But let's talk politics. I mean lets just talk about the background of the Science Media Centre and Ms Fox herself. The background to this is an organisation which at one point was called the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, then became Living Marxism and after Living Marxism was destroyed in its libel suit over Srebrenica and the concentration camps there, turned up the next day calling itself the Institute of Ideas... Now these groups when they were part of the Revolutionary Communist Tendency and now they are part of the Institute of Ideas are passionately pro and uncritical of science. They're passionately pro any sort of quote scientific advance in genetics, in medicine. They're passionately pro nuclear and always have been. So this is a group which has been set up and has become very powerful and very influential and it disturbs me a great deal that it washes its way through so much of the media as it does, on radio, on television, in journals as well.

Rose also noted the tendency for members of the network at various points to write 'under pseudonyms, several different pseudonyms in some cases.'

Spinwatch has monitored the groups that have flowed from the RCP, groups we collectively term the 'LM network'. Moving from an ultra-left position through to a libertarian pro-corporate line of argument, they have been, as Rose notes, strong defenders of what they call 'scientific progress', meaning that they have been strongly in favour of GM technology and other scientific advances favoured by transnational corporations. However, they have also taken a strong line against scientific progress in the area of risk. So they are opposed to the scientific consensus on climate change, on harms caused by tobacco and by the food and advertising industries.

The common denominator there is that this kind of scientific progress is against the interests of key corporate sectors. Spinwatch has also recently reported on how their traditional 'anti-Imperialist' position on colonial struggles has degenerated into a position that attacks those offering solidarity to the Palestinian people. Overall, what we see from the very earliest days of the RCT to the antics of the various tentacles of the LM network now, is consistent in the sense that it involves attacking the left and progressive movements. However, the increasingly close relationship between the LM network and corporate lobby groups and neoliberal and neoconservative think tanks, suggests that it might be more accurate to see them not as libertarian iconoclasts, but simply as another faction of the British conservative movement.

The original Red Pepper materials are here:

Out of the laboratory Emma Hughes hosts a Red Pepper roundtable on science