RCP/LM at Oxford University

It’s interesting that the comment from "RCP Watch Watch", to the first post on this blog, was posted from a machine at Oxford University. The uni is these days quite a hotbed of RCP/LM activity, following the conversion of Politics academic James Panton to the cause. Panton is the eminence grise behind Pro-Test, a pro-vivisection group that got massive publicity in 2008 for publicly resisting animal rights activists who were targetting Oxford University. He’s since popped up at quite a few speaking venues around the country with RCP/LM members, including the Dear Leader himself,, as a simple web search shows.

An upcoming young recruit at Oxford is Lee Jones, a young academic in the same department as Panton, and author of a piece entitled "Slam-Dunk the Funk – Defending Progress in the Age of Environmentalism" on the Institute of Ideas site which ticks all the right boxes. He gets especial brownie points for mentioning "the decisive defeat of the organised working class in the 1980s" in the first sentence, which is the very basis of Uncle Frank Furedi’s project. A search for Lee Jones on the Institute of Ideas website shows that he’s been a starring speaker in quite a few RCP/LM events, and he’s written quite a few articles on the Battle of Ideas 2009, Culture Wars and Spiked sites – on "therapy culture", "eco-colonisation", and "growth" – which are right down the party line, so much so that they’re a reference for RCP/LM watchers. He’s certainly a future prospect for the organisation and a name to look out for, and intellectual and hard-working enough to make Uncle Frank’s inner circle in a few years if he plays his cards right.