Depledge: We don't need any more restaurants. Lowe: Reward hard work for everyone.
'Thats the difference with Labour' they say and yes it is. 10,000s redundant in hospitality but Labour Entrepreneurship tsar can't be bothered but Rupert and Restore Britain wants everyone to succeed
In the space of a single week, two strikingly different messages about Britain’s economic future have emerged. One comes from Alex Depledge, the Labour government’s entrepreneurship adviser and self styled tsar reporting directly to Chancellor Rachel Reeves. The other comes from Rupert Lowe MP, founder of the rapidly growing Restore Britain movement, in a candid interview with Carl Benjamin of Lotus Eaters.
The contrast could hardly be sharper or more revealing of why the current administration is steering the country toward managed decline while the new voice on the right offers genuine hope to those who work hard and aspire to more.
Depledge: We don’t need any more restaurants
On 24 February 2026, The Telegraph reported that Ms Depledge, in an interview with Insider Media, declared: “We don’t need any more restaurants. I’m not anti-hospitality, but that’s not where my efforts are.” She went on to argue that government priority must shift away from hospitality and retail toward high growth industries such as technology and advanced manufacturing, clean tech, and creative industries.
The hospitality sector employs 2.6 million people, or roughly 7 per cent of the UK workforce and helps many of our kids get their first rung on the jobs ladder and they reacted with predictable fury. Sacha Lord, chairman of the Nighttime Industries Association and former adviser to Greater Manchester’s mayor, called the remarks disgusting and said they would make your blood boil. TV chef Michel Roux Jr and pub campaigner Andy Lennox were among those publicly condemning what they saw as dismissive elitism toward one of Britain’s largest employers. Restaurants themselves fell by 1.3 per cent in 2025 amid rising costs and squeezed consumer spending. The last thing the sector needed was a government adviser signalling that it is unworthy of support.
This is not an isolated gaffe. It reflects a deeper Labour mindset and the belief that Whitehall knows best which sectors deserve to thrive and which should be quietly sidelined. Ms Depledge’s previous comments urging investors to back edgy scale ups rather than slow SMEs reinforcing the impression of top down industrial planning dressed up as entrepreneurship policy.
Rupert Lowe: Celebrate hard work and honesty
By contrast, in his 19 February 2026 interview with Lotus Eaters, Rupert Lowe MP articulated a philosophy rooted in aspiration, reward, and individual agency. Speaking of his new party Restore Britain which gained 70,000 members in its first week, Lowe stated plainly;
“I want people to be rich. I want them to be independent. I want them to be high-minded… I’m going to reward work. I’m going to reward enterprise. I’m going to reward risk-taking… I want the return of the Protestant ethic… the spirit of capitalism.”
He explicitly rejected statism and central planning: “I don’t want to take their farms or their businesses off them… I want individualism… What I don’t want is a society that rewards shirkers.” Instead, he called for a Britain where hard work, honesty, and enterprise are celebrated, where the state serves the people rather than suffocates them, and where success is not taxed into oblivion.
This is the authentic voice of British conservatism at its best, one that trusts individuals to build, innovate, and prosper in any field they choose, whether that be a high-tech startup in Cambridge or a family run restaurant in Newcastle. We need to give all those hard working people help to be successful in anything they do.
Labours economic record speaks for itself
The philosophical gulf matters because the empirical record under Labour is grim. Public sector net borrowing for 2025/26 is on course for around £130–140 billion, close to 4.5 per cent of GDP. National debt is climbing toward 100 per cent of GDP, with debt interest payments at record levels. Energy prices remain among the highest in the Western world, hammering households and businesses alike. Growth forecasts for 2026 hover at a meagre 1.4 per cent at very best, with per-capita GDP growth stuck below 1 per cent. Inflation, at 3 per cent in January, one full percentage point higher than when they inherited it.
Most damning of all is the labour market. Unemployment has risen to 5.2 per cent, the highest in nearly five years and analysts warning it will get worse. Youth unemployment stands at between 15-16 per cent, the worst rate in over a decade and the fastest annual increase in the G7 and highest in Europe. Job vacancies have collapsed to their lowest level since January 2021. Private-sector firms, squeezed by Labour’s £25 billion National Insurance hike and other tax rises, are shedding staff and freezing recruitment. Tens of thousands of jobs are being lost each month directly attributable to this government’s policies.
In short, Britain is borrowing billions monthly, paying record sums in debt interest, watching young people rot on the dole, and seeing established employers cut back, all while its entrepreneurship adviser lectures the public that certain perfectly legitimate businesses are no longer welcome.
Failure is guaranteed with Labour
The fundamental difference is one of worldview. Rupert Lowe believes in the innate capacity of the British people to succeed through hard work and enterprise, in whatever form that takes. He wants a nation of good hard working people with a stake in the country, where risk takers are supported and rewarded, and a shrunken state gets out of the way. Labour’s approach, embodied by Ms Depledge, is the opposite: pick winners from Whitehall, disdain low-value sectors that employ millions, and assume that bureaucratic direction can substitute for millions of individual decisions made in the marketplace. Legislating for growth Labour say, but they just don’t understand that you de-legilsate for growth.
History is littered with examples of governments that tried to engineer economies by decree and failed. Britain’s post war experiments in nationalisation and planning delivered stagnation until the 1980s reforms unleashed enterprise across every sector. Today’s Labour government, borrowing and taxing at record levels while telling restaurateurs they are surplus to requirements, is repeating the errors of the past with modern rhetoric about future facing industries when other policies will kill them too. Thousands of entrepreneurs have left the UK precisely due to Labours anti business agenda.
The result is predictable. Discouraged aspiration, rising unemployment, anaemic growth, and mounting national debt. A country that tells its citizens we don’t need any more of a major industry is a country that has lost faith in its own people’s ability to create value. Rupert Lowe offers the antidote, a message of hard work, abundance, reward, and national renewal.
Britain does not need more central planners telling us what we may or may not build. It needs leaders who believe, as Rupert Lowe does, that the surest route to prosperity is to let the British people get on with the hard work of generating wealth, success, and independence, in restaurants, tech firms, manufacturing plants, or any honest enterprise they choose.
The choice before the country is clear. One path leads to managed decline dressed as progress. The other offers the restoration of the enterprise culture that once made Britain the workshop of the world.
The British people, given the chance, know which they prefer. Restoration Britain.