EXPOSING THE RIGHT-WING 'THINKTANKS'

In their book, 'Banana Republicans', US authors (and public relations experts) Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber outline, among other things, the systematic and successful way in which right-wing, corporate-funded thinktanks - claiming to be neutral and nonpartisan - have hijacked the US political, media and intellectual agendas in recent years.

It is a book crying out for a UK equivalent - given the growing proliferation of similar 'nonpartisan' (but glaringly and undeniably right-wing and conservative) thinktanks on this side of the pond.

The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Policy Exchange, Civitas, Reform and the Adam Smith Institute publish right-wing screeds and propaganda, in the guise of 'academic' papers and pamphlets, on a weekly basis. A gullible 24-hour news media here in the United Kingdom invites their spokespersons to offer regular comment on the issues of the day, without revealing their right-wing, free-market, anti-immigration links to their viewers.

None of these thinktanks offer any specialist expertise on a subject - say, the Middle East - in as rigorous, neutral and peer-reviewed manner as a university department or professional academic might. Yet they are easier to get hold of and far more media-savvy than your average professor or lecturer and so they are taken seriously and given acres of media coverage, despite the fraudulent and politicized nature of much of their 'research'. One only has to watch the BBC's flagship programme Newsnight tear apart Policy Exchange's widely-reported and widely-acclaimed report on extremism within Britains mosques (my own posting on the subject is here).

Yet the supposedly liberal and left-wing BBC Newsnight last week chose to carry a typically sensationalist, over-the-top and over-hyped report from reporter Richard Watson - on alleged government funding of 'radical' Muslim organisations - which relied on an investigation by the Centre for Social Cohesion. It left viewers with no proper information as to what this rather Orwellian-sounding institution stands for, or who its staff are.

The Centre for Social Cohesion was founded last year by the right-wing thinktank Civitas. Its website claims it is trying to "help bring Britain's ethnic and religious communities closer together while strengthening British traditions of openness, tolerance and democracy."

However, the political views and agendas of its staff and advisory council suggest it will have the exact opposite effect - fanning, instead, political intolerance, racial and religious hatred and right-wing authoritarianism.

Its director is the twenty-something Douglas Murray, self-proclaimed British neocon and author of "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. Murray appears frequently on programmes like the BBC's Question Time to mock and ridicule British Muslim organizations - all of which, he seems to believe, are filled with closet Islamists and jihadists. In an article in the Sunday Times, he described himself as a writer "most critical of Islam's current manifestation in the West".

And one only has to take a look at the members of the Centre's Advisory Council to realise how toxic and deep-seated its blatantly anti-Islam, anti-immigration agenda is. There's the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey who has defended both the Pope's comments linking Islam and violence and Samuel Huntington's controversial 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis. There's the editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, who was effectively described as a racist by the then head of the Commision for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, after arguing for the left to get to grips with immigration by abandoning multiculturalism. There's the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, whose recent claims about there being so-called 'no-go areas' in Britain for non-Muslims, and whose history of inflammatory remarks via vis Islam, I have already blogged about here. And then there's Dr Denis MacEoin, the now infamous author of the "fabricated" Policy Exchange report on British mosque bookshops, and a man who says,

"I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it…"

Judging from its director and its advisory council, it is no wonder then that the Centre for Social Cohesion is replete with so much anti-Muslim, anti-Islam material - reports, debates, pamphlets, articles - as well as attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.

Does the BBC's flagship news-and-current-affairs programme really want to rely on such a partisan and polemical thinktank for its key stories on British Islam and the terror threat? And if so, shouldn't reporter Richard Watson have explained to his viewers where the CSC bods are coming from, before interviewing them so uncritically? Whatever happened to Reithian impartiality?

As the Guardian's Seumas Milne wisely comments,

"The constant regurgitation by the media of Muslim-baiting "research" by hard right think tanks…not only misleads the public about one of the most sensitive issues of our time - it is also clearly driven by a neoconservative political agenda, which seeks to convince people that jihadist terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere are driven not by outrage at western violence in the Muslim world but by opposition to western freedom."