When asked whether Reform UK would revisit the current legal settlement on abortion, contraception, or LGBTQ+ identity, Nigel Farage had a clear answer: ‘No’. The question was prompted by Danny Kruger MP’s suggestion that Britain is ‘suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,’ and that Reform could have ‘a limited but important’ role in reversing the Sexual Revolution.
Under UK law, abortion is effectively decriminalised up to birth, men can declare themselves women via self-identification certificates, and half of 16-to-19-year-old women use hormonal birth control. Almost one in three pregnancies in Britain are terminated by abortion. Our sub-replacement birth rate is used to excuse mass migration — the most important issue for Reform voters. Over 10.9 million children have been aborted since 1968, replaced by the more than 10.7 million first-generation legal migrants currently living in Britain. As Galatians says, the law is a teacher, and without Christ, it encourages whatever it tolerates.
Kruger said Reform will pursue ‘a pronatalist ambition’ to rectify the damage done by declining marriage and record abortion rates to Britain’s demographic security and social fabric. But Farage disagrees – despite previously condemning the twenty-four-week abortion limit as ‘utterly ludicrous’. Farage now thinks abortion is a matter of ‘individual conscience’, and assured Kruger’s evangelical Christian faith will not impact party policy.
This may confuse Christians, who heard Zia Yusuf, a practising Muslim, promise to ‘restore Britain’s Christian heritage’. According to the party’s board member Gawain Towler, Reform believes ‘Britain needs all religions to go “Anglican”, not in doctrine, mind you, but in temperament … Sikh “Anglicans”, Hindu “Anglicans”, Jewish “Anglicans”, and yes, Islamic “Anglicans”. Private devotion, deeply felt, but not shoved in faces or used to extract concessions.’ A Reform government would treat our national faith as a lifestyle choice, equal to any other under an umbrella of liberal pluralism.
Catholics cringe at this false distinction, derived from Protestantism, between a secular public and religious private sphere. How can faith be ‘deeply felt’ if it does not influence public conduct? Though the Catechism makes clear the Church ‘is not to be confused in any way with the political community’, Catholics are not expected to be political ascetics. We are called to vote, defend our country, and involve ourselves ‘in the life of the political community’. We may disobey and change laws which contravene the Gospels and ‘common good of the nation and the human community’.
Such duties make liberalism irreconcilable with Catholicism. Fr Felix Salvany condemned liberalism because it ‘begets toleration of error’, vice, and sin by treating ‘freedom of opinion [as] the most cardinal of virtues, no matter what the opinion be’. Whereas Catholics declare Christ the way, truth, and life, liberals, like Pilate, are indifferent to any given definition of the true, just, and beautiful. It is liberalism that makes Reform reluctant to oppose sexual immorality or represent Britain's Christians, for fear of alienating other ‘communities’. If Reform UK want to rebuild a Tower of Babel from the multicultural rubble of ‘modern Britain’, Catholics cannot support them.
Meanwhile, Catholics will find a more welcoming home in Restore Britain. Led by Reform apostate Rupert Lowe, the party has earned a seven per cent polling average and 110,000 members in under a month. In its launch video, viewed over 41 million times, Lowe committed to celebrating our Christian heritage, and counted responsibility, restraint, forgiveness, duty, and fairness as the virtues shepherding his party. ‘Britain is a Christian country’, Lowe posted a day after launch, ‘and under a Restore Britain government – it will remain a Christian country’. Other faiths will not receive special dispensation.
Restore’s spokesmen are churchgoing Christians — including author at this parish Charlie Downes, who condemned record abortion rates as ‘another rotting stain on our national soul’. The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children praised the party’s commitment to reversing the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth and the Assisted Dying Bill, should it receive royal assent. Restore also promises to repeal censorious laws such as the Public Order Act 2023 and Scotland's Hate Crime and Public Order 2021, weaponised to prosecute Christians for public ministry and silent prayer outside abortion clinics. No Christian should be persecuted for grieving the loss of innocent life.
Nor will Restore appease contemporary ideologies that treat men and women as interchangeable cosmetic categories. Restore is the only party registering in polls willing to repeal both the Equality Act 2010 and Gender Recognition Act 2004. Tax relief will be provided to British women to have the families they already say they want. The sole pillar of Restore’s pro-natalist platform that will perturb Catholics is their promise to invest in IVF. Over 130,000 embryos have been discarded, and another 500,000 remain frozen, likely to be destroyed, in the UK since 1991. As a matter of electoral prudence, however, Restore are offering a far stronger defence of the sanctity of life and respect for sexual difference than any other viable party in Britain. Catholics are encouraged to voice their concerns to Restore’s amenable leadership.
Critics may also recoil at Restore’s nativist rhetoric. Downes told LifeSiteNews that mass migration ‘undermines’ the covenantal nature of the nation, and ‘is necessarily anti-Christian and immoral. Reversing it is therefore the Christian’s duty’. Nations are, however, biblical entities: tribes of families, like the ancient Israelites, bound together by shared history, language, and religion. Outsiders, like Ruth the Moabite, assimilate only through marriage, and by forfeiting loyalty to their former tribe and religion. Nations rely, as philosopher Bernard Yack argues, on the lineal bonds of ancestry, and lateral bonds of solidarity and shared cultural inheritance. Rapid demographic change breaks these bonds and disintegrates the nation.
Such concerns are not un-Christian. As Restore Britain’s policy fellow, Harrison Pitt articulates, Christianity recognises the reality of human difference. Christ instructed us to ‘make disciples of all nations’ – not eradicate national identity. Hence why St Paul tailored his epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Thessalonians, and Ephesians; and why, on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended and empowered the Apostles to evangelise in various languages. ‘Given [Restore’s] framework is Christian, and is explicitly Christian,’ Pitt reassures, ‘we regard the existence of ethnic difference as simply a feature of God’s creation, and therefore we want to act as stewards over it… we are not going to mutate into any kind of Nazi fever dreams or anything like that, because it would be inconsistent with our Christian perspective of the good’.
Dispossession of one’s patrimony, land, and political sovereignty by foreigners is described as a curse for those who disobey God in Deuteronomy. Hence why American diplomats quote Pope Benedict XVI when warning the UK and Europe that the mass migration poses a threat of ‘civilizational erasure’ to our shared ‘culture, history, religion,’ and recognition ‘of man’s rational, social nature – the imago dei – and so too of natural rights’. Even Reform UK’s Head of Policy, Cambridge theologian James Orr, cites Aquinas and Augustine to justify his friend, Vice President Vance’s reference to ordo amoris in defence of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. Love, properly ordered, should be extended outward in concentric circles of moral consideration: first to family, then local community, then congregation, and finally to the nation.
Pursuant to preventing such a threat, Lowe promises ‘a system of governance that puts the British people first, each and every time’ – meaning the native population, and their preferences and prejudices, will receive primary consideration by the state. Foreign customs which offend them, such as Islamic veiling and non-stun ritual slaughter, will be proscribed. Illegal occupants will be deported. Legal migrants who refuse to integrate will be encouraged or made to leave. The exploited asylum system will be abolished.
Critics may cite the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, insisting Catholics are obliged to receive any migrants claiming to be refugees. The Catechism imposes obligations on prosperous nations to welcome immigrants seeking work, but also obliges immigrants to honour and contribute to their adopted nation. Only 17 per cent of legal entrants to Britain since 2021 came principally to work. 95 per cent are net tax recipients, at a minimum lifetime cost to the taxpayer of £234 billion – that’s £465,000 each. Over £15 billion was spent in universal credit on migrant households between January 2024 and June 2025. It would be difficult to argue these immigrants ‘respect with gratitude the material heritage’ of our country, or shoulder their share of ‘civic burdens’. It is unsustainable to expect the British public to fund this forever, especially when such immigration was inflicted against the expressed wishes of the electorate.
As for deferring to our laws and ‘spiritual heritage’, foreign nationals are three times as likely as British nationals to be arrested for sex offences, with 47 per cent of charges in London brought against foreign nationals in 2024. (And that’s not counting crimes by naturalised immigrants.) Many migrants live sequestered in multigenerational enclaves, and elect sectarian representatives who pledge support to Palestine, Kashmir, or Sikh and Hindu manifestos. London’s Coventry Street displays Eid lights, and both the Palace of Westminster and Windsor Castle host Ramadan iftars. Muhammad is now the most common name for newborns in England, with Britain set to become 20 per cent Muslim by the end of the century. Without drastic action, the British people and their Christian faith will be reduced to dhimmitude by imported blocs who do not abide by Reform’s public/private distinction.
The state has betrayed its covenant with the people. As Thomas Colsy has argued for the Catholic Herald, this requires redress through remigration – which is exactly what Restore Britain is promising to do. They provide a democratic katechon against the state’s disregard for the sanctity of life, and our looming demographic and cultural obsolescence. Like me, Britain’s Catholics would be wise to support the party with more than just their prayers.
