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.