Labour MP questions donations to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party

A Labour MP has asked the Electoral Commission to look into donations to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, putting the new political operation under scrutiny as Britain moves to close loopholes around cryptocurrency in election finance.

Restore Britain was officially registered with the Electoral Commission on 19 March 2026, with Millennium House on Gapton Hall Road in Great Yarmouth listed as its address. Lowe is named as both leader and nominating officer. The party, which first emerged as a movement and pressure group before formally becoming a political party on 13 February 2026, has said it intends to field candidates in England, Scotland and Wales.

The concern lands in a political finance system that already requires parties to record and report donations and loans above set thresholds. The Electoral Commission also says that if a party returns a donation because it is not from a permissible source, it must report that return directly to the regulator. That makes the handling of any suspect money central to the question now facing Restore Britain and other parties watching the rules shift around digital assets.

The government stepped in on 25 March 2026, announcing an immediate moratorium on cryptocurrency donations to political parties, backdated to that day. Once legislation takes effect, parties will have 30 days to return unlawful crypto donations. The move followed warnings that digital assets can be difficult to trace and can be split into smaller transfers below reporting thresholds, leaving regulators with a partial view of who is funding whom.

Those worries were already on the record before the moratorium. In February 2026, the House of Commons Library said the Electoral Commission had reported that no political party had, to date, declared donations it had identified as cryptoassets. Around the same time, the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy warned that crypto donations pose an “unnecessary and unacceptably high risk” to the integrity of the political finance system.

For Restore Britain, the timing is awkward. Lowe’s break from Reform UK and the rapid launch of his own party have already drawn attention to the structure and discipline of his political operation. Now the donations question has widened that scrutiny, turning a party row into a test of how well Britain can police modern campaign money when the source of funds may be easy to disguise and hard to trace.