Dozens of British MPs and peers will rub shoulders with politicians from the European far right, Trump donors and American climate change deniers at a major right-wing event returning to London next week, documents can reveal.

The UK-based Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is an international network for right-wing activists and thought leaders that aims to “re-lay the foundations of our civilisation”. Visitors to its annual conference in London’s Olympia next week are charged up to £1,500 a ticket for three days of networking and talks from international stars of the libertarian and populist right. 

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch will both be speakers at this year’s event, alongside Boris Johnson, fracking boss-turned-Trump energy secretary Chris Wright, and Bill Anderson, chief executive of the German pesticides giant Bayer. 

But a leaked attendees list, seen by Unearthed and DeSmog, shows that those planning to attend also include politicians from far right parties across Europe, including Alternative for Germany (AfD) – which is designated as a “suspected extremist” organisation by German intelligence services – alongside the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, Vlaams Belang from Belgium, Spain’s VOX, and the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom. 

Other listed attendees include influential officials from president Donald Trump’s administration, including Sarah Rogers, a senior State Department official who has led its attempts to promote radical right-wing parties abroad. 

They are expected to be joined by more than 40 UK parliamentarians, including Conservative peer and Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, Conservative MP and former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey, and Reform UK MPs Sarah Pochin and Andrew Rosindell.

Georgie Laming, from the campaign group Hope Not Hate, said ARC was “one of the biggest radical right events in the UK and a networking opportunity for the global right and far right”. 

She told Unearthed and DeSmog: “It’s very worrying to see mainstream UK politicians rubbing shoulders with U.S. anti-abortion activists, European far right figures, and members of the Trump administration who want to bring culture wars to the UK.”

Some UK politicians who were on the attendees list told Unearthed and DeSmog that they were not planning to attend. “I was unaware of the attendees and I have no intention of attending,” said one peer, who asked to speak off the record. “I have written to organisers asking to remove my name from participants.” Unearthed and DeSmog understand that the peer had wrongly believed it was mainly an event about technology. Others said they had been mistakenly included on the list by organisers, or that they could not now attend because of other commitments.

ARC is run by Conservative peer Philippa Stroud, who founded the network in 2023 with the Canadian conservative pundit Jordan Peterson and the owners of right-wing TV channel GB News: hedge fund manager Sir Paul Marshall and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum. 

Marshall and Legatum have also been major funders of ARC, but material obtained by Unearthed and DeSmog from last year’s event shows that the conference has also received financial backing in the past from a host of American fossil fuel interests and major Trump donors – as well as from billionaire Reform donor Ben Delo. 

ARC declined to comment when approached by Unearthed and DeSmog. However, an ARC spokesperson told the Guardian newspaper that the network’s job was to “bring together leaders across business, culture, politics, and technology to discuss and debate what it will take to recover our civilisational foundations”.

They added: “Our ambition has always been to bring together an extraordinary group of leaders from around the world, establishing an international network of builders committed to the flourishing of our nations. We will see this ambition come to life at our third annual conference in London and around the world.”

Unearthed and DeSmog reached out to Houchen, Pochin, Rosindell, McVey and Delo for comment, but they have not responded.

A version of this article has been published by The Guardian.

American Interests

The speaker roster for this year’s ARC conference shows a strong influence from Trump allies. Alongside Chris Wright, it also includes Mike Johnson, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, and Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think tank. 

The Heritage Foundation was responsible for co-ordinating Project 2025, a radical right-wing policy blueprint published ahead of the last U.S. presidential election which, among other things, called on the incoming Trump administration to slash clean energy investment and unleash fossil fuel production. 

But the attendees list shows that ARC is also expecting influential but less-well-known figures from the U.S. right. Among them is Samuel Samson, deputy assistant Secretary of State in the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour.  

According to the New York Times, Samson “has been at the forefront” of the Trump administration’s “effort to reshape America’s relationship with Europe”, cultivating ties with far-right leaders across the continent. In March last year, he led a five-person delegation to the UK to investigate the administration’s concerns about free speech. On the trip, U.S. officials reportedly met with anti-abortion activists, the broadcast regulator Ofcom, and Foreign Office officials. Samson also reportedly had a secret breakfast meeting with Farage where they discussed “buffer zones” around abortion facilities, online safety laws and censorship cases.

Samson later published an article where he claimed the UK and Europe had become a “hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration,” and “restrictions on religious freedom”, citing the case of two British anti-abortion activists who had been arrested for “silently praying outside of abortion clinics”. 

A State Department official told Unearthed and DeSmog: “The Trump administration is proud to advocate for free speech, the rule of law, and a strong U.S.-UK relationship built upon our shared civilizational values. We look forward to productive conversations at ARC that build on these shared interests.”

Samson’s meeting with Farage was reportedly brokered by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an influential American anti-abortion group. ADF helped to overturn Roe v. Wade – a Supreme Court decision that had protected women’s legal right to abortion in the U.S. – and has since reportedly set its sights on the UK and Europe. According to the attendees list, ADF will be well-represented at ARC, with more than a dozen of its members down to attend and its CEO Kristen Waggoner on the speakers’ list. Representatives of the anti-abortion groups Right to Life UK, Christian Concern, and Spain-based CitizenGO are also expected to attend. 

“ARC is bringing together a toxic alliance of far-right politicians, fossil fuel interests and anti-abortion campaigners,” said Kerry Abel, chair of Abortion Rights. “The presence of the architects of the post-Roe assault on women’s rights should set alarm bells ringing. UK parliamentarians cannot claim ignorance about the agenda of organisations like Alliance Defending Freedom: their goal is to roll back hard-won rights, and they are increasingly targeting Europe and the UK. MPs attending this conference should be clear with the public about why they are lending legitimacy to that project.”

A spokesperson for ADF International said most of its members attending ARC next week were from the group’s UK and European offices. 

“ADF International is a Christian legal advocacy organisation that defends fundamental freedoms around the world, including in the UK where we have an office, the spokesperson said.

“In this country, we legally support people like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who was arrested for silently praying on a public street, and Pastor Dia Moodley, who was arrested for peacefully preaching in the public square. In the UK of all places, citizens are now being criminally prosecuted over the contents of their minds. That should trouble everyone.”

Also on the attendees list are executives from fossil fuel companies including Valero, Heyco Energy and Koch Inc.. Koch is a privately-owned fossil fuel giant whose co-founders David and Charles have been major sponsors of climate science denial for decades.

Heyco is a private oil and gas exploration firm based in Dallas, Texas. The company’s UK subsidiary Egdon Resources has held regular meetings with Reform’s Greater Lincolnshire Mayor Andrea Jenkyns about their shared desire to bring fracking for gas to the East Midlands region. Heyco was listed as a sponsor of ARC last year and its CEO George Yates, who is set to attend this year’s summit, is a frequent donor to Republican candidates.

They are expected to be joined by figures from prominent climate science denial groups including Net Zero Watch, the CO2 Coalition, and the Heritage Foundation.

Opposition to net zero and decarbonisation efforts were central to ARC’s offering last year. Over the three days, there were multiple sessions on the main stage in which criticism of climate policy was prominent.

In his speech last year, ARC founder and funder Paul Marshall claimed that countries around the world were “being infected by an ideological zeal” that had led them to develop net zero plans.He argued that this “climate derangement syndrome” sacrifices “our economic prosperity and our people’s livelihoods all for the sake of making some fractional changes to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”. 

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “The involvement of fossil fuel leaders in this conference underlines what this reactionary international stands for.”

“They are not interested in building an economy which works for the majority.” We shouldn’t be welcoming these people to London,” he added. To halt their momentum, politicians needed to stop “feeding the beast” by “constraining corporate power” and offering economic solutions “which genuinely give people back some control and dignity”.

An ARC spokesperson told the Guardian: “When we launched in 2023, it was tantamount to heresy to challenge net zero – now everyone from Bill Gates and Tony Blair to leaders across the right have made the point that abundant, reliable, cheap energy is the base layer of modern civilisation.”

The Donors

Materials from last year’s conference obtained and analysed by Unearthed and DeSmog show that ARC has taken money from powerful U.S. funders with close ties to the Trump administration.

Among the American billionaires who paid money into ARC last year are Joe Craft, president of one of the U.S.’ biggest coal companies, and his wife Kelly. The couple are major Trump donors, reportedly putting $2 million into Trump’s 2016 campaign and inauguration, after which Kelly Craft served as the U.S. Ambassador to Canada (2017-19) and Ambassador to the UN (2019-21). In 2026, she donated $125,000 to the Republican National Committee (RNC), and her husband joined Trump’s National Coal Council. 

Other ARC backers last year included Bud and Anne Brigham – billionaires and major Trump funders. Bud Brigham is a prominent Texas oil tycoon who made his money from the shale boom. In 2024, he donated $150,000 to the Trump 47 Committee and almost $170,000 to the RNC.

Another ARC donor, tech investor Joe Lonsdale, co-founded the data firm Palantir with Peter Thiel, who spoke at last year’s event over video. The company has been heavily criticised for the anti-democratic ideologies of its senior figures, as well as for its work on behalf of Trump’s ICE immigration deportations unit and the U.S. military. 

Lonsdale is an ally of Vice President JD Vance and friend of the radical right-wing tech entrepreneur Elon Musk; Lonsdale contributed a reported $1 million to Musk’s pro-Trump fundraising campaign during the 2024 presidential election. 

In total, the list of 42 named donors and sponsors who were thanked by ARC in its promotional material last year included nine fossil fuel companies or their executives or former executives, and a number of other individuals or organisations with fossil fuel interests. The promotional material added that there were also “a number of generous anonymous donors”.

Among those named were Howard Energy Partners, one of the largest energy infrastructure companies in the U.S., its CEO Mike Howard’s family foundation, and the former Canadian oil boss Gwyn Morgan. 

Howard, a Republican donor, was appointed to Trump’s National Petroleum Council in February this year.

Morgan, who helped establish the Canadian Alberta Energy Company (AEC) in the 1970s, has been dubbed the “Koch of Canada”. This is a reference to the American fossil fuel executives Charles Koch and his late brother David, who channelled millions into climate denial groups over decades. As revealed by DeSmog, Morgan has used his foundation to pump over $9.5 million into a sprawling network of libertarian think tanks, right-wing media outlets, and conservative organisations.