Inside the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship
I attended another far-right meeting this week.
This one didn’t feature skinheads, St George’s flags or chants outside a hotel. Instead there were smart suits, venture capitalists, cabinet ministers, think tank directors and some of the most influential figures on the international conservative right.
It was the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), held in London. Its public face is the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, but behind the scenes sits an extraordinary network of wealthy donors, media organisations, think tanks and political figures spanning Britain, the United States and beyond.
The organisers claimed around 4,000 attendees. I remain slightly sceptical. When I first contacted them hoping to blag a ticket the asking price was around £1,500. A little later it had fallen to £150, dinner included. Eventually they were selling livestream access for £20, in the end I watched the conference on YouTube for free. I suspect not everyone in that headline attendance figure was physically in the room.
What interested me, however, wasn’t the attendance. It was the ideas.
ARC presents itself as a conference about Western civilisation, personal responsibility, free markets and cultural renewal. Much of that language sounds entirely mainstream. But beneath it runs a much more radical current.
Repeatedly speakers returned to the argument that liberalism, multiculturalism and diversity are not simply policies they dislike but existential threats to Western civilisation itself.
Running through many of the speeches was the belief that societies function best when organised around fixed hierarchies: men over women, Christianity over other religions, traditional families over alternative lifestyles, and established national cultures over immigration and demographic change. Some framed their arguments in explicitly Christian terms, others in evolutionary psychology, civilisational theory or economics. Yet they pointed in remarkably similar directions.
Political scientists often distinguish between two broad traditions of nationalism.
Civic nationalism defines a nation through shared citizenship, institutions and democratic values. Ethnic nationalism defines it through ancestry, ethnicity or inherited identity.
Historically those traditions occupied very different parts of the political landscape. One of the striking features of ARC was how frequently speakers blended the language of the first with ideas traditionally associated with the second. References to “shared values” and “civilisation” sat alongside arguments about demographic change, cultural decline and the restoration of what many described as the natural social order.
That blurring matters because it changes which ideas begin to feel politically respectable.
The conference also illustrated another paradox.
Many of those present described themselves as champions of free markets and opponents of excessive government. Yet free markets are remarkably indifferent to race, religion or gender. Businesses generally recruit the people who create the most value. Economic liberalisation has transformed countries like India precisely because it has weakened older systems based on caste, inherited privilege or legal discrimination.
What many speakers appeared to favour was something rather different: economic freedom for those with wealth and power combined with a much more interventionist state when it came to immigration, culture, education and social values.
Libertarianism for the powerful; authoritarianism for everybody else.
Climate policy provided another revealing example.
Several speakers attacked attempts to reduce carbon emissions, portraying net zero as an assault on prosperity and individual freedom. Some on the American Christian right frame environmental protection as a theological error: God created the Earth’s resources for mankind to use, therefore exploiting them cannot be morally wrong. Others object on more familiar libertarian grounds, arguing that environmental regulation limits the freedom of business and private property.
Different arguments. The same conclusion.
None of this explains why the conference matters politically.
The answer lies less in the speeches than in the guest list.
Nigel Farage attended. So did Reform MPs Sarah Pochin and Andrew Rosindell. Kemi Badenoch appeared. So did Michael Gove, now editor of The Spectator, itself part of Paul Marshall’s growing media empire alongside GB News. ARC itself is backed by Marshall and Legatum, the Dubai-based investment group.
What fascinated me was not that Reform politicians attended. That was entirely predictable.
It was that senior figures from mainstream Conservatism shared the same platform, including Kemi Badenoch.
For decades there were reasonably clear boundaries separating mainstream conservative politics from movements further to its right. Those boundaries now appear far less distinct. ARC is one of the places where those worlds increasingly overlap.
Partly this reflects changing ideas. But it also reflects changing networks of power.
Historically the Conservative Party was sustained by an establishment of wealthy donors, newspapers, business leaders and institutions that supported it through good times and bad.
Today a transatlantic ecosystem of hedge fund managers, technology investors, media organisations, think tanks and campaign groups increasingly shapes the intellectual direction of the political right. Their influence extends well beyond any single political party. They help determine which arguments receive funding, which organisations acquire influence and which politicians gain access to both.
The real significance of ARC is not that a few controversial speakers shared a platform. Political conferences come and go.
It is that organisations like ARC are becoming the places where politicians, billionaires, think tanks, media organisations, religious activists and technology companies develop a common political language. In that environment, ideas once largely confined to the political fringe can be reframed, repackaged and introduced into mainstream debate without ever being described as extremist. The distinction between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism becomes less clear. Arguments once associated with fringe movements become respectable enough to be discussed from ministerial platforms. Anyone on the right who wants to be elected has to attend, seek their blessing, speak their language.
That is why ARC matters. It is not simply reflecting changes on the political right. It is helping to produce them.
PS
One aspect of the conference particularly struck me. Alongside politicians and cultural conservatives sat representatives of AI companies, venture capital and the technology industry. At first glance they seemed unlikely allies. They weren’t. Understanding why means looking beyond politics to the relationship between governments, technology companies and some of the world’s richest entrepreneurs. I’ll come back to that tomorrow.
Seems like the public face of the American propaganda machine. Is ‘individual responsibility’ just a phrase for everyman for himself, no social security, no state pension, no workers rights and no social health care?
You see this playing out in Reform, they voted against worker protections, and its known Farage would like to move to insurance based healthcare, their manifesto even alludes to a two-tier healthcare system – they first step to weaking the NHS to such a point where it can be declared not fit for purpose.
This has been playing out for years, but has been ramped up recently. I genuinely think there is an attempt to push the UK hard right, the people doing it know Farage is not leadership material, but if they continue to push narratives eventually a leader will immerge that takes a ‘common sense’ approach and will be electable – could be reform, could be the Tories, or even something new. That is unless the left can get its act together, but I don’t see anyone throwing millions at left wing ideologies. The best defence I think is re-join the EU, I would like to see Labour negotiate this behind closed doors before presenting the facts and figures, then hold a snap referendum on re-joining, the quicker people cast their votes the better, because you know floods of lies and misinformation will be dreamt up from the media – the less time they have to do this the better.