David Pallister, John Vidal and Kevin Maguire Saturday July 8, 2000
Three months ago a high court libel jury forced the magazine LM, formerly Living Marxism, into closure and bankruptcy. But that did not mean its controversial views would go away. On the same day as the verdict was delivered, LM's co-publisher Claire Fox, a 40-year-old former social worker and teacher, and two colleagues formed a plan for a month of "thought provoking" conferences in London, Oxford, Manchester, Edinburgh, Paris and Frankfurt. As the Institute of Ideas, Fox and her team have drawn into their project many of the leading cultural institutions in the capital: the Tate Modern, the British Library, the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Institution, the RSA, and the Art's Council. An impressive array of academics, scientists, journalists, lawyers and writers have agreed to speak. But critics, almost wholly from the left, argue that some of its more extreme laissez-faire positions are risible nonsense or simply promote an agenda pushed by big business. Should they be taken seriously? "I believe," writer Mick Hume told 50 people at a libel seminar, "in the right to be offensive." He exercised that right in his magazine LM (formerly Living Marxism) three years ago by publishing an article which claimed that ITN deliberately misrepresented that haunting picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated Bosnian Muslim at Trnopolje camp in 1992. The result, this March, was a crushing and expensive libel case which forced the magazine's closure. Hume and his co-publisher defendant, Helene Guldberg, are being personally pursued for £375,000 in damages. But being offensive can have its own rewards as LM's progeny, the Institute of Ideas, basks in the success of organising - this month and last - a series of conferences with the blessing and backing of some of Britain's leading institutions. And there's more: events in Oxford, Frankfurt, Paris, Dublin, Manchester and, in August, a raft of debates at the Edinburgh festival. The institute's director, Claire Fox, a former social worker and teacher, and her volunteers work out of a ground floor office formerly occupied by LM near Smithfield meat market. Ms Fox proclaims her pride in the Institute of Ideas and maintains it has no political agenda other than to challenge the consensus agenda through the power of debate. "It's the ideas that matter," she insists. "Why would I be doing this? I could be earning a lot of money as a consultant, or gone higher in education." For the spruce young(ish) controversialists who formed the core of LM's friends and contributors, it has been a long and curious ideological road. The institute now has a slogan: Ban nothing - question everything. Yet their origins lie in a small Trotskyist sect within the International Socialists (now the Socialist Workers' Party), which used to spend most of its time in textual agonising over the third volume of Das Kapital. After a monumentally unfathomable debate about the declining rate of profit and commodity fetishism, part of the faction split away from the International Socialists in 1974 and formed the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG). Its central platform was to have no truck with political activism, reformist and united fronts. An infantile disorder, Lenin would have called it. With a healthy respect for bourgeois ideology, it believed that the main task was to formulate the correct Marxist programme and then train a vanguard elite to storm the citadels of capitalism. The battle of ideas and the use of propaganda were all. Horrified
The first law of Trotskyist sects is that, like amoebas, they have to split to survive. When the chief RCG theoretician, David Yaffe, decided that the time had come actively to engage with the Communist party and the anti-apartheid movement, the purists were horrified. And so was born, in 1976, the even smaller Revolutionary Communist Tendency, later to become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) with its organ, Living Marxism. "They were skilful at organisation and publicity and had lots of energy," says one of their critics from the left. "But they were basically a cult dealing in theoretical absolutes. They had no real ideas, just postures." "Media pranksters and disco fascists," snorted one old International Socialist hand. To many observers there was a cultish flavour to the party. New recruits were collared in fashionable places like Covent Garden, Sloane Square and Oxford university. They were often approached with an invitation to take part in a bogus survey on political events of the day. Once recruited, they had to go through a programme of political education - learning the party line. It helped to look smart and good career moves in the media, academia and the professions were encouraged. Once in a job, they were expected to donate a percentage of their salaries to the party - and its publications. Then the cold war ended, the party's eight candidates lost their deposits at the fourth Tory election win of 1992 and Living Marxism began another transformation. Conventional politics were declared exhausted and atrophied and in 1996 the RCP was disbanded and Living Marxism was reborn as the even glossier LM. The new scriptures decree that the old labour movements has collapsed for good. Apathy rules. The division of left and right has become irrelevant. A new crusade and new ideas for human emancipation are called for. The big buzz word, to be reclaimed from Thatcherism, was freedom. Freedom to say whatever you like; the freedom to be offensive and contrary - just like in the old days. LM articulated its new philosophy and found new friends from surprising places. "The RCP were always refreshingly different," said one admirer in 1997 after a visit to an LM fringe meeting at the Edinburgh festival. "They took issue with the 'no platform for fascists' policy that most of the left slavishly and unthinkingly sought to enforce." Thus Patrick Harrington, former student organiser of the National Front, whose presence at North London poly in the 1980s became a cause celebre for the SWP, now adopts many of the views of LM. Ms Fox, now a regular on radio talk programmes, maintains that "everyone" knows how LM and the institute emerged but is reluctant to talk about it. "That's all history," she says dismissively. "The RCP ceased four years ago. That's that. It was the end of a revolutionary political party. The question then was whether it [LM] was worth doing," she said. Fear of risk
Yet essentially LM and the institute believe that society, business and science, especially biotechnology, are being held back by fear of risk and experimentation - the so-called precautionary principle as enuciated by Prince Charles over GM food. The government, it argues, manufactures panics and anxiety - over child-rearing, crime and health. Citizens are patronised, mollycoddled and made to feel like powerless victims. Useless therapies and burgeoning litigation over political correctness are making victims of us all. Ban nothing, question everything. One inevitable - and conscious - result has been that many of the institute's ideas have found sympathy among rightwing organisations and think tanks. It is a meeting of strange minds. Until its closure, LM more or less aped the conservative rightwing political, economic and cultural libertarian arguments being pushed heavily in the US by free market organisations a like the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the Cato Institute. These are all funded by industry but are just the tip of a vast network of "freedom" groups all linked intellectually and semi-formally by the loose coalition known as the Freedom Network. The meeting of minds in the libertarian zone in Britain allowed Forest, the pro-smoking group funded by the tobacco in dustry, to organise a debate (Blair's Britain - The Tyranny of Political Correctness) in the Groucho club last month under the institute's umbrella with Dr Masden Pirie of the free market Adam Smith Institute in the chair."We get on very well with these people," said Dr Pirie. Another rightwing think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, helped organise speakers for a debate last week on war crimes at University College London. The source of the LM-institute's funding has always been a source of wonderment. Living Marxism had 3,000 subscribers and LM rose to 10,000 but the sums never seemed to add up. Fox says everyone worked for free and it was always difficult to balance the books. When LM attracted the libel writ from ITN, the free speech brigade weighed in with support. The ICA offered its premises for a debate. Now the cultural establishment has come on board en masse. Some of Britain's cultural glitterati - Blake Morrison, Marina Warner, Linda Grant, Timberlake Wertenberger, Lisa Jardine, Antony Gormley and Jon Snow - as well as a number of Guardian writers, were invited. Not all accepted. Snow withdrew from an event after being invited by the RSA. It was only later that he realised the institute's connection and felt there was a lack of transparency. "I didn't have a clear idea of who they were," he said. Audiences at some of the conferences may be equally perplexed. From the platforms and the floor, the LM line is assiduously promoted by the magazine's supporters and contributors - often without clear attribution of their affiliations. Although Ms Fox denies it operates "front" organisations, LM's thinking has remarkable similarities with that of the pro-new roads Transport Research Group, and lobby groups like Families for Freedom, Freedom & Law, the Association of British Drivers and Audacity.org, a body opposed to restraints on devolopment. Members of these groups have been regular LM contributors. Leading the libertarian charge from the US, funding one of the debates and providing speakers for others, is the Reason Foundation. The institute's programme does not say it, but this rightwing think tank/magazine, which has been promoting the corporate takeover of schools in the US, is pro-guns and pro-GM. Both its founder and senior editor accepted invitations to talk at LM events - and will be paying their own way to come. Their leading writer, the syndicated columnist Sandra Postrel, is author of the libertarian book The Enemies of Freedom and frequently talks at the Hudson Institute. This body is mainly run by former Reaganite cold war warriors and initiates much of the "research" that attacks environmentalists and liberal governments. The institute is now moving abroad and from Germany there is a debate about Expo 2000 in Frankfurt funded by Novo, the small "unaffiliated" magazine whose editor, Thomas Diechman, wrote the pro-Serb piece that sunk LM. Five of the seven people "debating" in Frankfurt will be Novo contributors. In Paris, there is a debate about whether globalisation is such a bad thing, and in Italy the the director of the Progress Consultancy, a writer for LM, will tell how hard it is for business to operate in a risk-obsessed society - the subject of several debates in London. The links suggest a small world of LM activists, with individuals or small groups working inside both liberal and rightwing institutions, to promote the LM agenda, especially in the media. Discredited
In the past few years LM has effectively made five or more hours of prime time environmentalist-bashing TV. C4's much discredited series Against Nature was directed by Martin Durkin, a keen LM fan. The programmes featured LM contributors and followed the magazine's line that greens are not radicals but doom-mongering "Hitler-loving imperialists". Durkin and other LM writers have made several other similar films for the C4's Equinox series to push the anti-GM, pro "scientific progress" line. Durkin also made a virulently pro-GM film for C4 which was shown in April. LM's involvement at C4 extends beyond documentaries. Five out of six recent Zeitgeist programmes had LM contributors. Four LM "independent" contributors to LM/IoI also appeared on a BBC TV Counterblast programme which argued that organic foods were more dangerous than conventional foods. This idea was first raised by the Hudson institute which is funded by Monsanto, among others. Also pushing the idea on the BBC programme was leading pro-GM scientist Professor Anthony Trewavas, of Edinburgh university, who has several articles on Monsanto's website and will be at one of the institute's debates. The producer of the Counterblast series told the Guardian that he had no idea that most of the contributors had LM or other links. LM has forged strong links with internet companies, including Cyberia - the company that set up the first internet cafe and has a place on the Cabinet Office websites policy group. Another of its backers is cSscape, a US corporation whose British branch set up the full website for the Cabinet Office and has worked for Monsanto's PR company, the giant Burson Marsteller. Other hi-tech companies supporting LM/IoI include Gap21 - which calls itself a "21st century dialogue on globalisation and power", Internet Freedom, a radical free speech group, and Designagenda, an internet design operation set up by LM writer and academic Andrew Calcutt. Mick Hume and his colleagues last month brought out Last Magazine, another expensively produced 124-page glossy using the LM initials. "So please, no flowers or memorial services for LM," wrote Hume. "There is life after a libel trial. It starts here."