Monbiot on RCP
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For the leftist trainspotters among us. George Monbiot’s article is on ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when he writes this:
… The story harks back to one of the strangest political groups ever to have emerged in the UK.
The Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) was one of many leftist groupuscules to emerge in the 1970s. But it distinguished itself with a cruel and brutal libertarianism. It campaigned against bans on tobacco advertising, child sexual abuse images, landmines and the ownership of handguns. It claimed that animals have no rights, that global heating is a good thing, that environmentalists are like Nazis. It attacked strikers and gay rights campaigners. By taking extreme right-wing positions while calling itself left, it wrongfooted almost everyone.
Its members railed against the development of a “therapeutic culture”, in which people’s states of mind are “medicalised”. The RCP’s magazine, LM (previously Living Marxism), claimed, “It is those who have suffered the most who should be listened to the least.”
Its leading figure, Frank Furedi, now runs the Brussels arm of the hard right Mathias Corvinus Collegium, funded by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. Two stalwarts of LM were the sisters Claire and Fiona Fox.
Claire Fox became one of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party MEPs, before Boris Johnson made her a peer. Fiona Fox was one of several RCP alumni who, in the early 2000s, founded or took key roles in science communication groups. She became the first director of the Science Media Centre (SMC). This positioning at the interface between science and the media of members of the group was not easy to explain. Most, including Fox, appeared to have no background in science. But she had written an article for the RCP’s journal appearing to suggest that ME is caused by losing your “framework for understanding the world”.
These organisations came to dominate the media’s understanding of certain scientific issues. Science is huge, complex and confusing. They offered simplicity: these are the big stories, this is how to understand them, these are the scientists to talk to…
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