Left-wing political commentator Owen Jones has supported Nigel Farage’s view that Belgian police were wrong to shut down a far-right conference in Brussels.
Police swooped on the National Conservatism Conference yesterday after the mayor of Brussels ordered it to be stopped on public security grounds, but Farage who was in attendance at the event called it “bullying and anti-democratic”.
Now his view that the conference should not have been shut down has seen surprising support from outspoken Leftie Jones, who called the move a “disturbing attack on civil liberties”.
In a post on social media platform X, he said: “The police shut down of the National Conservative conference in Brussels is a disturbing attack on civil liberties.
“If you support the right of the state to shut down your opponents, you legitimise the state wanting to shut you down, too.
“I’m painfully aware that this conference features the likes of Suella Braverman and other right-wing demagogues who have done so much to trash civil liberties, and who want to destroy the right to protest. That doesn’t mean we abandon our consistent support for civil liberties.
“Note that in the 1930s, the British state introduced legislation that was superficially aimed at the fascist Blackshirts. That legislation came to be used against the left and the labour movement – including the Miners’ Strike fifty years later.”
He added that while he felt those in attendance were “politically dangerous” they should be defeated through political means.
Jones added: “These right-wing extremists are politically dangerous and, if they assume political power, they will threaten our hard-won rights and freedoms.
“But we have to defeat them through political organising and an alternative, not legitimising the onward march to authoritarianism.
“This episode again underlines that just as those who call themselves ‘social democrats’ tend to be terrible social democrats, those who call themselves ‘liberals’ tend to be terrible liberals, too.”
