The London Review of Books. 30 Years Of Public-Funded Extremism
It’s as curious as it is concerning that the London Review of Books should be considered staple reading for anyone wishing to get anywhere in intellectual or academic circles, but with its almost 50,000 per edition readership making it Europe’s most widely circulated literary magazine, it undoubtably has become just that. However radical the publication’s rhetoric it is of course quite entitled to write whatever it likes, that’s something I don’t think anyone would want to see taken away.
What I object to however is that I or indeed anyone else in the country should be having to bankroll this kind extremism through their taxes. Research recently undertaken by Just Journalism has exposed that throughout its 30 year long history the London Review of Books has been funded by uncomprehendibly generous levels of public money.
Just Journalism has exposed that starting in 1981, shortly after its establishment, the London Review of Books has received no less than £767,679 from the Arts Council England, all public money. Money that rather than going towards public services well and truly went towards all of our disservice; a glance over the lengthy diatribes against America and the West make that abundantly apparent.
Furthermore Just Journalism also found that between 2000 and 2010 the London Review of Books received £188,000 in public funding specifically for paying contributing writers, writers who it can be seen are the crème de le crème of the hardline and far-Left and whose contributions were out of all proportion with the opinions of the general public who funded them. Indeed whether we knew it or not we all paid for these things to be written regardless of whether we were going to agree with them or indeed even read them.
As Alan Bennett, one of the Magazine’s regular contributing writers put it ‘the London Review of Books has maintained a consistently radical stance on politics and social affairs’ although it really needn’t have been someone as prolific as Bennett who pointed this out, a child could have done so. Yet if anyone was considering contesting this they need only refer to the ever fair and balanced Mar-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books since 1992, before they would promptly be forced to change their mind. In an interview with the Guardian Wilmers told her interviewer that she didn’t think it was necessary to say how bad Stalin or Communism were, a response to an internal publication that said that ‘bad Stalin and Bad Communism pieces don’t find favour’.
Infinitely more favour however is given to those writers willing to churn out the all too familiar essays in defence of such murdering, Human Right’s abusing and anti-Democratic groups as Hamas and Hezbollah. Indeed when it comes to the Middle East the London Review of Books has naturally made itself a bastion of enlightened anti-Israel, hate fuelled, bigoted discussion. An admiring disciple of Edward Said, Wilmers quite openly says of her policy to Israel ‘I’m unambiguously hostile to Israel because it’s a mendacious state. They do things that are just so immoral and counterproductive’. Just in case anyone was in any doubt about that one.
The London Review of Books can go on printing as much laboriously drawn out anti-Western ranting as it likes, it can rival Pravda in socialist propaganda if that’s what it wants to do, but let no one expect that the rest of us should have to pay for it. At a time when our government is having to pull the financial rug out from underneath so many other worthy areas, not least our defence forces, one can only hope the same is done to this corrosively hostile publication.
Tom Wilson is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist
