Claire Fox

Fox was born in 1960 to Irish Catholic parents, John Fox and Maura Cleary.[1] She grew up in Buckley, Wales.[2] After attending St Richard Gwyn Catholic High School in Flint, she studied at the University of Warwick where she graduated with a lower second class degree (2:2) in English and American Literature.[1] She later gained a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education.[3] From 1981 to 1987, she was a mental health social worker. She was later an English Language and Literature lecturer at Thurrock Technical College from 1987 to 1990 and at West Herts College from 1992 to 1999.[4]

Fox joined the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) as a student at the University of Warwick.[5] For the next twenty years, she was one of the RCP's core activists and organisers. She became co-publisher of its magazine Living Marxism,[6] which closed in 2000 after the courts found it had falsely accused Independent Television News (ITN) of faking evidence of the Bosnian genocide.[1] In 2018, Fox refused to apologise for suggesting that evidence of the genocide was faked.[7]

Fox stayed with her ex-RCP members when the group transformed itself in the early 2000s into a network around the web magazine Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, both based in the former RCP offices and promoting libertarianism.[8][9] Author and environmental activist George Monbiot has argued these groups are part of the "pro-corporate libertarian right".[10]

After founding the Institute of Ideas, Fox became a guest panellist on BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and appeared as a panellist on BBC One's political television programme Question Time.[4][11] She was criticised in The Guardian for rejecting multiculturalism as divisive and for her libertarian beliefs in the desirability of minimal governmental control and free speech in all contexts.[1] She was also accused of supporting "Gary Glitter's right to download child porn",[1] something of which she later said, "I feel stupid for saying it. Paedophilia is disgusting".[12]

In 2015, Fox was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women.[13] Fox wrote the book I Find That Offensive! in 2016.[14]

In April 2019, Fox became a registered supporter of the Brexit Party.[15] She was in the first position in the list for the Brexit Party in the North West England constituency at the 2019 European Parliament election.[16] Her selection was criticised by the father of murdered schoolboy Tim Parry for her past support for the Provisional Irish Republican Army and for the RCP's defence of the 1993 IRA Warrington bombings, which had killed his son within the North West England constituency.[17][18] Another candidate for the Brexit Party, Sally Bate, resigned, citing Fox's "ambiguous position" on IRA violence.[19] A Brexit Party spokesperson commented on the criticism of Fox: "It's a desperate attempt to cause trouble".[20] Fox was subsequently elected to serve in the European Parliament.[21]

After standing down as an MEP when the United Kingdom left the EU on 31 January 2020, Fox was nominated for a peerage in July of that year. She will sit as a non-affiliated peer.[22] Lord Jonathan Caine, a long-serving Conservative Party adviser on Northern Ireland, criticised the decision, as did victims of IRA terror attacks.[23] She previously claimed to be against the existence of the House of Lords, and congratulated Liberal Democrats for not taking up peerages in a 2015 tweet.[24][25] She was created Baroness Fox of Buckley on 14 September[26] and was introduced to the Lords on 8 October 2020.[27]

On 9 November 2020, speaking in the Lords in favour of the Internal Market Bill, she described international law as “a supranational instrument for undermining national sovereignty” and said that, rather than breaking the law, the UK government were ‘making’ the law.[28][29][30][31]

Fox is the elder sister of Fiona Fox and Gemma Fox.[32] Fiona was also a Living Marxism contributor and later became director of the non-profit organisation Science Media Centre.[10][33]

• Institute of Ideas biography
• Claire Fox on Twitter
• Claire Fox on LinkedIn