An anonymous coward writes:

"Invasion of the Entryists"

George Monbiot, Guardian (London), December 9, 2003

How did a cultish political network become the public face of the
scientific establishment?

One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of
former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The "neo-cons"
pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party
and key departments of the British government.

But there is a group
which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of
the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right.
While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics --
entering organisations and taking them over -- appear unchanged.
Research published for the first time today suggests that the members
of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British
establishment.The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter
called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to
destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners
marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved
into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It
tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League
and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at
least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of
opposing factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By
this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the
journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to
the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a "confident
individualism" without social constraint. It campaigned against gun
control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography,
and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for
corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian
Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the
corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the
Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started
writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph
and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains,
offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex
scientific issues".

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with
remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and
environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these
platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,
Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi
sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their
potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely
claiming that the news organisation's journalists had fabricated
evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and
was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the
Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work
of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on
his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this
group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its
participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of
public communication used by the science and medical establishment.

Let us begin with the Association for Sense About Science (SAS), the
lobby group chaired by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Taverne, and
whose board contains such prominent scientists as Professor Sir Brian
Heap, Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie and Sir John Maddox. In October
it organised a letter to the Times by 114 scientists, complaining
that the government had failed to make the case for genetic
engineering. In response, Tony Blair told the Commons that he had not
ruled out the commercialisation of GM crops in Britain. The phone
number for Sense About Science is shared by the "publishing house"
Global Futures. One of its two trustees is Phil Mullan, a former RCP
activist and LM contributor who is listed as the registrant of Spiked
magazine's website. The only publication on the Global Futures site
is a paper by Frank Furedi, the godfather of the cult. The assistant
director of Sense About Science, Ellen Raphael, is the contact person
for Global Futures. The director of SAS, Tracey Brown, has written
for both LM and Spiked and has published a book with the Institute of
Ideas: all of them RCP spin-offs. Both Brown and Raphael studied
under Frank Furedi at the University of Kent, before working for the
PR firm Regester Larkin, which defends companies such as the biotech
giants Aventis CropScience, Bayer and Pfizer against consumer and
environmental campaigners. Brown's address is shared by Adam Burgess,
also a contributor to LM. LM's health writer, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick,
is a trustee of both Global Futures and Sense About Science.

SAS has set up a working party on peer review, which is chaired and
hosted by the Royal Society. One of its members is Tony Gilland, who
is science and society director at the Institute of Ideas, a
contributor to both LM and Spiked and the joint author of the
proposal Frank Furedi made to the supermarkets. Another is Fiona Fox,
the sister of Claire Fox, who runs the Institute of Ideas. Fiona Fox
was a frequent contributor to LM. One of her articles generated
outrage among human rights campaigners by denying that there had been
a genocide in Rwanda.

Fiona Fox is also the director of the Science Media Centre, the
public relations body set up by Baroness Susan Greenfield of the
Royal Institution. It is funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical
companies Astra Zeneca, Dupont and Pfizer. Fox has used the Science
Media Centre to promote the views of industry and to launch fierce
attacks against those who question them. She ran the campaign, for
example, to rubbish last year's BBC drama Fields of Gold.

The list goes on and on. The policy officer of the Genetic Interest
Group, which represents the interests of people with genetic
disorders, is now John Gillott, formerly science editor of LM and a
regular contributor to Spiked. The director of the Progress
Educational Trust, which campaigns for research on human embryos, is
Juliet Tizzard, a contributor to LM, Spiked and the Institute of
Ideas. Gillott and Tizzard also help to run Genepool, the online
clinical genetics library. The chief executive of the British
Pregnancy Advisory Service is Ann Furedi, the wife of Frank Furedi
and a regular contributor to LM and Spiked. Until last year she was
communications director for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority. The coordinator of the Pro-Choice Forum, which publicises
abortion issues, is Ellie Lee, a regular writer for LM and Spiked and
now series editor for the Institute of Ideas.

Is all this a coincidence? I don't think so. But it's not easy to
understand why it is happening. Are we looking at a group which wants
power for its own sake, or one following a political design, of which
this is an intermediate step? What I can say is that the scientific
establishment, always politically naive, appears unwittingly to have
permitted its interests to be represented to the public by the
members of a bizarre and cultish political network. Far from
rebuilding public trust in science and medicine, this group's
repugnant philosophy could finally destroy it.