To understand where Boris Johnson’s culture war is heading, the case of Spiked is instructive – and not just because his senior adviser Munira Mirza is a veteran of the former far-left & now far-right cult.
Spiked grew out of a Marxist sect that called itself the Revolutionary Communist Party. It prided itself on being truer to the methods of Lenin & Trotsky than its far-left competitors. Members saw themselves a vanguard elite that would kick the working class into revolution…
Unaccountably, the working class was not greatly interested in being led into a glorious future by professor of sociology Frank Furedi and his cult-like acolytes. When the RCP put up candidates for election in 1987, they all lost their deposits…
So the RCP turned to “consciousness raising” via its magazine Living Marxism (later LM). To attract attention to itself, it struck extreme attitudes, with cult members such as Claire Fox (made a Baroness by Johnson) supporting the mass murder of civilians by IRA terrorists…
LM magazine also questioned the science around AIDS & published an article suggesting that ITN had faked stories about genocide by Serbs in former Yugoslavia. This was a lie, and ITN successfully sued. LM was forced to close but reinvented itself as Spiked Online…
Building on their fraudulent claim to be free speech martyrs, members of the Spiked network decided the way forward was as champions of “libertarianism”. They made much of being engaged in “culture wars” & discovered allies & sponsors for this project on the far right…
This was a good way to milk far-right billionaires (the Koch brothers) & striking controversial “libertarian” poses led to gigs on the Moral Maze & Question Time, & for right-wing media (see Brendan O’Neil et al). Maybe they still saw this as a Trotskyite “entryist” strategy.
But to keep up the “culture war” brand they had to constantly re-up the controversy factor, striking ever more more extreme libertarian poses to define themselves against the “bourgeois liberalism” that (in a hangover from their far-left days) they still saw as the enemy…
So, if “bourgeois liberals” said carbon emissions were causing climate change, Spiked had to deny it. If “bourgeois liberals” thought gun control & suppression of child pornography were desirable, Spiked had to urge an end to restrictions on gun ownership & child pornography.
If “bourgeois liberals” deplored racist chanting at football games, Spiked had to say they were killjoys whose only aim was to stop the working classes from having a good time. Polarisation is whole point of culture wars – and they inexorably ratchet up extremism.
For the cultists who coalesce around Spiked, what was originally a Leninist vanguard strategy became a successful media career path. For Johnson, culture wars are an electoral strategy & people such as his adviser Munira Mirza are past masters at this game.
It will get worse.
Do Spiked believe in any of this stuff? Well, Trotsky said "the end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.“ For them, culture wars are simply the means. The more interesting question is what they now see as "the end".
Incidentally, I've just seen that I've been blocked by @spikedonline. Very "libertarian".
Was it something I said?
More here on Munira Mirza and her husband Dougie Smith – who has long-standing links to far-right groups and who is now another of Boris Johnson's most influential aides.
Originally tweeted by Tom Scott (@Tom___Scott) on 14/06/2021.
