While London cooks, billionaires bankroll climate-sceptic ARC

It was supposed to be a gathering of the great and the good to discuss climate change. Instead, the Extreme Heat event, scheduled as part of London Climate Action Week, was cancelled because it was too hot.

If the organisers were embarrassed, they could at least claim their point had been made.

As London sweltered, Mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled the capital’s first dedicated Heat Action Plan, acknowledging that extreme temperatures are no longer an occasional inconvenience but a recurring challenge. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres observed: “London isn’t just calling. It’s cooking.”

Yet one conference carried on regardless.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), aka the “anti-woke Davos,” assembled hundreds of politicians, billionaires, culture warriors, religious leaders, libertarians and self-appointed defenders of Western civilisation.

Alongside the familiar attacks on multiculturalism, diversity initiatives and “woke” politics was another recurring theme: scepticism towards climate action and hostility to environmental regulation.

At precisely the moment London was adapting to a hotter future, ARC was denying the crisis.

The billionaire network behind ARC

Despite attracting some of the biggest names on the global right, ARC has received remarkably little sustained media scrutiny.

Founded in 2023 by the self-styled “professor against political correctness” Jordan Peterson, Conservative peer Baroness Philippa Stroud and the Dubai-based investment group Legatum, with GB News owner Sir Paul Marshall playing a central role, ARC presents itself as a forum for restoring confidence in Western civilisation.

Yet in reality, it’s become a meeting point for wealthy donors, conservative politicians, evangelical networks and right-wing commentators from around the world.

At its centre sits Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire turned political financier and media tycoon, whose influence has expanded rapidly through his ownership of UnHerd, his co-ownership of GB News, and his acquisition of The Spectator. At ARC 2023, Marshall reportedly hosted a private dinner with prominent right-wing media figures, where he floated the idea of funding a new generation of journalists. He has consistently framed opposition to “progressivism” as both a spiritual and economic mission, arguing that “woke capitalism” poses a fundamental threat to free-market society itself.

Charity Commission filings show, in 2023, the Sequoia Trust, Marshall’s personal charity, donated £1 million to ARC. Describing the organisation as a response to what he called an elite class intent on making Western societies fearful of their future and ashamed of their history, in the year ending June 2025, the Trust made a further £2 million grant to ARC.

The same trust has financed an interconnected ecosystem of conservative institutions. Between 2018 and 2025, it donated £5 million to Holy Trinity Brompton, the influential evangelical church whose reach extends deep into British political and business life. It has also given £890,000 to Policy Exchange, whose culture war reports were frequently cited by Conservative ministers, alongside substantial funding for the Education Policy Institute.

Investigations by DeSmog and Unearthed show that ARC has also benefited from support from powerful American fossil fuel companies with close ties to Donald Trump. Among them is Anthony Pratt, an Australian-born packaging billionaire and Trump ally, who reportedly donated $14 million to the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super Political Action Committee (PAC), alongside a further $1.1 million to the president’s inaugural fund. Other backers include major Conservative and Reform UK donor Lord Anthony Bamford, and crypto billionaire Ben Delo, who donated £4 million to Reform UK earlier this year. 

Opposition to Net Zero and decarbonisation is only one front in a broader ideological campaign linking resistance to environmental regulation with hostility towards immigration, multiculturalism, LGBTQ+ rights and institutions its participants portray as the work of liberal elites. In a speech at this year’s ARC, Marshall described policies to reduce carbon emissions as rooted in “an ideology of fear and destruction,” arguing they provide “a new excuse for state interference.” Collectively, these ultra-wealthy individuals are financing a powerful transnational network intent on reshaping politics, culture, and public discourse.

A global right-wing summit

That network was on full display at the conference, where around 4,000 delegates reportedly gathered at London’s Olympia exhibition centre, paying up to £1,500 for three days of speeches, networking and strategy.

The guest list amounted to a who’s who of the global conservative movement. Kemi Badenoch claimed that Net Zero policies were stealing young people’s futures, despite speaking during the hottest week of the year. Divorcee Nigel Farage extolled the virtues of marriage, while Donald Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, shared a platform with Bayer chief executive Bill Anderson. Politicians linked to the Trump administration, Germany’s AfD, Australian conservatism and Europe’s wider populist right featured prominently.

The audience included Conservative peer Ben Houchen, Esther McVey, Reform UK MPs Sarah Pochin and Andrew Rosindell, alongside more than a dozen representatives from Alliance Defending Freedom, the US legal organisation that played a central role in overturning Roe v. Wade.

Hope Not Hate’s Georgie Laming described ARC as ” one of the biggest radical right events in the UK and a networking opportunity for the global right and far right,” warning about mainstream British politicians sharing platforms with anti-abortion activists, European far-right figures and members of the Trump administration.

Speaking for young people without young people

Yet for all ARC’s claims to be shaping the future, one constituency was notably underrepresented: the young people its speakers claimed to defend.

Throughout the conference, speakers returned to the same themes. They howled about the crisis facing young men, warned that Net Zero was destroying young people’s prospects, and blamed family breakdown, declining opportunity and cultural decay. But while younger generations were invoked repeatedly, they were rarely heard from directly.

Perhaps the most critical assessment of ARC came not from the national newspapers but from The Nerve, whose political writer Stella Tsantekidou attended the conference.

“The conference doesn’t scream youth,” she wrote.” It’s expensive (£450 per ticket with a 70% discount), impossible for most young people to afford. Most of those that do go are approached with offers of free tickets because of their involvement with other societies, such as Conservative and Reform student groups.”

Inside the conference, older politicians, billionaires and commentators spoke confidently about the challenges facing younger generations, while young voices remained largely absent from the main stage. The contradiction runs through ARC itself, a movement that presents itself as fighting for the future, yet is financed by billionaires, organised by political veterans and dominated by older elites speaking for young people rather than listening to them.

The real contradiction

The cancellation of the Extreme Heat conference because temperatures had become unbearable was almost too perfect a metaphor.

Outside, London was confronting the realities of a rapidly warming world. Inside Olympia, many of the world’s most influential conservative politicians, donors and campaigners were investing their energy in questioning the urgency of responding to it.

That contradiction tells us something important about contemporary politics.

The climate debate is no longer simply about science or emissions targets. It has become part of a much larger ideological project in which opposition to climate action sits alongside broader campaigns against progressive politics, regulation and liberal institutions.

ARC is no fringe gathering. It’s a well-funded international network connecting money, media, politics and religion across multiple countries.

And while it claims to be fighting for the next generation, its vision of the future is being written overwhelmingly by the old, the wealthy and the powerful. And on final note of irony: it seems that attendees were provided with little fans against the heat. I’ll break it to you gently comrades – they won’t do much for you when the world gets really hot.

Right-Wing Watch is written by Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead