When I was a newly arrived migrant straight off the potato boat, one of the things that stuck me was how on Friday evenings and Saturdays in London you would always see lefty paper sellers at tube stations and shopping centres.

The SWP and Militant tended to opt for donkey or combat jackets doubtless believing that dressing smartly was a clear sign of a class traitor. I once went to see Tony Cliff speak and he seemed to have prepared for the meeting by wearing a shirt that looked like it had been crumpled under a pile of books at a jumble sale for a fortnight.

One group decided to buck this trend, and its members always dressed as though they were managers in a local estate agents. The men all wore suits, and the women all wore smart office clothing. Whereas all the other sellers took a scattergun approach and would offer their literature to every passer-by, the Revolutionary Communist Party (2.0)[i] only seemed to sell to people who were as snazzily dressed as them. Never once  was I offered a copy of Living Marxism or The Next Step.

They were in the classic British sectarian tradition, or so we all thought. The Troops Out Movement was a perfectly serviceable solidarity organisation and much of the far left was fitfully involved in it. However, in the time honoured way the RCP set up the Irish Freedom Movement (IFM) as its wholly owned, party building front with its own publications and even its own demonstrations. I went along to one of these and ended up at the social in a pub afterwards where I got into a conversation about the poetry of Thomas Hardy with one of them. He seemed a bit disappointed when I decided to go home.

The IFM’s selling point was that it was more openly pro-IRA than everyone else saying things like “the IRA’s success in blowing nine RUC men to pieces” (The Irish War p.197), a form of words it’s true no one else would have used who was trying to engage with the British working class and its organisations.

There was something about them that never smelt right. Their cultish ultra-leftism made them feel like a bit of a honey trap for people who might be daft enough to do something stupid. There was definitely a view that they some sort of MI5 shopfront.

Has history vindicated these suspicions? That isn’t likely to be known until the state papers are released some time in the 22^nd century.  However, the subsequent evolution of its surviving leading members is an indication they were not too far off the mark. Claire Fox, who was given a peerage by the Tories despite it being a matter of public record that she affected to support an armed struggle against the British state, regularly pops up on extreme right platforms like Talk TV, most recently explaining away the motives of people conducting an Islamophobic pogrom.

Others ended up as advisors to Boris Johnson and they all now seem to inhabit  a swamp of Farage adjacent right wing think tanks and media outlets. As far as I know, they never offered a public explanation of this unprecedented change of tack.

What are we to learn from this episode in left history given that no other group made a similar evolution. Probably only that if they look and smell like a dodgy cult, they probably are.

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[i] There have been three Revolutionary Communist Parties in Britain. The first was set up in the 1940s and had multiple splits. The second was around in the 70s and 80s and the third is currently flourishing.