Rishi Sunak and Belgian PM criticise mayor’s
halting of NatCon conference
Emir Kir ordered police to close down radical
rightwing conference attended by Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage
Lisa
O'Carroll in Brussels, Aletha Adu and Ben Quinn
Tue 16 Apr
2024 18.38 BST
The UK
prime minister has rounded on Belgian authorities for closing down a radical
rightwing conference in Brussels that was addressed by British politicians
including Nigel Farage and Suella Braverman.
After a day
of chaos, claims and recriminations, the decision by a local Belgian mayor to
stop the National Conservatives (NatCon) event was also condemned as
“unacceptable” by Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander De Croo.
The two-day
conference, which was also due to hear from Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor
Orbán, and the far-right French politician Éric Zemmour, had been scrambling to
find a venue to host the speakers after two previous venues pulled the plug at
the last minute.
But within
hours of starting proceedings at a third venue, the Claridge hotel, police
entered the building to serve an order to close it down. Their action came just
as Farage, the former Brexit party leader, was finishing his speech.
Emir Kir,
the mayor of the Brussels district of Saint-Josse where the Claridge is
located, confirmed on Facebook he had issued a ban in order to “ensure public
security”. He said the far right – which is predicted to surge in EU-wide
elections taking place in June – was “not welcome” in the city.
A
spokesperson for Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, said: “It’s very clear
that cancelling events or preventing attendance and non-platforming speakers is
damaging to free speech and to democracy as a result. It’s very clear that free
debate and exchange of views is vital. Even when you disagree.”
De Croo
said: “What happened at the Claridge today is unacceptable. Municipal autonomy
is a cornerstone of our democracy but can never overrule the Belgian
constitution guaranteeing the freedom of speech and peaceful assembly since
1830. Banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop.”
The
decision to close the conference caused surprise on Tuesday morning as there
was little evidence of disturbance at the low-key venue that has previously
hosted Brazilian singers and latino festivals.
But by 1pm
there was bedlam after police tried to serve an order to shut the event down,
eventually entering the venue at the invitation of the organisers as Farage was
finishing his speech.
“I think
it’s absolutely monstrous,” Farage told reporters after wrapping up his
address.
Earlier
organisers had blamed “extremists on the left” for trying to suppress free
speech and many believed the move to close the event handed a massive publicity
coup to NatCon, a little-known organisation.
“I’ve
experienced cancel culture personally here … but what has happened in there on
the stage with global media, we can see that legally held opinions from people
who are going to win national elections is not longer acceptable here in
Brussels, the home of globalism,” Farage told reporters.
“This is
the complete old Communist style where if you don’t agree with me, you’ve got
to be banned, you’ve got to be shut down.”
Organisers
allowed Braverman, the former UK home secretary, to go ahead with a lengthy
speech before telling the near 100 delegates that they had to leave the
building.
Braverman,
who has sought to cultivate a following on the right in Britain and beyond
since she was sacked last year as home secretary, delivered a speech in which
she claimed the UK could leave the European convention on human rights (ECHR),
scorning Sunak’s recent suggestions that he would be willing to exit from it if
it prevented him from implementing his policy of deporting asylum seekers to
Rwanda.
“It’s
therefore no surprise that recent noises in this direction from the prime
minister are being dismissed by the public as inauthentic.”
After her
speech, she told Sky News that the “thought police, instructed by the mayor of
Brussels” had sought to undermine free speech and debate.
Speakers at
the event included elected officials from across the EU, on themes such as “Why
Should We Prefer Our Own Culture to Others?” or “Challenging Wokeism: an
International Matter”.
Among the
other speakers in the line-up were Ryszard Legutko, a Polish politician who has
said he does not “understand why anyone should want to be proud of being a
homosexual” and Rod Dreher, an American writer who argued that the Christchurch
mosque gunman who killed 51 people in 2019 did have “legitimate, realistic
concerns” about “declining numbers of ethnic Europeans”.
Sunak had
been urged at the weekend to stop Braverman from attending the rightwing
convention featuring figures who have been under investigation for extremism.
Organisers
insisted they would try to find a new venue for Wednesday when Orbán, who is in
Brussels for a leaders summit in the evening, is due to speak.
In 2020,
the Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski was reprimanded under Boris Johnson’s
Conservative party leadership for attending a NatCon event in Rome, where Orbán
was also a speaker.
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