Paul Mercer
Longman, Harlow, Essex, UK. £45
This is a magnificent reference book which will prove indispensable to anyone interested in politics. It is a godsend to academics, activists, researchers, journalists and secret policemen.
Although the author is politically more to what most people would term ‘the right’, this work is written, as the publisher’s blurb correctly puts it, with ‘critical impartiality, emphasising the objective of providing the user with a range of factual data to assist informed assessment.’ ‘Political’ is defined in the broadest terms, so entries include not only merely ideological and political groups or parties, like the SWP, or Militant, or the BNP, but single issue pressure groups supporting environmentalism, animal rights, health issues and the like. Quangos, charities, think tanks, professional bodies (like the BMA), trade unions and religious movements or ‘cults’ are also included, wherever their activities have some involvement in the political arena. Internal party groupings like the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee or Labour’s Tribune Group are also described and there is even an entry for MI5 (but not for Special Branch or MI6).
Another useful feature of the volume is its listings of overseas groups or parties who have either a formal or informal input into British politics. The ANC, Earth First, Queer Nation, the (Nazi) Church of the Creator, the (French) Front National, and various other political groups, parties or terrorist groups are included. Similarly useful are listings for now defunct but historically significant groups like Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, the British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), Popular Propaganda (a libertarian conservative group) and the Committee for a Free Britain.
Entries attempt to provide current addresses, dates of establishment, names of leading lights and other basic information, self descriptions of groups where the author considers them to be accurate, and the author’s own descriptions, which frequently include extensive and properly sourced data drawn from books or press accounts. Entries vary in length from a few lines to highly detailed mini-essays. A separate section lists journals and magazines, and there is an ‘Issues’ index, an alphabetical listing of groups according to political andor issue orientation, such as ‘Anarchist’, ‘Anti-racist’, ‘Charities’, ‘Extreme Right’ etc. This could be improved, however, by the inclusion of such categories as ‘Civil Liberties’, ‘Free Speech/Censorship’, ‘Free Market Economics’ and ‘Classical Liberal/Libertarian’. There is also a list of abbreviations, a comprehensive Names Index and nine charts of ‘Lineages’ showing the development and/or factionalising of Communist, Trotskyist and Nazi/Fascist groups.
With any such reference work, especially one as ambitious as this, there are bound to be errors. A few I noted at random are: an error in the address for the relatively new civil libertarian group Diversity; and in the entry for Feminists Against Censorship, the book Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures is attributed to the wrong ‘authors’ (it is an edited collection of essays). In some cases the author does not have addresses, but welcomes communications (c/o the publisher) from those with details. There are occasional omissions. There is no entry for the influential Mont Pelerin Society, the international classical liberal/free market annual scholarly conference. He states that the Unification Church runs ‘political front groups’ in the UK, but does not name them. There is no entry for the Church of Scientology.
Among defunct groups he omits the Adam Smith Club (based at the IEA), of which I was Secretary, which was active in the 1970s, and the Pinay Circle.
One can occasionally argue with the author’s comments. The description of former National Front supporter Michael Walker’s journal Scorpion as a ‘racist newsletter’ and ‘certainly white supremacist’ does not really accurately sum up its largely cultural and philosophical content, its more sophisticated theoretical position (akin to the continental quasi-fascist and Nietszchean group GRECE), nor its relativist (rather than hierarchical supremacist) and probably sincere position on alleged racial differences. The entry for Searchlight summarises extensively the growing recognition on the ‘left’ of that journal’s involvement in dirty tricks, disinformation and role as an agency of the British intelligence services. But Mercer is surprisingly gentle with them, and should have commented upon and documented some of their frequent deliberate falsifications, gross inaccuracies and smears.
The entry for my own group, the Libertarian Alliance, comments that we have ‘close links with the right-wing of the Conservative Party’. This is misleading, for our orientation has never been toward party politics, but rather toward scholarly and long-term ideological endeavour. Moreover, while we are happy to speak to and, we hope, influence Conservative groups, we speak to the Labour Party, trade unions or anyone open to some aspect of the libertarian position. The radicalism of our civil libertarian position on immigration, victimless crimes, sexual freedom and tolerance, free speech and censorship, and threats to civil liberties, is hardly what comes to mind when the term ‘right-wing’ is used. Neither does the author mention that we have as many ‘links’ with libertarian socialists, anarchists, sexual minorities, other civil libertarians, socialist feminists and the NCCL (to which we are affiliated) as we do with the Conservative Party.
This complaint overlaps with a more theoretical one, that of the author’s use of the term ‘extreme right wing’ to describe fascist, national socialist and racist opinions, and ‘right wing’ to describe positions ranging from authoritarian and ‘traditonalist’ conservatism, liberal conservatism, free market economics, classical liberalism and libertarianism. Since the latter have no political or intellectual relationship to the former, and are not part of some more moderate version of which the former is the more extreme extension, this is confusing. Why not use the proper and accurate ideological labels themselves: ie Nazi, Fascist, Marxist, Socialist, Anarchist, Conservative, Liberal, Libertarian etc?
But these criticisms are more by way of niggling. They do not detract from the author’s achievement in compiling this work nor from its usefulness. One looks forward to corrected and more detailed future editions. No serious researcher will be able to do without them.
Monthly card index upratings of entries are available on subscription. A CD-ROM 6 monthly updating service will also be available in the future.