Spiked Watch

Monitoring the LM Network through its mouthpieces and 'think tanks'.

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We need to rethink our approach to resisting Donald Trump’s ideas

The US president has proven himself a narcissistic liar with no impulse control – it is time to get serious about how we combat him

“If you don’t know what Spiked is and you read that it is a website written by libertarians who came out of Living Marxism and the Revolutionary Communist party, you might think it sounds leftwing. You would be wrong. They now operate as handmaidens of the alt-right. Don’t give them the time of day.“

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Free Speech Rankings: misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential

The evidence used to compile Spiked Online’s Free Speech Rankings is not to be trusted, says Carl Thompson

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Living Marxism issue 97

Here’s an archived version of the article that got Living Marxism (@spikedonline’s predecessor), closed. Suitably, from a website dedicated to “defending” Slobodan Milosevic. 

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John Simpson: I was on wrong side in Bosnia death camps libel trial

BBC veteran apologises for backing magazine that claimed exposé of Serb-run camps was false

More on Living Marxism and their death by libel. 

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What does @SpikedOnline really want?

Many times we get asked "what do the LM cult want?" It's something we've been asking ourselves since we bumped into them at uni in the 80s, when this bizarre sect of professional contrarians went by the name of the Revolutionary Communist Party (also known as the Revolutionary Cocktail Party, by the way, due to their dubious credentials as revolutionary communists). 

The truth is that what they want is hard to say. Particularly if we consider their rather strange trajectory. At times –as during the RCP days– they have passed quite successfully as part of the left. In recent times they have aligned with the libertarian right, although some still wrongly or intentionally pigeonhole them as part of the left. Where they always a rightwing operation? Did they change? 

Even when they claimed to be part of the left, their tactics involved alienating mostly those of the left, for what they saw as being too little leftists, perhaps too reformist, delaying the revolution, a position that might sound like revolutionary defeatism. But few times have they shown the same zeal with the right, and this is very suspicious.* 

They took a number of controversial positions with this purpose. The most controversial being –obviously– being apologists for Serb war crimes, something that ultimately signalled the end of their magazine, then called Living Marxism. 

Since dropping the pretence of being marxists (when their main operation went from being called Living Marxism to Spiked!) they are becoming more and more openly right wing, as Furedi cozying with the Hungarian far right indicates. Or with their recent attempts to bring Milo at a school in Kent, to then try to set up an “unsafe space” there, a place where as we have discussed have a lot of influence.

But more than wondering what they really want what we have to stop to consider is what they are doing and what effect does this have?

What they are doing is occupying more and more positions of influence, particularly in education, environment, local policy etc, from where to push their ideas and benefit economically as “punters”, dragged by producers in need of hot takes and controversial positions. This allows them not only to push their agenda, but also to work as an effective deceptive PR operation. Here’s a good list of the fronts from where they work. And there is more here. Outrage makes them money. And they are very good at this, even if they always mobilise the same predictable sophistry. At the moment they are milking the outrage and lobbying machine and they are doing it very well. And very likely you are unconsciously contributing to this, by disseminating their views – it doesn’t matter if you disagree with them.

We have stopped engaging them on Twitter for two reasons. Firstly, for the obvious one that we are now blocked by @Spikedonline and @Furedibyte – the irony, when people pushing debate as the answer to all ills don't let you debate. But mainly, because even opposing their ideas in the open helps them, as we suggest above and discuss here. You should consider engaging them in a similar way. 

They aren't up for a debate online, as they aren't in their sham debates at the Institute of Ideas, where most panels are cluttered of their people, plus a token "disagreer". 

If you attend more than one of their debates you will see how it's all playacting, they pretend they don't know one another, have friends in the audience asking the right questions. This article is very good in capturing this aspect of their operation. 

So, stop engaging them on Twitter. Stop disseminating their deceptive PR that passes as edgy opinion. Deny them a platform. Expose them instead as the shady collection of fronts they are, as a cult that for radical defenders of free speech changes ideology in tandem, from revolutionary communist to libertarianism, from open borders to writing “progressive” articles against immigration, when it suits their brexiteering. Understand and publicly expose their trajectory, and the way they have set up so many fronts, that –whilst claiming to be non-partisan operations or think tanks– are actually mouthpieces set up to expand their sphere of influence. 

For whatever it is they want to do. 

*An anecdotal aside here: one of us was once in the 80s in a RCP conference where Frank Furedi –at that time known as Comrade Frank Richards– spoke inciting the attendees to always take a contrarian position when arguing with fellow leftists. The idea, it seems was to awaken comrades through disagreement, some 101 form of dialectics, it could be argued. It was all about taking a position from where to disagree. This was highlighted very clearly, and will be familiar to anyone who ever read more than two of their articles, either in Living Marxism or on Spiked. A member of the audience then proceeded to ask a question to Furedi: “Why aren’t you out there disagreeing with nazis, then?” We are still waiting for the answer. The only reply was the boos from his brainwashed supporters. As you can see, very little has changed.

And finally, a very interesting take from the inside here. 

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Poison in the well of history

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

Toby Young (@toadmeister) and his Spiked Online/RCP associations

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The Orbán government’s international conference on the future of Europe, with Milo Yiannopoulos

Yesterday the Hungarian media got wind of an international conference on The Future of Europe, to be held between January 23 and 25, 2018 in Budapest’s Castle Garden Bazaar. The conference is…

Jus a conference organised by the Orbán government, with Milo as keynote and Frank Furedi (@furedibyte) as speaker. 

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A 1998 pamphlet, originally published by Nottingham Anarchist News, written by a female ex-Revolutionary Communist Party (UK) member. The RCP went on to be called Living Marxism, now connected to the Institute of Ideas and Spiked Online.

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Left and libertarian right cohabit in the weird world of the genocide belittlers | George Monbiot

George Monbiot: Yes, atrocities by the US get little media attention. But that's no excuse for this revisionism towards Srebrenica and Rwanda

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Libertarian Humanism or Critical Utopianism? The Demise of the Revolutionary Communist Party

Dave Walker, New Interventions, Vol.8 No.3, 1998

WELL, it’s now official. The Revolutionary Communist Party is no more. According to the editorial in the March 1998 issue of LM (née Living Marxism), the RCP has been wound up. The reason is simple. What Marx wrote ‘is in many ways less pertinent now than at any time in the past century and a half’. Marxism is all about revolution, ‘and of what relevance is that’, we are asked, when ‘the working-class movement has been consigned to the heritage museums and the only people likely to be storming palaces are tour parties of sad little pilgrims worshipping the ground that Princess Diana walked on’.

We had been warned. Towards the end of last year, Channel Four outraged the fragile sensitivities of the Green movement with its series Against Nature, three programmes which challenged many of the fundamental tenets of Greenery, such as population growth, industrialisation, global warming and animal experimentation. Green spokesman George Monbiot went ballistic, accusing the series of being a conspiracy organised by the RCP because it featured Frank Füredi, the party’s founder and chief theoretician (Guardian, 18 December 1997). Things became interesting with Füredi’s reply in the next day’s issue. He carefully steered around his long-running central involvement with the RCP, saying that he had not been interested in party politics for the last seven years, that his last four books couldn’t be considered as Marxist, and that he considered himself a ‘libertarian humanist’. The day after that, the paper reported Martin Durkin, the Against Nature producer, saying that the RCP had been dissolved a year previously. Not known as an RCP member or supporter, it’s not clear how he was privy to such information.

Another pointer was when ITN, in its libel case against LM over what the journal considered was misleading reportage on the war in former Yugoslavia, charged it with having the ‘improper motive’ of ‘fuelling its campaign of pro-Serbian propaganda ... thereby hoping to further the cause of revolutionary communism and/or Marxist ideology’. This, said LM’s Helen Searls in the November 1997 issue, was a ‘caricature’ of the magazine’s politics, and it was not clear what annoyed her the more: that ITN was misrepresenting LM’s formally neutralist stand on the Yugoslav wars, or that LM was being associated with ‘the cause of revolutionary communism and/or Marxist ideology’.

Observers of the left-wing scene had noticed that over the last few years, the RCP, which ever since its formation in 1981 had always enjoyed a high public profile, was engaged in what can only be described as a steady drift away from any recognisable political engagement, which has ultimately led to the virtual abandonment of any concept of recognisable politics altogether. For the past year, the monthly Living Marxism has been marketed under the anonymous and meaningless title of LM, and is almost exclusively concerned with heaving brickbats at the liberal media, censorship, the intrusion of the state into people’s lives, and its latest theoretical discovery, the ‘culture of low expectations’. The occasional pieces on more obviously political issues serve as incongruous reminders of a barely-remembered past amongst the increasingly repetitive and narrowly-focused material that fills the magazine these days.

Up until the March 1998 issue, there had not been any open renunciation of Marxism, but that the initialisation of the magazine’s title was not an accident or a mere question of style was borne out by an article by Füredi in the LM for May 1997:

‘In today’s circumstances class politics cannot be reinvented, rebuilt, reinvigorated or rescued. Why? Because any dynamic political outlook needs to exist in an interaction with existing individual consciousness. And contemporary forms of consciousness in our atomised societies cannot be used as the foundation for a more developed politics of solidarity.’

What has happened is that we have been hit with ‘the decline of subjectivity’; ‘humanity has effectively been recast in the role of object to which things happen that are beyond all control’. So what can we do? Well, not much, it seems. Such concepts as class struggle or socialism ‘are abstractions that remain external to an environment where the very belief in the human potential faces scorn and cynicism’. Politics in the accepted form are out:

‘Those of us who want to do something face a more fundamental problem: how to strengthen the conviction that we have the potential for changing our circumstances. Whether this is done through appealing to self-interest or idealism or a belief in some higher purpose than survival is neither here nor there. There is a need to regroup all those who understand that when human beings cease to play for high stakes, to explore and to take risks or try to transform their circumstances, the world becomes a sad and dangerous place.’

This is, of course, an implicit rejection of Marxism. By appealing to people on the basis of ‘self-interest or idealism or a belief in some higher purpose than survival’, and trying to round up all those interested in playing ‘for high stakes’, exploring or taking risks, Füredi is effectively negating the Marxist axiom that the working class is the universal class through which the interests of humanity as a whole can be expressed; that through the working class seizing power and leading the fight for socialism, the liberation of humanity can occur. The working class as the potential liberator of society is rejected in favour of an amorphous agglomeration of people who are in favour of trying ‘to transform their circumstances’, a vague concept which can mean anything to anyone. Accepting (as he does) that classes still exist is of no help here, as his seemingly magnanimous concession to today’s class-riven society may at first suggest. If this new strategy is not based upon a particular class, then any class is eligible to join in.

Although he’d written the introduction to the RCP’s reprint of the Communist Manifesto a couple of years back, in his editorial in the March 1998 LM, Mick Hume assures readers that he’s not writing yet another commemoration of this now obsolete work. Nevertheless, it’s well worth looking at the Manifesto, because of what Marx wrote in it about the critical-utopian socialists who appeared during the early years of capitalism. Marx said that because of the undeveloped nature of the system, they could see class antagonisms and the ‘action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society’, but the proletariat ‘offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement’. He went on to say that these people, wishing to improve the lot of ‘every member of society’, appeal to society as a whole ‘without distinction of class’, and end up appealing to the ruling class: ‘For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?’

As the twentieth century draws to a close, LM recognises that classes still exist, but the damage inflicted on the labour movement is so great that it in effect sees the proletariat as a class ‘without any historical initiative or any independent political movement’. Moreover, if we are to regroup all those who understand the need ‘to play for high stakes, to explore and to take risks or try to transform their circumstances’, then why not appeal to those who have some clout in society?

But who, exactly? Time and again LM has informed us that the capitalist class has lost confidence in itself and its system, and hides behind the banalities of mission statements. (Maybe, but it still knows how to attack the working class. But who wants to read about the class struggle and other boring remnants of the past?) If we are to believe what we read in LM, those with real influence in society, those who are in the vanguard of the culture of low expectations, are those whom the magazine attacks the most — the liberal media stars, the ‘politically correct’ brigade, the massed ranks of counsellors, social workers, anti-smoking campaigners, non-governmental organisations, and so on, whose misanthropic and pessimistic attitudes have corroded society as a whole.

So where can the former members and supporters of the now-defunct RCP go now? Organising events like the recent three-day conference on free speech with a wide assortment of media personalities, famous novelists, stand-up comedians, fashionable artists and computer games designers may keep it going for a bit. There’s scope for individual members or supporters in carving out a career in the academic or media world, having a book published, or getting a website put on-line, but just what sort of longer-term perspective the group can possibly have is unclear. It seems that the former RCP is operating as some kind of umbrella organisation for a slew of think-tanks on a wide range of topics, largely concerning the media, censorship and regulation. Whilst cultural issues are obviously an important area for study, you can’t maintain for long anything resembling a political organisation solely on these grounds.

As for ideological direction, the editorial of the March 1998 LM says that its agenda is ‘based on a firm belief in the much-maligned human and individual potential’. Fair enough in and of itself, it is woefully inadequate for any coherent political orientation, and, having rejected Marxism and thus losing the theoretical stability that it provides, the ex-RCP may well fragment with bits flying off in all manner of strange directions. Because the RCP eschewed the usual left-wing tactics of critical support for and entry into reformist organisations, it is unlikely that many of its adherents will end up following the course of many disillusioned Marxists into the byways of reformism.

One possible trajectory is right-wing libertarianism. As I mentioned in the last New Interventions, not a little of what appears in LM is disturbingly reminiscent of this trend, a political cul-de-sac if ever there was one, but one that could appeal as happily as liberalism or Marxism to ‘a firm belief in the ... human and individual potential’. Stripped of any concept of class-based collectivity, the reinvigoration of subjectivity and the individual called for by LM could easily in practice result in the disinterment of that classic petit-bourgeois myth, the rugged individual.

How long can the former RCP continue down its chosen road? Although small organisations, not necessarily of a political nature, can produce a magazine for years, decades even, without much evidence of means of support, LM’s very professional production doesn’t come cheap, and its recent evolution must have taken a heavy toll on its circulation figures, as there cannot be many people willing each month to read an ever-increasing number of tracts on an ever-decreasing range of topics. Assuming that the organisation remains in one piece, I can’t see LM attracting any wealthy sponsors who will help keep it going. Nor can I see any political or intellectual current in Britain adopting the former RCP as its think-tank in the way that New Labour has used the Marxism Today wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Even if the ITN court case doesn’t finish LM off, lack of direction and a declining audience could well do so.

If the ex-RCP does not fall apart, its recent development and the absence of any obvious political perspectives will almost certainly lead to many of its remaining adherents drifting away out of politics altogether. Many will feel that there is little point in working in an organisation that has no clear objectives, and will use their talents in areas that they’ll see as more personally rewarding. If the admission by former RCP leader Rob Killick in the March 1998 LM that he wishes to emulate Bill Gates in being ‘successful, rich and clever’ is typical of his colleagues, this implies that it was not particularly ‘clever’ to have spent all those years flogging papers on street corners, attending interminable meetings, seeking out contacts and paying good money after bad in dues, when one could have been involved in so many other enjoyable and perhaps more lucrative endeavours.

Of course, the RCP’s renunciation of Marxism is not the first of its type, nor, unfortunately, is it likely to be the last. It’s not unknown for the organisations that have the most accurate but pessimistic prognoses to end up junking revolutionary politics, and the RCP’s assessment of the state of the labour movement at the beginning of the 1990s was considerably more accurate than those of other groups, if also more pessimistic. Then, in a typically one-sided way, it proceeded to view the decrepit state of the labour movement as the demise of the working class as a potential revolutionary force, and came to the stunningly original conclusion that Marxism is obsolete. From opposite ends of the left, Living Marxism and Marxism Today drew the same dismal conclusion! The contrast between the RCP of yore and its fading into oblivion is a nicely ironic illustration of its theory of the ‘culture of low expectations’.

Left-wing groups that are perceived as having gone off the rails often slough off fragments claiming to act in the groups’ true tradition. Once or twice, a group’s leader has drifted off into unwelcome territory, leaving behind, as Max Shachtman did, a number of erstwhile supporters claiming fealty to the leader’s self-betrayed heritage.

Neither of these criteria applies to the RCP, even though its withdrawal from working-class politics was more rapid and thoroughgoing than anything we’ve seen in many a decade. Whilst the party has shrunk considerably, its leading and secondary cadre appear to have remained intact, suggesting that there has been remarkably little dissension over what is not a minor tactical shift or a strategic rethink, but a fundamental political and philosophical reorientation. One cannot rule out the possibility that there might have been some grumbling, perhaps amongst those not so heavily involved in the media and culture arenas, but there have been no visible signs of it in LM. Anyway, disgruntled RCP members and supporters have usually disappeared off the political scene, rather than attempt to form or join another organisation.

Never popular, to put it mildly, with other left-wingers, the RCP did do some high quality theoretical work that often earned the praise of otherwise hostile critics, and it did challenge many of the left’s sacred cows, and pointed out quite a few of its weaknesses. Although it will be tempting for people to joke about the original RCP of the 1940s being a tragedy, and the recent one being a farce, now that the latter has openly repudiated its entire political tradition, and entered upon the road to almost certain oblivion, it will be a shame if there is nobody around to keep people aware of the positive aspects of its past.

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Ratko Mladić’s conviction is a reminder to speak out

Ratko Mladić’s conviction should stand as a reminder of what the international community should not do when confronted with mass murder.

“Meanwhile, an obscure magazine called Living Marxism – a publication that would later reinvent itself as Spiked – published sympathetic articles on Radovan Karadzic (the President of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war), and claimed that respected journalists like the Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy and ITN’s Penny Marshall – who had witnessed the concentration camps set up by the Serb army in Trnopolje in northern Bosnia – were telling lies. Living Marxism was later sued by ITN and lost the case, incurring hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages.“ — James Bloodworth

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LobbyWatch interviews George Monbiot, on the topic of the LM Network. 

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The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had some funny views about child sexual abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. They saw nothing to get worked up about. It was all hysteria on the part of those who …

From @buddy_hell’s blog. 

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With Ratko Mladic in the dock in the Hague and warlords' friend Tomislav Nikolic winning the elections in Belgrade, it is time again to r...

Bob from Brockley in an article, that contextualises very well @spikedonline’s former incarnation’s (Living Marxism) toying with genocide denial:

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Just out of curiosity. What is the difference between blocking someone on Twitter and retreating into a safe space? We’d say that probably the former is done over less meaningful or hurtful things than the latter... These are people who make a living of preaching unsafe spaces and free speech. Let’s say blocking people on Twitter doesn’t look very well. 

What got us blocked by Frank Furedi, you might ask? Asking him for an opinion on the Mladic verdict.  Sad.

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Life inside the RCP cult

The post below —written by @InfiniteCoincid for his blog— provides an excellent insight into the Revolutionary Communist Party, where the LM Network that would then end up grouping around @spikedonline, first got together. 

We post it here in the spirit of keeping everything in one place

...

My days in a far-right troll cult

In Sheffield as of 1987 anyone walking through the shopping precinct in the centre of town ran a gauntlet of left-wing newspaper sellers. The 14-year-old me often generally managed to avoid handing over 30p or so of my hard-earned paper round money for Socialist Worker, but on occasion I found myself buttonholed by some garrulous and well-presented young people pushing a publication called ‘The Next Step’. None of them appeared to be local, and they were, by comparison with their competitors, refreshingly unconcerned with whatever workers’ struggles were going on in South Yorkshire at the time. I didn’t get the ideological distinctions between the Revolutionary Communist Party, as they were called, and the Socialist Workers, but I suspect that the way they responded whenever I asked about such things – they were more than happy to slag off their rivals on the left – appealed to my disaffected sensibilities and inchoate contrarian instincts. I started going to meetings at which they pressed a copy of Lenin’s ‘What is to be done’ on me, and also made me shell out for a copy of a book called ‘Moral Panics’, which I did read and found splenetically entertaining if sometimes puzzing at the level of basic logical argumentation.

Although I had trouble keeping up with their sometimes contradictory-seeming political arguments, they were at least friendly, relatively unpatronising and certainly socially useful. They took me to the Leadmill to see a band who later turned out to be Deacon Blue and got me properly drunk, all the time shouting in my ear about stuff I really didn’t know much about. I do remember that one of my new comrades, taking issue with a stranger’s St George’s badge, began shouting at them about Northern Ireland and started a dancefloor ruckus. We also took a trip to London to the gay pride carnival, or as it was at the time, demo, where I had a distinctly Life of Brian moment upon seeing a banner from the Revolutionary Communist Group. I asked the natural question, only to be told that they were ‘wankers’. Then the general election came around, and we ourselves stopped being the RCP, turning instead into something called the Red Front, under which monicker we went banging on doors in search of people to disagree with. Our campaign ended with 107 votes, which was considered a victory as at least it was more than the possibly dead bloke from some basically defunct version of the Communist Party had received. Eventually other aspects of teenagehood took over and I, despite some tugging on their part (I think I still owe them £1.75 for the Lenin book, which they were keen to get hold of), I succeeded in drifting away.

From then on I kept an occasional eye on what they were up to but maintained my distance. I remember joining all my fellow delegates in turning my back as an RCP member spoke up at NUS conference, but I don’t remember why. Although I was living in Ireland at the time, I was vaguely aware that they were ubiquitous in the mid-1990s, standing on street corners looking slick and pushing subscriptions to their magazine Living Marxism. It had entertaining covers and contained articles written from a consistently libertarian standpoint, with elaborate arguments that would sort of persuade you that what you had thought about (for a not-entirely-random example) the environment was wrong, but with an uncanny feeling that you were the victim of some sort of trick or part of a game that wasn’t actually all that much fun to play. After it became clear that they were prepared to perpetrate full-on atrocity denial in order to promote their wilfully exasperating view of the world, it was very hard for anyone to take anything they said seriously. Few would have expected them to continue to deepen their influence in British life, but it seems they are far more determined and cunning than anyone might have thought.

Given their relatively rapid en masse shift away from the left, there’s been a ongoing mystery of why they do what they do, particularly since (through their website Spiked) they started selling their contrarian punditry to corporations and the right-wing media. From my own experiences and from having followed their development through articles such as this and this, I suspect they are a bit of a sect, but one in which the personal bonds override and yet (if we consider their commitment to the politics of self-interest) determine their collective ideological stance. The members of the core group, largely unchanged for the last thirty of so years, have managed to cave out steady careers in the media, with a shared ideological bent seemingly determined by the desire not just to provoke but to (as we now understand it) troll. Their contrarianism far surpasses anything I might have identified with as a teenager.

The LRB piece linked to above refers to this teenage aspect, the way their rhetorical insistence that everyone ‘act like grown-ups’ seems to betray an adolescent mindset. (It also mentions that Frank Furedi’s dependence on newspaper articles for his source material suggests that his reputation as a serious academic is not entirely deserved.) They continue to have a fixation on the young, with their successive front projects such as the Manifesto Club, the East London Science School and WorldWrite (of which 1987’s election candidate is now director) aimed directly at teenagers. Now that schools are up for grabs by anyone with enough cash, regardless of their ideological proclivities, they seem to be enjoying more direct access to young minds. The prominence of Brendan O’Neill as a steadfastly obnoxious commentator for my new-not-favourite newspaper The Telegraph has (re)alerted many to the dangers of their project, which now seems to dovetail with certain aspects of a hard-right agenda, particularly outright climate denial and the abuse of the notion of ‘free speech’ to legitimate hate speech. This site has also written this week of the insidious influence they also seem to enjoy in sections of the BBC. (This excellent Tumblr blog Twitter feed is also extremely informative on such matters, with an very useful primer to countering their bullshit available here.) Of course, it’s something of a provocative exaggeration to call the Spiked/LM/RCP crowd a far-right troll cult, just as it’s completely absurd to call the #metoo phenomenon a ‘moral panic’ and a ‘modern day Salem’ or claim that misplaced hysteria over climate change caused the Grenfell fire. But from my experiences as an impressionable young person subjected to their influence, combined with the fact that their current agenda is so close to that of the global far-right as to make very little meaningful difference, this is not a group of people who should be allowed anywhere near schools.

Original post. 

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How to counter the deceptive PR produced by @Spikedonline (et al)

One very common mistake from people trying to counter the deceptive PR generated by Spiked! and other LM mouthpieces is taking their hot-takes for ideologically sincere (albeit debatable) ‘thinking’, that can be countered by presenting reasoned arguments. This is a problem, as the ideological machine gathered around Spiked! counts on people’s outrage to disseminate its work. Spiked! et al have also created around themselves a false aura of intellectual rigour. It is a false aura, because as we have shown before, their contrarianism follows always the same recipe. 

This has been so since the days of the RCP and their passing for trots in order to alienate everyone on the left and push their own agenda. From opposing the anti-apartheid moment, to a bit of genocide denial, there is nothing these people won’t do in order to promote their drivel and attack progressive movements. Outrage sells—outrage helps disseminate their ideas—the dissemination of their agenda is what keeps them in employment as professional punters. And no, you can’t debate them—they won’t let you debate them if you come to them asking for the right questions—why do you think they’ve blocked us on Twitter? This block is something anyone who has attended their events—through the Institute of Ideas, Debating Matters, Invoke Democracy Now, etc—will have experienced when trying to ask the wrong questions: they will block you on Twitter—they will hog the microphone among themselves in their events, in order to keep consensus whilst keeping the image of a debate. 

In order to counter their ideological work it is important to come up with a different strategy that just debating them. If you will confront them on Twitter, instead of just retweeting their drivel adding your outrage, try to make it clear for others who these people are, where they come from, what they are about. There are many publicly available articles that trace their trajectory. We have a good selection here, others on our main page—our selection continues to grow. 

We recommend that when you engage Spiked! on Twitter you add a link to either of these two posts: 

1. The @spikedonline recipe for pound shop contrarianism (rightwing deceptive PR)

2. Let’s talk @spikedonline and their friends

In these two posts we have attempted to provide a summary of their tactics and trajectory. The more people are aware of them, the better. There is a lot to say about them and it is easy to get lost. The above posts—we believe—provide a good intro, pointing at other articles that go deeper on this or that aspect of this group.

There is little point in trying to confront them online by just showing their ideas are rubbish, reactionary, or just hot-takes written to a deadline. Expose them instead as the shady operation they are, and let others make up their minds whether they should buy anything they say or not. We know no one should. We have known it since their heyday in the 80s.