Delingpole: Actor Laurence Fox Launches Party to Wage War on Woke

laurence fox addreses issues
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James Delingpole

Actor Laurence Fox is launching a new political party to wage war on woke.

The party — provisionally called ‘Reclaim’ — will have three objectives.

According to the Telegraph:

The first is “to promote an open space through full protection of the fundamental freedoms of speech, expression, thought, association and academic inquiry. To stand in full opposition to laws and other measures which undermine those freedoms”.

The second objective is “to reform publicly funded, controlled and operated institutions to ensure that they deliver on their primary purpose, free from political bias or agendas beyond their scope.

“This program of reform will cover, although not be exclusive to, our system of democracy, education, law enforcement, the civil service, public media, charitable organisations and other non-governmental organisations in receipt of public funds.”

The third objective is “to preserve and celebrate our shared national history, cultural inheritance and global contribution”.

Fox — best known as DC Hathaway on the long-running detective series Lewis and a star of the Delingpod podcast — confirmed to me that the project will be launched in mid-October and that so far it had raised more than £5 million in donations (some believed to come from disgruntled former Tory donors disappointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative In Name Only government). He’ll be telling us more in an interview nearer the time.

This will be the first UK political party expressly dedicated to fighting the Culture Wars. While it’s true that both UKIP and Nigel Farage’s current vehicle the Brexit Party have loosely engaged with this field in their manifestos, their main aim in both cases has been delivering Brexit rather than waging war on woke.

The Reclaim party claims neither to be on the left nor the right and should appeal to at least two key groups. Firstly consider the socially conservative, working-class Northerners and Midlanders — the so-called Red Wall — who would traditionally have voted Labour but are increasingly alienated by its metropolitan woke posturing on issues like race and gender. And then the disgruntled Tories thoroughly sick of their party’s leftwards drift, especially on cultural issues, since the Thatcher era.

Both Labour and Conservatives appear increasingly determined to ignore what ordinary people actually think and believe. They are both stuck in the politically correct, liberal-elite attitudes of the Westminster bubble — which have little attraction in the country at large.

Labour has now effectively nailed its colours to the mast of woke — aka identity politics and cultural Marxism — with its recent declaration by leader Sir Keir Starmer that Labour will be dedicated to combating ‘structural racism.’ In other words, it is now the default assumption of the Opposition that the entirety of British society is rife with embedded racism, that whites are beneficiaries of inbuilt privilege, that everything is unfair on ethnic minorities and that this must be addressed through government compulsion.

Boris Johnson’s flailing Conservatives aren’t much better — though they have, it’s true, made a belated recent attempt to regain some of the swathes of cultural territory lost to the left in the last three or so decades.

Their announcement that robustly socially conservative former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is being considered to oversee the broadcasting regulator Ofcom and that Margaret Thatcher’s biographer and High Tory Charles (now Lord) Moore is mooted to be the new Chairman of the BBC has reduced the left-liberal media elite to paroxysms of shivering terror and sphincter-bursting expostulations of luvvie outrage.

But first, neither appointment may actually happen. And second, it’s surely a case of far too little, far too late. Even though the Conservatives have been in power for a full decade now, they have done almost nothing to arrest the radical left’s relentless long march through the institutions.

There’s barely an institution left in the United Kingdom — not even the Army has been spared — that has not been colonised and then destroyed from within by Social Justice Warriors.

That’s why, since he first started speaking out on these issues last year, Laurence Fox has become such an influential figurehead: he speaks for the many, many people in Britain who are sick of seeing their culture and traditions being eroded, having to walk on eggshells every time they open their mouth lest they offend someone, and who now feel like strangers in their own country.

As the scion of one of Britain’s most distinguished acting dynasties — father James co-starred with Mick Jagger in Performance; uncle Edward was in Day of the Jackal; cousins Emilia and Freddie are both hugely successful — Laurence Fox ought to be a left-liberal luvvie through and through.

As an alumnus of Winston Churchill’s old school Harrow, he ought to be a pillar of the Establishment.

Somehow, Fox has managed to escape both curses by remaining defiantly his own man, forever saying what he thinks regardless of the consequences. (Which he thinks everyone else should be free to do too — as we were until really quite recently).

Thanks to his outspoken views on issues like climate change and ‘diversity’ — none of them remotely extreme; just not on board with the liberal-left narrative — he has effectively been cancelled by his profession. His fellow actors have, almost to a man and woman, rejected him. Casting directors shun him.

His revenge will be sweet.

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