Rishi Sunak and Belgian PM criticise mayor’s halting of NatCon conference

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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”.