Laurie Wastell

Brussels A familiar refrain at any National Conservatism conference is that leftist elites are censorious, authoritarian and intolerant of free speech. Today, it seemed like this was proven correct, after the Brussels police were ordered to shut down the conference in an outrageous assault on freedom of speech. It has been a surreal day so far, but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is an outrageous, authoritarian assault on democratic freedom by the Brussels authorities When the conference started at the Claridge hotel this morning, it was already on its third venue, after two others were forced to cancel at the behest of Brussels's socialist mayor, Philippe Close.

This week, the equalities minister and business secretary Kemi Badenoch took aim at Britain’s woke bureaucracy. The government’s Inclusion at Work panel, convened by Badenoch last year, has unveiled its new report into UK employers’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practices. Composed of private and public-sector experts and advised by a Harvard professor, the panel noted that 10,000 EDI jobs in the public sector are estimated to cost the British taxpayer £557 million per year. It's high time that the government got a grip on our spiralling EDI bureaucracy According to the report, many EDI initiatives have little evidence behind them, are often ‘polarising’ and in some cases ‘unlawful’.

With Sir Keir Starmer creeping closer to No. 10 every day, attention is rightly being paid to the radicalism of Labour’s agenda. Many have pointed to the awful prospect of its Race Equality Act, which would entail vast social engineering by state bureaucrats in pursuit of racial ‘equity’. Labour backs a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ that arguably equates criticism of Islam with racism – amounting to something like a blasphemy law. Meanwhile, its chilling plans for a ‘trans-inclusive’ ban on conversion therapy could criminalise clinicians not taking an ‘affirmative’ approach to patients who present with gender dysphoria.

The ‘paraglider girls’ ruling last week has thrown long-standing questions about judicial impartiality in Britain into sharp relief. On Tuesday, three women convicted of appearing to show support for Hamas by displaying paraglider images were let off virtually scot-free by a judge, Tan Ikram, who had previously handed down jail sentences for private WhatsApp memes. When it emerged that three weeks before Ikram had liked an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn (he says accidentally), concern about his perceived leniency toward the ‘paraglider’ girls soon turned to outrage. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman called the light sentencing (each of the women received a 12-month conditional discharge) ‘utterly shocking’.