The man who interrupted West Country MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s speech at a conference this week to warn about the rise of fascism is the father of a Bristol woman who was killed in Syria fighting Islamic State.
Dirk Campbell took over the microphone from the North East Somerset MP at the exclusive 'National Conservatism' conference, where a number of ministers and MPs spoke this week. The 72-year-old was one of several people who infiltrated the conference and disrupted it.
In 2018, Mr Campbell’s daughter Anna, a plumber from Easton in Bristol, was killed by a Turkish Air Force air strike in the Rojava conflict between Kurds and Islamic State, during the Syrian Civil War.
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Anna, who was 26 when she was killed, is still remembered in Bristol in street art and at protests against the city’s arms firms which still supply Turkey with military hardware, and also in Kurdish-controlled Syria, where she is feted as a heroine.
Since her death, Mr Campbell has been campaigning to force the Turkish authorities to allow access to her grave to retrieve her body, but without success. and the composer and musician has since taken up his daughter’s activism.
He said he managed to get into the National Conservatism Conference, simply by not declaring his background and only linking to his music sites on social media. As the North East Somerset MP and former Cabinet minister Mr Rees-Mogg began his speech at the conference, he approached the stage and took the microphone, and began speaking. Mr Campbell said: “Ladies and gentlemen, you all look like very nice people and I’m sure you are fantastically nice people, but I would like to draw your attention to a few characteristics of fascism.”
Mr Campbell tried to continue talking but was grabbed and removed from the stage, before being frogmarched forcibly from the venue. Mr Rees-Mogg recovered his speech, saying: “We believe in freedom of speech so he can have his national loonies conference next week and he can see how many he gets to come along.”
After the incident, Mr Campbell told Byline News that he wanted to draw people’s attention to his view that: “National Conservatism is the first step on the road towards fascism.”
“Those at the conference were romanticising the idea of the nation, which is a core definition of fascism,” he added.
Speakers at the conference included a Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger - the son of Bake Off judge Prue Leith - who said the ‘normative family, the father and mother sticking together for the sake of the children, is the only basis for a safe and functioning society’, before other panel discussions on ‘God and Country’, with National Conservatism chairman Christopher Demuth saying they are ‘at the barricades against the hegemonic elite’.
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