A history of the RCP and Spiked

An interesting, thoughtful, and detailed history of the RCP, appears on the New Historical Express blog (née Hatful of History), written by a history lecturer, Dr Evan Smith, at Flinders University in South Australia, which perhaps gives him sufficient distance from the UK to examine the RCP quite coolly without any UK Left baggage. It’s well worth a read and has some interesting tidbits and quotes from RCP personnel. One to bookmark for reference.

Anti-statism and the trajectory from the Revolutionary Communist Party to Spiked. Evan Smith, Feb 5 2022.

The RCP gets into law

Spiked, the cult formerly known as the RCP, has mounted a takeover of the Radio 4 midday clickbait programme “Antisocial“, which ‘discusses’ currently ‘trending’ hot-button issues with two guests from opposing viewpoints. No big deal – it’s a daytime show probably only listened to by students and the unemployed, and has the political heft of Teletubbies, so unlikely to affect mainstream politics and culture. However, on today’s show about “lefty lawyers”, there was an avowedly Spiked-employed writer, Luke Gittos, who is apparently part of the Freedom Law Clinic, a new law school offering courses for sale for aspiring young people to get on the ladder to being briefs.

The title of this school sounds very RCP, and Gittos pushed its work bigtime. Its website is less than inspiring, and is clearly a ‘work in progress’ with the About section containing only filler text rather, than, say the names of people behind the project and its history and purposes. The Contact section only has a basic email form, without any phone numbers or social media handles, which you’d expect from a site trying to recruit paying punters.

Is the FLC a RCP front and money-making project? The courses on offer aren’t cheap, coming in at £1495 for “non-law graduates” for a 30-day course (eg this “fast-track” course), but the sorts of punters it would attract would fit into the RCP’s young, middle-class and suited demographic, such as yer man Gittos, and the cult is always in need of fresh young recruits.

Luke Gittos

Gittos’ Twitter/X account reeks of right-wing culture war mixed with libertarianism, following the RCP line in general. His tweets on the Gaza war follow the Spiked line and indeed he retweets Spiked editorials on it. In a recent post he repeats the Spiked doublethink of being in favour of “allowing” marches for peace in Gaza and also writing that cops should have cracked down on them instead of the EDL nazis who rioted:

This is two tier policing. Low numbers of ‘football lads’ heavily policed, kettled and arrested on mass while antisemites are left alone, allowed to say their stuff and only chased down via twitter after the fact.

Luke Gittos, tweeted 12/11/23

Which is sad, as one of the few good points in the RCP’s history was its direct anti-fascism.

If Gittos is a practicing criminal lawyer, as he claims, he can’t be getting much law work done with his prolific writing for Spiked, much of which is vehemently anti-lawyer and anti-courts, such as railing against “activist lawyers” and “human-rights lawyers” colluding with “people-smugglers”. He appears on the broadcast media frequently pushing the Spiked line, so the impression we get is of another RCP media wonk. One to keep an eye on.

PS

In his personal intro to the Antisocial programme, Gittos said “Spiked is a magazine of the Left”, which caused merriment and coffee-spluttering at RCP Watch Towers. To claim the RCP as “Left” is at best chutzpah, at worst outright and egregious lying.

Frankie goes to Brussels

A loyal reader points us to an intriguing snippet, which appeared in Private Eye recently. The reader writes:

“An arm of the pro Viktor Orban thinktank, ‘Mathias Corvinius Collegium’ has been set up in Brussels. According to Private Eye the director is none other than the ‘Lenin de nos jours‘, Frank Furedi.”

PE no 1589, 6-19 Jan 2023, page 15

There’s further information on the MCC Brussels website at https://brussels.mcc.hu/person/professor-frank-furedi with a hagiographic bio of Uncle Frank and an unflattering photo[1].

Uncle Frank cheerleading for the Right isn’t news – he’ll do anything for money – but Viktor Orbán is pretty much beyond the pale even for the European Right, and is not a natural bedfellow, as an authoritarian champion of “illiberal democracy”, of a supposedly “libertarian” movement like the RCP/LM, which (to its credit) still maintains a steadfast support for free movement across borders. Still, his cult has moved a long way Right in the last decade, following currently fashionable trends, and as importantly the money. Orbán is very much the leader of the Right in Europe [2] and it looks like Uncle Frank is keen to ride on his coattails, plus Hungary gets billions of euros a year from the EU so Frankie will be eager to get his hands on some of that largesse.

It won’t hurt that Furedi is Hungarian by birth [3], though left the country, aged 9, in 1956 after the failed uprising, and has lived abroad since.

Our reader also adds:

“Looking at the ‘Our Team‘ section [of the MCC site] one finds that the Head of Policy is one Jacob Reynolds who is also Partnerships Manager at Duchess (or whatever she is) Fox’s Academy of Ideas.”

To which we add that Bill Durodié, a ‘visiting professor’, has been associated with the RCP/LM for some 30 years as their ‘consultant’ on all things GM and plastic.

References

[1] He looks seriously wasted and wizened in the photo (compare to his youthful features on Wikipedia), and is clearly ill. We wonder if his acolytes and protegées, such as O’Neill and Fox, are manoeuvering for the cult leadership. James Heartfield might also be in the runners, though he seems to prefer his position as consigliere to the Dear Leader, out of the limelight.

[2] Curiously, Orbán was a big cheese in the Fidesz party after the Soviet Union collapsed, and a fervently pro-Western liberal. His rapid turn to the Right and adoption of ‘culture wars’ looks to be pretty opportunistic. Have a listen to the Hardtalk interview of an ex-colleague of his, now opposition activist, Zsuzsanna Szelényi, on the BBC World Service on 6/2/23, which is very enlightening.

[3]. Wikipedia bio of Furedi (accessed 6/2/23)

The RCP brings down the PM?

In today’s news it’s announced that the RCP’s agent in 10 Downing Street, Munira Murza, has quit, the media describing this is a major blow to the Prime Minister seeing as she’d worked with Boris Johnson (aka Bozo) for donkey’s years. Ostensibly she’s quit in a dudgeon of high-mindedness over Bozo’s slur against the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, but this just isn’t credible to RCP Watch or, indeed, to anyone familiar with the RCP and its ‘robust’ methods. Imagine if, say, an aide to Starmer had packed it in for similar reasons, you can just imagine the RCP rottweiler Brendan O’Neill mocking them for being a ‘snowflake’.

It seems pretty likely that Mirza knows a sinking ship when she’s on one, and has decided to jump before the waters reach the gunwales, and to put the boot into Bozo as she leaps for safety. There’s little point in remaining an aide to a clearly lame duck PM, and plenty point in positioning yourself, and by association your sect, as a must-have adviser for the next PM. That Mirza’s public quitting will likely bring down the Bozo regime is a real feather in the cap for the RCP and shows how close to the levers of power it’s reached. Uncle Frank will be quietly proud.

Boris Johnson’s policy chief Munira Mirza resigns over PM’s Savile remarks. BBC News, 3/2/22

Why Boris Johnson’s Tories fell for a tiny sect of libertarian provocateurs. Andy Beckett, the Guardian, 1/8/20

The RCP writes the Tory manifesto. This blog passim, 1/11/19, outlining Mirza’s history and positions, particularly over racism (spoiler: it no longer exists).

From climate change denial to ‘inactivism’

Spiked got a dishonourable mention in a ‘long read’ [1] in the Guardian a few days ago, describing how climate change denial is morphing into “inactivism”. With the evidence overwhelmingly supporting the hypothesis that climate change is real and human-made, those who outright deny its existence have become akin to Flat Earthers. That’s particularly the case for major fossil fuel corporations, and their front organisations (step forward Spiked, funded by Koch Industries [2]), who cannot deny climate change without serious damage to their ‘corporate credibility’ (trans: they’ll look very silly). The trend now, according to the Long Read, is for denialism to be succeeded by “inactivism”:

an epic struggle to convince you not so much to doubt the reality of climate crisis, but rather to dampen your enthusiasm for any attempts at dealing with it.

Michael Mann, cited in the long read, The Guardian, 11/11/21

Characteristic of inactivism is not just an encouraged apathy towards climate change, a sort of ‘WTF, what can you do?’ attitude, but a witch hunt against “Green elites” engaged in “misanthropy” [3], aggressively expressed by Spiked’s rottweiler, the far Right wannabe cult leader Brendan O’Neill, in typically purple prose

The hostility to fossil fuels seems increasingly to be driven by misanthropy rather than reason; by an elitist feeling of revulsion for the gains of modernity rather than by a rational assessment of the undoubted problems humankind still faces.

Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Online, 12/11/21

This is now the party line of the cult. No longer outright denial of climate change (though plenty of scepticism on Spiked and other fronts [4], including the Climate Resistance blog run by the pugilistic Ben Pile), but rather a hostility to ‘net zero’ and any measures to cut CO₂ emissions.

References

1. “Meet the inactivists“, The Guardian,
2. Koch Industries has funded Spiked, at the last count, to the tune of £300k (see this blog passim). Koch Industries is notorious as the arch corporate climate change denier which has funded scores of denialist bodies – see this Greenpeace article, another by the Campaign against Climate Change, and this NY Times opinion piece on the history of the Koch empire. See also the DeSmog page on Spiked and Koch Industries.
3. “Keep burning those fossil fuels“, Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Online, 12/11/21
4. Tellingly, the RCP/LM front organisation Sense About Science, is silent on anything to do with climate. Seriously. A search for ‘climate’ on its website brings up nothing, despite COP having been in the news for months.

Matthew Goodwin

Twitter has been afire with condemnation from liberals and anti-fascists for Prof Matthew Goodwin, senior academic at the University of Kent, for his declaration to a parliament select committee that he’d invite fascists to speak at the institution (see video on Twitter) as a believer in ‘free speech’. This robust libertarian position made RCP Watch’s antennae twitch, as did his host institution where Uncle Frank Furedi is long established, and it didn’t take much digging to find that he writes for Spiked, and has appeared at Battle of Ideas events organised by the Institute of Ideas (prop: Claire Fox). He follows, maybe even helps to write, the party line on racism, which is that structural and institutional racism doesn’t exist, and interpersonal racism isn’t a patch on the that of the 70s and 80s, back when the RCP were fighting nazis on the streets. Racism ain’t what it used to be, according to the RCP, a position now carried into Downing Street by Uncle Frank’s highest-placed protegée, Munira Mirza (see this blog passim).

Goodwin is telegenic, provocative, self-promoting, and not lacking in self-belief, so it’s likely that Uncle Frank cast his beady eyes on him when he arrived in 2015 at the University of Kent (at Canterbury, as was), and he’s clearly, as with other Kent academics, fallen under Furedi’s baleful spell. He know his stuff on the far Right, for sure, not least through his association with the pro-Brexit Legatum Institute, and being mates with barking Right Tories, in particular James Delingpole and the eugenicist Toby Young.

He has an impressive publication record, but clearly he writes from a Right perspective, trying to diminish and define away racism, and to “normalise and detoxify the new right“.

References

Wikipedia: Matthew Goodwin

Matthew Goodwin home page

University of Kent page on Goodwin

The Problem with Matthew Goodwin. A detailed critical article on the blog ‘Guy Debord’s Cat‘.

Questions raised about the Battle of Ideas. An ‘event report’ on the 2018 Battle of Ideas event, on the popular blog Bella Caledonia, at which Goodwin appeared.

I’m not racist, but.. Daniel Trilling. Critical review of “National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy”, by Goodwin and Roger Eatwell.  

Going native: Populist academics normalise the anti-immigrant right. Martin Shaw. Critical review of the Goodwin & Eatwell book.

Andrew Doyle

The Spiked writer, and comedian, Andrew Doyle, is riding high. He was the RCP/LM’s representative on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze in recent years, taking over from the now-ennobled Clare Fox who’s busy raising cash for cult coffers in the House of Lords these days, and put in doughty robust performances following faithfully the RCP/LM party line. He’s the writer behind the sweary cult comic character Jonathan Pie, as mentioned on this blog 3 years ago. Now he’s turned up as a presenter on GB News, the new right-wing TV channel run by Andrew “Brillo Pad” Neil, ex-editor of The Scotsman and then of The Spectator. Characterised as Fox News for the UK, GB News is an obvious channel for the RCP/LM to get its claws into, being pro-Brexit, anti-‘woke’, anti-Left, and funded by serious US and UAE corporate money. Expect to see more RCP/LM figures gravitating to GB News in the near future, and to see Doyle on mainstream media more often. It’ll be a good little earner for the cult, which is always on the lookout for new ‘revenue streams’.

PS: Andrew Doyle appeared as guest comic on Radio 4’s The Now Show (21/4/23), in its flagship Friday evening comedy slot, a plum posting for any comedian. The RCP/LM isn’t known for its laughs, and Doyle showed this with his laboured, obvious and unfunny ‘satire’. He managed to get some identity politics in, proclaiming he’s gay, which can’t have gone down well with the cult given its ferocious antipathy to any form of identity politics. What next for the News Quiz, we wonder? Frank ‘Laugh a minute’ Furedi as guest comic, or maybe Brendan ‘Rotweiler’ O’Neill?

PPS: Doyle got on to Radio 4’s The News Quiz (12/5/23), also in the Friday evening comedy slot. Again he was unfunny, and got into a long pro-Brexit and anti-Left rant, the didacticism of which would have gained the approval of his comrades.

References

The unsurprising reason Jonathan Pie rants sound straight out of Spiked. 6/2/18. The anarchist website libcom.org exposes Doyle as the voice behind the ‘outrageous’ sweary comedy character Jonathan Pie, and Spiked as Doyle’s direction. “Publications like Spiked, and sockpuppet comedy aliases like Jonathan Pie, provide left-liberal cover for far-right nationalists” – ooch! A pithy description of the ‘appeal’ and ‘mission’ of the cult.

Jonathan Pie. RCP/LM Watch, 8/5/18.

Andrew Doyle biography on his own website.

Lady Claire Fox

With the accession of Munira Mirza (see this blog passim) to the head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, the media has finally woken up to the RCP/LM/Spiked organisation, and many articles and opinion pieces have been written about herself, very few showing any understanding of the modus operandi of the LM Network. A recent article in the Guardian [1] showed some understanding of the cult, and how it has successfully worked its way into the media and thence into the heart of government. Better late than never, perhaps, for all that the Cassandra voices of this and other blogs, and of journalists like Nick Cohen and George Monbiot, have warned against the rise of Uncle Frank Furedi’s sect for many years.

What amused RCP Watch about the Guardian article was the reference to Claire “Rotweiler” Fox being proposed for the House of Lords:

“On Friday [31/7/20] another RCP veteran, Claire Fox, was nominated for a peerage by the government.”

This was well worth a chuckle for its sheer chutzpah. There have been many comments on antisocial media about how she could square her long-time opposition to the Lords with being made a Lady, but nearly all have been by posters who simply do not understand the nature of Leninist sects. The RCP/LM/Spiked, like all Trot sects, only cares about the Party’s survival and growth. The Party, and its Dear Leader, is always supreme and overrides any personal scruples. Personal morality is never important, and is usually seen as a petit-bourgeois affectation, a distracting luxury for liberals, not suitable for serious vanguardists. Fox is 30-year inner cadre going back to the RCP’s founding, and a loyal Leninist, and will do and say whatever serves the Party.  Her peerage money will also boost Party coffers, together with the tithe (5% of gross, back in RCP days) on her Brexit MEP income.

Mirza herself was the subject of a mostly uncritical BBC Radio 4 programme [2] which didn’t add a lot to what we cognoscenti of the sect know, but it did wheel on Uncle Frank who spoke with glowing pride of his protegée, leaving RCP Watch in little doubt that he still controls Mirza. It’s worth a listen at just 15 minutes.

1. Why Johnson’s party has fallen for a tiny sect of provocateurs. Andy Beckett, The Guardian, 1/8/20.

2. Profile, Munira Mirza. BBC Radio 4, broadcast 28/6/20.

 

DeSmog on Spiked

The impressively diligent and comprehensive Green investigative journalism site DeSmog [1] has just published a primer and reference to Spiked which is worth bookmarking:

https://www.desmog.co.uk/spiked

It has a high signal/noise ratio, and is packed full of references and resources on the history and practice of Spiked, going back to the RCP years, with the emphasis on the sect’s virulent anti-environmentalism and its ‘scepticism’ over climate change. Many of the resources are new to RCP Watch, despite our stalking of the sect for many years.

Much more detail on the RCP/LM, and its close links with far Right and corporate anti-environmentalist organisations such as the infamous Institute for Economic Affairs and the Koch organisation, has been reported in this blog passim [2].

References

1. “DeSmog UK aims to investigate and analyse the undue influence of climate science denial and the fossil fuel industry on UK energy and climate policy.” ‘About us‘ on the DeSmog site.

2. “Revealed: US Oil Billionaire Charles Koch Funds UK Anti-Environment Spiked Network“. DeSmog, 7/12/18

 

 

Ella Whelan on the Moral Maze

For those eager listeners of BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze, who’ve been pining for the RCP/LM line on hot button topics with Claire Fox having apparently quit the programme, we present the new RCP panel member: Ella Whelan, writer at Spiked Online and, apparently, its assistant editor with Brendan O’Neill (aka Tommy Robinson for the middle classes). She obviously has the brief of (anti-) feminism correspondent, going by the voluminous list of articles written by her for Spiked. She’s on the Moral Maze tonight, on the subject of the morality of genetics, and was on the previous show.

There’s clearly a place saved at the MM panel for a RCP/LM staffer. Previously, her mucker Andrew Doyle, ‘comedian’ and creator of the libertarian alter ego Jonathan Pie (see this blog passim), occupied the seat for a number of shows. As we’ve written before, anyone in the broadcast media world knows the RCP/LM of old, and knows who its rent-a-gobs are as they guarantee good, contrarian copy, so it’s beyond credibility that the MM producers and its lugubrious presenter, Michael Buerk, don’t know that they’re putting sect members on air. Which is fair enough, maybe, but after the recent revelations of the sect being funded by the insanely rich Koch Bros (now just Bro, as one recently croaked) there’s a moral duty (sic) on the Beeb to announce the affiliations of RCP panellists, and occasionally witnesses, when they introduce them.