It’s a strange feeling finding out that you have been part of a revolutionary group that secretly controls Britain and, er…didn’t realise it. For four years in the 1990s, I was the Research Director of the Fabian Society. It was a wonderful job, at a time when Labour under Tony Blair was open to new ideas and policies. As a Labour-affiliated, mildly left-of-centre organisation, the Fabians were very well placed. Earnest thinkers, networkers and youngsters finding their feet in politics all had a space in which they could come together and think about and discuss politics and ideas in an environment where questioning the received wisdom was the point, rather than a political crime.
According to much of social media at the moment, I missed the true purpose of the Fabian Society
I had a ball, suggesting such heinous ideas for Labour to adopt as getting the NHS to work with private providers to increase the supply available to patients, and giving parents and others the ability to come together and create new schools. I wonder what happened…
We produced all sorts of papers, including the Southern Discomfort series that, if I say so myself, is still talked about today. Before the 1997 landslide, if you drew a line between the Wash and the Bristol Channel then Labour held a dismal three seats outside London. We held a series of focus groups among swing voters in five marginal seats to find out what was preventing them backing Labour. The answers were a checklist of what became New Labour. John Prescott, rather wonderfully, went on the airwaves to dismiss the research, saying: “You might as well go into a pub and ask people”. Well, yes.
But according to much of social media at the moment, I missed the true purpose of the Fabian Society. For Alex Phillips, a presenter on Talk Radio, the Fabians are part of “the destruction of The Western World.” Other posters tell us to, “Imagine an enemy that doesn’t declare war. An enemy that doesn’t storm the gates but is invited into the halls of power. An enemy wearing the face of a friend”. Another describes “the Fabian Cabal that runs our politics and our administrative deep state.” I won’t go on – if you want to get the full force of these spasms of derangement, have a look at this.
The origin of these conspiracy theories about the Fabian Society secretly running Britain which have suddenly sprung up is the appeal court ruling in the Epping Forest asylum seekers’ hotel case. Some genius ‘discovered’ – although it has never been hidden – that the senior judge, Lord Justice Bean, had been a member of the Fabian Society. Not just a member but, for a year, the chair. A lefty! Outrage! One barrister has reported Sir David to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office for not recusing himself.
Who knew that some lawyers have been involved in politics, eh? So – shocker – some judges have previously expressed political views when they were lawyers. As judges, they put those views aside and rule on the law. And if they don’t, they are overruled. No one – rightly – seems to have been bothered that the original judge in the case had been a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
As it happens, David Bean, as he then was, was chairman of the Fabian Research Committee to which I reported. We disagreed on much. But you could not find a more intellectually open, decent or honourable man. I can hardly imagine a man more suited to the bench. He is as far from the caricature of a lefty activist judge as it’s possible to find.
But no sooner had Lord Justice Bean’s shameful past as the chair of an organisation which discussed left-of-centre policy emerged, than it was then ‘revealed’ that more than half the cabinet – and a very large number of public figures – are also, today, members of the Fabian Society. It’s such a secret that the Fabians, as any successful membership organisation would do, boasts about its membership on its website. And it’s so secretive a cabal that anyone join online. You get “access to fantastic political debates in every corner of the country, along with: Our flagship quarterly magazine, the Fabian Review – sent to your home. At least four reports or pamphlets posted to your home each year, with dozens more available on our website. Invitations to Fabian conferences and events across the country, including reduced price admission for ticketed events. Access to the meetings of around local Fabian Societies in every corner of the country. Members who are not already Labour Party members become affiliated supporters of the party, with voting rights.”
You don’t, however, get training in destroying the West or infiltrating public bodies. For the £5.90 a month that membership costs, that’s a bit much to expect.
Does it matter that so many people online seem to think that membership of a harmless, worthy and – truth to tell – slightly dull organisation is in fact evidence of a secret society that is bent on subverting the West? No more than any more of the wacky conspiracy theories that are the meat and drink of the online world. But it is evidence of at least one thing: the drip, drip, drip delegitimisation of our institutional norms through willingness of all sides of the divide to accept anything, no matter how bonkers, if it provides a political dopamine hit.
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