Forced closure of Brussels NatCon conference ends “democratic” pretences

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The forced closure of the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels by Belgian police on Tuesday, acting on the orders of Emir Kir, the socialist mayor of the municipality of Sint-Josse, is a landmark moment in the advance of leftist tyranny, intolerance and suppression of free speech in the Western world. It crosses a new red line in the Left’s increasingly shameless and aggressive drive to deny public expression to any opinions that contradict the cultural Marxist consensus.

Only because the organisers had the grit and determination to take their case to the Belgian conseil d’état, the country’s supreme administrative court, which found in their favour, has the conference now been permitted to resume its deliberations. This followed upon global media reaction deeply embarrassing to the Belgian government, which caused the prime minister Alexander de Croo to condemn the closure of the event as  “unacceptable” and “unconstitutional”.

The conseil d’état took the same view, citing article 26 of the Belgian constitution, which “grants everyone the right to assemble peacefully”. So, the conference has resumed its session, but only after the entire world has had an opportunity to see how fragile democracy now is within the EU and how brutal is the determination of the leftist establishment to silence all opinion contrary to its own. The mediation of a court of last resort to enable the continuation of a peaceful gathering that should never have been interrupted does not disguise the dire state of freedom of expression in Europe.

The pathetic, transparent pretext claimed by mayor Kir was to “prevent any public order problems from being caused by this controversial meeting”. In fact, as the extensive footage from various news outlets shows, there was never at any time the least prospect of even the mildest disorder. In this context, a gathering of mainstream politicians, academics and thinkers was controversial only in the sense that Mayor Kir disagreed with the philosophy of freedom and nation-state sovereignty they were expounding. 

The same conference met in Brussels in 2022, with no problems of public order, and the same was the case this year, except for the harassment to which the attendees were subjected by the police and civil authorities. To disguise this embarrassing reality, in an extravagant exercise in disinformation, designed to misrepresent the conference to the wider public, Kir tweeted: “In Etterbek, Sint-Josse and Brussels city, the far right is not welcome”.

The term “far right”, as we have learned in recent times, is no longer a description of an ideological position: it has displaced “fascist” as a catch-all denigration of the kind of views espoused in the 1990s by John Major’s iconic spinsters bicycling to holy communion, since renounced by the Conservative party and now demonised as supposedly extreme. That is how, across Europe, the legacy political parties, leftist corporations, NGOs, mainstream media and the entire apparatus of the deep state have turned the ratchet further leftwards, in an attempt to separate authentic conservatives from their natural constituency among the public. It is no longer working.

To put the record straight, we should clearly understand what the National Conservatism Conference is, what principles it represents, who organises it and who are the speakers and attendees. The conference – the eighth such event – is organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, a public affairs institute established in 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries. To this end, it pursues research, educational and publishing ventures, as well as conferences, which have so far been held in London, Washington, Rome, Orlando, Brussels (1922), Miami and London again last year.

The second London conference, in 2023, attracted a great deal of attention in this country, because of the calibre of the speakers and the quality of their contributions, often intensively researched. As was widely recognised at the time, the contributors exhibited a level of thinking, of analysis and of fresh ideas such as have long been absent from Conservative Party conferences, where ministers deliver recipes for managed decline written by aides and civil servants.

This year’s conference, on the theme “Preserving the Nation-State in Europe”, was obviously unpalatable to the powers-that-be in Brussels, where endorsement of ever-closer integration within the EU, as a reaffirmation of globalism, is the sole tolerated orthodoxy. It is unlikely, to put it mildly, that the nonentity Emir Kir exercised his powers of censorship without at least covert encouragement from the European Commission. 

The “narrative” to be fed to the mug punters of the general public was of a group of “far-right” bovver boys provoking civil disorder in the capital of the European Union, the blessed organisation that (pace NATO) has preserved peace in Europe (except perhaps for Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine) in the post-War era.

The list of confirmed speakers will help identify the “bovver boys”: Gerhard Cardinal Müller, former Vatican Prefect of the Sacred Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; Victor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary; Mateusz Morawiecki, former prime minister of Poland; Nigel Farage (trigger warning), honorary president of Reform UK and GB News broadcaster; Suella Braverman, former UK home secretary; Miriam Cates MP; Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a prominent German-based Catholic conservative; Matthew Goodwin, professor of Politics at the University of Kent and prolific writer; and the leaders of several European political parties forecast to come top of the polls in the forthcoming European elections.

So, are these people supposed to be fascists or neo-Nazis? Hardly; with Yoram Hazony, the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, also serving as president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, and Melanie Phillips and strongly pro-Israel Suella Braverman among the speakers, it seems unlikely that epithets such as “holocaust denier”, recently, outrageously, hurled at J K Rowling, would gain much traction in this context. 

So, instead, the all-embracing, totally undefined term “far-right” is attached to thoughtful people who have, in the past five years, made an impressive and considered reappraisal of the problems afflicting a Western society that has become marinated in the regressive cult of cultural Marxism. That they were similarly and ignorantly described in the House of Commons by Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, as “far-right fanatics” tells us all we need to know about Labour’s attitude to free speech, as he and his colleagues grinned triumphantly over the shutting down of the conference.

Labour is demanding that Rishi Sunak should withdraw the Conservative whip from Suella Braverman for attending an eminently respectable and intellectually high-powered conference on conservative ideas. That bodes ill for liberty under a future Labour government. It seems the party has not been so de-Corbynized as its apologists claim.

Anyone, of any political persuasion that embraces ideals of freedom of expression, even if their beliefs are far removed from national conservatism, should be deeply concerned about the snuffing out of free speech that the forced closure of this conference represents. The prearranged venue was the Concert Noble, in Brussels. Expelled from there at the last moment, after the venue had been leaned on by the authorities, the organisers moved to an alternative venue, only to be hounded out of that within hours. The third venue – owned by a Tunisian immigrant who, as Nigel Farage explained, believed in free speech – saw the conference proceedings open.

However, the police then arrived to close it down, while Nigel Farage was on stage, speaking. They then withdrew temporarily and, soon after, a large police presence enclosed the building. People arriving were not allowed to enter the conference; those leaving were told they would not be allowed back in. Supplies of food, plates and even drinking water were reportedly prevented from entering the building. The Brussels police artificially contrived what a reporter on Mahyar Tousi TV described as a “hostage situation”.

If Vladimir Putin’s police did that in Moscow, global condemnation would be front-page news. Both Viktor Orbán and Mateusz Morawiecki successfully delivered their speeches, despite the police closing down the conference, since MEPs of the European Conservative Group (ECR) invited them into the European Parliament, where they voiced the opinions the EU had tried to silence, in the belly of the beast. Eurosceptic MEPs, who are now a force to be reckoned with and will be even more so after the June European elections, were outraged by the Brussels establishment’s suppression of free speech.

A member of the Italian Lega’s delegation to the parliament said: “What the mayor of Brussels has decided, deliberately revoking permits for a conference just because it is distant from his political views, is extremely serious and worrying. Is this democracy?”

Despite the intervention of the conseil d’état and the resumption of the conference, this outrage has caught fire in Brussels and will be a major issue at the European elections, with the potential to increase the votes for genuinely conservative parties challenging the alarming expansion of power and entitlement by the leftist establishment. The exponential increase in state intervention in the lives of individuals and institutions, aggravated by NGOs and other unelected bodies, has led to an explosion of laws suppressing free speech, in Britain as well as in Europe and North America.

It is a pandemic of entitled, arrogant intolerance. Even as the West’s authentic conservatives were struggling to find a platform for their views in Brussels, Britain’s faux-Conservative government was progressing a ban on smoking through Parliament that, to the point of caricature, highlighted the abyss that now separates the institutional Tory Party from the most basic ideals of conservatism. That, however, was the last provocation the British public is likely to suffer at the hands of the Tories: they will be out of power and into the dustbin of history within the year.

The other pseudo-conservative parties in Europe face the same fate, as the Netherlands elections demonstrated. What happened in Brussels this week is not just about a petty tyrant flexing his puny muscles: it is about leftist bigots turning civil police forces into instruments of totalitarianism, and parts of Britain are not immune from that oppression. 

Leftism, which used to pique itself on having an intellectual basis, even if it was tomes of economically illiterate aspirations by Marx and Engels, has declined into dementia, its discourse having degenerated into nonsensical gender gobbledegook. The Right, in contrast, over the past decade, has seen one of its periodic bursts of intellectual ferment, brimful of new ideas, less evident to the public because that creative thinking is not represented among the nominally “conservative”, actually social democratic, legacy parties.

The National Conservatism movement is a significant element within this renaissance, which is why it is imperative to those occupying the leftist power structures, to snuff it out. The most concerning legacy of the cultural Marxists’ monopoly on power is that, through control of the education systems, they have created a generation of youth for whom freedom of speech is a secondary consideration to validation of woke precepts.

Another conference speaker who managed to deliver his message, in the form of a conversation on stage, was Cardinal Müller. He observed: “When I began as a professor in Munich, although people were ‘ideologized’, people could disagree and say their piece. That’s not the case today. We need to fight for the university’s independence from political and ideological influence.”

That is true and it applies to many other forums besides universities. We have been sleepwalking into Orwellian totalitarianism and, unless we act to reverse it speedily and comprehensively, freedom of expression will be an historical memory. When even a serving prime minister, senior statesmen, a prince of the Church and many respected academics and intellectuals can be silenced by diktat and police coercion, simply because their opinions are disapproved of by the entitled Left, the situation is very grave indeed. This week’s events in Brussels are a strident wakeup call; we must respond robustly.

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