RCP/LM as a “far Right” group

The US Marxist magazine Jacobin posted an interesting, if wordy, article on the “normalization” of anti-Muslim hatred in the UK, which is worth reading in itself as it has some useful insights from a Left viewpoint [1]. Of interest to this blog, though, is that it cites and extensively quotes Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, the RCP/LM’s tabloid website, as representative of a “far right” organisation, and repeatedly outs him as “far right”, with some justification based on his output in Spiked and other Right-wing outlets. Unsurprisingly, Spiked calls Islamophobia a “myth” – unsurprisingly, because the RCP/LM is by nature contrarian, and is particularly contrarily hostile to the UK Left for which Islamophobia is a given [2].

The sect has form in this kind of denial of the bleeding obvious in order to serve its ideological and publicity ends. During the Balkan wars of the early 90s, the sect repeatedly and stridently denied atrocity reports (except when committed against Serbs, natch) despite abundant evidence, and gave print space to atrocity deniers which eventually led to a libel action against LM magazine which brought it down [3]. In Rwanda, the RCP/LM denied that any kind of genocide was taking place. The sect continues to deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. And so on.

Thus, denial of Islamophobia is par for the sect’s course, but the extent to which O’Neill, the RCP/LM’s attack dog, rubbishes it leads the Jacobin article’s authors to describe him as “far right”. For all that the RCP, back in the 80s day, did physically fight nazis in the street, its current incarnation claims that “open racism”, as it fought back in those days, has “vanished”. It not only denies Islamophobia, it denies the existence of racism, or at least as it idiosyncratically defines it [4].

O’Neill himself, and his magazine, have to be judged on its actions and words, and anyone reading Spiked articles can be under no illusion that this is a Right libertarian magazine that often strays into far Right territory. It’s about time that it was called out on this publicly, and not just by an obscure US Marxist magazine. O’Neill is regularly invited on to TV, radio and Press [5] because he gives good contrarian copy and is grand for the wind-up. If he were seen for what he is, the Rottweiler of a far Right organisation, his legitimacy as a pundit would be shot, as would the sect’s.

[1] Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon, “Normalized Hate“, Jacobin magazine, 17/8/17

[2] It’s also a clear and present danger to Moslem communities suffering racist attacks and State oppression, but the RCP/LM only has eyes for the Left and liberals as their Enemy No. 1, their Goldstein.

[3] See a 201o post on this blog.

[4] See O’Neill’s article in The Spectator, 6/8/16, “Britain’s real hate crime scandal“, in which he claims that ‘hate crime’ is a “self-sustaining myth”. The article could as easily have been written by Katie Hopkins.

[5] Including, amazingly, the Big Issue, which regularly publishes polemics by O’Neill, despite – or perhaps because – of its editor, the ex-Trotskyist John Bird, knowing the RCP/LM of old.