Laurence Fox



These people are the establishment. White privilege and casual sexism is the sea they tend to swim in. Attention-seeking haters such as Katie Hopkins and strangely bitter successes such as Piers Morgan help spawn these posh understudies. Their side has won, so why are they such losers? Why are their egos so fragile?

Laurence Fox is a British actor, singer, TV personality, anti-anti-racist loudmouth, and wannabe politician who is opposed to Black Lives Matter and is a defender of the greatness of the British Empire and white British people. Since first speaking on the subject of race in January 2020 he has created a series of public controversies, culminating in plans to launch his own political party, Reclaim.

Early life and career
He is the son of Posh British actor James Fox (Performance, A Passage to India, A Question of Attribution, etc), and nephew of fellow actor Edward Fox. Laurence attended Harrow, the same school as Churchill,  and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, taking various minor acting roles before getting his big break as Kevin Whately's sidekick on TV detective show Lewis, a spin-off of the detective show Morse. Lewis ran from 2006 to 2015, and in 2016 he released his debut album of singer-songwriter folk-rock, Holding Patterns, which failed to trouble the charts. He was formerly married to Doctor Who/Secret Diary of a Call Girl actor Billie Piper and his brother in law is actor and filmmaker Richard Ayoade.

Question Time and race
His political views first crawled into daylight when he was selected as a panelist on BBC1 political discussion program Question Time: the show's panel largely comprises politicians and journalists, but they sometimes have a gimmicky non-professional-politico to make up the numbers and inject some new perspectives. A (Black, female) member of the audience asked a question about the sometimes racist attitude of the media to Meghan Markle, the mixed-race wife of Prince Harry. Fox denied that there was any racism involved in the way certain sections of the media took a pathological hatred to Markle, and when it was suggested that Fox as a wealthy white person might enjoy a certain amount of privilege, he said it was "racist" to call him a "white, privileged male". He also said, "It's so easy to throw the card of racism at everybody… and it's really starting to get boring now." Fox's boredom at the subject of racism produced a certain media storm.

In the aftermath he emphasized his cluenessness on race by criticising the 2019 film 1917 (directed by Sam Mendes) for including a Sikh character, saying it "felt incongruous" and referring to "oddness in the casting". Fox was unaware that 130,000 Sikh soldiers served in World War One as part of the army of British India. After criticism, Fox apologised.

He claims to have been himself the victim of racism as a white man in Africa, where he felt upset that Black Africans were deferential to him.

He has criticised Black History Month for "indoctrination and divisive ideologies", tweeting a link to an article by Calvin Robinson with the same message. Robinson is a Senior Fellow at the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which has close links to the British government, and personally believes "#BlackLivesMatter is a dangerous mix of Marxism and Critical Race Theory, which poses a fundamental threat to race relations in Britain."

He claims to have been ostracized by the acting world for his beliefs. He caused a massive argument at British actors' union Equity: after his Question Time appearance, ethnic minority union reps accused him of acting to "berate and bully women of colour attempting to discuss issues of race and gender discrimination", "playing to the gallery, a populist tirade, with women of colour being used as cannon fodder", and said he had been trying to conceal his privilege and "damn any recognition of that privilege as the very racism he claims is exaggerated when people of colour try to discuss it". Fox threatened to sue Equity for libel, and the union's leadership apologised, but in response its entire race equality committee resigned in protest at the apology.

In a bizarre stunt to prove that he wasn't a racist, he set about insulting people on Twitter by (falsely) calling them paedophiles, believing this was recompense for being accused of racism. However he seemed to quickly realise this was a bit stupid, and deleted the tweets. Despite this, three of his victims brought cases for libel: Simon Blake (of LGBT charity Stonewall UK and Mental Health First Aid England), Crystal (a performer from Ru Paul's Drag Race UK) and Nicola Thorp (TV actress and journalist).

Working on his music
He released his first album, Holding Patterns, in 2016, and followed it up with A Grief Observed in 2019. These met with general indifference: Holding Patterns reached 89 in the UK charts in a 2-week chart run, and the follow-up failed to reach the Top 100 despite a large media campaign and a lot of press (based entirely on his acting success and family, and none of it in newspapers' music sections, according to music journalist Michael Hann). Hann said of its merits: "Fox’s music isn't terrible. ... Its single biggest weaknesses is Fox’s voice, which almost touches good, but is also just far enough away to be oddly disconcerting. He hits all the right notes (and in the right order), but it’s a blunt instrument, unvarying in tone and timbre. He always sounds as though he is making a point in a pub argument, whether he is professing his love, pondering the state of the world, or confessing his sins."

Most of his songs are about his divorce from Billie Piper, but his anthem and statement of principles is "The Distance". This includes the classic complaint of the privileged white male media personality who somehow thinks he's censored despite never being out of the newspapers:

He improbably promotes himself as a last light of The Enlightenment standing up for reason against intolerance: "The light has been turned down on the age of reason / Replaced by blinding fires that burn wild across the region".

Working on other people's music
On 19 November 2020, he tweeted a typically inflammatory article from the Daily Mail about the 1987 Christmas song by. The article claimed that the song was being censored by the BBC due to the homophobic slur "f*****" in the lyrics, although versions without the slur have been played for some years. The article was updated later that day to include the events below. Fox tweeted:

Minutes later, The Pogues memorably responded:

Herrenvolk, meaning "master race", was a concept in Nazi ideology.

Other beliefs
He appears to be something of a COVID-19 denialist or skeptic, calling the government response "hysteria" and saying that people should take their masks off. Fox is also an anti-vaxxer who during the COVID pandemic resorted to taking every medicine and horse dewormer he could think of rather than get vaccinated.

He has become associated with the right-wing libertarian sect around Spiked magazine, recording interviews and podcasts with James Delingpole, Julia Hartley-Brewer, etc. It seems like the alternative medicine might have had some side-effects on his brain as he tweets outright hatred against transgender people, nothing new, just the usual right-wing wrongs.

In June 2022, he was suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika made up of trans pride and LGBT rainbow flags and attacking trans rights, and declared his admiration of far-right-affiliated transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker).

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to
In September 2020, he announced he was forming a new political party, and claimed to have received £5 million (US$ 6.4m) in donations. The party is provisionally called Reclaim. Its policies are vague but it wants to reform broadcasting and education to be "free from political bias". One of the main donors is Jeremy Hosking, who made his fortune in private equity and has donated millions to causes around Brexit and the Conservative Party. In the first quarter of 2021, the party received a sizable £1,153,300 in donations, mostly from Hosking.

Fox stood as a candidate for Mayor of London in the May 2021 poll, with the main points of his platform being eliminating regulations against the spread of COVID-19 and opposing "political correctness". Fox received 1.9% of first-preference votes (47,634), almost twice as many as of the Count Binface Party, a man dressed as a bin who polled 1%. He was outpolled by Niko Omilana, a YouTuber who had pledged to cut the price of Freddos chocolate bars to 5p. Needless to say, he lost the deposit.

Reclaim currently only has one MP: Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the Conservative Party for comparing vaccines to The Holocaust.

Swastika controversy
In June 2022 his Twitter account was temporarily suspended after he created a swastika from the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag. His actions were widely condemned as they happened the same weekend as an attack on a gay bar in Oslo. He was also condemned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.