What, decadent? Weak-willed? “Both of those things.” Our pessimism about the future and our view that everything is a threat is” - she pauses and silently smokes most of a cigarette. Nobody thought about Holland, which hasn’t drowned, but through human ingenuity produced a solution to its problem. When New Orleans flooded no one thought, how marvellous that humans managed to build a city on a swamp. It’s not a panacea for the third world and companies will make lots of money out of it - but it’s ever thus.”įox’s belief in human ingenuity’s capacity to make lives better is untimely and, to some, exasperating. My parents were from a farming family and I know there’s there’s nothing to be sentimental about. I support modern farming methods because I’m a modernist, not a sentimentalist. “It’s part of being a progressive person that I consider agriculture should be as efficient as possible. This unfashionable faith in progress leads her into controversial areas. “There are revolutionary principles I adhere to. “If there was still an RCP I would be a member,” she says. Often with other Trotskyist splinter groups, but still. Both teem with former members of the RCP, an iconoclastic Trotskyist splinter group that regularly engaged in non-metaphorical fisticuffs. Two things emerged from these ashes - Spiked, a web magazine, and the institute, which Fox directs. It closed in 2000 after being sued for libel by ITN for falsely claiming its journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian muslims. The Institute of Ideas was born from adversity, namely from the collapse of the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP) magazine she used to co-publish, Living Marxism. If you don’t, you’re taking it on trust, which is intellectually dishonest.” But it’s a political philosophy that needs to be looked at. “If you challenge multiculturalism you are seen to be a racist. People became desperate to hang on to the ascendancy of left ideas without really questioning what they were about.”įox offers multiculturalism as an example. And they don’t like that.” They? “The liberal left.” Why wouldn’t they like orthodoxies being challenged? “There was such a sense of relief on the left when New Labour came to power that certain orthodoxies could not be challenged. Why do they think you’re infamous? “Because the point of the Institute of Ideas is to challenge established orthodoxies. “I have a reputation for infamy,” she concedes. It permits customers to choose the path of carcinogenic oblivion. We’re having coffee in one of the few cafes near her London offices that has a libertarian philosophy like hers. It seems a good idea to ask her to account for herself.įox lights a cigarette. And she refuses to disparage the benighted views of Michael Buerk - who chairs Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, on which she is a panellist - about uppity women.
#Gary glitter interview bbc download
In her time, she has stood up for Gary Glitter’s right to download child porn, libelled ITN journalists, backed GM technology and attacked multiculturalism. If his page had come in scratch ‘n’ sniff, it would have emitted a whiff of sulphur.Ĭlaire Fox is, if not the devil, then someone who holds devilishly unsettling views. He charged that she was in cahoots with her sister, Fiona, who ran a dubious PR firm that was in hock to GM companies and proselytised for pharmaceutical corporations. Then, two years ago, George Monbiot castigated Fox in this paper for being a member of a “bizarre and cultish network” that was poisoning scientific debate in Britain. It found that she was linked to pro-gun American libertarian groups, was funded by unpleasant pharmaceutical corporations and had a shady past in the nastiest Trotskyist bunch who ever picketed a nurses’ pay dispute. F ive years ago the Guardian investigated Claire Fox and her Institute of Ideas.
0 kommentar(er)
