Rupert Lowe
MP for Great Yarmouth · Restore Britain · United Kingdom
“If Uber Eats, Deliveroo and the rest were found to be employing illegal migrants, they would be fined, prosecuted or even shut down. The farce of young Sudanese illegal migrant men on mopeds delivering spring rolls and pepperoni pizzas in every British suburb would end. The Government must lead by example.”
“I will tell this Parliament exactly how we can remove millions of illegal migrants. As we have seen time and again, deportation is routinely frustrated by a carefully designed maze of legislation, international treaties and legal challenges.”
“I thank the hon. Member for her intervention. I am not going to go into detail; it is all in this policy document. I will give her one to take away. Specialist detention facilities would be constructed near airfields to hasten the process.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. First, I want to thank the 720,772 British men and women who signed our petition demanding the mass deportation of illegal migrants—a policy position that has moved from the so-called mad fringe to the acceptable mainstream in less than two years.”
“Owners of houses in multiple occupation who imposed gangs of feral illegal men on quiet British villages would be prosecuted. Public officials who knowingly placed dangerous and unvetted migrants near schools and nurseries would be sent to prison.”
“The hostile environment measures would force out hundreds of thousands; a concurrent programme of enforced deportations would be implemented alongside that to remove the rest.”
The complete record
Every one of 217 lines we hold for Rupert Lowe, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 2 of 5.
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I will indeed write to the Committee. I have one final question for the Minister: what else is the Home Office lying about?”
“It assumes that the state has the right to look over our shoulders. We defend against it by severely limiting the power of the state, not radically expanding it. Abolishing jury trials, cancelling elections, implementing facial recognition—and now this. This incoming dystopian future must be resisted. I will be holding my own protest against this creeping move towards George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. I will simply not comply. I will not be downloading a digital ID and I urge other MPs to commit to doing the same. The solution is obvious: I will just have to reinvest in a Nokia—I preferred the simplicity of that anyway. The sound people of Great Yarmouth do not want digital ID.”
“I certainly do not trust this Government. Let us remember: once the Government get a new power, they never give it back. It expands and evolves. Digital ID will not stop at proving who we are. It will creep into travel, banking, housing, benefits and even voting. Today, it is voluntary; tomorrow, it will be required for security reasons. The day after that, we will not be able to access basic services without it—all for our own good, remember. Britain is supposed to be a country in which the Government serve the people, not the other way around. It is a country built on privacy, liberty and trust. British people just want the Government to leave them alone and get out of their lives—to build a business, raise a family and live in peace. Digital ID treats every citizen as a suspect.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I feel sitting on the Government side of the Chamber, but I could not find a spare seat anywhere else, which is a testament to the fact that this subject is contested extremely passionately and that arguably it needs to be debated in the Chamber. Digital ID is the biggest step towards a surveillance state that this country has faced in my lifetime. If any Government want access to every detail of our lives, they are the ones who should be feared. We live in a country where the state cannot even run a basic IT system without losing data or leaking personal details. Digital ID will not last a week before a mountain of sensitive personal data is left at a bus stop in Kent again. I do not trust any Government.”
“Her courage in speaking openly about her experience has helped to expose a growing problem: namely that the British state is now more willing to imprison somebody for a social media post than for a rape. That is not justice, that is not proportionate and that is certainly not the mark of a free country.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I am grateful to the Petitions Committee for granting time for this extremely important debate, following our successful petition. Most importantly, I thank the more than 190,000 British people who signed the petition that we initiated, which calls for an end to the creeping use of prison as a punishment for what people say online. We would not be here today without their support, which is a credit to the petitions system, one of the better-functioning arms of Parliament. I welcome Lucy Connolly and her husband, who are here today. She is one of the many ordinary citizens who has been swept up in the chaotic and inconsistent enforcement of our online speech laws.”
“This debate is not about whether we are prepared to live in a country where liberty exists only for those who never cause offence—an impossible and undesirable standard. To Lucy and to every other person who has found themselves dragged through the system for a post online: you deserve better from your Government, and I sincerely hope today marks the beginning of a serious rethink in this House.”
“We must be clear: no free society can survive with a people afraid to speak. Democracy depends on robust argument, dissent and the ability to challenge orthodoxy. As George Orwell so presciently stated: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Parliament needs to draw a deep line in the sand: in Britain, nobody should ever be sent to prison for an offensive social media post—full stop. That requires legislative reform. We need clearer thresholds in law, a robust statutory requirement that prosecutorial decisions consider freedom of expression, and a prohibition on custodial sentences for pure speech cases. The poison of two-tier justice must be forensically extracted from our judicial system.”
“The Met police have said no action will be taken. I do not want people in prison for social media posts; I also do not want such obvious two-tier policing. Shola walks free, yet Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for one foolish social media post, soon deleted. Where is the fairness in that? If these ludicrous laws are to be implemented, it must be done fairly, with no political bias. Evidently, that is not currently happening. Is our prison system so efficient, so functional and so unoccupied that we have the capacity to put a young mother like Lucy in prison for more than 300 days? I think not. When rapists and murderers are walking free—even being released early—there is zero justification for imprisoning Lucy and the many others like her, particularly when the influence of such questionable legal aid is so heavily involved.”
“The Reform leadership’s bitter attempt to see me in prison failed, but too many others do not escape the consequences of such vile misuse of the system. We now have laws being used to punish subjective offence, based on the most fragile interpretation of “harm” and enforced through discretionary and—far too often—politically skewed policing. A post that is deemed sharp criticism one month somehow becomes grossly offensive the next. It is arbitrary, it is inconsistent and it is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democracy. I receive multiple death threats, yet the police take no action. To take just one example, online influencer Shola Mos-Shogbamimu recently posted on X: “I’m against the death penalty but for you @RupertLowe10 I’ll gladly make the exception.” This post currently has 2 million views.”
“I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has heard of the Pakistani rape gangs, which are currently the subject of my crowdfunder. When he reads the report that is coming out in March, I am sure he will agree with me. We are witnessing the steady expansion of what are essentially speech crimes—offences where there is no violence, no real threat of violence and, often, no identifiable victim at all. Yet people face dawn raids, criminal records, ankle tags and even lengthy prison sentences—for words, for arguments, for opinions that somebody somewhere claims to find offensive. I had my own experience: a late-night police raid, initiated by false allegations from former Reform party colleagues, relating solely to words I had allegedly spoken—the party of free speech, indeed.”
“T6. Does the Home Secretary agree that if a migrant—legal or illegal—cannot speak English, claims benefits, lives in social housing, refuses to work, rejects integration, commits crime, and is a drain on our society or even actively hates Britain and wishes to do us harm, they should be removed from our country, regardless of how many millions of deportations that would inevitably result in?”
“Q14. Every week we hear of a brutal murder, rape or stabbing, far too often perpetrated by someone who should not be in our country to begin with. Does the Prime Minister agree that, for cases in which the guilt is so undeniable, the crime so monstrous and the evil so irredeemable, the reintroduction of the death penalty for both foreign and domestic criminals should be put to the British people in a legally binding referendum?”
“Will the Secretary of State today agree to publish clear, honest and regular statistics on the number of illegal migrants convicted of sexual offences, murder or indeed any other crime? A yes or no answer will do well.”
““Auntie” is definitively a monopoly. When Mr Reith wrote into the charter that she should inform, educate and entertain with complete impartiality, he did it for good reason. This recent disgusting episode with this “Panorama” programme, where we have undermined our relationship with probably our greatest ally, is just the tip of the iceberg. Would the Minister agree that now is the time to responsibly defund this monopoly? If she does not, would she agree that it is time for root-and-branch reform with a view to ensuring that, in the same way that she has done with football club boards, we see people from across the country who are actually forced to pay for this service represented on the board of the BBC?”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. What does the ECHR actually mean for British people? Let us go through a few examples. A convicted Sri Lankan sex offender was allowed to stay in Britain because he is gay and would be at risk of persecution if he was returned to his home country. I do not care. A Jamaican drug dealer was jailed twice but allowed to stay in Britain after claiming that his removal would breach his right to family life. I do not care.”
“No. A Zimbabwean was jailed for killing a man in a car crash but allowed to stay in Britain after it was discovered that he had an illicit love child. I do not care. A convicted Indian paedophile was allowed to stay in Britain by claiming that the move would harm his children. I do not care. An Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son will not eat foreign chicken nuggets. I definitely do not care. We hear so much about the human rights of foreign paedophiles, sex pests and murderers—”
“What about the human rights of the British people? They have the right not to be raped, stabbed and killed by foreigners who should never have been in our country to begin with. Please spare me the continued moral outrage.”
“Step one: we should leave the ECHR and remove all other legal obstacles to mass deportation—Restore Britain’s new 100-plus page policy document proves it can be done. Step two—”
“Please spare me the continued moral outrage. I am bored of it. The British people are bored of it. It is not cruel to deport criminals, and it is not inhumane to defend our own citizens. What is cruel and inhumane is allowing foreign killers and sex offenders to walk among us in the name of the human rights they should have forfeited the moment they committed their crimes. Hon. Members can sit here and persuade themselves otherwise, but one simple fact remains: the British people want those people gone—not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. What happens on their return to their own country is quite simply not our problem. The solution is to take three straightforward steps.”
“Through freedom of information requests, Restore Britain has uncovered unpublished Treasury analysis breaking down contributions by ethnicity. Evidently the data exists, so will the Chancellor commit to going further by publishing the same analysis by nationality, so that we can see which groups are paying their way, and, more importantly, which groups are not?”
“Meanwhile, schools hold teacher training days in term time, or teachers strike and shut classrooms; yet somehow it is parents who are punished when learning is interrupted. I say they should take the teacher training days in the school holidays—there are certainly plenty of those to choose from. The state must realise that parents are not the enemy. A short term-time family holiday is not an act of neglect; often, it is the only opportunity many families ever get for such an experience, because the travel industry hikes prices to astronomical levels outside term time.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. Parents bring their children into this world; they clothe them, feed them, love them, raise them and, yes, educate them. Schools should support families, not to replace them. Yet right now in Britain parents are being fined and threatened simply for taking their children out of school for a handful of days to spend meaningful time together as a family. Is that such an awful crime? I think not. This is a society that treats the state, not the parent, as the ultimate authority. The Government claim that missing five days of school a year will somehow destroy a child’s education. Really? If so, we have no confidence in our education system at all.”
“Every family should have the right to a small number of authorised term-time absence days each year, at the family’s discretion; there should be no fines for responsible parents; headteachers must be empowered to use their own judgment. Let us end the nonsense that Government officials somehow know our children better than we do. Childhood is short. Parents should not need permission from the state to raise their own children. It is time to return authority to parents and to shrink the reach of this bloated and inefficient state into our family lives. Let us put families back at the top of the agenda, where they used to be.”
“I agree with the hon. Member. Why should working families be priced out of memories—particularly parents such as those in my Great Yarmouth constituency, who rely so heavily on the tourism trade during the school holidays for their careers or business activity? Parents know what is best for their children far better than a distant bureaucrat sitting in Westminster armed with a spreadsheet. Those are the same bureaucrats who thought it best to lock children away from school for months on end for what equated to a bad cold for the vast majority of them during lockdown. I think I will listen to the parents. I suggest three basic reforms.”
“I concur with the comments about Charlie Kirk that the Minister made at the beginning. It shows that anybody who is brave enough to put themselves up for public service and try to change the world for the better faces such dangers and risks. May I ask the Minister, first, to reassure us that we will have total transparency about the process that was followed in this ambassadorial appointment? Secondly, assuming we get over that hurdle, can he please explain to the House why the appointment of a man who described President Trump as a “danger to the world”, whom the Americans described as an “absolute moron”, who has close links with China and who has a history of misfeasance in public office was the right appointment for the relationship with the most important and powerful country in the world, and one that is essential to this country?”
“My new political movement, Restore Britain, is currently running a membership poll on support for deporting all illegal migrants. The response, from thousands of people, is almost unanimously in favour. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on mass deportations, given the extraordinary level of public support, and ensure that the House has the opportunity to debate not just the moral imperative but the legal and operational reforms required, including secure detention facilities, bilateral returns agreements, foreign aid suspensions, remittance taxes, visa cancellations, the introduction of a true hostile environment and plenty more, in order to deliver the mass deportation of every last illegal migrant at scale and pace?”
“After 20 years in the City of London, over the last year I have had to endure a stream of what I would call financially illiterate verbal baby food. Today I hear the Chancellor talk about regulating for growth. You do not regulate for growth; you deregulate for growth. The genesis of our problems are the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, which sprung from the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This was a Labour Act that created the Financial Services Authority, which turned into the PRA and the FCA. Those two organisations have shut the City of London down. We are now a shadow of our former selves in terms of raising global capital, and I heard you say the opposite—”
“My question is this: is the Minister aware of the concept of buyer beware, or caveat emptor, which used to be the basis of financial regulation? It is very risky to force people into more and more high-risk investments as you hollow out our economy with higher taxes and regulation.”
“Jury trial has been deeply embedded in the British psyche and, indeed, in our constitution since Henry II, who introduced it in order to deal fairly with land disputes. It is also embedded in the United States constitution through the sixth amendment, to protect against biased judges and oppressive prosecutions and to safeguard individual liberties. I have severe doubts about our judiciary at the moment—I am not sure that it is going in the right direction—and when I read the “Adult Court Bench Book”, it gives me even greater concern. As the Minister probably knows, jury trial is already under threat in defamation cases. I have three questions. Why do the Government appear to be so terrified of decent British people sitting on juries? Are the Government intent on further undermining jury trial.”
“Millions of Brits are eating halal meat against their will and without their knowledge due to our deceitful labelling system. The two-tier regulatory arbitrage between our abattoirs and halal slaughterhouses means that economic factors foster a more widespread adoption of the cheaper option, which means that halal meat is seeping into the food chain and the consumer is unwittingly eating it.”
“It experiences a minute of pure agony while the blood pours from its body. There is no sedation or stunning, just raw terror and suffocation. As a farmer, I would rightly be prosecuted for treating our animals like that, but in the abattoir, it is legal under religious exemption. It is two-tier slaughter. Instead of an instant, painless death, these poor beings are put through the most unimaginable pain, all in the name of religion. This is not farming; it is torture. The British people have no idea that this is happening, because supermarkets do not label it, restaurants do not mention it and schools do not highlight it, and politicians in these buildings are too terrified to mention it, out of fear of upsetting the religious minorities. I am afraid I do not care—it is about animal welfare.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I accept that this is a very sensitive debate. We all get along fine in Parliament, so I hope that Members will accept what I say as my genuine view. One of the greatest joys of being a farmer is raising livestock. We see them born, we feed them, we watch them grow and we care for them. When their time comes, we want the end to be swift, calm, dignified and painless. Right now, today, in abattoirs across the country, we are allowing vile practices that would turn the stomach of any decent person, all in the name of religious exemption. There is no bolt to the brain, no stunning, no anaesthetic, but a blade—a deep, crushing cut across the throat. The animal does not die instantly; it thrashes, gasps and panics—it feels everything.”
“I do, and I will cover that at the end of my speech. We are all eating halal meat without knowing it. I find that morally repugnant. We should ban non-stun slaughter, we should ban halal slaughter and we should ban kosher slaughter.”
“The issue of stunning is complex, as the hon. Member probably knows. The halal stun is a lower voltage than the non-halal stun. As the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) rightly said, chickens are put into an electric bath before they are killed. It is the level of the stun that counts. Freedom of belief does not mean freedom to cause cruel and brutal pain. When I care for animals, I have the most stringent set of rules to abide by. I am regulated on how I house them, feed them and transport them. There are inspections, paperwork and codes of practice, all to make sure they are treated with dignity.”
“I am going to finish. A halal abattoir can brutally butcher an animal alive, and all is fine. Where is the fairness in that? Where is the humanity in that? This is not a fringe issue. In 2024, an estimated 214.6 million animals were slaughtered for halal meat: 27 million entirely non-stunned and the remainder with some form of weak and ineffectual attempt to ease the animal’s pain, often just causing an epileptic fit. It is state-endorsed butchery. We talk so much in this place about being a nation of animal lovers. It is time to prove it. Let us ban non-stun slaughter, along with any fig leaf of reduced-stun slaughter, which simply accentuates the suffering.”
“Q14. Does the Prime Minister agree that imprisoning Lucy Connolly, a young mother with a 12-year-old daughter, for one foolish social media post that was soon deleted is clearly not an efficient or fair use of prison?”
“Despite multiple promises of inquiries from political parties across this House, it seems the only operational investigation will be the rape gang inquiry that I have privately launched. It has garnered cross-party support, and I implore MPs from any political persuasion to align with our cause. Will the Minister commit today to engaging in a co-operative manner with the investigation and make herself available to answer questions from our expert panel?”
“A regulator will simply make the job of smaller clubs more difficult and limit their ability to take calculated risks to successfully compete for promotion, league position or cup success. It is the larger clubs that will benefit, and the dynamic that has driven the premier league’s success will be undermined.”
“English football works and has worked for many decades. My message to all Members today is to leave it alone. Football is a risk business, supported in this country by the most passionate fans in the world. It requires a balance between risk taking and business savvy, if the aspirations of the supporters are to be delivered in the form of entertaining, successful football of which they can be proud. Many of the failures in our game, such as Bury under Hugh Eaves and Leeds under Peter Ridsdale, were driven by boards dominated by fans rather than by more logical businessmen. The job of running a smaller club in the premier league is difficult at the best of times—I should know—when competing with clubs that have substantially greater turnover.”
“I should declare my interests, as on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in two football-related businesses as a result of my chairmanship of Southampton football club. We do not have many success stories left, but English domestic football is one of them—so what do politicians want to do? Regulate it, of course. The biggest beneficiary from the success of the Premier League is His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, through tax and national insurance levied on player and staff wages. That is money flowing out of the beautiful game. Salaries have correlated closely with the growth of broadcasting income, particularly from overseas television rights. Lord Sugar referred to it as the prune juice effect. No regulator played any part in laying the foundations of the world’s most successful league.”
“Judging by this debate, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport looks like she is pretty handy on the terraces. I say to her, in football lingo: you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Fans do not want ideological lessons from their clubs; they want to watch exciting football, enjoy a beer and have a proper day out. Good for them, I say. All of us here need to leave them alone. Those responsible for this Bill must also take full responsibility when the premier league inevitably wanes as the woke do-gooders perpetrate the damage that history teaches us is inevitable. The Chancellor speaks oxymoronically about trying to revive our financial markets by regulating for growth, after the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 destroyed London as a centre where capital meets risk. You do not regulate for growth; you deregulate for growth. We do not need this interference by tyre-kicking regulators in our national game.”
“Just last week, I uncovered two coaching roles offered by Ipswich and Fulham, both specifically excluding white men from applying. Ipswich made the right choice and removed the racist ad; Fulham have not. These roles have been pushed by the Premier League itself. Match-going fans are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. They would be surprised to hear that clubs are banning them from applying for certain roles based on their skin colour. Racism is racism, even when white people are on the receiving end of it. I hope that all of us in this House call it out for the wickedness that it is. We must eradicate the poisonous DEI from our beautiful game. Fans attend football to escape all that nonsense. A functional football team is the perfect analogy for any successful society, based on merit and merit alone.”
“I think the passion of fans can be a dangerous thing if they are on a board, yes. The FA Premier League’s success has been driven by the prescient founding formula for financial distribution, ensuring a competitive league. Under the Bill, fans collectively will suffer, and another more innovative league in another geographic region, probably in Asia, will emerge as a leader. Members might all feel good about themselves, but billions and billions of pounds will be driven out of the country. There is no need for a football regulator or indeed any more wokery in the game, exemplified by the support for a questionable organisation such as Black Lives Matter, when the knee was taken before each game: the world’s best football meets the world’s best virtue signalling.”
“Sincere condolences to the shadow Leader of the House on the loss of his father. Mass deportation of illegal migrants and foreign criminals must be our ultimate policy objective. Will it be logistically straightforward? Absolutely not. Is it necessary? Absolutely, yes. It is mass deportations or a mass amnesty, and I choose deportations. Will the Leader of the House commit to a debate in Government time on how we can deport the numbers required on a rapid timescale that is acceptable to the British people, who reasonably expect our borders to be policed and the law to be upheld?”
“The premier league projects unrivalled soft power, rakes in a fortune for HM Revenue and Customs and is actually good fun, usually offering competitive football, despite Southampton’s woeful record this season. What is the Government’s plan? It was first proposed by the Conservatives, of course: regulate, strangulate, suffocate. Who wants that to happen the most? La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and even the Saudis. A regulator would deter foreign investment and add bureaucracy to an already heavily governed industry. It is ludicrous and does nothing to protect clubs in the lower leagues. It should be revoked. Let us encourage and campaign, not regulate. The private sector built this success without regulation. My overriding message to all of you is “Leave football alone.””
“As is seemingly my usual opening line in many of these debates, I am one of very few people elected in this place who has any actual experience of the industry that we are discussing. As a former premier league football chairman, I can honestly say that the premier league works. Britian does not have many success stories left, but our domestic football is one of them. My message to all of you is “Leave it alone.” I mean this as a genuine question: do any of you understand the consequences of what you are looking to do? Regulating these industries does not work. London as a financial centre has withered and died on the vine since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Why would football be any different?”
“Women are being forced to face significant risk in order to be inclusive. Men must not be allowed access to women-only spaces, regardless of whether they believe themselves to be a woman—they are not. We must prioritise safety over inclusivity, dignity over wokery, reality over ideology. Will the Leader of the House commit to a debate in Government time on protecting women-only spaces and women-only services?”
“Given the Secretary of State’s statement, I remind her that proper functioning democracy costs money. My constituents in Great Yarmouth do not like being represented by unelected councillors, so can she give a copper-bottomed guarantee that the new Norfolk and Suffolk homunculus council will have its elections in May 2026?”