Interesting commentary here. Particularly in regard to Claire Fox
Tories remain so spellbound by Boris Johnson’s populist takeover of their party that they remain silent as he trashes their values, drives out talent, allows an unelected adviser to run amok and displays ineptitude with fatal consequences amid the pandemic. Yet every now and then comes an act that should cause any decent Conservative to stop and ponder what has happened to their party – and one such moment came last week with Johnson’s despatch of some pals and paymasters into the House of Lords.
But consider the case of Claire Fox, who illustrates the corrosion being caused to the Conservative Party, just as Trump is damaging the Republican brand. Here is a person who carefully built a career as a “controversialist” by exploiting media frenzy for divisive outrage and shocking opinion. This ensured she first became a fixture on the bumbling BBC, then briefly an MEP by riding on Nigel Farage’s coat-tails. Now she has been rewarded by fellow Brexiteer Johnson with a peerage, lifetime membership of the country’s finest club and attendance “expenses” of £313 a day.
Fox poses as a defender of free speech, prepared to say the unsayable, yet much of what she says is simply unspeakable.
She emerged as part of a small Trotskyite splinter group called the Revolutionary Communist Party that discovered the value in constant contrariness and ended up indistinguishable from hard-right ideologues. She helped run their magazine called Living Marxism, which had to shut down after it accused ITV journalists who exposed some of the worst atrocities on European soil since the Second World War of fabricating their evidence. This cabal was so desperate for attention that during the Iraq War it did not just oppose the foolish misadventure but rooted for Saddam Hussein against British troops. After the 1993 Warrington bombing, which killed two children and left 50 casualties, it defended “the right of the Irish people to take whatever measures are necessary in their struggle for freedom”. No wonder Colin Parry, that dignified father of a 12-year-old boy murdered in the abhorrent attack, condemned her peerage and lack of apology as something that ‘offends me and many others deeply.’
In her self-styled guise as a freedom fighter, Fox once defended the right of the pop star Gary Glitter to download child pornography against snowflakes who think that such depravity only fuels the abuse of minors, (although she later said she sees paedophilia as ‘disgusting.’) She supported a reggae singer’s right to encourage in song the killing of gay men. She argues in support of climate deniers, does not think we face a climate emergency and has, of course, attacked multiculturalism.
inews.co.uk/opinion/boris-johnson-honours-list-claire-fox-jo-johnson-569697?ito=twitter_share_article-top
Lack of public toilets in towns.
