Spiked
Spiked is an online magazine, whose stated aim is to be a "metaphorical missile against misanthropy".ref It claims to support free speech — but only if you freely speak in favour of their pet ideologies. It is sneakily funded by US coal barons the Koch brothers
, via their Charles Koch Foundation.[1][2]
Spiked rails against “climate scaremongering”,ref and calls for fracking and coal production to be ramped up.ref It mocks the idea that air pollution is dangerous,ref and has proposed abolishing the planning system.ref “We need to conquer nature, not bow to it,” it contends. “Let’s make the ‘human footprint’ even bigger".ref
Spiked does not disclose its funding. At all.
Spiked hates: environmentalism and green NGOs,ref leftwing politics, the welfare state,ref regulation, anti-capitalists,ref Jeremy Corbyn, George Soros, George Monbiot,ref #MeToo,ref and Black Lives Matter. Carole Cadwalladr is a "conspiracy theorist". It claims "ordinary people" are oppressed by the “anti-Trump and anti-Brexit cultural elites”, “feministic elites”, “green elites” and “cosmopolitan politicians”.
Spiked loves: Katie Hopkins, Stephen Bannon and Breitbart,[3] Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Tommy Robinson, Toby Young, Arron Banks, Viktor Orbán. It demands the hardest of possible Brexits, insisting that “No deal is nothing to fear”, as it would allow the UK to scrap EU regulations.ref
Timeline
After Living Marxism met its nemesis in Mar.2000, a network of new groups sprang up to replace it, with the usual suspects: Frank Furedi, Claire Fox, Mick Hume, Brendan O’Neill, James Heartfield, Michael Fitzpatrick, James Woudhuysen. Among these new groups were the Institute of Ideas (then the "Academy of Ideas"), the Manifesto Club as well as Spiked.[4]
Powerbase has all the info: LM network
, Manifesto Club, Spiked, Institute of Ideas, and more.
| Mar.2001 |  Spiked Online was founded after the bankruptcy of its predecessor, Living Marxism. Mick Hume was again the editor, with most of the same contributors.[5][6] |
| Mar.2000 |   Living Marxism closed due to bankruptcy, after losing a libel case in which it falsely claimed that ITN had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims.[7][8] |
| Jan.1997 | LM: Living Marxism became LM after the demise of the RCP. LM launched itself with the cover story that would be turn out to be its nemesis in Mar.2000, the allegations that ITN and other mainstream media outlets had 'fooled the world' in their reporting of Bosnian Muslims apparently imprisoned behind Serb barbed wire.[7] |
| 1996 | RCP Dissolution: The Revolutionary Communist Party slowly disbanded, although some former members continued to maintain a loose political network to promote its ideas.[9] The RCP sold Living Marxism to Helene Guldberg at the end of 1996. |
| Nov.1988 |  Living Marxism magazine was launched by the Revolutionary Communist Party, with Mick Hume as editor. See Living Marxism |
| 1981 | Revolutionary Communist Party: the Revolutionary Communist Tendency changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist Party. See Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978). Its main preoccupations at the time were Ireland and anti-racism.[10] |
| 1976 | Revolutionary Communist Tendency: the Revolutionary Communist Group split again, and one of the splinters formed the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, led by Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent. See Frank Füredi |
| 1974 |  Revolutionary Communist Group: after a dispute over arithmetic in Vol.3 of "Das Kapital", the International Socialists Group split, and one of the new factions formed the Revolutionary Communist Group. Revolutionary Communist Tendency |
| Dec.1962 | International Socialists Group: The Socialist Review Group became the International Socialism Group.[11][12] |
| 1950 | The Socialist Review Group was founded by 8 supporters of Yigael Gluckstein, aka Tony Cliff, a Trotskyist activist. The group had been expelled from the Revolutionary Communist Party for their views of Russia as a bureaucratic state capitalist regime.[11] |
People
- Brendan O'Neill, Editor. Co-founder of the anti-regulatory Manifesto Club. Brendan O'Neill
- Helene Guldberg, Co-founder; was Managing Editor; was a director of Spiked Ltd (Dec.2005-Nov.2017).ref Helene Guldberg
- Matt Ridley is a shareholder in Spiked Ltd.
Contributors
, owned by the Reason Foundation — also generously funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.refArticles
- Apr.23.2019: Spiked Smears Autistic Teenager Brendan O’Neill attacked Greta Thunberg as being like a "cult member", pushed into the "position of its global leader" after having "pumped her and million of other children with the politics of fear". Tim Fenton, Zelo Street.
- Oct.02.2017: Iain Dale’s 100 most influential people on the Right 2017. Editor, Spiked Online. Brendan O’Neill has become something of a hero for those who are interested in defending free speech and freedom of expression. He’s not afraid to take on the politically correct brigade and deserves a much higher profile in the next twelve months. Iain Dale, Conservative Home.
- Nov.18.2016: ‘Spiked’ launches a demented, fact free attack on “Stop Funding Hate”. Stop Funding Hate" is a campaign tackling racist tabloids. Try what may, I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever to support Spiked’s claim that this campaign is a “hateful, nasty elitist campaign for press censorship”. Spiked writers Naomi Firsht and Brendan O'Neill have simply made stuff up. Colin Lawson, Reason and Reality.
References
- ^ How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain. That Spiked magazine’s US funding arm received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation suggests a hidden agenda. George Monbiot, DeSmogUK, The Guardian, Dec.07.2018.
- ^ US Oil Billionaire Charles Koch Funds UK Anti-Environment Spiked Network. For years, people have speculated about who is behind a shadowy group of well-connected ‘free speech advocates’ spreading far-right ideologies and climate science denial. Through a joint investigation with George Monbiot at The Guardian, DeSmog UK can reveal that the group are funded by the Koch brothers — right-wing libertarian US oil billionaires who have been at the heart of climate change denial in the USA. Mike Small, DeSmog UK, Dec.06.2018.
- ^ No, Stephen Bannon is not a white supremacist. ...the appointment of Stephen Bannon – former Breitbart Media chairman and CEO of Trump’s campaign – has been a boon. Tom Salter, Spiked, Nov.21.2016.
- ^ In defence of "radicalisation". ...the RCP ... folded in the mid-Nineties, but few of us actually ‘recanted’ our ideas. Instead we resolved to support one another more informally as we pursued our political tradition as individuals, or launched new projects with more general aims that have also engaged people from different traditions, or none. These include spiked and the Institute of Ideas, where I now work. Dolan Cummings, Spiked, Sept.05.2007. Original archived
- ^ The politics and origins of Britain’s Spiked-Online—Part Two. Zach Reed, World Socialist Web Site, Mar.31.2016.
- ^ Why we were right to fight. Ten years after a libel trial closed LM magazine, its former editor reflects on how that case foreshadowed the battles over free speech today. Mick Hume, Spiked, Mar.18.2010.
- ^ a b The picture that fooled the world. This image of an emaciated Muslim caged behind Serb barbed wire, filmed by a British news team, became a worldwide symbol of the war in Bosnia. But the picture is not quite what it seems. Thomas Deichmann, LM, Feb.1997. Original archived
- ^ The day I faced being a £1m bankrupt. The European Court of Human Rights thinks our libel laws are unfair. For the author, they turned out to be a Kafkaesque parody of justice. Mick Hume, The Times, Mar.07.2005. Original archived
- ^ Revolutionary Communist Party: 1996 - Dissolution. Powerbase. Accessed Oct.20.2018.
- ^ The Revolutionary Communist Tendency / Party… An archive of British Trotskyist publications. Rob M, Splits&Fusions, Aug.31.2018.
- ^ a b A World to Win: Life of a Revolutionary. Chapter 3: The Socialist Review Group. Tony Cliff, Marxists.org, Bookmarks Publications, London, 2000.
- ^ The Smallest Mass Party in the World. Part 3: Facing the crisis. Ian H Birchall, Marxists.de, SWP 1981.
