Kirk Leech

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Kirk Leech, who is also known as Kirk Williams [1], is a member of the British libertarian LM group. Leech was a long time and leading member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

For a number of years he ran their Irish 'front' organization the Irish Freedom Movement, at one time being based in Dublin Ireland. Whilst living in Bradford West Yorkshire, Leech set up a number of campaigns and groups who claimed to be taking on, with physical force, organised racists. This was carried out under the umbrella of Bradford, Workers Against Racism.

He stood in the 1987 General Election in the Newcastle Central Constituency for the RCP [1]. He was also for a number of years the RCP's key man in Scotland. Leech worked with the German Group Novo a sister organisation of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

He is the assistant director of WORLDwrite, an anti-environmentalist "development education charity" with strong links to the LM network [2].

He has also written for Living Marxism, Spiked Online and Living Marxism's German sister publication, Novo.

In 2002, he contributed to "Ethical Tourism: Who Benefits?", part of the Institute of Ideas' Debating Matters series. Leech summarised his argument as follows:

"Advocates of eco-tourism see it as the means to overcome the conflicting demands and pressures of conservation and development. Whilst seemingly an advance on previous ideas which sought just to exclude local people from their land to safeguard bio-diversity, both concepts in reality tie local communities into a development vision limited by both a reliance on the natural environment and the limited development perspective of sustainability. This partial and degraded sense of development is of no long-term benefit to local communities. There is nothing essentially wrong in local communities benefiting from revenues accrued through foreign visitors, but to see this as the means by which local communities develop, whilst at the same time restricting any attempts they may have to transform their real social position, is nothing more than enforcing primitivism." [3]

(*Tiffany Jenkins ed.), "Ethical Tourism: Who benefits?", Hodder Arnold H&S, 2002


References

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