The online right are currently having a meltdown over the Fabian Society.
For those unfamiliar with them, the Fabians are a middle-class intellectual group historically linked to the Labour Party. They were founded in the late nineteenth century by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, with figures such as George Bernard Shaw among their most prominent members. They emerged from the same late-Victorian reformist milieu as the Bloomsbury set, though they were never quite part of that world.
In their early years, the Fabians had some decidedly odd ideas. Durham University holds an archive of early Fabian pamphlets that I read through years ago. Alongside thoughtful policy work, there is also some rather unsettling material from Shaw flirting with eugenics, and a great deal that now reads as unintentionally comic — including a pamphlet on how socialists should best manage their servants.
Over time, the Fabians settled into a familiar role within the broader labour movement: gradualist, pragmatic, and suspicious of grand ideological gestures. They produced a steady stream of policy pamphlets and discussion papers, and increasingly became what they largely remain today — a hobby for middle-class Labour sympathisers who enjoy meetings, talks, and the production of earnest documents.
To give a flavour: the recent agenda of the Durham Fabian Society consists of exactly what you would expect — lectures, panel discussions, and worthy conversations about policy and public administration. The stuff of conspiracy theories this is not.
If you think of the labour movement as having two broad wings — one working-class, practical, and trade-union rooted; the other middle-class and ideological — the Fabians always sat awkwardly between the two, rejecting both revolutionary politics and bourgeois crankiness.
Their moment of greatest influence probably came under Tony Blair, when a series of Fabian pamphlets — notably Southern Discomfort — helped shape the intellectual framework of the Third Way. Pamphlets feature heavily in this blog for a reason. The Fabians do love a pamphlet.
And for over a century, that was essentially it: boring, worthy, wordy.
Until the Court of Appeal ruling in the Epping Forest asylum-seekers’ hotel case.
Online conspiracy theorists “discovered” that one of the judges involved, Lord Justice Bean, had once been a member of the Fabian Society — not only a member, but briefly its chair. This was presented as explosive evidence of a left-wing plot. Curiously, nobody seemed troubled by the fact that the original judge in the case had previously been a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
From there, the conspiracy snowballed. It emerged — with mounting horror — that a large number of cabinet ministers and public figures are also members of the Fabian Society. As if this were some secret cabal, rather than an organisation you can join for £5.59 a month, which guarantees you at least four pamphlets a year.
Less than £17 per pamphlet. Try not to be alarmed.
This is typical of the hyperventilating outrage that wafts from the painfully online right. The story has now migrated to YouTube and TalkTV, where it appears in the familiar form of lurid, fact-free conspiracy content.
This isn’t a fringe view on YouTube, this is a TV channel owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The absence of evidence produces a familiar dynamic. Challenge these claims online and you won’t get an explanation — just demands to “do your own research” or assurances that “everyone knows”.
What this really reveals is not anything about the Fabian Society, but about the epistemology of the online right. Their worldview is increasingly detached from fact and reality, sustained instead by an endless churn of insinuation, repetition, and grievance — each new “revelation” designed to provoke outrage rather than understanding.
https://spectator.com/article/the-truth-about-the-fabian-society