Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I find the ongoing influence of the former Revolutionary Communist Party/Living Marxism on the right really, really weird. I don't understand how their politics moved, how they're still around, how they still have influence (Spiked, the Spectator, Brexit Party MEP, and Munira Mirza former Deputy Mayor now head of Policy).

It feels like they're maybe the most successful Trotskyist party in the UK

Yeah when I read that part I didn't really get how that works other than one just casts about for the most extreme political stance?

They are really weird/baffling. There's a really good 2010 LRB piece on them (but quite long):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n13/jenny-turner/who-are-they

Vol. 32 No. 13 · 8 July 2010
Who Are They?
Jenny Turner reports from the Battle of Ideas

The fifth annual Battle of Ideas was held over a weekend last October at the Royal College of Art in West London. There was a route you could do, a circuit, up the stairs at one end of the windowless basement and down them again at the other, and I did it many times, bag dragging at my back. Each day was divided into five time-slots, each slot into 'strands': the Battle for Energy, Battle for Work, Battle for Reproductive Choice; or Breakfast Banter, Café Controversies, Bookshop Barnie. The talks themselves had titles like 'Working for the State: Public Service or Gravy Train?', 'India's Future: Slumdogs or Millionaires?' So much stuff, so much Horrible Histories alliteration, so many dispiritingly either-or questions: out of 74 talks, I spotted just one whose take-home message I couldn't immediately guess. It was on 'football, greed and the recession', it was called 'Who Ate All the Pies?', and I'm afraid I don't know the answer, because I went to 'Rethinking Freedom in an Illiberal Age: Securing Rights or Celebrating Liberty?' instead.

I'd bought a two-day ticket at £80, for which I got a red plastic bracelet. I had to keep it on overnight, the man told me; it would be fine in the bath or shower. Not many other people had red bracelets, I couldn't help but notice. A lot had red ribbons round their necks with ID cards hanging from them – they were Contributors. Others had yellow ribbons, denoting Volunteers. Some Contributors were also Partners, and got their logos in the programme: the Economic and Social Research Council, Shell, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the British Library. I counted 55 Partners, Champions and Supporters in eight categories. You could feel a mind at work here, collecting, collating, naming, laying things out. It was very neat, this mind, good at networking and sorting; more talks, more sponsors, more slots on the grid. And a Reception with chamber music at the beginning and a Party with cheap beer at the end, and Satellite meetings in other cities before and after; once this mind gets going on its plan for world domination, it seems to find it hard to stop.

The Battle of Ideas has been held annually since 2005 by the Institute of Ideas, an organisation that from the outside looks pretty much like a standard right-wing public policy think tank – much talk about 'free speech, not me speech' and 'the crisis in authority', much condemnation of 'greenthink' and 'meddling policymakers' – but which also functions as some sort of platform and refuge for people who used to be in the Revolutionary Communist Party, a British Trotskyist sect that had its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s. The RCP formally disbanded in 1997, but a loose bunch of former members still hang out together, producing the webzine Spiked, setting up media training for teens (Debating Matters, Young Journalists' Academy, a 'programme for London state-school pupils who have the passion and the guts, but not "the right contacts"') and a confusing cloud of other organisations: the Manifesto Club, WorldWrite, Audacity.org, the Modern Movement, Parents with Attitude ... Back in the day, members of Trot groups would 'enter' – join and manipulate – bigger organisations in order to gear up their influence, on the way, they hoped, to world revolution. These days, though, it isn't clear what the Continuity RCP is after, except that someone, somewhere, really likes setting things up.

[...]

The website Lobbywatch, which is run by anti-GM-food-industry activists, sees all these organisations as nodal points on what it calls 'the LM network', after Living Marxism, which was the RCP's magazine in the 1990s. Is Lobbywatch correct to believe there is such a thing as an 'LM network'? That depends. Yes, in the sense that there is a loose, informal group of people, some of whom have known each other a long time, some of whom have become involved more recently; some of whom share memories of passionate commitment to a tiny democratic-centralist organisation, some of whom don't; all of whom seem roughly to agree with each other on a rather shallow and repetitive libertarian agenda, and to display varying degrees of left-liberal-baiting enthusiasm for all the big, scary corporate technologies, especially those involving genetic manipulation, petrochemicals, non-sustainable power generation, human cells. It probably does make sense to talk about an 'LM network', in the way it's possible to talk about Oxbridge or Scottish or London literary mafias, or Guardianistas, or YBAs. Right now, when I look at Spiked, out of 12 'selected authors' listed on the front page, I immediately recognise six as having been Living Marxism regulars. One story attacks 'the tyranny of the anti-junk-food crusade', another attacks public smoking bans, and of three pieces pegged to the BP disaster, one blames the 'rituals of risk aversion', one is headlined, 'Addicted to oil? What a dumb idea', and one urges 'the world's big energy companies ... to realise that producing oil efficiently is moral purpose enough'. There seems to be substantial ideological agreement here.

Some people, however, believe the 'LM network' is more organised than this allows; apart from anything else, such a belief generates more exciting copy. Nick Cohen, the Observer columnist and author of What's Left: How the Left Lost Its Way (2007), has called them 'a vicious movement' and 'the smallest and nastiest of the Trotskyist sects' (the latter in a piece from 2002 that prophetically notes how 'former lefties can make a good living in the media by attacking their ex-comrades – I'd do it myself if the price was right.') George Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and anti-capitalist campaigner, started looking at the group closely in 1997, after some of them contributed to Against Nature, the notorious anti-Green television documentary; over the years he has called them 'industry lobbyists', 'a bizarre and cultish network', 'an obscure and cranky sect'. 'Invasion of the Entryists', originally published in the Guardian in 2003 but better read in the extensively footnoted version on Monbiot.com, contains a nicely compressed digest of the author's main objections to Living Marxism, the magazine: campaigns against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child porn; campaigns in favour of global warming and freedom for corporations. Monbiot also follows Jonathan Matthews of Lobbywatch in reporting curious clusters of former LM contributors now working in public science education. For example, according to Monbiot the educational charity Sense about Science – a prominent supporter of Simon Singh in his recent dispute with the British Chiropractic Association – has a former LMer for a managing director, and another one as her deputy; the director of the Science Media Centre is Fiona Fox, a former LM contributor and younger sister of Claire Fox, the IoI's head honcho. ('Various people have brought allegations about my past involvement in politics to the attention of my current and former employers,' FF said when I asked her about this. 'At every stage my employers have robustly defended me and my right to be judged on my ability to perform my job now rather than either my past or my family associations.')

Both Cohen and Monbiot – and others besides – talk about the LM network's habit of supporting freedom of expression for all sorts of horrible people: BNPers and child pornographers and atrocity deniers. Of course it's only the right to speak that is supported, not what is said: members of the LM network are always careful to stress that they're no less opposed to racism, sexual exploitation and mass murder than everybody else, it's just that they think unpleasant opinions should be not banned but 'battled' with, in open debate. For example, the Battle of Ideas I attended took place the week after Nick Griffin's turn on Question Time, so there was lots of talk about 'the right to be offensive' and 'illiberal liberalism', while at the same time it was made clear that the principle of free speech was being defended, not the views of the BNP. The pairing became a given – free speech, see kiddie porn and Nazis; Nazis, see kiddie porn and free speech.

[...]

In the 1980s, RCP members were often dishy and well turned-out, in that DMs and MA1 jacket, ambient-fury-of-the-Thatcher-era street-fighting way. This, I'm sorry to say, had a lot to do with why I used to buy their paper and once went to a meeting of their women's chapter in Edinburgh, at which we were told that condoms were Thatcherite and we ought to celebrate scientific achievement by going on the Pill. The meeting was horrendous, bossy and full of buzzwords, run by people pretending they didn't know each other. These days, IoI bods look like delegates at a Unison conference, or the seekers who gather at Landmark seminars and the Alpha Course. The ones who make the speeches are mostly white and in their thirties and forties (the volunteers on the cameras and boom-mikes are younger and more diverse). They're more relaxed than they used to be, less aggressive and overtly controlling, but they still have a habit of sitting on panels together, pretending they don't already know each other, and they still dominate meetings with tedious, well-rehearsed spontaneous interventions. This is one of the things that made the Battle of Ideas so deadly boring, and one reason so many people call the IoI 'a weird cult'.

[...]

Fox introduced the first event in the Keynote Controversies slot: 'Rethinking Education: The New Crisis of Adult Authority in the Classroom', based on the book by Frank Furedi, out that same weekend.1 'We', apparently, were 'very excited' when 'we' realised Furedi's book was being launched at the same time as the Battle of Ideas; Furedi is 'one of the UK's, indeed Europe's, indeed the world's leading public intellectuals', Fox told us, besides which she'd read the book already, and was glad to say it 'doesn't disappoint'. Which is just as well, given that Furedi, it is said, has been for the past 40 years or so the RCP's leader and theoretical guru.

Furedi himself was an anticlimax. He's short, slight, Mekonish, in his early sixties, wearing a white shirt with a navy tanktop and brown cords. He began by saying that he never wanted to write a book on education in the first place, but people kept saying to him: 'You know, Frank, you are the man.' The content of what children are learning is 'pretty sordid', he thinks: there is far too much 'soft social engineering' – by which he means healthy-eating propaganda, eco-spying, anti-bullying and so on – and nowhere near enough 'intellectually oriented classical and theoretical knowledge', by which he means 'Greek philosophy, Renaissance poetry, the novels of George Eliot'. The problem, he argued, is the 'fetishisation of change', an issue that transcends 'the left-right divide'. He seemed proud of quotes he'd found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – 'whose work has really influenced my work' – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though 'you couldn't be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.'

It's difficult to give a fair account of his argument. It's not so much that he said anything obviously disagreeable, because he didn't: he's against meddling control freaks, ignorant teachers, the craven obsession with health and safety, and lots of other stuff that you would happily agree with, if only you could stop yourself suspecting that none of these issues is as straightforward as he makes out. The way he presented his argument was brain-shrinkingly vague. The focus was mainly on UK schooling, and yet Furedi hardly engaged at all with what actually happens inside British schools. There were instead grand-looking historical generalisations – 'in the 21st century, conservation of the past is a radical act' – and a lot of anecdotes of the sort that make people start going on about political correctness gone mad: 'They're even expelling two-to-four-year-olds in nurseries for racism, for homophobia, for inappropriate sexual behaviour.' It's significant that Furedi uses the word 'expelling' – no one who works in education has used this word for decades. They always use the word 'excluded', which is both more neutral and more exact.
[...]

As well as the gnomic bits, the dinner-party tittle-tattle, the status quotes from famous thinkers hanging like hardware off an It bag, Furedi's talk has another odd rhetorical habit, which I noticed was copied by other speakers at the Battle of Ideas. 'You and I as grown-ups', 'not just as biologically mature grown-ups', 'the experience of grown-ups has become pretty irrelevant': the IoI adores grown-ups, and being grown-up, and talks all the time about how important it is to treat each other 'as grown-ups'. The effect is paradoxical, but predictable. If you talk constantly about 'grown-ups' it makes you sound like a child.

[...]

But it doesn't make much sense to look at Furedi as a single unitary author, scribbling away on his own. For as long as he has been working, his intellectual identity has been corporate, formed by and formative of friends and comrades met through the RCP. In itself, there's nothing unusual about someone being left wing when young and becoming more right wing as they get older. What's strange about the RCP, though, is the way the group seems to have moved together, 'as a disciplined unit', in the words of Nick Cohen.

The best introduction to the history of British Trotskyism is a pamphlet by John Sullivan, a former member of the International Socialists, called Go Fourth and Multiply/When this Pub Closes – that's 'fourth' as in Fourth International.2 Sullivan, who died in 2003, wrote these notes in the 1980s as an affectionate but critical insider. Like everybody else, he writes, people in left politics have a muddle of motives; they really do want to end oppression, but they're also in it for the social life and the ready-furnished sense of purpose and belief. Successful leaders, of Trot groups as of any others, understand their followers' needs and work hard to meet them. Sometimes struggles are embarked on for political reasons, because the world-historical conjuncture demands it. Sometimes they are a way of attracting 'custom in an already overcrowded market', 'cynical attempts to keep the troops happy'.

[...]

So what was the RCP's secret? People associated with the online archive Marxists.org tell me that, as a young man, Furedi was a serious scholar of Soviet political economy, and that the early RCP attracted others like him. Sullivan, however, held that Furedi's work was just 'student theory', an 'eclectic mishmash'. The RCP, in Sullivan's view, had one great USP, and that was 'style'. They were, in his formulation, 'the SWP with hairgel'. And the stylishness wasn't just on the level of personal posing. I remember being impressed with the next step, the party's weekly newspaper, with its lower-case masthead, neo-constructivist graphics and daring use of ink in colours other than the-people's-flag-is-deepest-red. tns was also unTrotskyistically frugal in its use of hortatory exclamations (especially when compared with its nearest rival, the RCG's Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!), carried fewer boring stories about trade unions, and wasn't forever nagging and guilt-tripping about this group of oppressed persons or that.

The RCP wasn't really interested in working-class struggle, or Third World liberation struggles, or any other wretched-of-the-earth-type struggle at all. 'Although I only became aware of this much later,' one 1980s RCPer wrote recently, 'young RCP comrades ... were by and large simply not socialists.' Don Milligan, an academic and gay activist, ran an RCP branch in the 1980s. He doesn't think the party leadership were 'socialists either' but 'Leninists of the purist kind', 'driven mad by the glamour of the October Revolution', a tiny, supercool vanguard, 'seizing the bridle of the Revolution and riding it into power'.

And so the early RCP struck out in bold new directions; it was particularly interested in science, medicine, reproductive health. The NHS was described in a pamphlet published in 1983 as 'a system that has always provided third-rate services on the cheap for working-class people'. Nuclear power was 'potentially safer and less environmentally damaging than existing methods of electricity generation'; 'green concerns' were 'the politics of evasion'. In 1984, the party withheld its support from the striking National Union of Mineworkers, arguing that without a national ballot, the strike was doomed to failure: a position that alienated it from the last great moment of the British labour movement. In 1987, the party published its notorious pamphlet The Truth about the Aids Panic, which argued that HIV would never spread in rich countries beyond needle-sharers and practitioners of casual anal sex, and that Aids charities were just pretending it would because they liked interfering with people's private lives. Time has shown the RCP's arguments to have been sort of right: Scargill didn't win, Aids didn't spread as originally predicted, even George Monbiot now supports the case for nuclear power, faute de mieux. But the victories are the sort that come not from rigour but rigidity – the mechanical rightness, twice daily, of the stopped clock.3

[...]

For most of the Western left, the collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s led to depression, soul-searching, New Labour and other forms of political despair. The RCP, too, was thrown into crisis. The Leninist model, it was becoming clear, was for the foreseeable future a complete no-hoper; what other ways might there be for a small group to go about grabbing power? the next step closed in 1988, marking an end to the SWP copycatting; with the launch of Living Marxism later that year came a shift towards the 'designer socialism' of the Communist Party of Great Britain's briefly influential Marxism Today. 'For the first time this century there is no real sense of a working-class movement with a distinctive political identity anywhere in the world,' 'Frank Richards' wrote in Living Marxism in 1990. The party's task, therefore, had been redefined as 'challenging the myths perpetuated by the system', a job requiring the participation of only 'a small minority'. And just as well, because by this time the RCP was disintegrating like a civilisation in a disaster movie, from the bottom, whole branches at a time.

In 1996, the RCP published a booklet called The Point Is to Change It: A Manifesto for a World Fit for People. 'Don't worry, we have not changed sides,' Mick Hume explained in a Living Marxism editorial. 'We are as fiercely opposed as Marxists have always been to the ways in which people's lives are degraded by a society that subordinates everything to the pursuit of profit.' After much discussion, however, the party had come to realise that there were 'new barriers' standing in the way – such as the trend for 'problem-mongering', as Hume calls it in his preface to the booklet, a tendency to inflate 'the dangers and difficulties which face us in every field'. People, he argues, are either 'patronised as hapless, fragile victims' or beset by warnings against '"the beast within us all" that needs to be caged or repressed'. Such 'barriers' could only be overcome, Hume wrote, by 'a determined defence of the gains of humanity to date – democracy, science, reason – against the new armies of critics. And it is why our manifesto insists that much more progress is possible if only we could raise our sights to see a new horizon.' All right then, let's cast off those mind-forg'd manacles and take a look.

[...]

What sank LM in the end was anti-imperialism. Philosophically, the magazine was in no doubt about what was happening across the world in the 1990s: 'humanitarian intervention', Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, was just a ruse the West used to make itself look good, monstering the local opposition while pursuing the usual colonial goals. The problem, though, was journalistic. How could LM report on this when it had no money to send anyone anywhere at all? The problem was further complicated by the fashion for what Hume called, in a 1997 pamphlet, the 'journalism of attachment' – confessional accounts, by Western correspondents, of atrocities witnessed. Hume argued that such reporting 'can allow no room for the scepticism, nuance or critical questioning that are the working tools of good journalism', and becomes, instead, 'a twisted sort of therapy', which 'ultimately dehumanises all those involved and degrades journalism into know-nothing sentimentality'. It's an impressive argument, but it raises one important further question: how, then, are you going to go about reporting from places where terrible things happen?

A 1995 piece by a writer called 'Fiona Foster' – 'just back', as the standfirst breezily put it, 'from a visit to Rwanda' – epitomises the problem. Foster took an unusual line on the massacres of 1994: she downplayed the genocidal aspect in favour of 'the role played by outside powers', and accused 'aid agencies' of 'building prisons' instead of bringing in food and medical help. Aid agencies, unsurprisingly, objected; Alex de Waal, an expert on Sudan, did some digging and discovered that Foster is really Fiona Fox. Her 'visit to Rwanda' took place while she was working in the media relations department for Cafod, the Catholic relief agency.

Shortly after this episode, it was another attempt to cover anti-imperialism on a shoestring that got LM sued for libel, closed down and pulped, and the magazine and everyone associated with it portrayed as atrocity-deniers. The subject of the piece was the war in Bosnia, specifically a news film made there in the spring and summer of 1992, although the LM story, 'The Picture That Fooled the World' by Thomas Deichmann, wasn't published until nearly five years later. The 'picture' in question was of Fikret Alic, an emaciated Bosnian Muslim man who had been photographed behind barbed wire at the Bosnian-Serb-run prison camp of Trnopolje. Originally shot and broadcast by ITN, the still image was then run on the following day's newspaper front pages, with headlines such as 'Belsen 92: Horror of the New Holocaust' (Daily Mirror), 'The Proof' (Daily Mail). The image was taken by most people as evidence that the Serbs had been running a genocidal operation in northern Bosnia, but Living Marxism disagreed.

There was no barbed-wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees ... The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists ... The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence.

The article seemed to accuse ITN of having fabricated the image. ITN sued, in spite of the unwritten law that journalists never sue their colleagues, and when the case came to court three years later, won.

The most detailed overview of the case is by David Campbell of Durham University, whose 25,000-word essay was published in the Journal of Human Rights in 2002. Campbell wonders why neither Deichmann nor LM seemed able to see beyond their barbed-wire fence to the many well-documented accounts of rape and murder to have come out of the Trnopolje camp. It was important to them to underplay the latter, he argues, because 'what matters to LM is severing any potential link between the Holocaust and the war in Bosnia' in order to weaken the case for military intervention. That LM found itself denying that Serbian ethnic cleansing happened was, as Campbell sees it, an inadvertent consequence of their knee-jerk anti-imperialism, an ethical 'paucity' – shallow, canalised, one-sided – that tends to be the consequence of an 'absolutist view' of free speech, and their 'historical illiteracy'. It subsequently emerged that Deichmann thought Trnopolje couldn't be described as a 'concentration camp' because it didn't have a gas chamber.

[...]

The magazine's Bosnia coverage had a very odd tone, cold and flippant and a bit sarcastic. The July 1992 edition had Serbia on the cover, described as the 'WHITE NIGGERS' of the New World Order. 'The world's media have invented a veritable Holocaust in Bosnia,' Furedi wrote, under his own name, a couple of months later. 'It is surely only a matter of time before gas chambers are discovered in the car park of the Agriculture Ministry in Belgrade.' LM was perhaps trying to counteract the 'very one-sided, anti-Serb' gushiness it objected to in 'the liberal media' but the effect is not cool, disciplined, objective – it's just mean.

Put it another way. Suppose you were accused of denying that a prison camp known to be a place where people were brutalised and murdered was really as bad as all that. You probably wouldn't set up a libel defence campaign and advertise it with a picture of the barbed wire that caused all the trouble in the first place. You probably wouldn't call it 'Off the Fence'.

It's Sunday lunchtime back at the Battle of Ideas, and there's a Lunchtime Debate called 'Should Teachers Be Role Models?' To which the answer, I suspect, will turn out to be no. There's a man on the panel called Kevin Rooney, who teaches social science at a school in Hertfordshire and according to the Sunday Times is Fiona Fox's husband, though when I asked her to confirm this, she refused. When the discussion, yet again, sags tediously back to Nick Griffin on Question Time, the right to be offensive and so on, Rooney says he would defend to the death, 'as Voltaire said' (although he didn't), the right of a teacher to be a member of the BNP – the only responsibility a teacher has is to 'know his subject'.

Then there's a Café Controversy called 'Standing Up to Supernanny', organised by Jennie Bristow, a cheery woman with a brook-no-nonsense demeanour who used to write for LM in the 1990s and now runs an editing business called Punctuate!, which advertises on Spiked. One of the invited speakers is Zoe Williams, the cheery, no-nonsense Guardian columnist, who wheels in her baby in a trendy triwheeler buggy and talks endearingly about how annoyed she gets with the government telling people what food to give their kids. Usually, I'd be cheering her on, but by now I am fed up with listening to confident people showing off about their no-nonsense chattering-class opinions. Just for once, I think, why can't all of us bloody intellectuals shut up with our endless posturing opinions and listen to why parents go on feeding their children quick, soft, cosy junk? Is it because, secretly, we know the answer, and just can't bear to think about the utter pointlessness of all this blah?

[...]

Right at the beginning of Wasted, Furedi writes about how, when his son was about to start school, he and his wife found themselves 'bombarded' with 'horror stories' from other parents. He was bewildered and appalled: 'I grew up,' he writes, 'in an era where you automatically went to the school nearest to your home,' as, he seems to be assuming, did most of his readers. So the book starts with all of us knowing just where we're coming from.

Except that he didn't, and we don't. Furedi's father and his sister were involved in the 1956 uprising. His parents were Jewish, his mother the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. Furedi has written in the Times that he has 'never forgotten the Proustian moment' when the Hungarian Revolution began – he was nine years old and about to tuck into 'dripping on garlic toast'. His father, a watchmaker and 'extremely right-wing', had been denounced as a 'class enemy'. His sister had been banned from studying medicine because she was a 'class alien'. When the Soviets invaded, the family ran for it, to Austria then Canada. 'I, obsessed by Wild West novels, was preparing to meet my first cowboy.' Furedi comes to the topic of education as a migrant, a speaker of English as an additional language, a refugee; just like his heroine Hannah Arendt did, and as her writings on education richly acknowledge. And as Furedi's don't.

He did, though, write a piece in LM in 2000 about why, 'as one whose family was virtually wiped out in Nazi concentration camps, I have mixed feelings about the Holocaust being transformed into a contemporary morality play.' It isn't that he doesn't think the Holocaust needs to be remembered, but that he dislikes the way Holocaust remembrance plugs into 'victim culture', 'a voyeuristic impulse to claim a stake in other people's pain'. He says this is something he learned from his 82-year-old mother. 'After watching a TV programme about second-generation Holocaust victims, she appeared puzzled about the terminology used ... She did not see or define herself in terms of victimhood ... Maybe there is something wrong with me, she said. Many professional therapists would probably agree and offer the diagnosis of a sick woman in denial.' The one thing, perhaps, that ultimately holds the LM network together is its members' refusal to countenance the existence of psychic conflict or confusion. People are not 'hapless, fragile victims'; neither do they struggle to contain 'the beast within us all'. People run fine on 'democracy, science, reason'. We are, after all, 'grown-ups'.

'Political sects,' John Sullivan wrote in the 1980s, 'are the heart of a heartless world, and they will disappear only when that world begins to change.' Of course, when he wrote that, he hoped the world would change in an exciting, utopian direction. Except that so far it hasn't; and yet these groups have changed a lot. Or have they? In my samizdat edition of Sullivan's pamphlet, a foreword by 'Arthur Trusscott' brings the history of Trotskyism in Britain more or less up to date. Frank Furedi, according to this, has gone from wanting to change the world to 'whingeing about it, like a cut-price Julie Burchill', yet the 'inner core' of his party survives, along with its 'insufferable arrogance', making for 'an interesting twist of the dialectic, that the content of a phenomenon can change dramatically, whilst its form remains unaltered.' 'Frank has a plan,' my friend remembers one of the comrades darkly saying. One day, the conditions would be right and they would be ready: public-sector cuts, rising unemployment, the collapsing Euro, a Tory government, more or less.

[Syt]

That reminds me, I haven't had a newspaper from the anarchists in my mailbox in a while.

[Sheilbh]

Department for International Development (created by Blair) being merged into the FCO as Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Not good

[Josquius]

And a lovely dog whistle in the racism report plan about inequality for "white working class Boys"

[Valmy]

In other news, two De Gaulle statues got defaced. One being sprayed by yellow colour, the other with "esclavagiste" (slaver) painted on it. 

Well maybe that just means statues of actual slavery practitioners don't exist in France and they just need to target some random people who lived 100 years after slavery?

[Duque de Bragança]

In other news, two De Gaulle statues got defaced. One being sprayed by yellow colour, the other with "esclavagiste" (slaver) painted on it. 

Well maybe that just means statues of actual slavery practitioners don't exist in France and they just need to target some random people who lived 100 years after slavery?

Given that abolitionist statues were also defaced or destroyed, I am afraid that identity-based communalism is rearing its ugly head.

[Valmy]

The abolishionists were once abused for going too far, and now they are abused for not going too far enough. Such is the cycle of revolution

But I was more getting at that I was impressed France had no actual statues of people who profited off slavery so other people who had nothing to do with it needed to be targetted instead.

[Agelastus]

Department for International Development (created by Blair) being merged into the FCO as Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Not good

Very good. It should never have been an independent department in the first place.

[Tamas]

Department for International Development (created by Blair) being merged into the FCO as Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Not good

Very good. It should never have been an independent department in the first place.

It is an admission of reduced British ambitions, for sure.

[Sheilbh]

Also, in statue news, people in Nuneaton are "guarding" the statue of *checks notes* George Eliot


I really hope our culture wars take a strange 19th century literature detour - I am ready for this 

[Sheilbh]

It is an admission of reduced British ambitions, for sure.

I'm not sure that follows and, apparently, the aid budget will be protected at 0.7%.

I think there's basically two schools - one extreme is Germany where aid is managed by an independent corporation that isn't part of the government; the other end is the US which does non-interested aid but also very much uses aid as a part of foreign policy to advance American interests. We have been somewhere in the middle.

Moving it into the FCO indicates to me that we'll probably get less good aid results, but we'll be tying it to UK interests/foreign policy more explicitly. I'm not sure if that's more or less ambitious.

[Josquius]

Also, in statue news, people in Nuneaton are "guarding" the statue of *checks notes* George Eliot


I really hope our culture wars take a strange 19th century literature detour - I am ready for this 

Football hooligans scrapping over who the best bronte sister was?
I'm in.

[Sheilbh]

Football hooligans scrapping over who the best bronte sister was?
I'm in.

The Trollope Firm sizing up against the Dickens Casuals.

[celedhring]

Okay, I'm missing something here. Why would George Elliot's statue need to be guarded? Or is it some ellaborate meta-prank?

[Duque de Bragança]

The abolishionists were once abused for going too far, and now they are abused for not going too far enough. Such is the cycle of revolution

But I was more getting at that I was impressed France had no actual statues of people who profited off slavery so other people who had nothing to do with it needed to be targetted instead.

Voltaire was rumored for a long time to have profited from it. I am somewhat surprised he was not chosen as a target. There has to be a Voltaire statue somewhere.