Claire Fox | The Spectator columnists & writers

Thursday

15 Jul 2021

A ‘Zoom parliament’ is bad for democracy

Is the new normal here to stay? For the sake of our parliamentary democracy, let's hope not. There is little doubt that holding the Government to account has been made harder by the imposition of restrictions during the pandemic. During the Covid crisis, politicians have been too keen to treat parliament as a normal workplace; the truth is that it isn't and never will be. If ever there was a good excuse for an 'us versus them' rule exemption, surely it would have been to honour the public by ensuring scrutiny and pushback against the Government removing people’s liberties so easily. Instead, parliamentary proceedings have taken the hybrid form of in-person and Zoom proceedings. This is an unhappy compromise for which we are all worse off.

Sunday

13 Jun 2021

Can GB News live up to the hype?

British TV viewers have never had so many channels to watch, yet they've also never had so little choice. The Brexit referendum exposed this lack of political diversity all too clearly. As a panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze for 20 years, I suppose I was something of a BBC luvvie. No doubt I was still seen as a bit of a maverick by some, but I was accepted on the media scene. However, when I casually mentioned back in 2016 that I was going to vote Leave, things changed. 'But you’re an intelligent, well-educated person, Claire', said one senior producer. From that moment on, in studios and green rooms, I was greeted with a familiar sneer. From my position of privilege, it was hardly a problem. Yet that sneering was even more viscerally felt by audiences.

Saturday

13 Jun 2020

How a serious issue with racism was reduced to a tick-boxing exercise

Who needs statue topplers when the state will do it for you? Some bright spark in authority has decided the way to defend the statues on Parliament Square is to board them up. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has taken his lead from protesters and started a national trend, with councils setting up posses of the unelected to assess whose statues might survive the great 2020 cull. Meanwhile, the BBC, so terrified of bad PR, has pre-emptively removed from its i-player an iconic episode of Fawlty Towers, written as a satire on Little Englander mentality. Own goals all round. What started out as a genuine, furious, international reaction to the brutal killing of George Floyd seems to be turning into an institutional nervous breakdown.

Coffee House Shots

Is toppling a statue an act of performance art?

14 min listen

Coffee House Shots

Is toppling a statue an act of performance art?

14 min listen

Sunday

17 May 2020

My fears about the ‘new normal’

Perhaps there’s light at the end of the long lockdown tunnel. The roadmap at least allows hope that life might get back to normal. For me, normal means freedom to live life as we choose, from cramming into packed planes to go on holiday to crowding into pubs for birthday parties. However, even saying that can lead to gasps of incredulity. Normal? No way! Too risky. It has become fashionable to now aspire to the ‘new normal’. That ‘new normal’ very often accepts, with a resigned fatalism, that a range of everyday, ‘normal’ freedoms will need to be curtailed. More worryingly, if you argue that freedom is one key reason for ending the lockdown sooner rather than later, you are increasingly dismissed as indulgent, selfish, irresponsible, unrealistic.

Saturday

25 Apr 2020

Staying at home doesn’t make us heroes

I don’t particularly like the constant war analogies used about fighting coronavirus. However, when someone like Matt Hancock conjures up the Blitz spirit, urging us to pull together ‘in one gigantic national effort’, I think of that cliched question: 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' Forget the sexism, what will our answer be to future generations? The fact is that millions of us will have to reply: ‘I did nothing, I stayed at home.’ That raises a real dilemma of lockdown society: are we being socialised into concluding that passivity is a positive virtue? In the 1915 war recruitment poster 'Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?', designed to shame people to enlist, a daughter poses the question to her father sitting in an armchair, while her brother plays with toy soldiers.

Thursday

2 Apr 2020

This is no time for ‘gotcha!’ journalism

The lockdown has ensured that many millions now gather round the TV and watch the daily press conference from No.10. We hang on every word from politicians and medical/scientific experts, trying to read the runes of our fate for the next hours, days, months. These people are leading the country’s response to Covid-19. A third group in the room (be that virtually), whose leadership should be indispensable, are the press, charged with asking penetrating, crucial questions on our behalf. This should be when the nation feels the latest strategy is being held to account and scrutinised, when more light is shone on controversial decisions that affect our livelihoods and liberty, even life and death. The media are so key in a national emergency, especially when opposition parties in the UK are – let us say – largely in disarray, even leaderless.

Thursday

20 Feb 2020

This week, has Mike Bloomberg blown his presidential hopes with a disastrous TV debate (00:50)? Plus, has the BBC really gone downhill (12:05)? And last, Toby Young reveals all about his first stand up comedy gig (26:30).

Sunday

16 Feb 2020

Don’t expect the EU to learn any lessons from Brexit

I have enjoyed my first fortnight back as a civilian after my temporary stint as an MEP. Along with other Brexit party representatives, we had one job, and we did it. I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home. Looking back at my experience as an MEP, there are lessons worth noting. I had assumed that a gathering of 700 or so MEPs from all around Europe, would, at the very least, provide a fascinating exchange of views from an international perspective. But the parliament operates through artificially federalised political groupings; behind closed doors the leaders of each grouping carve up who gets to speak, for how long (typically 60 seconds), and in stage-managed terms. Topics for discussion are similarly preordained, prescribed by legislation initiated elsewhere.

Monday

20 Jan 2020

Jess Phillips is wrong to tell men to ‘pass the mic’

When Labour leadership challenger Jess Phillips urged men to 'pass the mic' to a woman on the top job, telling Sky’s Sophy Ridge it would 'look bad' if Labour failed to elect a woman, she more or less admitted not being up to the job. Surely the weakest argument any leadership candidate could use is demanding a step-up based on their sex? In effect, Phillips is trying to knock out the leading candidate, Keir Starmer, because he’s a man. We heard a similar argument on Question Time last week. When Laurence Fox was asked who he preferred as the Labour leader, he replied 'Keir Starmer – he just looks like he can take Boris on quite well.' Quick as a flash, Shami Chakrabarti – who had only just declared that she wasn’t going to share her opinion on the Labour leadership race - suddenly developed a view and snapped back: 'You don’t think any of the four women?' Laurence, now being lauded as a hero of the anti-woke fight-back pointed out: 'It’s not about women! Jeepers creepers!' He added, rather sarcastically: 'Sorry, let me rewind: any of the women.

Tuesday

7 Jan 2020

My clash with Alastair Campbell convinced me it’s time to hug a remainer

I confess I had butterflies doing the first BBC Politics Live of 2020. It felt like the first day back at school. Beyond Twitter spats and Christmas family banter, the festive period had been politics-free. Would I be rusty, especially as one of the other panelists was the formidable Alastair Campbell? As a former People’s Vote heavyweight, Campbell is something of an arch nemesis who has a reputation for taking no prisoners. But regardless, one of my new year resolutions is to not dwell on past enmities. I am keen to build some unity, in order to make Brexit as productive as possible. Ahead of the programme, I reminded myself of the importance of not gloating about our impending departure from the EU, regardless of my antipathy to the second referendum crowd.

Saturday

14 Dec 2019

Boris Johnson couldn’t have done it without the Brexit party

Dear Boris Johnson, Friday felt like June 2016 all over again. The electorate voted Leave; in their droves. Remain reacted by lashing out at the voters (far too many examples but see this for starters:) [embed]https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews/status/1205247632135872516?s=20[/embed] This was no ordinary General Election: it had another purpose of wresting back control from a gridlocked parliament that had defied popular sovereignty. Although every vote didn’t count in the same way as a referendum (let’s get rid of FPTP), nonetheless millions of voters reminded us all just who owns democracy, by grabbing the levers of power to reaffirm that they had not changed their mind about leaving the EU. So congratulations on winning.

Tuesday

10 Dec 2019

Boris’s ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal isn’t what all Leave voters want

Whatever the results on Thursday, there have been aspects of this election campaign not revealed by polling. My experience of speaking and campaigning in my MEP patch in the North West has been revelatory. I am in awe of a layer of new activists who have been inspired to want more fundamental change than that offered by the establishment parties. Many are new to politics, have found their voice and have discovered the power of being actively engaged. It reminds me of a far earlier experience of the miners’ strike, when miners' wives groups sprang up nationally and formidable women started to take control. It’s exhilarating to be with people for whom politics might mean a fresh reboot of democracy; I have been humbled by their energy and hard work.

Saturday

5 Oct 2019

An invitation to carry on insulting me and my fellow Brexiteers

After appearing on Newsnight last week, an #FBPE-monikered keyboard warrior wrote a much liked comment above my picture that read: "Bat shit crazy, howling at the moon @brexitparty_uk neo Nazi fascist apologist tries to blame the judiciary. Straight out of the Hitler/Goebbels Handbook. We are living in dangerous times. #stopbrexit #RevokeA50 #SaveDemocracy". This was one of the more polite responses. We all know that the internet has become somewhat unhinged and I get a daily dose of such unrestrained invective. But it is a shock when such attitudes spill over into face-to-face encounters. When I spoke at a debate on Brexit at a festival in Highgate last weekend, a seemingly polite and civilised affair, fellow panelist Labour MP Owen Smith compared my views - in front of a live audience - to those of Enoch Powell: "we could have heard so many of the things that Claire said today from his lips in an earlier era.

Wednesday

7 Aug 2019

It would be foolish to take Boris’s Brexit promises at face value

As the by-election result came through from Wales last week, one Tory Leaver tweeted this: “Brecon and Radnor is a timely warning to Brexiteers. Vote for the @brexitparty_uk and you will hand another seat to Remain. How could you be so stupid?”. So stupid? The nerve, when after all, it was the the Brexit party that resuscitated the referendum result after a near death experience created by his party. I was furious at the arrogance. But he isn't alone; this view has now become the narrative popularised by some Tory grandees and voters, even though many of the latter loaned the Brexit party their votes in the Euro elections. Yet without the Brexit party, it is likely that Theresa May would still be prime minister.

Wednesday

10 Jul 2019

Will Philip Pullman forgive my ‘gross insult to Beethoven’?

In my first week as an MEP, I was delighted to find that my Twitter feed included lots of interest in classical music and literature: Beethoven and Schiller. It soon became apparent that it wasn’t a cultured debate, but vicious condemnation of us turning our backs during “Ode to Joy”. The EU officials had demanded that we stand for the “national” anthem, and we objected to that great work being hijacked as a federalist "Anthem of Europe". We were accused of being philistines and disrespecting European civilisation. Novelist Philip Pullman scolded me for my “gross insult to Beethoven”. As it happens, I love the universal brilliance of Beethoven; all the more reason to object to the EU claiming him for itself. Why do some Remainers assume that a vote to Leave – and a protest against the EU bureaucracy – is somehow a rejection of the wonders of European culture? A rather overblown story in the Observer claimed that the renowned Three Choirs Festival scheduled for August wasn’t selling out.

Saturday

8 Jun 2019

What Channel 4’s Jon Snow can learn from the Brexit Party

Since being elected a Brexit Party MEP, I have gone from gamekeeper to poacher as far as the broadcast media is concerned. Until six weeks ago, I had the privilege of being a commentator who could sit on couches endlessly pontificating. Now as a politician, I’m the target of my fellow commentators. They either discuss me in my absence or ask a series of staccato questions with little room for context or nuance. Maybe I’m fair game. After all, I have spent two decades as a Radio 4 Moral Maze panelist interrogating witnesses. This, perhaps, is my comeuppance. Yet what I've learned about the way the broadcast media works in recent weeks bothers me and I've been asking myself a question: what good does it do if journalism is reduced to demanding politicians ‘answer me – yes or no’? What do we lose when the media’s attitude to anyone who wins election is to deny them room for intellectual reflection or the chance to properly explore and think through ideas? I mentioned this concern to one radio producer and she assumed it was because voters would expect simplistic answers, deliverable outcomes and ‘populist’ slogans from politicians.

Friday

31 May 2019

Women With Balls

The Claire Fox Edition

41 min listen

Women With Balls

The Claire Fox Edition

41 min listen

Claire Fox, left libertarian thinker, director and founder of the Academy of Ideas, and panellist on the Moral Maze, was this week elected as an MEP for the Brexit Party. In this episode of Women With Balls, she talks to Katy Balls about her disagreements with Nigel Farage, the prejudice she has received in green rooms, on the streets, and on social media, and the decadent perks of her new job.Presented by Katy Balls.

Saturday

18 May 2019

Meet the secret Brexiteers

Much has been made of the Brexit Party’s insurgency amongst people in Leave-voting communities, who have been subject to disparaging and patronising establishment contempt ever since they dared to vote the ‘wrong’ way in the EU referendum. But far less attention is given to the minority of Leave voters who work and live in the professions and other areas where support for Remain is the default position. One woman who approached the Brexit Party stall in Chester last week told me his: “I am a solicitor; my friend here is a physiotherapist and we are both fed up of being shunned by colleagues because we voted Leave. I just don’t tell people anymore.” She speaks for millions. Maybe it is because I am part of the media/ policy intelligentsia circle (or, at least, I was until I became an apostate and decided to stand as an MEP), but over the past three years I have come across a wide range of Secret Brexiteers who dare not admit they voted Leave.

Wednesday

1 May 2019

David Lammy inspired me to stand for the Brexit Party

I am standing as Brexit Party candidate in the forthcoming EU elections. The response of voters so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Phew. Here’s a chance to demonstrate that the shambles that parliament has made of delivering on a referendum mandate will be challenged by a democratic fightback. It really is exciting. But, I admit, deciding to stand was rather more nerve wracking, and sent shockwaves among my peers. *** “Why on earth rock the boat, it could ruin your life and career?”. Just one of the incredulous warning notes sent to me when a friend heard I was considering standing. I certainly had doubts about throwing my hat in the electoral ring. I love my work at the Academy of Ideas, creating a public space for ideas to be contested without restraint and interrogating orthodoxies.

Thursday

12 Oct 2017

Language barrier

Since the EU referendum result last June our nation has been divided: not only by the vote but also by language. If 62 per cent of Britons (many of whom undoubtedly voted for Brexit) now say Britain ‘sometimes feels like a foreign country’, it’s not anti-foreigner prejudice so much as a feeling that people in authority are speaking at them in a foreign language. Not Polish or Punjabi but PC-speak, that opaque code that connotes whether you are ‘on message’ and one of ‘our kind of people’ or one of those racist lizard-brained Leaver oiks. Look at the new language of diversity that is now being prescribed in much of the public sector. The British Medical Association recently sent all its employees a 12-page booklet, ‘A Guide to Effective Communication: Inclusive Language in the Workplace’.

Thursday

10 Nov 2016

In defence of post-truth politics

Donald Trump’s shock US election victory has provoked a transatlantic howl of disbelief from a cosmopolitan elite aghast that American voters have had the temerity to reject its one true liberal world-view. Hillary Clinton’s loss is seen less as the rightful humiliation of a discredited machine politician and more as proof that the masses have, once again, rejected ‘the facts’ of the situation. To this elite, installing the Donald in the White House represents the apocalyptic dawn of a ‘post-factual era’. After all, Hillary Clinton’s chief weapon against Trump was an army of fact-checkers. Instead of attempting to defeat his arguments by the power of her own, she encouraged voters watching the debate to look up ‘the facts’ on HillaryClinton.

Thursday

15 Sep 2016

Archers abusers

It’s been going on for months now and I must make a confession. I secretly endure a nightly battering in the privacy of my home; it’s been relentless, torturous and psychologically damaging. But before anyone rushes to rescue me or phones a government helpline, fearing I am the victim of some dastardly wife beater — I should explain that the culprit is Radio 4’s The Archers and its relentless and addictive domestic abuse storyline. My torment was supposed to end last Sunday night, with the conclusion of Helen Titchener’s trial for stabbing her bullying, much-hated husband Rob. When the jury foreman announced not guilty, I was with the rest of the nation, roaring ‘Yes!’ And yet, straight afterwards, I came over all queasy as Rob resumed his threats… Just as Helen has been a victim of manipulation for a whole 18 months, so have we, the listeners.

Thursday

2 Jun 2016

The snowflake factory

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/266976520-the-spectator-podcast-the-purge-of-the-posh.mp3" title="Claire Fox and Tom Slater discuss 'Generation Snowflake'" startat=641] Listen [/audioplayer] Another week, another spate of barmy campus bans and ‘safe space’ shenanigans by a new breed of hyper--sensitive censorious youth. At Oxford University, law students are now officially notified when the content of a lecture might upset them. In Cambridge, there were calls for an Africa-themed end-of-term dinner to be cancelled just in case it caused offence to someone somewhere. It all seems beyond parody. ‘What is wrong with these thin-skinned little emperors?’ we cry. But while we can harrumph and sneer at Generation Snowflake’s antics, we miss a crucial point: we created them.

Thursday

3 May 2012

Freedom also comes in pink

Women of the world unite: a sinister patriarchal plot is out to get us. Evil tobacco companies are conspiring to seduce us by wrapping up ‘our poison’ in shades of ‘pale or pastel colours’. There is concern in public health circles that the dark arts of design, armed with images denoting ‘femininity, style, sophistication and attractiveness’, will result in us losing our pretty little heads. Or so says Cancer Research UK, keen to save us from our womenly weakness, with their latest research report published yesterday. Cancer Research UK are outraged that ‘research shows’ Big Tobacco is packaging brands of cigarettes specifically to appeal to women. I am not sure which part of this argument is most insulting. On the one hand, this is a gendered version of the patronising claim of the plain packaging warriors: that the only reason anyone smokes is because of the displays of well-designed brands behind supermarket tills.

Saturday

7 Jun 2008

I have a basic human right to look at fag packets

Claire Fox says that plans to ‘denormalise’ smoking by removing cigarettes from display infantilises adults and imposes upon us a dubious official version of what is ‘normal’Has your personal life been ‘denormalised’ yet? Mine is about to be, and believe me it’s not pleasant. The health ministries in Scotland and Westminster have just announced plans to make a perfectly legal habit seem as abnormal as possible. The SNP’s Public Health Minister Shona Robinson, quickly followed by England’s own health secretary Alan Johnson, tells us that public displays of cigarettes are hindering official ‘efforts to denormalise smoking’. Apparently, being able to see the rows of cigarette packets that are a familiar sight in every corner shop and garage in the country makes smoking seem like a normal part of life.