The National Conservatives meet again
And this time it's an Orban love-in led by Brits
The National Conservatives are meeting again next week, this time in Brussels. I covered their three-day jamboree in London last May, at which speakers included Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees Mogg, Lee Anderson and a plethora of foreign figures on what I call the New Right. Some of my coverage is here:
https://davidaaronovitch.substack.com/p/and-on-the-third-day-the-national
While I was looking at the stalls in a side room at the Emanuel Centre in Westminster the former journalist who was in charge of publicity for the event spotted me and came over for a chat. He volunteered the spin that I would not find very much that was Hungarian about the conference, despite the presence of a stall for the expensively produced The Hungarian Conservative magazine and the appearance on the platform of several speakers who were employed directly or indirectly by the Orbán government or its supporters. It interested me that he felt it necessary to reassure me regarding something that I had not mentioned to him.
However there’s no such spin possible for this month’s beanfeast, which is entitled Preserving the Nation-State in Europe. There are three keynote speakers. Suella Braverman is joined by Nigel Farage in what could well be a harbinger of British New Right alliances to come - but easily the most powerful of the trio is Victor Orbán himself. He is the Big Fish here.
In addition, threaded through the sessions (which also feature figures from Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, the Flemish nationalist Vlams Belang, the Polish Law and Justice Party, the far right Spanish VOX party, the anti-abortion legal organisation ADF, a sprinkling of anti-Francis Catholics and the inevitable Melanie Phillips and Matthew Goodwin) are a series of people paid for and maintained by the Hungarian regime.
They include the Budapest based eccentric American Christian Rod Dreher, John O’Sullivan who is President of the Danube Institute in Budapest, the American Gladden Pappin who is president of yet another “research” body, the Hungarian Institute of International affairs (and whose chilling interview with Freddie Sayers of UnHerd I recommend) and above all our very own ex Revolutionary Communist Party guru, Professor Frank Furedi. Furedi sits on the organising committee of this conference.
Furedi, for the uninitiated, broke off from the SWP to form the RCP back in the Trotskyist Jurassic. When the RCP – militant supporters of the Provisional IRA, it should be recalled and publishers of The Next Step (see above) – was disbanded, it reformed first around a magazine called Living Marxism, then around a series of organisations including Spiked Online and the Institute for Ideas. Its leading cadres, who have clearly maintained close contact and who act pretty much in concert with and promote each other include Baroness Fox, Brendan O’Neill, Joanna Williams, Ella Whelan and a number of other regular guests on UK talk shows.
Furedi himself was professor of sociology at Kent University, but in 2022 was appointed executive director of “MCC Brussels”. MCC stands for the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Corvinus was a legendary king of Greater Hungary in the late fifteenth century).