touches on some very interesting politics
Nice to see some recognition and backstory to the fucked up official line.
The story harks back to one of the strangest political groups ever to have emerged in the UK.
The Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) was one of many leftist groupuscules to emerge in the 1970s. But it distinguished itself with a cruel and brutal libertarianism. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child sexual abuse images, landmines and the ownership of handguns. It claimed that animals have no rights, that global heating is a good thing, that environmentalists are like Nazis. It attacked strikers and gay rights campaigners. By taking extreme rightwing positions while calling itself left, it wrongfooted almost everyone.
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Its leading figure, Frank Furedi, now runs the Brussels arm of the hard right Mathias Corvinus Collegium, funded by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. Two stalwarts of LM were the sisters Claire and Fiona Fox.
Claire Fox became one of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party MEPs, before Boris Johnson made her a peer. Fiona Fox was one of several RCP alumni who, in the early 2000s, founded or took key roles in science communication groups. She became the first director of the Science Media Centre (SMC). This positioning at the interface between science and the media of members of the group was not easy to explain. Most, including Fox, appeared to have no background in science.
From Politico:
That led British left-wing newspaper the Guardian to label the ex-RCP landscape — a gaggle of companies, charities and initiatives that share managers and shareholders — as a stooge of right-wing causes and big business. Furedi dismisses that as “a fantasy.” Yet, RCP veterans are certainly influential in conservative and Euroskeptic circles: Academy of Ideas founder Claire Fox was an MEP for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. LM regular Munira Mirza worked as Boris Johnson’s policy whizz in Downing Street.
I remember reading about LM’s coverage of the war in Bosnian which seemed so contrarian that it was denying well-sourced information and, reading about his they have mutated since, I’m left with the feeling that they’re puppets to larger vested interests. Unfortunately, it seems like the full story is yet to be told.
Being in the RCP was not, for Mirza, a brief flirtation with student leftism, a fun detail to add colour to the profile of a Conservative Party apparatchik. It has rather been a key through line and organising ideology of Mirza’s politics, and hints at the wider, stranger story of how an ostensibly communist grouping that supposedly disbanded in 1997 came to hold not insignificant sway in the contemporary Conservative Party. Understanding the group’s history and how it has come to stalk the corridors of power gives us valuable insight into the internal world of the party that has run the country for a dozen years and counting.
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Nominally Trotskyist, at its outset the RCP looked like a small sect of the kind that very often live and die without ever troubling the halls of power or making it out of the footnotes of little read books about the British left. Through the 1980s, however, it began to mark itself out as a distinctly contrarian organisation, possessed of somewhat different politics than you might expect of a group called the Revolutionary Communist Party. They counter-picketed striking nurses and opposed sanctions on apartheid South Africa; in 1987, they released a pamphlet called The Truth about the AIDS Panic which argued that the public health campaigns around AIDS were simply instruments of social control by a state interested in interfering in people’s sex lives.
If we could see the shape of things to come in the RCP’s early years, it was in the 1990s, when leftist sects of all stripes struggled to position themselves in a world without a Communist superpower, that they came to be the organisation we know today. The questions arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union provided grist for the mill of the RCP’s newly established magazine, Living Marxism (LM). Living Marxism set out the stall for a set of politics that had reasonably little to do with Trotskyism or Marxism, but which were possessed of a kind of reactionary coherence. Attempting to describe the RCP’s politics in conventional political language is somewhat difficult; they are somewhere close to libertarians (and often identify themselves as such), albeit ones possessed of some desire to understand the world through a loosely Marxist class framework, a passion for futuristic technology, and a contrarian streak a mile wide. They advocated for grand absolutes of free speech, and in favour of genetically modified crops and nuclear power. It was their reactionary contrarianism, however, which defined their project and which was ultimately to be the magazine’s undoing: if the mainstream British press were in favour of it, Living Marxism was against it.
Genocide denial is such a profound act that it seems bizarre to conclude that anyone would do it out of sheer counter-suggestibility; nonetheless, that seems to have been Living Marxism’s primary motivation as, through the 90s, the magazine became increasingly vocal about what they saw as the mainstream British media’s anti-Serb bias.
Ah ha:
Spiked’s opposition to environmental activists and to what they viewed as the anti-humanist moral panic over climate change became more pronounced as green issues came increasingly to the political fore (the wheels of this opposition, reporting from 2018 found, had been greased by funding from the Koch Brothers).
It continues Looking at it’s influence on the Tories:
Trotskyists, famously, love doing entryism; that is, joining organisations to steer their politics and direction from within. While it is a stretch to call the RCP as it has existed since the fall of the Soviet Union Trotskyist (even in its earlier years, ‘edge-lord’ would probably have been a more accurate description of their politics), a passion for entryism remains; a passion which has seen the RCP pull off the most impressive feat in its nearly half a century long history. Namely, successfully infiltrating the Conservative Party.
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I present you with this densely knotted web of connections not to suggest some grand conspiracy. I am not claiming that it has been the RCP at the wheel of the Conservative Party all along. I present it rather to indicate that the influence of the RCP has been for some time a feature and not a bug of Conservative politics, very much present in the intellectual and policy creation world of the party. The network this article discusses is small, but in recent years they have been exerting their influence on a small group of people: that is, an unusually cliqueish Downing Street set, with close personal ties to the political media.
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The way in which the RCP network managed to seep into the Conservative intellectual ecosystem in the Cameron years suggests, first, a degree of basic compatibility with Conservative ideas; however, it also suggests a paucity in the Tory party’s homegrown intellectual scene, a lack in its internal milieu that outside groups with the right inclinations could step into. In short, the Conservatives lacked ideas beyond the will to power; the RCP has never lacked for ideas.
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The 2019 Conservative Party platform was one that centred ‘getting Brexit done’. It was economically populist, going big on regional investment and casting off austerity. The success of this electoral strategy saw them take a swathe of historically Labour seats in the midlands and north – the so called ‘Red Wall’. The strategy frontloaded the idea of Brexit as an issue that pitted elites against the people; an argument that gelled very well indeed with the culture war meets reductionist class analysis perspective of the RCP.
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The Conservative Party in 2019 found itself a decade in power but needing to reinvent itself as anti-establishment to win. To suggest that the RCP were the whole reason why the Conservatives ended up looking and acting the way they did in the years after the referendum would be to overstate their influence. This being said, the RCP-ish pose struck so consistently by the Johnson government – seeking to portray those who oppose them, be it the Labour Party or those campaigning for a second referendum, as identitarian, out-of-touch cultural elites – cannot have come about through sheer coincidence, considering just how many RCP associates were in a position to influence, directly or indirectly, the party’s position.
Ah ha:
Spiked’s opposition to environmental activists and to what they viewed as the anti-humanist moral panic over climate change became more pronounced as green issues came increasingly to the political fore (the wheels of this opposition, reporting from 2018 found, had been greased by funding from the Koch Brothers).
That’s sourced to an earlier piece by George Monbiot:
Until now, there has been no evidence that Charles and David Koch have funded organisations based in the UK. But a few weeks ago, a reader pointed me to one line he found in a form submitted to the US government by the Charles Koch Foundation, which showed money transferred to a company that appears to be the US funding arm of a UK organisation. Once I had grasped its significance, I set up a collaboration with the investigative group DeSmog UK. We could scarcely believe what we were seeing.
.The organisation the Charles Koch Foundation has chosen to fund is at first sight astounding: a US organisation established by an obscure UK-based magazine run by former members of a tiny Trotskyite splinter group. Some of its core contributors still describe themselves as Marxists or Bolsheviks. But the harder you look at it, the more sense the Koch donations appear to make. The name of the magazine is Spiked. It emerged from a group with a comical history of left factionalism. In 1974, the International Socialists split after a dispute over arithmetic in Volume 3 of Das Kapital. One of the new factions formed the Revolutionary Communist Group. In 1976 it split again, and one of the splinters formed the Revolutionary Communist Tendency. It was led by a sociologist at the University of Kent called Frank Furedi. In 1981 it changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist party.
In 1988, the party launched a magazine called Living Marxism (later LM). By then, it had abandoned many of its former convictions. Among the few discernible traces of its revolutionary past was an enthusiasm for former communists in the Balkans, such as Slobodan Milošević. In 2000, it closed after losing a libel case: it falsely claimed that ITN had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. But as soon as the magazine folded, a network of new groups, with the same cast of characters – Furedi, Claire Fox, Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill, James Heartfield, Michael Fitzpatrick, James Woudhuysen – sprang up to replace it. Among these organisations were the Institute of Ideas, the Academy of Ideas, the Manifesto Club and a new magazine, Spiked. It had the same editor as LM (Hume) and most of the same contributors.
We found three payments over the past two years from the Charles Koch Foundation. They amount to $170,000 (£130,000), earmarked for “general operating support”. The payments were made to Spiked US Inc. On Spiked’s donations page is a button that says “In the US? Donate here”. It takes you to the PayPal link for “Spiked US, Inc”. Spiked US, in other words, appears to be its US funding arm. Beyond a postal address in Hoboken, New Jersey, it is hard to see what presence Spiked has in the US. It appears to have been established in 2016, the year in which the Koch donations began.
When I asked Spiked what the money was for and whether there had been any other payments, its managing editor, Viv Regan, told me that the Charles Koch Foundation has now given Spiked US Inc a total of $300,000, “to produce public debates in the US about free speech, as part of its charitable activities”.
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Spiked’s writers rage against exposures of dark money. It calls the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, who has won a string of prizes for exposing the opaque spending surrounding the Brexit vote, “the closest thing the mainstream British media has to an out-and-out conspiracy theorist”. It carries numerous articles by people from the obscurely funded Institute of Economic Affairs and from the Cato Institute. Its editor also writes for Reason magazine, owned by the Reason Foundation, which has received $1m from the Charles Koch Foundation over the past two years.
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The Kochs are mentioned in several Spiked articles, but no corresponding interests are declared. An article in 2016, when Spiked US received $170,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation, attacked the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, in which the Koch brothers have a major interest.
Is this the extent of the Koch brothers’ involvement with groups based in the UK? Who knows? I have not yet had a response from the Charles Koch Foundation. But I see these payments as part of a wider pattern of undisclosed funding. Democracy without transparency is not democracy.
