- One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance
of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons"
pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and
key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has
travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the
extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics
have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and
taking them over - appear unchanged. Research published for the first time
today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial
section of the British establishment.
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- The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist
splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out
to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners
marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into
the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt
the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed
the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP
activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.
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- In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism,
later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi,
the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly
to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a "confident
individualism" without social constraint. It campaigned against gun
control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and
in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations.
It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers.
It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute
for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded
by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains,
offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex
scientific issues".
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- In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media,
with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific
and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these
platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast,
Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were
preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine
was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation's journalists
had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM
closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank
the Institute of Ideas.
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- All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks
to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published
today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in
this group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants
have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication
used by the science and medical establishment.
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- Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science
(SAS), the lobby group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne,
and whose board contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian
Heap, Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October it
organised a letter to the Times by 114 scientists, complaining that the
government had failed to make the case for genetic engineering. In response,
Tony Blair told the Commons that he had not ruled out the commercialisation
of GM crops in Britain. The phone number for Sense About Science is shared
by the "publishing house" Global Futures. One of its two trustees
is Phil Mullan, a former RCP activist and LM contributor who is listed
as the registrant of Spiked magazine's website. The only publication on
the Global Futures site is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the
cult. The assistant director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is
the contact person for Global Futures. The director of SAS, Tracey Brown,
has written for both LM and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute
of Ideas: all of them RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied under
Frank Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for the PR firm
Regester Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis
CropScience, Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners.
Brown's address is shared by Adam Burgess, also a contributor to LM. LM's
health writer, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, is a trustee of both Global Futures
and Sense About Science.
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- SAS has set up a working party on peer review, which
is chaired and hosted by the Royal Society. One of its members is Tony
Gilland, who is science and society director at the Institute of Ideas,
a contributor to both LM and Spiked and the joint author of the proposal
Frank Furedi made to the supermarkets. Another is Fiona Fox, the sister
of Claire Fox, who runs the Institute of Ideas. Fiona Fox was a frequent
contributor to LM. One of her articles generated outrage among human rights
campaigners by denying that there had been a genocide in Rwanda.
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- Fiona Fox is also the director of the Science Media Centre,
the public relations body set up by Baroness Susan Greenfield of the Royal
Institution. It is funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical companies
Astra Zeneca, Dupont and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science Media Centre
to promote the views of industry and to launch fierce attacks against those
who question them. She ran the campaign, for example, to rubbish last year's
BBC drama Fields of Gold.
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- The list goes on and on. The policy officer of the Genetic
Interest Group, which represents the interests of people with genetic disorders,
is now John Gillott, formerly science editor of LM and a regular contributor
to Spiked. The director of the Progress Educational Trust, which campaigns
for research on human embryos, is Juliet Tizzard, a contributor to LM,
Spiked and the Institute of Ideas. Gillott and Tizzard also help to run
Genepool, the online clinical genetics library. The chief executive of
the British Pregnancy Advisory Service is Ann Furedi, the wife of Frank
Furedi and a regular contributor to LM and Spiked. Until last year she
was communications director for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority. The coordinator of the Pro-Choice Forum, which publicises abortion
issues, is Ellie Lee, a regular writer for LM and Spiked and now series
editor for the Institute of Ideas.
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- Is all this a coincidence? I don't think so. But it's
not easy to understand why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which
wants power for its own sake, or one following a political design, of which
this is an intermediate step? What I can say is that the scientific establishment,
always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests
to be represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish
political network. Far from rebuilding public trust in science and medicine,
this group's repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it.
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- · The sources for this and all George Monbiot's
recent articles can be found at www.monbiot.com.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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