by Annabel Denham, Telegraph
The Conservative peer and think-tank leader on how embracing faith, family and freedoms could help rebuild an increasingly fractured society
Next week, around 4,000 politicians, academics, entrepreneurs, campaigners, artists and journalists will descend on London’s Olympia to map out a “hope-filled future” for Western civilisation – an ambitious effort to rebuild and restore confidence in a society estranged from its identity, history and cultural foundations.
The speaker list includes former Australian prime ministers Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott, as well as Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, who will all take to the stage. Delegates will arrive from 90 different countries, and hold different political views, but share a conviction that something has gone badly wrong in the West.
The gathering is organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc), a fast-expanding international network that seeks to present itself as an antidote to the prevailing mood of cultural pessimism. Dubbed the “anti-Davos”, it combines scepticism of technocracy, net-zero orthodoxy, progressive identity politics and the steady erosion of civil liberties with a broad concern over the wider crisis of confidence in Western – particularly Anglosphere – societies.
At the centre of the project is a partnership between three figures: Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Baroness Stroud, and its principal financial backer, hedge-fund manager Paul Marshall. Arc also has 58 advisory-board members: an impressive roster of figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray and Vivek Ramaswamy.