Many on the right seem to view the failed efforts of Brussels officials to shut down this week’s National Conservatism conference as a victory. For a start, they prompted a great deal more media attention than the event’s organisers could otherwise have hoped for. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage also said that the presence of police outside the hall might have been the most “productive and fruitful” moment in Brussels “ever,” given that it proved “Brexit right.”
But author and journalist Peter Hitchens, who writes a column for The Mail on Sunday, has urged conservatives against dropping their guard—warning, in the simplest terms, that this battle may have been won, but the war for free speech is far from over.
He told Times Radio that “you often find in local government the first signs of what national governments will do 15 or 20 years hence.”
Indeed, police arrived at NatCon after Emir Kir, mayor of the Brussels commune of Saint Josse, the venue is located, tried to silence the gathering, stating that “the far-right is not welcome.” His ban was later overturned, but the introduction of restrictions against so-called ‘hate speech’ across Europe—most notably right now in Scotland—suggests that in a few years time, a similar ban could easily stand up in the courts.
Mr. Hitchens described the mayor’s actions as the latest illustration of the “tendency among the modern left to believe that conservatives are not just wrong but bad, and that they are therefore entitled to close them down.”
He added that there is certainly precedent for this failed attempt to silence conservatives on a local level to metastasize into a durable censorship regime in the not-too-distant future:
Those of us with long memories will recall that an awful lot of what is now called the ‘political correctness’ of the [UK] national government began in local authorities … back in the 1980s. We laughed at them and said that they only strengthened the cause of conservatism. In fact, those ideas came to dominate national government and indeed the national culture and are now enshrined in law and are pretty much followed by everybody.
Given all this, Hitchens suggested that the events in Brussels earlier this week are unlikely to go unrepeated, and should instead be taken “quite seriously as a presage of things to come.”
Claire Fox, a member of Britain’s House of Lords—Parliament’s upper chamber—and director of the Academy of Ideas, added that the gathering of police outside of NatCon was “a sign of [the] European political elite running away from debating populist concerns” on issues like farming, immigration and the environment. The humiliation of mayor Kir is hardly likely to alter Brussels’—and, for that matter, London’s— position.
