The October 2007 edition of the international anti-fascist magazine Searchlight has a topical article ("The browning of the BNP") on what it identifies as the intellectual affinity between the British National Party and the clammy ideological impulses that inform Martin Durkin's documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, shown on Channel 4 in Britain in March 2007.
An entertaining if familiar tour of the deep background of Durkin's film - the ideological evolution that leads from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) to Living Marxism to LM Magazine to Spiked and the Institute of Ideas (IoI) - echoes earlier surveys by George Monbiot (here and here), GMWatch and LobbyWatch while adding an ultra-right frisson.
But the dissection of this trajectory of supercharged, cod-leftist, compulsively contrarian, relentlessly cynical Ayn Randism makes a shivery misidentification when it refers to Mike Hulme (leading climate scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and participant in the IoI's forthcoming festival) rather than Mick Hume as the ex-editor of Spiked. The misnaming is familiar - see DK Renton (and a wider story of RCP - at least - indulgence, here), but this confusion of the serious and the gruesome is of a different order.
