Extraordinary scenes unfolded in Brussels today, where the National Conservatism conference was shut down by police. The event was to include addresses by Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman, and Viktor Orban. I was invited to give an address as well, and only declined because it interfered with a family celebration. Having seen what happened today, I wish I had gone to be in solidarity with the organizers, who have my full support. For, after only two hours, police arrived at the Claridge conference venue to inform them that it would be terminated on the grounds of potential “public disorder.” The authorities can be seen entering the venue while Farage was still on stage speaking here.
By this time, the shutters had already come down, and police were refusing to allow any other participants to enter the building. It was a surreal and extraordinary scene, with barriers to entry at a free-flowing conversation on politics and culture being erected by heavily-armed men in dark riot gear. This included invited speakers such as Eric Zemmour, seen here being refused entry, and Paul Coleman of the Alliance Defending Freedom, who observed, “This is what cancel culture looks like. And those cheering it on should be very careful. The winds can change direction very quickly.”
The tactics used by police and the mayor were reminiscent of a medieval siege. According to Frank Furedi, one of the organizers, they threatened to cut off electricity and pressured caterers into dropping the conference contract, leaving those locked inside without access to food and drink. According to Nigel Farage, they also warned its Tunisian owner and his wife of dire consequences for their business if they refused to comply. Authorities have reportedly also taken his car away. This at least solved the drink problem. The owner was so angry that he had wine brought up from his own cellar.
The Claridge was already the conference’s third venue, after its first choice—Concert Noble—turned them away under pressure from the Socialist Mayor of Brussels, Philippe Close. This comes despite the fact he had no such qualms about hosting the radical mayor of Tehran for a conference in the city last year. The NatCon organizers scrambled and found another venue in the Brussels suburb of Etterbeek, only for Antifa to alert the leftist mayor there, who duly pressured the Sofitel Hotel to cancel the event.
What we have witnessed here is an unprecedented collaboration between Antifa, local politicians, and the police, in the capital of the EU, to shut down a peaceful meeting of political dissidents. If they can get away with police-state tactics as shameless as this, against a gathering that included a cardinal, high profile British and French politicians, prominent intellectuals, and the head of government of an EU member state, what does it say about the state of liberal democracy in Europe? As Harrison Pitt, a senior editor at The European Conservative present at the conference, told us: “There is nothing new here about cancel culture. But this is a whole new level of brazenness. Stormtroopers have barricaded entry to the venue, dictating who goes in and who goes out.” Farage declared that “we are up against a new form of communism.” And Frank Furedi summed it up bluntly: “It’s really something out of a tinpot dictatorship.”
Or, as I see it, this is what a subverted culture looks like.
The extreme irony of the situation is palpable. NatCon attendees like Viktor Orbán are hate figures for leftists and liberals because of their alleged illiberalism, yet a major demonstration by tens of thousands of Hungarians against his government in Budapest last week was allowed to go ahead without any interference from the authorities. In Brussels, by contrast, speakers have just been driven out of private venues by police and far left activists on the grounds that, to quote directly from the Mayor’s order banning the conference: some of the attendees have a vision that is “not only ethically conservative (e.g. hostility to legalized abortion, same-sex unions, etc.) but also focused on the defense of ‘national sovereignty’, which implies, among other things, an [sic] ‘Eurosceptic attitude.’”
I’m sorry, but: what? These are all legally held views. Anybody in a free society should be permitted to peacefully assemble to discuss whatever they like. By all means disagree with national conservatives on border security, multiculturalism, the EU, or family formation as much as you want. But using activist intimidation, police barricades and threats to private business owners—and their family members!—to prevent them from being expressed at all is not the sort of disagreement that is the lifeblood of genuine liberal democracy. It is naked censorship.
We should pay close attention to the reaction of mainstream politicians and journalists on both sides of the aisle. To his credit, the Belgian Prime Minister declared on X that “What happened at the Claridge today is unacceptable … Banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop.”
Elsewhere, however, the reaction was positively gleeful. One Green MEP gloated that national conservatives “think you’re battling the Woke and Globalist Elite but then you’re not even making it past this guy,” referring to the rather unassuming-looking mayor who issued the ban. In an ominous sign for freedom of expression in Britain, the Labour Party senior leadership also seemed to think the whole affair hilarious, giggling uncontrollably about the suppression of what they called a “far right” gathering. A prominent barrister, fresh from victory at the European Court of Human Rights last week (in a case which found that climate change violates the human rights of Swiss retirees), demonstrated no such concern for the ECHR rights of the “God botherers” at NatCon:
It is difficult to avoid the impression that these people have no objection to illiberalism when it targets right-wing causes. To what extent is this mere negligence? This question deserves serious reflection, and we will pursue it in follow up posts.
The other striking aspect of the whole affair is the biography of Emir Kir, mayor of Saint-Josse, the Brussels district in which the conference is taking place. He’s the official who issued the order banning it, in which he declared that “the far-right is not welcome.” This is peculiar coming from him: according to Wikipedia, Kir, the son of Turkish immigrants, was expelled from the Socialist Party in January 2020 after he met with two mayors from the MHP, a far right Turkish Party with a paramilitary wing called the Gray Wolves. “Far right” is of course a euphemism for Islamism in this case. He said it had been “pleasant” to receive them at Saint-Josse’s town hall. Earlier in his career he lost a defamation case after a Belgian court found that he had denied the Armenian genocide, and he has subsequently been found to have signed a petition demanding the removal of a monument erected in memory of the Armenian massacres.
It is impossible not to be struck by the asymmetry here: Kir, “the first mayor of non-European descent in Belgium,” appears to endorse genuinely Islamist causes in his ancestral homeland, yet has gone out of his way to dress himself up as a leftist progressive in Europe. In this respect he is not atypical. The Turkish diaspora votes heavily left wing in Europe, yet strongly backs President Recip Erdogan’s nationalist AKP party in the last round of elections back home, as seen in the returns for the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France below. One wonders how long this unholy alliance between Islamists and the far left will endure?
In choosing to ban a peaceful gathering of European conservatives who had come together to discuss, among other things, the perils of excessive immigration and multiculturalism, a cynical observer might conclude that Mayor Kir has behaved as an abject hypocrite motivated more by perceived Islamist self-interest than consistent principles. Has he, perhaps, hijacked his office to serve non-Belgian masters? As the terminally online news-junkie might lament, there are “many such cases.” It would certainly help explain the jihadist chants now commonplace in his city.
I did not have time today to say all that I wanted. But I am engaged in a longer-form project to expose the way radical Islamists manipulate incredibly naïve Western liberals. Stay tuned.