RCP/Spiked/IoI

[nino_savatte]

Yes, but that's the old leadership, inner circle and useful contacts from the rank and file plus newer people who were never in the RCP. It's the old RCP rank and file I'm asking about.

I was always under the impression that the rank and file were referred to as 'supporters' rather than 'members'. The membership itself was rather small and consisted of Furedi and his inner circle.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Look who's involved in this Spiked! organised event. Only Policy Exchange.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/events/#.VNpCJSusXnh

Then there's this pencil neck.

Two Spiked young Tory types, someone from Policy Exchange, someone who left Policy Exchange to become an advisor to Boris Johnson, and, er, rather incongruously, Julie Bindell.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I was always under the impression that the rank and file were referred to as 'supporters' rather than 'members'. The membership itself was rather small and consisted of Furedi and his inner circle.

I think the formal membership was bigger than that, but for the purposes of my question their distinction between supporters and members isn't that meaningful as "supporters" were expected to be more active and involved than members of most left wing groups.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

The rank and file are still around and promoting IoI front groups for instance they have pro-migration stalls at events in Hackney...

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Two Spiked young Tory types, someone from Policy Exchange, someone who left Policy Exchange to become an advisor to Boris Johnson, and, er, rather incongruously, Julie Bindell.

I don't think Bindell's presence is incongrous she has been attacking intersectionalism and even the sensible wing of it for a while

 

[Idris2002]

I still have a chuckle at "Preparing for Power". How fucking delusional was that?

If you build it, they will come.

 

[Idris2002]

Yes, but that's the old leadership, inner circle and useful contacts from the rank and file plus newer people who were never in the RCP. It's the old RCP rank and file I'm asking about.

A friend of mine was in their student group. Now she's a suburban working mum of two, and quite normal (still left, but not active).

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I don't think Bindell's presence is incongrous she has been attacking intersectionalism and even the sensible wing of it for a while

She doesn't like intersectionalists, but she also doesn't like Tories.

 

[killer b]

Maybe @dave cinzano can help?

 

[nogojones]

The only person I personally know who was involved with them pops up on my fb now and again denying climate change and wearing Bush for president baseball caps. Ever the contrarian

 

[Nigel Irritable]

The rank and file are still around and promoting IoI front groups for instance they have pro-migration stalls at events in Hackney...

Their successor organisations attract a supply of interns and aspirational younger people, who wear laminated badges at their events and usher people around and operate the microphones (well described in the LRB piece early on in this thread) and run stalls at appropriate events. But I'm talking about the original rank and file. The people who made up their branches in Bristol or Nottingham in 1988 or 1992. What happened to them? And I don't even mean where are they now so much as what did they do during the period when their party and then they themselves became more or less surplus to requirements?

 

[DaveCinzano]

Isn't "Fiona Foster" Claire Fox's sister?

That's the sausage

 

[Nigel Irritable]

A friend of mine was in their student group. Now she's a suburban working mum of two, and quite normal (still left, but not active).

When did she leave?

 

[8ball]

...I don't even mean where are they now so much as what did they do during the period when their party and then they themselves became more or less surplus to requirements?

Which requirements?

 

[JimW]

Look who's involved in this Spiked! organised event. Only Policy Exchange.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/events/#.VNpCJSusXnh

Then there's this pencil neck.

For one glorious moment I read the subhead 'podcast' there as 'Posadist'.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Which requirements?

The requirements of the RCP's leadership.

 

[treelover]

She doesn't like intersectionalists, but she also doesn't like Tories.

They don't like her either.

 

[Idris2002]

Probably in the early

When did she leave?

Probably in the early 90s, I think.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Probably in the early
Probably in the early 90s, I think.

So actually during the change of ideology.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

Their successor organisations attract a supply of interns and aspirational younger people, who wear laminated badges at their events and usher people around and operate the microphones (well described in the LRB piece early on in this thread) and run stalls at appropriate events. But I'm talking about the original rank and file. The people who made up their branches in Bristol or Nottingham in 1988 or 1992. What happened to them? And I don't even mean where are they now so much as what did they do during the period when their party and then they themselves became more or less surplus to requirements?

some of them are still around or at least were during 08/09 check out that modern movement link I reposted on the previous page, also the people I met on their stalls in Hackney which must have been 07ish were typical old lefty types who had been around for years - you know the type.

Some may have left since then, but I don't know. I'm sure many drifted away during the transformation, but I think more of them hung around than you might think. thanks to the front groups and the salons and forums etc - not to mention IoI is a membership organisation.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I note that Kenan Malik, as well as standing for them in the 1992 elections, was the editor of the next step in the early 1990s when it was repurposed as an internal publication.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

some of them are still around or at least were during 08/09 check out that modern movement link I reposted on the previous page

That piece is interesting, but I'm not sure that it actually says very much about the pre-1997 rank and file. The people who were to the "left" of the IoI were themselves newer recruits.

I suppose that what largely happened was that the old rank and file was in decline anyway by the time the earliest parts of the "turn" are lauched by Furedi and Co at the end of 1991. If they were growing or even doing ok by that point, there probably wouldn't have been the same kind of abrupt turn. And that although lots of them didn't go the whole route towards the IoI and its politics, they were already steeped in the RCP's contempt for the rest of the left (indeed for anything political outside the RCP). And then they were influenced by both the general demoralisation of the left in that period and the RCP's extreme pessimism, which preceded the shift towards right wing politics. So probably not the kind of people you'd expect to try to form new splinter groups, a Continuity RCP, etc.

There was an ex-RCP member in my SSP branch in Glasgow. And Paul Flewers turns up occasionally in more academic-style internet discussions. But beyond that, I really don't think I've ever encountered a former RCP rank and filer in any left wing context.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I think the formal membership was bigger than that, but for the purposes of my question their distinction between supporters and members isn't that meaningful as "supporters" were expected to be more active and involved than members of most left wing groups.

On this bit: The LRB pieces quotes a former member saying that when they hit 900 activists in the mid eighties it was divided into roughly 400 members / 500 supporters. So the formal membership wasn't just the central leadership, but it was a slight minority. That in itself is quite unusual - only Lutte Ouvrier that I can think of amongst even slightly substantial groups with a category of organised supporters or candidate members has more "supporters" than "members". Presumably this helped the leadership exercise tight control and also gave most involved an exciting sense of "hardness" and "discipline".

 

[belboid]

I know one ex member, would probably have left in the early/mid-nineties. Still a leftie, with a slight tendency to be as abstract as possible about issues. I suspect most of them are just too embarassed to mention it to anyone, or have just left political activity entirely.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

The Don Milligan piece earlier in the thread takes the view that the core leadership decided to jump back into bourgeois careers that their youthful activism had denied them, having realised in 1989/1990 that the revolution wasn't going to happen and certainly not under their leadership. And that the next six or seven years were about using the commies and socialists in the existing membership and the resources of the existing organisation to create a new periphery/milieu before said communists in the rank and file could be discarded with communism itself.

It's an appealing thesis, but I'm not sure how it really squares with the bewilderment of "Fiona Foster's" 1996 contribution. She sounds like a half deprogrammed scientologist, not sure what can or can't be saved from the old cause. She certainly doesn't sound like someone coming to the end of a well planned six or seven year scheme. In general, I'm always a bit sceptical of very "neat" accounts of any long term process that leave out confusion, stupidity and blundering about as factors.

 

[nino_savatte]

If you build it, they will come.

I could put together a piece of IKEA furniture quicker.

 

[youngian]

When Littlejohn finally becomes the worst dead journalist instead of the shittiest journalist alive, O'Neill is a shoe-in to take over his putrid Mail column
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/

An A-to-Z guide to the new PC
From appropriation to zero tolerance, everything you need to keep an eye on while checking your privilege

 

[DaveCinzano]

Maybe @dave cinzano can help?

 

[nino_savatte]

When Littlejohn finally becomes the worst dead journalist instead of the shittiest journalist alive, O'Neill is a shoe-in to take over his putrid Mail column
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/

That's what passes for 'satire' on O'NeillWorld.

The comments underneath are typically ignorant.

Here's a sample.

mohdanga Ed • 6 days ago
It's ironic how non-whites complain about white privilege in the white countries they have chosen to come and live in, all the while receiving benefits from the white privileged host population who built white countries from nothing. Stay in your non-white countires, build them to the standard of living that white countries have and us privileged whites won't complain.

 

[DaveCinzano]

When Littlejohn finally becomes the worst dead journalist instead of the shittiest journalist alive, O'Neill is a shoe-in to take over his putrid Mail column
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9432672/an-a-to-z-of-the-new-pc/

At risk of sounding like Alanis Morrisette, there is a certain wry humour to be had in O'Neill shilling such nonsense to a right-wing rag such as the Speccy Twat, given that one of the RCP's big things was how political correctness had been, in essence, a right-wing invention mocking the left (and subsequently taken up by municipal liberals in lieu of actually effecting social change). There was a whole conference devoted to the theme in 1993 - ‘The Perils Of Political Correctness’.