Commies, Commies everywhere

Back in January I suggested that Martin Bright's knocking documentary on Ken Livingstone was connected to his relationship with Policy Exchange.

Well now Livingstone is gone and Boris Watch informs us that Policy Exchange is firmly ensconced at City Hall:

During the electoral campaign, Boris was aided by Dan Ritterband, a
one-time director of Policy Exchange, and soon after his victory,
Nicholas Boles, the founder of the organisation, was named as the
mayor’s Chief of Staff. Boles was, the Observer reported,
‘asked to help the new mayor find the right staff’, and one of his
first appointments was Munira Mirza – an employee of Policy Exchange –
as Director of Policy, Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries.
Ritterband, meanwhile, maintained his position among Boris’s advisers.

Given the way Livingstone was red-baited over his Socialist Action advisers, it is particularly ironic that Johnson should have appointed Mirza, who was formerly involved with the Manifesto Club, an organisation associated with the the Living Marxism/Revolutionary Communist Party network. Splintered Sunrise has some interesting thoughts on the parallels between Socialist Action and the RCP.

For my money, the classic example of an upwardly mobile Marxist or ex-Marxist clique is the Lovestoneite faction which started out in the American Communist Party and ended up working with James Angleton and the CIA. The key Lovestoneite figure in Britain was Roy Godson, father of Policy Exchange's Dean Godson.

The rise of neoconservatism marks to a significant extent, the emergence of a post-Marxist movement as a dominant strain on the right. It seems not everyone involved in promoting neoconservatism understands that.