They concern the strong influence of the Koch Brothers-funded rightist-libertarian Spiked Online and its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party, including a number of Spiked staff standing on MEP lists, and how the Brexit "Party" morphed from the shambles that conducted a poorly attended march on Westminster a month or so ago to a relatively slick campaign with strong production values:
FOX BREAKS COVER - From Revolutionary Communist To Farage's Right Hand Woman
Otto English on the weird moral maze of would-be MEP Claire Fox and her Spiked network.
Nigel Farage’s Brexit party is leading the polls for the EU elections and, given the party has no manifesto, policies or coherent strategy for leaving the EU, that’s some achievement. It seems that our political discourse is now so irredeemably f*cked that voting for a party with no actual policies in order to elect MEPs to a parliament they don’t believe in is just fine and dandy.
As Farage paraded his candidates for the adoring media, one in particular caught my eye. There – in amongst the Rees-Moggs and middle-aged millionaires was Claire Fox – known to Radio 4 listeners as a talking head on the
Moral Maze.
Fox is currently director of the ‘think tank’ the Institute of Ideas, but for two decades she was a core figure in the Revolutionary Communist Party and the co-publisher of its in-house magazine,
Living Marxism. Neither Fox nor the Brexit Party attempted to deny that, but I wonder whether rank-and-file Brexiters planning to vote for Ms Fox know quite what they are getting.
...
Bust as Living Marxism – Reborn as Spiked
Since 1997, the group has rebranded. LM – now known as Spiked – thrives online and its editor, Brendan O’Neill, has increasingly cosied up to the Brexit Establishment while accepting $300k from the Charles Koch Foundation. Claire Fox writes for the magazine intermittently, while trotting out libertarian stances including, allegedly, the view that Gary Glitter had a right to download child pornography. Her self-styled ‘Institute of Ideas’ (which had to rename itself the ‘Academy of Ideas’) has served as a hub for the
LM network which includes
Brexit: the Movie maker Martin Durkin and others.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/04/24/fox-breaks-cover-from-revolutionary-communist-to-farages-right-hand-woman/
AstroTurfers of Britain Part Two: Who is Behind Brexit Party Recruitment and its PR Makeover?
Otto English delves deeper into Claire Fox and Spiked Online‘s close connection to Nigel Farage’s new party, and discovers another PR executive involved in recruiting potential MEPs.
It seems just a few short weeks ago that we were howling at its laugh-a-minute ‘March for Leave’ and low-tech website. How did it turn from an amateurish outfit into an undeniably slick operation – with a superior launch video and a festival-style roadshow touring the country? And, on that journey, why has Nigel Farage stuck so steadfastly by Claire Fox, the only weak link in the chain?
...
It started with Claire Fox. To grasp why her past membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) remains so relevant, and why people like me keep banging on about it, you have to first understand that the RCP never actually went away.
...
The group had always excelled at astroturfing – magnifying their message across the political fringes via front organisations and pop-up publications and, if anything changed with the demise of the RCP, it was only that, with time, the
Living Marxism alumni simply got much better at it.
...
For such a small group, the Spiked network is remarkably well-represented on the Brexit Party candidate list and it is quite possible that Katon has been ransacking her contacts book. In addition to her client Claire Fox, Katon’s colleague David Bull who spoke at a Spiked event in 2003, is also standing for the party in the North West.
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/05/13/astroturfers-of-britain-part-two-who-is-behind-brexit-party-recruitment-and-its-pr-makeover/
Twitter user Bob from Brockley posted a useful roundup of similar concerns:
Bob From Brockley @bobfrombrockley
A short thread about Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party candidates from Spiked (Claire Fox & Alka Cuthbert - also active in the Full Brexit pressure group), their Northern Ireland backstory, and the crapness of our media:
(Click on the tweet to access the thread - it's too long to excerpt here in the time I can spare today.)
A few thoughts:
Some of our American friends on DU seem very keen to jump to the conclusion that Putin's behind our current travails, when the role of the American right/libertarian movement is all too apparent. The involvement of one doesn't discount the other, but we can draw clear lines of influence and profit between the vulture capitalists (including the current US president) who're only too eager to pick over the UK's bones post-Brexit and arch-Brexiters in the UK political scene.
The Euro elections are weird. The expectation is that those elected will only be in post for a short while, if at all. That may mean that voters are less worried about the political hinterlands and quirks of some of the Brexit "Party" candidates, and more focused on piling in behind its bandwagon.
Turnout is the key factor. Farage's parties have in the past never done well in elections where the turnout has been around 40 per cent or over. Will these EU elections pull people to the polls more than they have in the past? And, obviously, if so, which ones ...?
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