Mick Hume

Mick Hume is associated with the libertarian and anti-environmentalist LM network. His is a journalist and erstwhile organiser of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He was editor of Living Marxism. He is a columnist for The Times (London) and the former editor of Spiked, for whom he still writes.

According to his biography on the "Communicating the war on terror" conference website:

Mick Hume is the editor of spiked and a columnist for The Times (London) and a regular contributor to other publications. He was the editor of LM Magazine (which he launched, originally as Living Marxism, in 1988) until it was forced to close in 2000 following a libel suit brought by ITN. Hume is a fortysomething ex-grammar school boy from Woking, who went to Manchester University and still has a season ticket at Old Trafford."

In 1999, journalist Andy Beckett went to a Living Marxism-organised conference that Hume attended. Beckett interviewed Hume about his background and observed:

he rehearses the LM worldview: the globe is "at the end of a political cycle of left and right"; class, once the foundation of all left-wing thinking, "is not a political factor"; there is "no alternative to the market". Instead, the LM project has evolved into "reclaiming the human subject". ...

What Hume is reluctant to mention is that, until three years ago, Living Marxism was the official journal of a more obscure organisation: the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). After a long, uncharacteristic pause, and a certain amount of looking at the floor, Hume admits that he "spent 10 years in the RCP". What about the other staff of LM? "The network of people I live and work with contain lots of people who were members of the RCP…" Hume tries to sound casual. "I didn't think you were going to write about the RCP and all that."

Affiliations

• Spiked editor-at-large

Resources, References and Contact

• Andy Beckett, Licence to rile, The Guardian, 15 May 1999, accessed 27 April 2010