Support Our Mission
Read Our Latest Edition
BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
The wind-up of Advance UK has led to legal threats and recriminations between former activists and senior figures – with Byline Times able to reveal that party founder Ben Habib reported his own Chief Operating Officer to the police.
Advance UK, a competitor party to Reform and Restore Britain, formally deregistered with the Electoral Commission in July, amid fears it would only haemorrhage support to Rupert Lowe MP’s Restore Britain.
It was set up by businessman Ben Habib, who was the co-deputy leader of Reform UK from October 2023 until he was removed and replaced by Richard Tice in July 2024.
Habib quit Reform in November 2024, after falling out with leader Nigel Farage and then chairman Zia Yusuf – with Habib backing a hardline stance in favour of mass deportations. Habib, who was born in Pakistan, had also called on far-right MP Rupert Lowe to be readmitted to Reform.
On 30 June 2025, Habib took over what was then the Integrity Party, relaunching it as ‘Advance UK’. That same day, former Reform MP Rupert Lowe launched his own project, ‘Restore Britain’ – which soon outflanked the party in every respect. Restore began as a ‘pressure group’ but formally registered as a party this February, and secured 9% of the vote in the recent Greater Manchester Mayoral election.
This July, Ben Habib announced his intention to merge Advance UK with the non-party campaign group ‘Great British PAC’, which he chairs. He launched a ballot of members to certify the move.
In an extraordinary intervention, Tim Power, the party’s Chief Operating Officer, wrote to all members shortly after the ballot went out, saying: “I am writing to inform you that the membership ballot launched on 5 June 2026 has been cancelled…
Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.
“The ballot was not conducted in accordance with that Constitution…Any decision to de-register the Party or merge it with another organisation requires a special resolution – a 75% supermajority – of a properly constituted College of Electors under Articles 1.7 and 2. The College has never been properly constituted.”
He added: “Advance UK is a company limited by guarantee. This means the Party’s assets – its funds, its membership database, its intellectual property and its brand – are held for the benefit of the Party’s objects as a registered political party. They do not belong to any individual and cannot simply be transferred to another organisation” – i.e. Great British PAC.
“GBPAC is not a registered political party. It does not stand candidates in elections. Its objects are materially different from those of Advance UK,” Power wrote.
He also claimed “any transfer of member personal data to GBPAC would require the individual consent of each member under UK GDPR. No such consent has been obtained.”
Power told Advance UK members: “What has happened over the last few days has exposed serious governance failings within this Party – failings that should have been addressed months ago and were not.
“A Board of Directors should have been properly constituted. A Treasurer should have been appointed. A College of Electors should have been properly elected by you, the membership, for the first time. None of that happened. And the result is that the Party arrived at this moment without the governance structures it needed to handle a decision of this magnitude properly.”
SIGN UP TO EMAIL UPDATES
Ben Habib soon restated the ballot, claiming Power was “wrong on all points and should be ignored.” He claimed the party was considering the “legal position.”
Around 8,000 members voted from the 38,000 potenti…