Nick Cohen writes about BBC Radio 4's strange and intimate relationship with the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Radio 4 is so lost in establishment liberalism it does not know how to break out of it. The BBC's managers accept that they must give a hearing to the currents in public life they habitually ignore. But like a teetotaller on his first binge or a vicar on his first visit to a brothel, they do not experiment cautiously but go wild at the first sniff of a novel experience and hand the airwaves over to the strangest group produced by the Seventies far Left: the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The best way to describe it is as a cult that followed the teachings of its great helmsman, one Frank Furedi. The best way to understand the paranoia of its politics is to add that Furedi spent years working under the assumed name of "Frank Richards" because, like Lenin and Trotsky before him, he wanted a nom de guerre to throw the spies of the imperialist state off his trail. 

In the 1990s, the party's leaders decided to give up on socialism and move into the media. And like good Leninists, the rank and file obeyed their superiors' orders and abandoned their previous convictions on demand. The Moral Maze is now its base at the BBC and is on the radio as I write. Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, which the party's cadres founded when they decided that Trotsky was wrong after all, is on the panel and one of the witnesses is a contributor to Spiked, the institute's online journal. When I last appeared on the programme, one of the witnesses was Brendan O'Neill, the editor of Spiked, and half the panel — the author Kenan Malik and James Panton, an Oxford academic — were Spiked regulars. I waited for Michael Buerk, the presenter, to tell listeners that a fair proportion of his guests came from this cosy coterie. He never did. 

Nor do his colleagues. If you come across a new voice on a Radio 4 talk show, talking with loudmouthed conviction, the odds are that he or she will be from the RCP/Institute of Ideas. Indeed, if you want to become a talking head on Radio 4, the best advice I can give you is to join the RCP crowd. 

That's just the first four paragraphs above. Read the rest here.

You might remember the counter-factual Channel Four (not a BBC station) TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle from a few years back. The producer of that documentary, Martin Durkin is also tied to the RCP (or what remains of it) although he denies this. What is it with British media and the RCP?

Nick Cohen has written about the RCP before in the New Statesman.