Bit of a laugh.

People have been passing this around, as a lovely example of social media hyperbole. I wonder at what point in typing in that rant (we all love a rant, we all do it!) did Fox get lost in his attempted metaphor and forget that it wasn’t him that was dead.

But I am writing today to address the very serious matter of feminists and gay and lesbian campaigners consistently getting accused of being far-right, regardless of their actual political positions. (Obviously, some are far right. Your position on matters of sex and sexuality does not demand a particular political stance).

So, why do people like me regularly get accused of ‘thinking like’ people like Fox? Here’s a potted biography of Fox from the BBC. It makes amazing reading. According to this article, his first claim to fame was ‘being asked to leave Harrow’.

He’s not a nob though, oh no, he once told The Telegraph ‘he hated Harrow and hasn’t a drop of blue blood’ – oh well, no privilege there then. I expect it’s sheer chance The Telegraph has never asked you what you think of Harrow.

That extraordinary article explains that the reason Fox is famous is that he ‘came from one of Britain’s most famous acting dynasties’. Oh well, family connections then. They can take you a long way.

But in his time, Fox has also managed to famously, spectacularly fail at being a reporter (he was sacked from GB news) and a politician (he stood for Mayor of London for Reclaim, the political party he founded). How on earth would anyone find the money to fail so spectacularly at so many expensive things?

And, to go back to that rant of his, he feels really sorry for Jason Arday for being hounded to death for failing at just one thing. At least I think that’s what he feels sorry for him for, because Fox hates EDI.

Embarrassingly, so do I.

‘Progressive’ activists like to say very loudly that people like me are ‘really’ far right, because we agree with people like Fox that EDI is not helpful. They say it because they enjoy their noisy virtue signalling, they’d much rather, eg, run around with flags and drums and chant ‘we are here, we are queer and we are [insert name of town]’ than do the real, hard work that real equality campaigning would entail. It involves a lot of investment, a lot of thinking and a lot of teaching. For example:

That was back in the days when there was real funding available for serious social projects. Meanwhile, women who like to think they are ‘left leaning’ or ‘centrist’ say we lefty women are creating ‘purity spirals’ by being fussy about how we do women’s rights.

They don’t want to do it our way because that would mean eg, not going on, and on, and on, about everything that’s wrong with every trans person they can find online but instead, doing the long, hard work of unpicking all the nonsense about sex and ‘gender identity’ that’s got into our statute books; it would mean working to re-establish feminist principles so that we can preserve protections for women and girls whilst leaving room for everyone to live in a way that suits them; it would mean not lazily blaming ‘Islamic’ men for everything bad that happens, but finding out who or what is really responsible for ‘extremism’ of all kinds in our society (clue: look at some of the things people like Laurence Fox have been saying on the telly, and ask why the media keep prioritising the voices of the Foxes and Farages over more sensible people’s opinions).

Funnily enough, the best place to find common-sense attitudes to racism, sexism and all the rest of it is usually amongst hard-pressed, working-class communities where people don’t have the time or the opportunity to get fancy ideas like Laurence Fox’s, or get caught up in unlikely ideas such as ‘gender identity’, as the long-time privileged professional classes have done.

Fox dreams

When you see some of those falsely elevated academics given a chance to talk on TV or wherever, it’s often very clear that they aren’t exceptional, and really don’t have much to say, but that was always true. If Fox had his way, universities would go back, not to having really clever people as professors, but to only allowing rich, white males an easy ride, so they could find their way into fancy academic jobs, show business, politics and anything else that took their fleeting fancy. That’s his dream world.

And that’s the difference.

Like a lot of old fashioned feminist socialists, I am always looking for ways to make the road easier for women and girls, for people who lack money and connections, and for all the people from minority groups who either get trampled on by richer people or else hung out to dry by virtue-signalling EDI outfits; socialists do this not so ‘under-privileged’ people can magically obtain Russell-group professorships, but so that they can fulfill whatever their own potential is, and stand as much chance as, eg, Laurence Fox does of standing for Mayor of London, getting acting jobs or giving their opinions on the telly.

Please tell me you can see the difference?

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