Free speech champion Toby Young heads to Orbán’s Hungary

As a lover of freedom and a long-standing scribe at some of Britain’s most venerated right wing media outlets, one might assume Young will be raising Hungary’s own recent record of censorship and repression.

Since he returned to power in 2010, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán has rewritten the country’s constitution, seized control of its media and judiciary, and imposed sweeping laws designed to crack down on the rights of LGBT people, women and girls, asylum seekers and civil society groups.

Young will surely also raise the fact that Orbán’s regime has arrested people for their social media posts. In 2020 a new law passed by Orbán and his Fidesz government resulted in dozens of people being investigated and detained for allegedly scaremongering on social media about the Covid-19 pandemic.

And what better place to raise these concerns? Young is being hosted by Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Orbán’s in-house think tank, which is largely funded through the proceeds of Hungary’s national oil company, MOL.

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MCC and its Brussels branch have been keen to cultivate ties to Britain’s right in recent times. GB News presenter and former academic Matthew Goodwin, the newly-appointed honorary president of Reform’s youth wing, was until recently a “visiting fellow” at MCC.

Goodwin has spoken at MCC’s summer festivals for the past couple of years, using his appearance last year to laud Orbán’s government for “fighting” the supposed liberal “elite” over its stance towards Russia’s war in Ukraine.

These sentiments were echoed by Reform’s new senior advisor James Orr – said to be US vice-president JD Vance’s “philosopher king” – at this year’s MCC summer festival.

Orr described Orbán’s government as a “counterexample to the ideology in my own country that rejects national pride and heritage”. He also praised Hungary’s opposition to the West’s near-universal solidarity with Ukraine. He has previously described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “regional Slavic conflict” that he doesn’t “care very much about”.

Another MCC visiting fellow, Mick Hume, worked for Reform during last year’s general election. Hume runs the European Conservative, a right wing online magazine which has received funding from Orbán’s government.

Back in 2001, Hume was the launch editor of the radical libertarian publication Spiked – one of Toby Young’s journalistic stables. And who was the “theoretical guru” behind Spiked? Current MCC Brussels executive director Frank Furedi. Small world.