There are two good rules-of-thumb when you’re defending liberal democracy against populists. The first is to stand by your principles. And the second is to never act like the person they want you to be. Brussels authorities have failed on both counts.
Yesterday morning, police arrived at a venue called Claridge, near the European Quarter of the city, where the lunatic-right National Conservatism Conference was under way. Under orders from a local mayor, they closed the event down.
Mercifully, wiser voices soon intervened. Liberal Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo branded the move “unacceptable” and “unconstitutional”. Last night the country’s supreme administrative court cited article 26 of the constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly, in a ruling which overturned the mayoral decision. The conference now continues as planned.
It’s funny old thing. Brexiters attacked the Supreme Court over the Article 50 judgment, the unlawful prorogation of parliament and the Rwanda ruling. Donald Trump lashes out at the court cases against him. Hungary’s Viktor Orban eradicated the independent judiciary in his own country. Barely a day passes without some Tory minister attacking the European Convention of Human Rights. Populists hate the courts and they hate human rights. But when it comes to their freedoms being threatened, they suddenly change position. It turns out courts and human rights are good for something after all.
This, of course, is not the lesson they have taken from events. Some are simply incapable of honest intellectual introspection. Others are too cynical to ever dare experiment with it. So instead they have largely ignored the legal judgment and used the initial ban to spread their standard narrative: they are a threat to the establishment, which has tried to silence them.
“We shouldn’t be surprised that the European elites are resorting to such tactics,” academic and wannabe populist leader Matthew Goodwin wrote in the Daily Mail. “These are tactics straight out of the Soviet playbook – and they shame an international body that proclaims itself so hypocritically to be a bastion of human rights and freedom.” Lets take a closer look at this claim. The decision was not taken by the EU. It was taken by a local mayor. But the truth is never going to get in the way of someone operating at such unparalleled heights of cynicism. Goodwin and his allies wish to tell a story, a very simple and deceptive story, about the people and the elite. The decision to stop the event did not hinder them. It helped.
Let’s be clear about what this event is and who populates it. Among the speakers were most of the half-wits, wannabe autocrats and deranged conspiracy theorists on the continent. Nigel Farage was present, as was Suella Braverman. And alongside them people like Orban.
They talk about free speech but they do not pursue it. Orban has taken over the entirety of his country’s media sector and brought it under his control. His control of information is so extensive that Hungary really cannot be called a democracy anymore, because the transmission of ideas which sustain it are entirely absent. Braverman passed numerous pieces of legislation criminalising protest in Britain in a concerted attempt to silence those she disagreed with. They couldn’t care less about freedom of speech or assembly. They simply want their own right to be able to say whatever they like while removing it for others.
But that is their failure, not ours. The core principle of liberalism is that freedoms must be shared universally, regardless of who we are or what we think. It demands a level of consistency which its opponents are incapable of: freedom for everyone, not just for us. Liberty for all, not just our race, or our nation, or our political tribe.
This is the principle against a ban. But just as important is the strategy.
We are in the battle of our lives. The fact that the tide is running against populism in Britain has blinded many of us to how severe the fight is internationally. June’s parliamentary elections in Europe will likely see an unprecedented level of success for right-wing populists. The autumn could see the return of Donald Trump in the US. It is quite possible that by the end of the year we will be watching a populist surge on both sides of the Atlantic, with a British Labour government caught in the middle.
That means we need to fight smart. Our mission is to wipe populism from the face of the earth. And that cannot be done by bans. It cannot be achieved by behaving like the very thing they claim us to be. It can only be done by showing the falsity of their propositions day after day: refuting them, humiliating them, dismantling them, defeating them.
The speakers at that conference are the very worst of us. They are blathering, insecure, emotionally incontinent, hard-right imbeciles of the highest order. Their only saving grace is the lack of capacity for embarrassment, because it would dissolve them were they ever to come into contact with it.
But then, that is the beauty of liberal freedom. It grants such diminutive examples of our intellectual life the same rights as everyone else.
Nigel Farage is the worst of us, but he has a right to speak
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17.04.2024
There are two good rules-of-thumb when you’re defending liberal democracy against populists. The first is to stand by your principles. And the second is to never act like the person they want you to be. Brussels authorities have failed on both counts.
Yesterday morning, police arrived at a venue called Claridge, near the European Quarter of the city, where the lunatic-right National Conservatism Conference was under way. Under orders from a local mayor, they closed the event down.
Mercifully, wiser voices soon intervened. Liberal Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo branded the move “unacceptable” and “unconstitutional”. Last night the country’s supreme administrative court cited article 26 of the constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly, in a ruling which overturned the mayoral decision. The conference now continues as planned.
It’s funny old thing. Brexiters attacked the Supreme Court over the Article 50 judgment, the unlawful prorogation of parliament and the Rwanda ruling. Donald Trump lashes out at the court cases against him. Hungary’s Viktor Orban eradicated the independent judiciary in his own country. Barely a day passes without some Tory minister attacking the European Convention of Human Rights. Populists hate........
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