stretching back to the post-war period, involving Europe, multiculturalism and immigration policy, all pointed towards weakening British sovereignty, that is not based on any research or study, and seems to be his personal interpretation of historical changes.
The statistics
The 2021 census found Muslims make up 6.5% of the population of England and Wales, roughly 3.9 million people out of 59.6 million. That’s up from 4.9% in 2011. It’s a real increase, and it’s concentrated heavily in particular places, such as London at around 15%, Tower Hamlets at nearly 40%. Birmingham and Bradford and some other towns also have large Muslim populations.
That national figure of 6.5% is an average across England and Wales. On its own, it obscures the extent to which the population is geographically concentrated. In several local authorities, the proportion of Muslims is five or six times the national average, meaning that residents’ day to day experience may differ substantially from what the national figure alone suggests.
Casey audit
The Casey audit found decades of institutional failure driven by poor data, victim blaming, and reluctance to confront ethnicity for fear of appearing racist. It confirmed evidence of disproportionate representation of Asian or Pakistani heritage men in some local areas, but said national data was too incomplete for firm conclusions. This led to twelve accepted recommendations, including mandatory rape charges for adults abusing under 16s, mandatory ethnicity data collection, and a statutory inquiry which is now underway.
Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry
Lowe’s crowdfunded report claims that at least 250,000 predominantly white girls have been abused since the 1950s, that offending occurred across at least 149 local authority areas, and that around 87% of convicted offenders in the cases it examined had what it describes as “distinctively Muslim names”. The 250,000 figure is an extrapolation rather than a count of recorded victims, while the 87% figure comes from a name-based analysis rather than official national crime statistics.
The inquiry attributes the pattern specifically to Pakistani Muslim clan culture and cites theological justifications within Islam. It concludes authorities enabled the abuse through active or passive consent, and calls for mandatory ethnicity and religion recording, tougher sentencing, and mass deportation of convicted foreign nationals. Both figures should be treated as claims made by the report, not established national totals.
My opinion
I don’t want to dismiss the Rape Gang Inquiry outright. It was crowdfunded by ordinary members of the public who wanted answers the Government did not provide, and whatever its flaws, it succeeded in putting the scale of this abuse back on the political agenda. That achievement should not be waved away.
What I am concerned about is the fact that £802,000 (even though only part of these funds has been withdrawn – Rape Gang Inquiry Updates number 13) of public donations was committed for a piece of work that is, in effect, running in parallel with a Government-funded statutory inquiry. The projects are not identical, but two inquiries, two funding streams – one has to ask whether that duplication of effort and money is the best use of resources, or whether it exists because people simply do not expect the official version to tell the whole story. Will the Government’s inquiry be too sanitised, too cautious about naming what it finds, for fear of the political fallout? We don’t know. But if that lack of trust is justified, the answer is to fix the official inquiry, not to run a second one alongside it.
Then there is the timescale. The statutory inquiry is not due to submit its final report until 31st March 2029, three years away, on top of everything that has already been documented in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere for well over a decade. That is not acceptable. Some of what has already been uncovered, including accounts of children being subjected to abuse involving animals, is so severe nobody should argue in favour of taking their time over it. Every year of delay is another year in which more children are at risk.
The core principle should be that skin colour and culture are irrelevant; the only thing that matters is stopping the abuse and holding every perpetrator equally accountable regardless of ethnic or social background. Policing should focus purely on the crime, not on managing sensitivities about who is committing it, and if fear of unrest or lack of resources is holding officers back anywhere, the fix is more police and the political will to use them, not caution.
The real source of my frustration is the time these processes take and the volume of reports, audits and publicity generated while the abuse itself keeps happening. How many more rapes will it take before the rape gangs are dealt with? How many more reports, discussions and years will go by? Another 250,000 rapes? 500,000? A million? Let’s stop the talking and see more action. This fear about racism has to end, and so does waiting until 2029 for the inquiry’s findings and recommendations that are needed now. These children are not political pawns and they should not be treated as such.
Dunblane – murder or massacre?
If further evidence were needed that Rupert Lowe’s presentation of important facts requires closer examination, we need to consider his comments about the Dunblane massacre, made during that same Joe Rogan podcast. While discussing UK gun laws, he told Rogan that handguns were banned in the late 90s because of what he called ‘a murder up in Dunblane’, and when Rogan queried him on the figure, Lowe repeated his claim of ‘one murder’.
I don’t need to tell you, I am sure, that what happened in Dunblane was not a single murder. On 13th March 1996, sixteen children aged five and six, along with their teacher, were shot dead at Dunblane Primary School by gunman Thomas Hamilton, who then turned a gun on himself. A further fifteen people, including twelve children, were injured. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history, and it was the public outcry that followed, through the Snowdrop Campaign, which led to the ban on private ownership of most handguns, introduced by John Major’s Government in 1997 and extended by Tony Blair’s Government later that year.
What was striking was not simply the inaccurate description of the event, but the way the tragedy was framed. The conversation focused on the fact that law-abiding gun owners lost access to handguns, rather than on why those restrictions were introduced in the first place. The legislation was a response to the deaths of sixteen children and their teacher, not an arbitrary attack on gun ownership. The debate over firearms cannot be separated from the human cost that prompted Parliament to act.
Restore Britain’s defence, that Lowe was simply referring to one incident rather than one victim, does not really address the problem. Reducing the murder of sixteen children and their teacher to a single killing, on a podcast with an audience running into the millions, caused genuine offence. Labour MP Chris Kane raised the matter as a point of order in the House of Commons, and Scottish politicians from more than one party condemned the remark in strong terms. To me this did not sound like simply a case of getting the facts wrong. The issue I had with the remark is that the wider context of the mass shooting was absent from his explanation, and the emphasis was placed on the restriction of handguns rather than the reason those restrictions were introduced. Without the human aspect, the real cost to humanity is missed.
If Lowe is prepared to discuss one of the most well-documented tragedies in modern British history without acknowledging the mass shooting that led to the legislation he is criticising, it makes me doubt his arguments on more complex issues such as immigration, culture and public health are being presented with the full context required.
Vaccinate or not: should it even be a question?
Mr Lowe’s views on vaccination are also relevant. During the interview, he described himself as a “pureblood”, a term used by some Covid vaccine sceptics to refer to those who chose not to receive a Covid vaccine. He criticised vaccine mandates, particularly those affecting NHS workers, and praised ivermectin as a Covid treatment while portraying criticism of his views as evidence that his arguments had been suppressed. The issue is not whether medical policy can be questioned; scientific debate is essential. The issue is whether claims presented to millions of people are supported by reliable evidence, particularly when they concern interventions designed to prevent serious illness and death.
The consequences of declining vaccination rates are not theoretical. In 2026, England saw a resurgence of measles, with 983 laboratory-confirmed cases recorded between January and July, compared with 959 cases for the whole of 2025. UKHSA reported that 61% involved children aged ten or under. Tragically, measles has already been linked to three measles-related deaths in England this year, two children and one adult with an underlying immunological condition.
Lowe’s remarks do not themselves explain these outbreaks, but they form part of a public debate in which accuracy about vaccination matters.
Before widespread vaccination, diseases such as measles, polio, diphtheria and whooping cough caused thousands of cases of serious illness and death in Britain. Their dramatic decline followed the introduction and widespread uptake of vaccination programmes. While vaccines should always be subject to proper scrutiny and safety monitoring, dismissing their impact ignores decades of evidence showing that they have transformed public health.
Immigration
The current system allows people who arrive in the UK and claim asylum to have their claim assessed. While waiting, if they are destitute, they can receive accommodation and basic support. They can access NHS care, and those receiving asylum support can generally receive help with prescription costs.
Illegal arrivals are not automatically granted permission to stay; they are supposed to go through the asylum process, but the major issue has been the backlog and the difficulty removing people whose claims fail.
Legal migration has also been high in recent years, driven by work visas, health and care recruitment, student visas and family routes. Restore Britain’s central argument is that the scale of migration has exceeded what public services and infrastructure can absorb.
How Restore Britain says it would change it
Lowe went into great detail to say Restore Britain wants to move from managing high migration to reversing it, aiming for “net negative immigration”. Its proposal is to tighten entry rules, remove illegal migrants, reduce access to settlement rights, and create a much more aggressive removal system.
Restore Britain argues this would require changing the legal framework so that deportations are not repeatedly blocked by appeals and legal challenges, increasing detention/removal capacity, negotiating returns with other countries, and making the UK less attractive as a destination for people arriving illegally.
Lowe has described his proposed policy in terms of deporting “millions”, and Restore Britain presents its approach as a fundamental break from previous governments’ policies rather than a minor adjustment. Restore Britain’s argument is not that the current system does nothing. It’s argument is that the current system is too constrained and too slow.
What could be the pitfalls of the change?
The biggest practical problem I see is that changing the law does not instantly create the ability to remove people. The UK would still need to identify individuals, prove nationality, obtain agreement from other countries to accept them, process legal challenges, build detention capacity and fund a much larger enforcement system. Countries often refuse to take back their nationals without documentation or agreements. There is also the question of who exactly would be removed: illegal entrants are one category, but proposals involving people who are legally resident create far more legal, economic and practical difficulties. Chances are that a government could promise rapid large-scale removals but then discover the machinery cannot deliver at the speed promised.
Lowe’s appearance was effective politically because it presented a clear diagnosis and a clear enemy: elites, institutions and failed governments. But the harder question must be whether the proposed solutions can operate at the scale promised. A political slogan can be delivered in minutes; a deportation system capable of removing hundreds of thousands of people requires legislation, staff, facilities, international agreements and years of administration.
- Where are those people held while cases are processed?
- How many detention places exist on day one?
- How many removal flights can realistically operate?
- Which countries will accept returns?
- What happens when someone has no passport and their country says “we don’t recognise them”?
- How many immigration officers, caseworkers, judges and interpreters are needed?
- Who will replace them if they were working?
The current immigration debate raises questions that go beyond simply whether people should be allowed to remain in the UK. While the government already has a process for identifying asylum seekers, assessing claims and removing those who do not qualify, the reality is that the system appears unable to cope with the volume of cases. The difficult part is not just making a decision to remove someone; it is establishing who they are, where they come from, whether their claim is genuine, and where they can legally be returned to if they don’t meet the legal test to stay.
Parties such as Restore Britain may argue that the problem is caused by legal and administrative barriers and that a tougher system of detention, faster processing and removals would solve the issue. However, the practical challenge remains: without agreements with other countries, particularly those through which migrants travel before reaching the UK, changing the law alone does not provide a destination for those removed. The question should be why the UK is dealing with large numbers arriving irregularly when many have already travelled through other countries regarded as safe under asylum policy, and whether the current system strikes the right balance between humanitarian obligations and the capacity of public services, which are already under pressure for many UK citizens.
A final thought
There is a danger when politicians become so focused on a problem that they stop seeing the human beings affected by their solutions. A concern can be legitimate; that does not make every proposed answer humanly acceptable. Policies should be judged not only by what they promise to fix, but by who pays the price.
Restore Britain were sent a preview for this article and we invited them to comment. No response had been received by the publication deadline.
