Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain Faces Backlash Over Great Yarmouth Job Claims

(GREAT YARMOUTH, UK) — Rupert Lowe, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth, sparked a fresh row over immigration after writing that Britain should not “import millions of Pakistanis and Indians to do jobs that unemployed Brits should be doing.”

Lowe also wrote that it was a “wilful decision” by politicians to import “millions of low-skilled migrants from the third world,” and he described immigration as a form of “colonisation.” The remarks singled out Indians and Pakistanis by nationality and drew criticism online, where they were widely described as racist or xenophobic.

His comments landed at a time when Lowe has been recasting his political identity. He recently launched the right-wing party Restore Britain after splitting from Reform UK.

Local census data sits awkwardly beside the scale of the claim. In Great Yarmouth, 2021 Census figures cited in coverage show 907 residents of Indian and Pakistani origin combined, less than 1% of a constituency population of 99,750.

A YouTube breakdown cited in the same coverage put the local figures at 786 residents of Indian origin and 121 of Pakistani origin. That also totals 907, and again places the combined number at less than 1% of the constituency.

The gap between “millions” in national rhetoric and fewer than a thousand people in the local census figures has become part of the dispute around Lowe’s language. Great Yarmouth is the constituency he represents in Parliament, and the demographic data cited in coverage does not match the scale implied by his post.

Lowe’s broader claim, that immigrants are taking jobs that should go to unemployed Britons, is also challenged by the labor market figures cited alongside the controversy. One set of employment numbers says employee jobs held by people who were non-UK citizens when they first registered for a national insurance number rose from 12% in July 2014, or 3.5 million, to 20% in December 2025, or 6.5 million.

Those figures show a clear rise over more than a decade, but they do not establish the argument Lowe made about specific communities taking jobs from unemployed Britons. They track jobs held by people who were non-UK citizens when they first registered for a national insurance number, a wider category than the nationalities he named.

Coverage citing the same data says increases among Indian and Nigerian nationals were especially sharp between January 2021 and December 2025. It also says many of those jobs were concentrated in sectors with chronic shortages, including health and care.

That sector detail matters in practical terms for the labor market described in the figures. Health and care employers have long relied on overseas recruitment where domestic vacancies remain difficult to fill, and the cited numbers place many non-UK citizen workers in exactly those shortage occupations rather than in an undifferentiated pool of low-skilled work.

Lowe’s wording sharpened the reaction because it tied immigration to nationality, skill level and national decline in a few lines. By writing about “Pakistanis and Indians” and “low-skilled migrants from the third world,” he moved beyond a general argument about migration levels and directed it at named communities.

Political language around immigration often turns on national totals, but this dispute has also centered on scale and precision. The local demographic figures cited are exact, while the employment figures span a decade and include estimates through 2025; taken together, they do not support a simple account in which immigrants displace unemployed Britons in one constituency or across one type of work.

Great Yarmouth has become the focal point because Lowe is both the MP for the seat and the author of the comments under scrutiny. The constituency figures cited in coverage are small, the national jobs data is broader than his wording suggests, and the remarks have left Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain tied to a debate that reaches beyond one post and into how immigration is framed in public life.