[A-List] Monbiot tackles the Institute of Ideas

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Invasion of the entryists

How did a cultish political network become the public face of the scientific
establishment?

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 9, 2003
The Guardian

One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former
left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons" pretty well run the
White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the
British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further,
from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the
pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180
degrees, its tactics - entering organisations and taking them over - appear
unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the
members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British
establishment.

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the
Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing
oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it
picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage
and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike,
undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic
of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked
members of opposing factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time,
the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume
and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described
its mission as promoting a "confident individualism" without social
constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco
advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human
cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton
and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers
from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the
Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for
the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret
Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to
educate their customers "about complex scientific issues".

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable
success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental
broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox,
Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to
argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing
human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued
by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation's journalists had
fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed,
and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the
Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the
researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database
www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group's campaign for
individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in
the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and
medical establishment.

Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science (SAS), the lobby
group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, and whose board
contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian Heap, Professor
Dame Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October it organised a letter
to the Times by 114 scientists, complaining that the government had failed
to make the case for genetic engineering. In response, Tony Blair told the
Commons that he had not ruled out the commercialisation of GM crops in
Britain. The phone number for Sense About Science is shared by the
"publishing house" Global Futures. One of its two trustees is Phil Mullan, a
former RCP activist and LM contributor who is listed as the registrant of
Spiked magazine's website. The only publication on the Global Futures site
is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the cult. The assistant
director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is the contact person for
Global Futures. The director of SAS, Tracey Brown, has written for both LM
and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute of Ideas: all of them
RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied under Frank Furedi at the
University of Kent, before working for the PR firm Regester Larkin, which
defends companies such as the biotech giants Aventis CropScience, Bayer and
Pfizer against consumer and environmental campaigners. Brown's address is
shared by Adam Burgess, also a contributor to LM. LM's health writer, Dr
Michael Fitzpatrick, is a trustee of both Global Futures and Sense About
Science.

SAS has set up a working party on peer review, which is chaired and hosted
by the Royal Society. One of its members is Tony Gilland, who is science and
society director at the Institute of Ideas, a contributor to both LM and
Spiked and the joint author of the proposal Frank Furedi made to the
supermarkets. Another is Fiona Fox, the sister of Claire Fox, who runs the
Institute of Ideas. Fiona Fox was a frequent contributor to LM. One of her
articles generated outrage among human rights campaigners by denying that
there had been a genocide in Rwanda.

Fiona Fox is also the director of the Science Media Centre, the public
relations body set up by Baroness Susan Greenfield of the Royal Institution.
It is funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical companies Astra Zeneca,
Dupont and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science Media Centre to promote the
views of industry and to launch fierce attacks against those who question
them. She ran the campaign, for example, to rubbish last year's BBC drama
Fields of Gold.

The list goes on and on. The policy officer of the Genetic Interest Group,
which represents the interests of people with genetic disorders, is now John
Gillott, formerly science editor of LM and a regular contributor to Spiked.
The director of the Progress Educational Trust, which campaigns for research
on human embryos, is Juliet Tizzard, a contributor to LM, Spiked and the
Institute of Ideas. Gillott and Tizzard also help to run Genepool, the
online clinical genetics library. The chief executive of the British
Pregnancy Advisory Service is Ann Furedi, the wife of Frank Furedi and a
regular contributor to LM and Spiked. Until last year she was communications
director for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The
coordinator of the Pro-Choice Forum, which publicises abortion issues, is
Ellie Lee, a regular writer for LM and Spiked and now series editor for the
Institute of Ideas.

Is all this a coincidence? I don't think so. But it's not easy to understand
why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which wants power for its own
sake, or one following a political design, of which this is an intermediate
step? What I can say is that the scientific establishment, always
politically naive, appears unwittingly to have permitted its interests to be
represented to the public by the members of a bizarre and cultish political
network. Far from rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this
group's repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it.