George Monbiot, in a recent piece
in the Guardian newspaper, suggests that American oil industry millionaires the
Koch brothers are seeking to influence British politics through the UK based Spiked
magazine – a magazine I write for occasionally. Monbiot reports that Spiked
informed him on request that they received some money from the Koch Foundation
to organise a series of high profile free speech events.
As I understand it, the events have been, or are being,
organised. I watched one of
these on-line. It was a good debate, and endeavoured to engage even attendees
who were very critical of the panellists' take on free speech as a universal principle.
The Kochs are incredibly rich, very influential in the US
Republican Party principally and hold very economically liberal views. Monbiot cites
a quote from 40 years ago: ‘Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist
paradigm.’ That’s fair enough – they said it, he reported it. But for some
context, and perhaps to put some balance on his piece, Monbiot could have
mentioned that they also fund work on prison reform (for which President Obama
commended them) and other causes considered progressive by some. They have not
aligned themselves with Trump, and in terms of immigration are often seen as
relatively liberal compared to some strands of the Republican Party. They are
incredibly oil rich Americans who support and promote causes they agree with,
many of which I would disagree with.
Monbiot’s line is not so much an objection to the debates,
but to imply much more. He says that: ‘Until now, there has been no evidence
that Charles and David Koch have directly funded organisations based in the UK’,
and proceeds to suggest throughout his article that the money is not simply for
the events, but is linked to a malign, unstated purpose in the UK. This is
where he adopts smear, caricature and innuendo against his adversaries.
Monbiot gives us his view on the evolution of the Revolutionary
Communist Party (RCP), a Marxist group that folded over two decades ago. He
claims that there is a sort of continuity organisation behind Spiked and some
other organisations with a common origin in the RCP.
In evidence he claims, correctly, that initially Spiked’s
output relied heavily on people who had previously written for LM (formerly
Living Marxism, the RCP’s publication). He could have mentioned that quite a
few of the prominent young journalists who have written for / been involved in
editing Spiked for very many years now would have been in junior school, or
younger, when the magazine started out. He could have pointed out that Spiked
has featured a diverse range of writers, including Labour and Conservative
party members, Trade Unionists, a range of academics and many more. He could
have mentioned that many regular and occasional writers for the magazine have
written for a range of publications and appear in the media - no different to himself. Guardian journalists, too, have written in Spiked on topics where they
find common cause.
Spiked doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a political
publication. It’s positions are very often contrary to the Guardian’s line, and
certainly controversial in some circles. Yet Spiked’s arguments for a full
Brexit, for freedom of speech as a universal principle and opposition to the
encroachment of the state in private life, all resonate with many people.
Monbiot makes highly questionable claims throughout his
piece, such as regarding a supposed ‘enthusiasm for former communists in the Balkans’
of the long defunct magazine LM as somehow relevant. In fact LM steadfastly
opposed support for any side in that conflict, and others. Monbiot took a
different view there, as he has sometimes in relation to western intervention
in other conflicts.
The Spiked he caricatures isn’t the one I occasionally write
for and support. Many of the issues Monbiot says Spiked ‘inveighs against’ are
real issues for many people. It is not only Spiked, or ‘the hard right’, who
have criticised #metoo, Corbyn and ‘anti-capitalism’. Monbiot seems to believe
that no one could possibly think differently to him without some malign,
unstated intent ... some ‘agenda’. Perhaps that is indicative of a more general
problem in left wing politics.
Monbiot claims that Spiked articles ‘repeatedly defend
figures on the hard right or far right: Katie Hopkins, Nigel Farage, Alex
Jones, the Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance, Tommy Robinson, Toby Young,
Arron Banks, Viktor Orbán.’ It would be fair to say that spiked has defended
odious characters such as Hopkins and Jones from
attempts to censor them on line or elsewhere. There is a long tradition of
free speech advocacy that views it as a principle that must also apply to those
you disagree with. This includes those who say offensive things. But as Monbiot
doesn’t mention what they are being defended from, the article plays to the
misapprehension that to back free speech is to agree with that speech. Spiked
has argued for
free speech for all shades of opinion and in many circumstances in which it is
threatened.
Monbiot makes a point of questioning Spiked’s stance on free
speech. He states that Spiked has ‘called for schools, universities and
governments to be “cleansed” of “the malign influence” of green NGOs, which it
denounces as “the environmentalist enemy within”’. ‘Some friends of free
speech, these’, he adds. I looked at the Spiked article he linked to the former sentence.
Neither ‘cleansed’ nor ‘malign influence’ feature anywhere in that article. The
piece warns of the dangers of sustainability becoming an orthodoxy, beyond
questioning. There is no suggestion anywhere that anyone’s free speech should
be inhibited - the opposite in fact.
The words ‘cleansed’ and ‘of the malign influence’ -
referring to the influence of some environmental NGOs in policy making - does
occur in a different Spiked article (not on the subject of free speech at all).
I found it through googling - it was written by the blogger Pete North in 2014.
If the Spiked archive is accurate, he is the writer of one single article in
the magazine’s entire 18 year history. North has called Spiked much worse that
the rhetoric he dishes out against the environmentalists in that article.
Monbiot himself has indulged rather overblown rhetoric himself, for example, arguing
flying across the Atlantic is worse than child abuse, or comparing
the building of a hydro-electric dam in Cambodia to the destruction wrought by
ISIS. Are we to take those statements as the official Guardian message to its highly
mobile readers who benefit from cheap electricity?
Spiked have certainly challenged the labelling of Robinson,
Farage and Orbán as fascists. To assert they are being ‘defended’, without
stating what they are being defended from
is, once again, disingenuous, designed to create a false moral counter-position
in place of a political argument. My reading of Spiked’s articles on the
subject is that Orbán was ‘defended from’ the authority of the EU to bring
sanctions against Hungary in response to the latter’s policies. That is not a
defence of his policies, but principally of Hungarian democracy vis a vis EU authority. Why not engage
with the substance instead of pushing a caricature? If you think it’s a bad
argument, then it shouldn’t be too difficult to do.
Monbiot’s article asserts that one piece in Spiked ‘blamed
the Grenfell Tower disaster on “the moral fervour of the climate change
campaign”’. I read the article. The quote hardly captures the argument put
forward. The full quote from the Spiked piece is: ‘The government push for
action on insulation encouraged shoddy workmanship and cowboy operators, who
took advantage of the moral fervour of the climate-change campaign to make
money.’ Whether you agree or disagree with the article, that is quite different
to Monbiot’s assertion.
Beyond the smear and caricature characteristic of the whole
piece, there is a method of sorts in the article. Monbiot and his partners, Desmog, seem to operate on
the basis of writing the name of the person or organisation they seek to
discredit in the middle of a piece of paper, and selectively drawing lines to
other individuals and organisations with which that person / organisation has
any formal, or indeed informal and even family links, past or present.
Personal connections, sharing panels, writing in others’ publications or
working together are all assumed to be evidence of a nefarious ‘agenda’.
Desmog do this sort of line drawing literally on their blog.
It’s a form of research that a child could do. You could target any individual
or publication: the Guardian, or Desmog
themselves. In Desmog’s case it wouldn’t
take you 120 hours of googling and writing (the length of time Monbiot claims he spent
on his article) to create a web of intrigue: links to rich funders, wealthy PR
gurus, conflicts of interest and even the odd link to criminal activity. To pursue that would be stooping to a level
of conspiracy theorising that demeans politics.
Ultimately Monbiot disagrees strongly with key themes in Spiked:
Brexit, free speech, environmentalism versus development. But for him, the
political is intensely personal. He has let that get in the way of any
semblance of objectivity. Neither does his article work in its own terms, as a
counter to the ideas he dislikes. Associating views contrary to your own with conspiracies,
‘dark money’ or to others’ ‘agendas’ only serves to degrade political
discourse.
