LM WATCHING...

George Monbiot recently noted that GM Watch had "shown how almost the entire infrastructure of communication between science and the public in Britain has been captured by a bizarre ultra-rightwing cult. It's one of the oddest and most alarming stories I've ever come across."

The bizarre ultra-rightwing cult is often referred to as the "LM network". It developed out of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which itself was an offshoot of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency. The leading light behind these various metamorphoses is the British sociologist Frank Furedi. His followers appear happy to be under his ideological shadow and tend to worship him as one of the greatest thinkers of all time.

They promote an extreme libertarian ideology - no restrictions on paedophilia, race hate etc. - and they eulogise technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and human cloning. They see the GM debate as particularly important: "the terrain upon which society's relationship to science and human endeavour is currently being worked out."

In order to punch above their weight, they often hide their affiliations and engage in infiltration of media organisations; or operate via front groups or by colonising existing lobby groups.

They are represented, often in very senior positions, in a series of organisations which lobby on issues related to biotechnology, eg the Science Media Centre (director: Fiona Fox), Sense About Science (director: Tracey Brown; her assistant: Ellen Raphael), Genetic Interest Group (policy director: John Gillott), Progress Educational Trust (director: Juliet Tizzard), and the Scientific Alliance (advisor: Bill Durodié). Both Tracey Brown and Bill Durodie were also brought in in an advisory capacity in relation to the strands of the UK government's official GM Public Debate.

Our lobbywatch.org website has an LM Watch section: http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=39&page=1

Here's a recent addition to that part of the site. To get all the embedded links, go to: http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=52&page=1 (paste into your browser, if necessary)
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LM Watching...
Watching briefs - bits and snips to keep you abreast of the Furediites
http://www.lobbywatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=52&page=1

*Elton meets the RCP!
*Durodie and the power of ironies
*Hume uses Times column as promo for Ann Furedi
*Claire Fox was SPUC militant
*Gimmie dat ol' time techno-religion
...
*Elton meets the RCP!*

Blast from the past: Bruno Waterfield, long time Furediite - these days at e-politix - took time off revolutionary communist duties in 1984 to fly out to Sydney for the wedding of his sister Renate Blauel to Elton John. Bruno was under instructions to try to get a contribution to Party funds. With a Furediite shaking his collection tin under the bed, no wonder the marriage didn't last.

*Hume uses Times column as promo for Ann Furedi*

LM and Spiked editor, Mick Hume, has used his Times column as a platform for fellow LM-er Ann Furedi (formerly Ann Bradley, alias Ann Burton) to defend herself against recent revelations in the Telegraph. These showed how the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which Furedi heads, is guiding women more than six months pregnant to a Barcelona Clinic for abortions that are illegal under both British and Spanish law.

In the Hume piece Ann Furedi scoffs at 'any notion that BPAS is run as her personal political crusade'. Furedi tells us she has only been chief executive 'for 16 months, during which there have been no policy changes'. But Furedi didn't come fresh to BPAS, as this suggests, but spent many years as its Director of Communications - quite apart from helping LM place-people like Ellen Raphael gain employment there.

Hume's connections with the Furediites has been a long one. He was recruited into their Revolutionary Communist Tendency as far back as 1981, while a student of American politics at Manchester, during a 'Workers March for Irish Freedom'. Needless to say, this is not something he touched on in his Times piece.

On a deeper level, the championing of abortion right up to the point of birth is part of the underlying callousness that marks out the Furediites. It's also part of their attempt to break the basic bond with human life and nurturing. This, in turn, is necessitated by their extreme anti-nature, anti-humanist position.

*Claire Fox was SPUC militant*

Blast from the past: little known fact - LM co-publisher and Institute of Ideas' director, Claire Fox, was originally a fierce anti-abortion campaigner. At the time she was recruited into Furedi's Revolutionary Communist Tendency at Warwick University in 1980, she was active with the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC). Fox was drawn in to the RCT by its campaigning work around Irish republicanism. Her devout Catholicism and anti-abortion militancy meant that for some time she was kept at arms length from full membership.

Claire later channelled her fervour into being a Branch Organiser for the RCP, in which role she favoured 'beating the shit' out of new recruits in order to turn them into 'good' part cadres. Her sister Fiona Fox followed in Claire's wake, apparently experiencing no problems in reconciling her active RCP involvement, with working for a Roman Catholic agency - Cafod. Nowadays, Fiona heads the Science Media Centre while Claire heads the Furediite front, the Institute of Ideas.

*Gimmie dat ol' time techno-religion*

A letter in the Times from Doug Parr of Greenpeace responds to a recent Times piece by devoted Furediite, Tracey Brown, in her guise as director of Sense about Science, which paints nanotechnology as progressively virtuous and the sceptics as unrepresentative campaigning fundamentalists. In fact, says Parr, the debate about nanotechnology is to do with such critical questions as 'how this technology is applied, and for whose benefits and with what risks.' This, of course, is a mite subtle for the Furediites who pride themselves on mounting a startlingly uncritical defence of science, technology, 'progress' and the Enlightenment. (see Living Marxism)

*Durodie and the power of ironies*

The final programme in the recent Power of Nightmares BBC TV series was blessed by Bill Durodie, described as 'director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London'.

This part of the programme argued that the war on terror is an example of the precautionary principle in operation, and akin to the calls for preventive action made by environmentalists in the absence of scientific evidence. Curiously, the programme used climate change as an illustration of this, despite the fact that the scientific consensus is clearly with the environmentalists while Durodie's LM chums, like the neo-cons pursuing the war on terror, are with the nay sayers!

At what point the maker of Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis, ran across Durodie is anyone's guess, though he seems to have shared an Institute of Ideas platform with him and Frank Furedi in November 2003. Durodié's involvement in the TV series not only damaged its credibility but was somewhat ironic given one of the programme's sub-themes - the insidious influence of elitist political groups who perceive themselves as vanguards and uncompromisingly grind their ideological axes regardless of the reality.

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