Claire Fox

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Claire Fox (DoB 5 June 1960 - Party name: Claire Foster) is a director and shareholder of the Academy of Ideas and the director of its principal operation, the Institute of Ideas, an organisation that she founded in 2000 which is part of the LM network. The IoI describes its mission as "to expand the boundaries of public debate by organising conferences, discussions and salons, and publishing written conversations and exchanges." The IoI has been successful in drawing in to its events not just well-known names but leading British scientific institutions, like the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Institution. She is the sister of Fiona Fox.

Fox was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) until its dissolution in 1996. The group is described by Andrew Billen, writing in The Times, as “a Seventies Trotskyite splinter group”. Its leading light was Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.. When the RCP disbanded, Fox relaunched the group publication Living Marxism, the monthly review of the Revolutionary Communist Party, as LM. LM ran until March 2000, when it was sued out of existence as a result of a libel case brought against it by ITN journalists. Fox then went on to found the Institute of Ideas and to launch Spiked, an online publication, with many of her former RCP colleagues.

Fox began at Warwick University as a Conservative Party supporter and a member of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC). Fox’s parents were Irish Catholics who migrated to England before moving to Wales, where Fox was born. After three years she left university with a lower second class degree (2:2) in literature as a libertarian Marxist and activist. She uses her change of heart on the issue of abortion to explain why free speech and challenging orthodoxies is vital to democracy.

Fox is a columnist for The Free Society, which describes itself on its website as a group that has been "launched by the smokers’ lobby group Forest to give a voice to those who want less not more government interference in their daily lives". She is a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze.

Under investigation

When The Guardian investigated Claire Fox and the Institute of Ideas, they found links to pro-gun American libertarian groups and funding from pharmaceutical corporations.

George Monbiot has been scathing in his criticism for Fox and the rest of the LM network, which he describes as a "bizarre and cultish network" whose members have become "the public face of the scientific establishment" in the UK. Monbiot explains that Fox and her LM associates "have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment."

Fox's sister Fiona Fox is the director of the Science Media Centre. Monbiot writes, "Fox has used the Science Media Centre (SMC) to promote the views of industry and to launch fierce attacks against those who question them." Monbiot adds that the SMC is "funded, among others, by the pharmaceutical companies Astra Zeneca, Dupont and Pfizer."

David Miller, researcher at the Stirling Media Research Institute, says that while the SMC was set up to provide accurate, independent scientific information for the media, "its views are largely in line with government scientific policy". What is more, "70% of its funding comes from business, which could be said to have similar interests." Thus the SMC has taken a stance that is invariably supportive of GM crops and of the pharmaceutical companies.

Fox's organisation, the Institute of Ideas, also takes funding from GM and pharmaceutical companies. Fox responded to Monbiot’s charges of "entryism" (infiltration) into the scientific establishment by saying: "Entryism is clandestine, and that's something you can't accuse us of being." She argues that the Institute of Ideas' funding is an open book. "We have received money from Pfizer, and they have never interfered. We have received money from Syngenta, which is involved in GM technology."

When asked if she should be ideologically opposed to receiving funding from corporates, Fox responded:

There is no such thing as clean money. So we're not selling out ... My peers who do take money from the government tell me there are always conditions. Whereas with Pfizer, say, they have never tried to influence what we do.

What others say

• George Monbiot casts Claire Fox and her RCP intimates as people who have moved from "the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate, libertarian right". He adds that "members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment".
• Time Out London rated Fox 64th in their list of London's 100 top movers and shakers 2006

Controversial views

• Fox is strongly pro GM technology. She claims that "It's part of being a progressive person that I consider agriculture should be as efficient as possible. I support modern farming methods because I'm a modernist, not a sentimentalist. My parents were from a farming family and I know there's there's nothing to be sentimental about. GM offers great potential. It's not a panacea for the third world and companies will make lots of money out of it - but it's ever thus."

• Fox has stood up for Gary Glitter's right to download child porn. In an interview with BBC radio 5live, she advocated her pro-choice stance to a level many found uncomfortable – the radio station's switchboard was overwhelmed by listeners angry at her position.

• Fox is critical of multiculturalism, saying, "If you challenge multiculturalism you are seen to be a racist. But it's a political philosophy that needs to be looked at. If you don't, you're taking it on trust, which is intellectually dishonest."

'Asian people' and 'enlightened society'

• Fox has stated: 'I fear that there is a loss of nerve around a new issue in politics which is religious offence which is making Enlightenment ideals dead and dusted. How are we going to inspire young Asian people to want to be part of a rational, enlightened society if we are spineless in the face of some of these challenges? We have to hold our nerve.'

Affiliations

• Institute of Ideas - founder | Academy of Ideas, Secretary and director appointed 16 March 2000 | Informinc appointed 29 January 1997, company dissolved 21 April 2004 | Living Marxism
• Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child
• The Free Society
• BBC Radio 4, The Moral Maze, on which she is a panellist
• Fiona Fox, sister.

Reference

• Institute of Ideas, Claire Fox Institute of Ideas website, accessed 29 Dec 2010

External links

Profiles

• Andrew Billen, A prickly opinion on just about everything (profile of Claire Fox), The Times, December 17, 2002
• Stuart Jeffries, Infamy's child, The Guardian, November 19, 2005. (profile of Claire Fox)
• Marc Kidson, 'What the big idea?', Cherwell, 29 October 2009
• Caroline Scott, Claire and Fiona Fox, sisters, Sunday Times, 28 May 2006.
• Huw Spanner, Hope for the Best (Interview with Claire Fox),' Spanner Media April 2007.