LM WATCH is a collaborative effort aimed at tracking the LM network - former members and supporters of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), plus more recent acolytes.
Although originally a tiny splinter of a Trotskyist subgroup, Furedi and his followers now promote an extreme libertarian ideology and eulogise technologies like nuclear power, genetic engineering and human cloning.
The reason for wanting to stay alert to their activities is that, in order to punch above their weight, they often hide their affiliations and engage in infiltration of media organisations or operate via front groups or by colonising existing lobby groups. The primary channels for promoting the network's ideology, since their LM magazine was sued out of existence, are Spiked-online and the Institute of Ideas (IoI). Both of which have been successful in drawing support from major foundations , transnational corporations and even government funding bodies. But beyond this members of the LM network have managed to gain a remarkable degree of control over certain aspects of the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment. They hold key positions in Sense About Science , the Science Media Centre, the Genetic Interest Group, the Progress Educational Trust, Genepool, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and even the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). They have used these positions, in the words of Guardian columnist George Monbiot, ‘to promote the interests of pharmaceutical and biotech companies and to dismiss the concerns of the public and non-governmental organisations’. |
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