Restore Britain Watcher 🇬🇧

Semantic Summary

Automated news-monitoring configuration (not a profile of a person) tracking Restore Britain, the far-right party that split from Reform UK and emerged in mid-2026 as a more hardline alternative. Led by figures like Ben Habib, the party has pledged "the most ambitious programme of mass deportations ever seen in Britain" and is seen as pulling Reform further right. The watcher runs hourly between 07:00 and 23:00, delivering alerts via Discord, with breaking-news triggers for events such as a Restore MP being elected, Reform defections to Restore, or a Restore manifesto launch. It syncs a summary page to BookStack and sits alongside related watchers covering UK-wide and devolved-nations politics. Documented connections in this archive are to Reform UK and to Ben Habib, described as Advance UK leader and former Reform UK deputy leader.

Topic: Restore Britain (far-right party, split from Reform UK, more extreme on immigration) Created: 2026-06-05 Frequency: Every hour 07:00-23:00 (at :12 past the hour) Delivery: Discord alerts (discord:beanfarmer) Cron Schedule: 12 7-23 * * * Status: ✅ Active

Context

Restore Britain emerged in mid-2026 as a more hardline alternative to Reform UK. Led by figures like Ben Habib, they've pledged "the most ambitious programme of mass deportations ever seen in Britain" and are seen as pulling Reform further right.

Setup Summary

Watcher config: ~/.hermes/scripts/watcher-configs/restore-britain.json
Watcher script: ~/.hermes/scripts/watcher-restore-britain.sh
Cron job: 12 7-23 * * * (hourly 7am-11pm)
Delivery: Discord DMs
State dir: ~/.hermes/cron/watcher-state/restore-britain/
Summary MD: ~/Desktop/Politics/UK Politics/restore-britain-summary.md
BookStack: UK Politics book 3, page ID 47

Key Queries

Restore Britain party
Restore UK politics
Ben Habib Restore
Restore mass deportations
Restore vs Reform UK
far-right Britain 2026

Breaking News Triggers

Restore MP elected
Restore wins seat
Reform defection Restore
Restore manifesto
Restore general election

State Files

.last_seen — SHA256 hashes of seen headlines (prevents duplicates)
.last_seen_titles — cleaned titles for fuzzy matching (85% threshold)
.last_trigger — cooldown timestamp (2h normal, 4h breaking)
digest-YYYY-MM-DD.log — daily event log

Initial Seed (2026-06-05)

First run captured baseline headlines to establish state. Subsequent runs only alert on genuinely new stories.

UK Politics Watcher (broader UK coverage)
Welsh/Scottish/NI/Irish Politics Watchers (devolved nations)

BookStack Sync

Summary page synced to BookStack UK Politics book. Updated manually or via synthesizer cron if added later.

Known Associations

Auto-generated from cross-references in this archive.

Reform UK — 3 mentions · tagged
Ben Habib — Advance UK Leader, Former Reform UK Deputy Leader — tagged