Mick Hume

From Powerbase
Revision as of 08:37, 1 May 2012 by David (talk | contribs) (Spiked)
Jump to: navigation, search
LM network resources

Mick Hume is associated with the libertarian and anti-environmentalist LM network.

Mick Hume in 2007 or 2008

Hume was born in 1959 and raised in Woking, attending Woking County Grammar School for Boys [1] and studying American Studies in Manchester University. His first left-wing political act was, as a student in Manchester in 1981, supporting Irish Republican hunger strikers, alongside protesting against alleged police racism during that summer's Moss Side riots. [2] He is a journalist and erstwhile organiser of the Revolutionary Communist Party where he was editor of the weekly paper The Next Step from January 1987. [3] In 1988, he became the founding editor of the party's monthly magazine Living Marxism for which he wrote both under his own name and under the pseudonym Eddie Veale.[4] In 1997, following the dissolution of the RCP, the magazine was relaunched under his editorship as LM. Following the magazine's bankruptcy in a libel trial, he become the founding editor of its successor Spiked in 2001. He resigned from this post in 2007 in favour of Brendan O'Neill but continues to write for Spiked. He also speaks at the Battle of Ideas. [5][6]

He has written a column for the Times (London) since 2000.

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."[7]


Encounter

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."[8]

Affiliations

Publications

Pamphlets and Books

1996

  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto (Living Marxism Originals), Introduction by Mick Hume London: Pluto Press; New edition (15 May 1996) ISBN-10: 0745310338 ISBN-13: 978-0745310336

1997

  • Whose War is it Anyway? The Dangers of the Journalism of Attachment InformInc (LM) Ltd (July 1997)

1998

Living Marxism/LM

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

Living Marxism became LM at issue 97 in February 1997.

1998

1999

2000

Spiked

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Resources, References and Contact


References

  1. Talking About My Generation The Times 30 Dec 2008
  2. Bobby Sands was nobody's victim Spiked, 28 Oct 2008
  3. [Mick Hume moves on - new editor for Spiked Spiked, 29 Jan 2007
  4. Don Milligan, Radical Amnesia and the RCP, Reflections of a Renegade, January 8, 2008.
  5. Speakers Battle of Ideas, acc 13 Mar 2011 and is a source of briefing material for Debating Matters.
  6. Mick Hume Debating Matters website, 13 Mar 2011
  7. Speakers' biographies", Communicating the war on terror conference website, 5 June 2003, accessed 16 July 2009
  8. Andy Beckett, Licence to rile, The Guardian, 15 May 1999, accessed 27 April 2010
  9. From the Battle of Ideas Festival 2007: biography (Accessed: 14 May 2008)
  10. http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20071019084210/http://www.riskoffreedom.com/pdf_archive/07brief.pdf