The American right has developed a morbid fascination with Britain over the past two years, particularly after Elon Musk began tweeting about grooming gangs. Some European influencers have found it lucrative to present Britain and parts of the continent as having “fallen,” posting videos of crimes by immigrants and appearing on American podcast networks as weary ambassadors from broken countries to warn: “It could happen here.”
Yesterday The Joe Rogan Experience podcast released a two-hour interview with Rupert Lowe, leader of Britain’s Restore party. Was Lowe there merely to create content – or is Restore a serious political party? Some of his statements suggest it’s the former rather than the latter.
Claim: Only one person died during Dunblane (27:29)
Lowe: As you probably know they banned handguns in the late 1990s because there was a murder up in Dunblane.
Rogan: One murder?
Lowe: One murder.
Perhaps Lowe meant to say that there had been one incident which led to the banning of handguns – but he said one murder, and the Dunblane massacre, on March 13, 1996, saw 16 children and one adult teacher killed.
Verdict: False
Claim: Migrants go to the top of National Health Service waiting lists (37:59)
Lowe: [If you are a small-boat migrant] you go to the top of the waiting list for dental treatment which British people don’t get, in the NHS you go to the top of the waiting list…
Rogan: Wait, what? They get access to dental treatment that British people don’t get?
Lowe: Correct, correct.
NHS dentists who are providing care are not allowed to triage patients on the basis of migration status or any other characteristic – so small-boat migrants do not go to the top of the waiting list. One place where they might be treated more quickly, without having to wait on the community list, is when they are in immigration detention, usually pending removal from the country.
Verdict: False
Claim: Slavery is accepted in Islamic countries (44:50)
Lowe: Slavery is accepted within Islamic countries
It is true that modern slavery still thrives in large parts of the Islamic world, but there is a great deal of variation within it. Saudi Arabia, which is the worst offender among Islamic countries and fourth-worst in the world, is estimated to have 21.3 slaves per 1,000 people, while its neighbor Bahrain has 6.7 after years of government-led initiatives to crack down. That puts Bahrain below several non-Islamic majority countries such as Russia, with 13 modern slaves per 1,000 people. (Britain has 1.8.)
Verdict: Misleading
Claim: There were a quarter of a million rape-gang victims (45:42)
Rogan: This rape gang inquiry report that you have just released, the number – I want you to say it because it sounds so crazy, if I say it, it’s going to sound wrong. The number of people that were victims? The estimate?
Lowe: We’ve estimated that a quarter of a million rapes have taken place. It’s probably much, much more.
The quarter of a million estimate was suggested in a 2018 House of Lords question by former UKIP leader Lord Pearson, who extrapolated Rotherham’s 1,400 victims to a national scale.
Lowe’s inquiry’s report suggests that the numbers for victims in Rotherham (1,400 between 1997 and 2013) and Telford (more than 1,000 over decades) were scaled to the 149 local authorities where that inquiry heard about confirmed or suspected grooming gang activity, to give a total of 250,000 victims “as a bare minimum.” Treating Rotherham and Telford as typical of the scale of abuse may be wrong: it could be the case that they are documented and investigated because of their anomalous, horrifying, scale. As Baroness Casey’s 2025 audit said, under-reporting and flaws in data collection make it impossible to give an accurate estimate.
Verdict: Unproven
Claim: Labour are ‘looking the other way’ on rape gangs (53:42)
Rogan: Are there people that are in denial about this happening? That this rape gang problem is real?
Lowe: Oh without a shadow of a doubt…Labour just try to look the other way
Rogan: But when confronted by the numbers what is their response?
Lowe: We’ve been demanding a statutory inquiry and in the end we crowdfunded this…
Lowe says the British government is looking the other way and implies that demands for a statutory inquiry are not being fulfilled. But a statutory inquiry is open. There is plenty to criticize about it, and it is perhaps true that Labour would have preferred not to engage with the issue. But there is an official effort to address it.
Verdict: Misleading
Claim: People were given financial rewards for ‘ratting’ on each other during Covid-19 (1:20:59)
Lowe: We had people ratting on each other.
Rogan: They were rewarding people in Los Angeles, they were giving them financial rewards for telling on their neighbors who were having parties.
Lowe: That’s what’s happened in England.
This did not happen in England. There were never any financial rewards offered to anybody for snitching on neighbors during the pandemic – although police did set up forms and phone lines where the public could snitch.
Verdict: False
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