In 1981, they were building the foundations of a free speech fundamentalist position, declaring that, "Whether or not they are justified as measures aimed against fascists,
all state restrictions of the freedom of speech, assembly and press are ultimately directed against the working class." Quite early on, you can see the seeds of a contempt for anti-fascism that found Spiked making common cause with the far right in recent years. In 1984, they described fascist Patrick Harrington as "‘a soft target for the liberal left casting around for an issue on which to prove its anti-racist credentials’ and instead ‘[a]nti-racist student should have been campaigning against state attacks on overseas students’." The said the no Platform strategy was "an impulsive outburst of liberal moralism which seeks to sweep away distasteful views, rather than confront them politically", and dismissed fascists as "idiots...with virtually no influence."
And the fifth feature? Leather jackets and hair gel. As John Sullivan
put it in
As Soon As This Pub Closes, his classic late 1980s tour through left sectariana:
"The answer is style. The group is part of the harder aggressive, post-punk move away from peace and love, and the average RCPer looks very different from the grotty SWPers. They have been described as ‘the SWP with hair gel’, and many a parent, pleased at the improvement in their child’s appearance, have welcomed the move from one to another. Alas! The mind remains just as untidy."
I first encountered the RCP at the end of the 1980s, when they were a colourful presence in the student movement and, clipboards in hand, selling their magazine around Covent Garden, on a prime pitch now occupied by the
Big Issue. The RCP were then known for the graphic pzazz of their magazine
Living Marxism, by the uber-trendy hairstyles of the cadre, and by their ultra-contrarian political positions. Among the latter: AIDS is a state conspiracy to regulate the sexuality of the working class, a position I took particular offence at, while people were dying of the disease. By this time, the ultra-leftist positions of the early 1980s seemed to be morphing into provocation for its own sake. In 1996, the logic of this turn (they called it the "turn to the suburbs") was pursued with the RCP formally closed as a party (though continuing as a tightly knit and highly disciplined network) and
Living Marxism rebranded as LM, with Fox as co-publisher.
Genocide denial and libel
The hardcore "anti-imperialism" of their early days and the anti-liberal contrarianism that they had turned to in the 1990s came together in
the publication that should have ended the LM network. George Monbiot
tells the story:
In 1997, LM published an article claiming that the broadcasting company ITN had fabricated its dramatic discovery in 1992 of prisoners held by the Bosnian Serbs. “The picture that fooled the world” argued that ITN’s footage, in which emaciated Bosnian Muslim men clung to barbed wire, showed not a detention centre, as ITN maintained, but a safe haven for refugees. The Bosnian Serb soldiers at the camp were not detaining the Muslims but defending them...
[LM] recruited the fearless investigative journalist Thomas Deichmann to tell the real story behind the Bosnian enclosures. Only it wasn’t quite like that. Deichmann was an engineer by training, not a journalist. His writing was largely confined to an obscure German magazine called Novo, which he used repeatedly to defend the Bosnian Serb leadership against charges of murder, torture, rape and ethnic cleansing. He presented himself as a witness for the defence at the trial of the Serbian war criminal Dusko Tadic.
One of the journalists who broke the story of Trnopolje, the Serbian camp, was Ed Vulliamy, who was with the ITN team. ITN sued LM for libel, and won. Several celebrities, including Toby Young (who has kept up his association with them ever since), celebrated LM as the plucky free speech underdogs resisting the mainstream establishment. Vulliamy puts
the more accurate view:
"free speech" has nothing to do with what is going on. Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.
It is one of the grim ironies of the RCP's slow march through the institutions that now Claire Fox is a Brexit Party MEP she has been
appointed to the EU Delegation to the EU-Serbia Stabilisation and Association Parliamentary Committee.
Fox has frequently tweeted about her rejection of mainstream and accepted climate science, calling the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “advocacy research” and says treating the body as “high priests of The Science and final word on climate” would be a “betrayal of scientific inquiry.” Fox has also tweeted supportively of hereditary peer Matt Ridley’s climate science denial and recommended people look to the discredited arguments of economist Bjorn Lomborg. In a debate with environmental journalist George Monbiot, reported by the climate science denial blogger Ben Pile, she was asked whether she wanted people to be “free to pollute,” answering: “I want freedom.”
Perhaps the apex of LM's corporate work is their funding by the US right-wing libertarian billionaires Koch Brothers, as revealed by a
DeSmog/Guardian investigation, which found that Spiked has received $300,000 from the Koch’s over the past three years, including $150,000 in 2016 — the year of Donald Trump’s US presidential election victory and the UK’s Brexit referendum.
The road to Downing Street runs through City Hall
 |
| Boris Johnson and advisers in 2008 - Munira Mirza, Sir Simon Milton, Kit Malthouse, Richard Barnes and Ian Clement. Evening Standard |
Alongside their work for the corporate sector, the RCP slowly went about building up relationships with the Conservative Party. The thinktank
Policy Exchange appears to be the nexus between the ex-RCP and the Tories. Policy Exchange was set up in 2002 by Michael Gove and others, and played a major part in pulling the Tory party out of its post-Thatcher slow death. As Wikipedia puts it, it “describes itself as seeking localist, volunteer and free market solutions to public policy problem” and thus contributed to the shift in Conservative thinking towards the Big Society big idea, and the whole re-branding under Cameron of the Tories as “progressive” party.
As I
wrote in 2010, the Cameron project (like the New Labour project) was politically incoherent, combining elements of messy-haired libertarianism that felt appealing in the 2000s after years of hectoring, nanny-ish Blair and Brown with the harder communitarianism of Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, the vaguely liberal platitudes of Philip Blonde’s red Toryism, and the steely neoconservatism of Douglas Murray’s Centre for Social Cohesion. It is, arguably, this incoherence that made Cameroonian Conservativism an appealing project: there was something for everyone.
The libertarian edge was represented by
Boris Johnson, journalist and TV personality turned Mayor of London in 2008. Johnson has
surrounded himself with bright young and youngish things from Policy Exchange. During his mayoral electoral campaign, Boris was aided by Dan Ritterband, former director of Policy Exchange. On election, the mayor appointed
Nick Boles, the founder of Policy Exchange, as Chief of Staff. Boles was, the
Observer reported, "asked to help the new mayor find the right staff’. Among the subsequent appointments were
Anthony Browne as Policy Director and
Munira Mirza as his cultural adviser. Mirza, a long term critic of both multiculturalism and of state support for the arts, was able to give Boris arguments for making reactionary decisions while giving apparently progressive justifications.
By late 2010, I wrote that the RCP had probably been more influential than any other bit of the British far left in the last decade. They gave a
veneer of intellectual respectability to denialism about climate change, have acted as PR agents for the
agribusiness, airline and pharmaceutical industries,
aided and abetted AIDS denialism and its enormous death toll in Africa,
given succour to Serb nationalism at its most aggressive, helped
Boris Johnson capture London, provided
ideological cover for cuts in the funding for arts,
reduced the number of
decent free festivals in the parks of London, and, arguably, were the
architects of David Cameron's election victory.
Mirza drew closer to the Conservative Party in this period. She married
Dougie Smith, Cameron speechwriter and co-ordinator of Tory thinktank
Conservatives for Change (Cchange), on whose board sat Nick Boles, along with politicians such as Francis Maude and Theresa May - as well as once
running Fever Parties, a London-based organisation that apparently hosted "five-star" orgies for swingers. (Cchange was
originally closely linked to
Policy Exchange, originally called Xchange, and their
personnel overlaps.) Johnson promoted Mirza from advisor to
deputy mayor. By 2018, the New Statesman's Stephen Bush was
tipping her as a possible Tory mayoral candidate.
Going full Brexit: from Red Front to red-brown front
Boris Johnson's mayoral win in 2008 was a dress rehearsal for the Cameron parliamentary win in 2010 and key to its splintering of the New Labour electoral coalition by presenting a "progressive" Toryism. But Cameron's premiership also contained the seeds of its own destruction as its shifted the Overton window rightwards in the age of austerity, emboldening the party's europhobic hard right and Farage's national populist movement beyond the party. As Boris r
epositioned himself as the hero of this reactionary wing during the Leave campaign in 2016 (exposing how superficial his progressive sheen had been in his City Hall years), so too would the RCP network keep moving to the right, as well as giving pseudo-intellectual and even left-sounding cover to
Britain's most right-wing political forces.
Drawing on its anti-anti-fascist tradition, Spiked portrayed racists like Stephen Yaxley-Smith (aka "Tommy Robinson") and the EDL, and later
Steve Bannon and
Katie Hopkins, as salt of the earth contrarians maligned by elitist liberals out of conformity and class prejudice. Furedi
backed Orbán's increasingly authoritarian government in Hungary, speaking alongside Breitbart's alt-lite provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos at a 2018
conference hosted by Orbán. From 2016, the arguments developed in these polemics were turned against Remainers.
One LM initiative in the post-Referendum period was "The Full Brexit", an avowedly left-wing pressure group launched in the summer of 2018 to reframe the Brexit narrative as one about "democracy" rather than just bashing immigrants. Alongside a smattering of Blue Labour social conservatives and Lexit Marxists, a good half of its 20 founding signatories are RCP network members. Academic
Chris Bickerton has been a Spiked contributor
since 2005, when he was a PhD student at St John’s College, Oxford.
Philip Cunliffe, Furedi’s colleague at the University of Kent, is another long term Spiked activist.
Pauline Hadaway, another academic, is a veteran of the Living Marxism days.
James Heartfield was a paid RCP organiser.
Lee Jones seems to have been recruited at Oxford around the same time as Bickerton.
Tara McCormack is an RCP veteran, as is
Suke Wolton.
Bruno Waterfield write for Living Marxism. Other signatories aren't part of the network but have been promoted by Spiked:
Paul Embery and
Thomas Fazi for example (Fazi is also
connected to the 5 Star Movement and
recently retweeted an antisemitic tweet from someone with "Nazbol" in his user name). Many are also involved in
Briefings for Brexit, which has several RCP veterans on its advisory committee, and some are involved with
Civitas. This is a peculiar form of left-right crossover politics.
The RCP then played a key role in the creation of the Brexit Party, again providing "left" cover for a deeply right-wing project. Otto English in Byline Times
documents how, in February 2019, a film-maker, Kevin Laitak, a disciple of Furedi, began turning up at local
Leavers of Britain groups, telling campaigners that he was making a
short film about rank-and-file Brexiters. He then recruited activists who might consider standing for the new BXP, who were then called by a woman called Lesley Katon. Katon told would-be recruits that she was
the co-founder of a group called
‘Invoke Democracy Now’, whose activists, English notes, included
Claire Fox, as well as
Luke Gittos, the legal editor of
Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, its editor,
Living Marxism alumni
Tessa Mayes and Munira Mirza, and Mick Hume, former editor of
Living Marxism (for more on Invoke Democracy Now, see
Colin Lawson). Katon herself has several LM connections, and among the candidates emerging from this process were In addition to her client Claire Fox; Katon’s colleague
David Bull who spoke at a
Spiked event in 2003;
James Heartfield, a long-time RCP cadre;
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, a former RCP activist and Spiked contributor; and in Scotland long time Spiked writer
Stuart Waiton. Of these, only Fox was placed high up enough a regional list to get sent to Brussels.
Otto English
notes that the RCP's
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert and
John Heartfield, were in the cavalcade of hopeful Brexit Party candidates paraded by Nigel Farage earlier this month as he launched his bid for the next General Election.
