[A-List] UK state: ideological tinkering

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Lou Proyect forwarded this to Marxmail last December. I am archiving it here
in full for possible future reference, in addition to whatever interest it
may have for listers.


A prickly opinion on just about everything
The Andrew Billen interview
If you need someone to stand up for Gary Glitter, globalisation and GM, look
no further than Claire Fox. But how did a revolutionary socialist end up
setting the pace for public debate?
The Times, December 17, 2002

IF YOU GO DOWN TO the British Museum tonight you'll be sure of a big
surprise. A local hotel is hosting one of London's most extraordinary
Christmas parties. Among those who have been invited to feast on mulled wine
and "seasonal canapés" are Jonathan Dimbleby, Fiona Shaw, Peter Tatchell,
Chris Woodhead, Alan Sillitoe, Charles Moore, Fay Weldon, and Lord Evans of
Temple Guiting. It is an eclectic mix, even by Bloomsbury's standards, and
an even odder one if, among the coincidence of faces, you notice a selection
of backroom ideologues from the Left and Right, people not normally seen
dead in one other's company, still less drunk in it.
Their hostess is Claire Fox, director of the unlikely sounding Institute of
Ideas. Every contradiction of the guest list is contained in this woman: a
veteran of the Left but the Right's latest pin-up; a professed socialist who
speaks up for globalisation; the loser of a major libel action brought by
one of Britain's largest news organisations yet a media favourite, resident
on Radio 4's The Moral Maze and increasingly a participant on TV shows such
as Question Time; a courteous and humorous social animal yet the possessor
of views that cause phone-in hosts as well as their callers to abuse her on
air, as when she set about defending Gary Glitter's right to feast on child
pornography.

In public debates, and she seems to go to them all, she says the unsayable.
Over the last few years, I have noticed, however, that audience reaction to
her has matured from "who the hell does she think she is?" to, more simply,
"who is she?"

Others ask what on earth is the Institute of Ideas? Its website provides an
anodyne self-definition. Its mission is to "expand boundaries of public
debate by organising conferences, discussions and salons, and publishing
written conversations and exchanges". Co-sponsors have included the Royal
Society of Arts, the Tate, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British
Museum. Two festivals ago, I spoke at an IoI session in Edinburgh on the
future of satire. It was lively, fun and unpartisan.

The IoI's origins lie, however, deep in a Seventies Trotskyite splinter
group called the Revolutionary Communist Party and in its organ, Living
Marxism. When the RCP abolished itself in 1996, Fox relaunched the magazine
as the glossier, trendier LM. It was a minor publishing phenomenon until
March 2000 when ITN forced its closure by winning a court case against it
for an article that claimed it had misrepresented footage of an emaciated
Bosnian Muslim at a Serbian internment camp. Some then accused Fox or being
a pro-Serb "tanky". The complaint now is different: that the IoI has mutated
in a sinister fashion into a front organization for the far Right.

We meet at noon in the IoI's narrow, white offices near Smithfield. Fox,
wearing more make-up and looking more nervous than is usual for her, leads
me out to a café which I say is too noisy. We move on to a delicatessen, Fox
accusing me of being picky and "posh". I say it just shows how unreliable
impressions can be.

"I'm a little bit of an unknown quantity myself," she says, explaining her
nervousness. "I didn't emerge in the traditional fashion. I didn't come out
of the Oxbridge club. I didn't come out of the traditional trade union
movement. I've just emerged on the scene and people are a little bit like,
'What's she about?' "

So what, I ask, is her agenda? She says they - she means IoI's four staff -
remain influenced by their left-wing background. She still opposes
capitalism, although she stopped believing in revolution when the Berlin
Wall fell.

Why, then, does The Guardian, which mounted a big investigation into the IoI
two years ago, think her part of the American libertarian Right? "I've no
idea why The Guardian think what they think, but there are people who seem
to imagine that you can't have an idea unless it's paid for.

"The only explanation that some people can come up with for, for example,
why I'm a relatively enthusiastic supporter of GM (genetically modified)
food must be that I'm in the pay of the multinationals. It couldn't possibly
be that I have intellectually decided, having looked at the evidence, that
GM might be a way of solving some of the problems of the developing world,
might be at least something that should be looked at.

"It's as though nobody believes any ideas any more. You must only have them
because you've been bought off."

When it comes to her defining her current principles, Fox talks vaguely
about "challenging orthodoxies" and promoting "the idea of the active
subject". "We can make our destinies. We are not victims of it," she says,
and we segue into a conversation about how victimhood has become the new
heroism and how Diana, Princess of Wales, has become its icon.

"The espousal of Princess Diana as a model is a disaster and, as one of the
BBC's Great Britons, a complete disaster. She's a great Briton because she
suffered more than anyone else and she talked about it and opened her
 heart."

The Sexual Offences Act currently before Parliament is another symptom of
society's search for victims. "Its notion of consent is extremely dangerous.
The idea that you have to ask for consent, that is that consent has to be
explicitly given, would indicate that this was drawn up by people who have
never had a sexual encounter, never had a personal encounter and have no
idea about how human beings work. Either people will stop having sex, which
won't happen, or more and more people are going to be done for rapes when I
do not think rape will have occurred."

But the "there was yes-yes in her eyes" defence is pretty scummy, isn't it?
"Look, human beings have to be treated as grown ups who can actually
negotiate these things. I'm not saying there aren't times when the law and
people's defences can be irritating. But even this encounter, it's not
unambiguous. Life is not unambiguous. I mean by that: 'am I being set up?'

Not am I going to pounce? "No," she says, "but it's nerve racking. There's a
degree of risk. But I have to be a grown up. You have to be a grown up. We
have to trust each other to a degree and maybe that trust will be abused and
that won't be the end of the world either. We'll both survive."

She points out the flaccid liberal defence of asylum seekers also relies on
elevating victimhood to a moral good.

"One of the most dynamic things about human development has been people have
moved through the world, moved to other countries. What I don't like is the
way the debate about asylum has distorted what the real discussion should be
about immigration. People are forced to seek legitimacy by showing us their
scars. The only way they're considered to be legitimate is if they've
suffered sufficiently. I think that's completely degrading, for a start off,
but it also then leaves this notion of the 'bogus' asylum seeker. I don't
think there's anything bogus about wanting to improve your standard of
living or to live somewhere else.

"My parents were Irish immigrants and they came to England. They made the
decision to try and improve their standards of living by moving on and they
were treated badly but they survived and they did rather well."

The Foxes' eldest daughter was born 42 years ago in Manchester in 1960 but
the family moved to Clwyd, the industrial northeastern corner of Wales,
where they speak with hardly a lilt. Her father, who died a few years ago,
ran a successful plant-hire business and owned their house, but it was a
working-class area dominated by British Aerospace and British Steel. She
calls her family a matriarchy: a strong mother, bright, bookwormish Claire
and her two younger sisters, both of whom have successful careers.

The first inkling of a political awakening for Fox followed a visit in the
sixth form by the local Labour MP, who made the mistake of pledging that
Shotton Steelworks would not close. When it did, the feeling of having been
sold out hit Fox so hard it never left her. She voted for Mrs Thatcher in
1979, and no one since.

At Warwick University she worked lazily at her degree in English and
American literature, emerging with a 2:2, and harder at finding a political
identity. She even went to a meeting of the Federation of Conservative
Students, whose callow libertarianism she rejected (some might say only to
embrace it later) and argued passionately from a Catholic position against
abortion. She realised that she did not know what she was talking about and
was, she says, fortunate to meet people rude enough to tell her so.

Did she jettison God at that stage? "Oh, don't do that to my mother," she
pleads. "I became a Marxist and then I looked at religion completely
differently. I was a liberation theologist in that Catholic sense."

On leaving, she worked for a decade in the voluntary sector, mainly in
mental health but also in homelessness and for battered women (dealing with
victims, in other words). Afterwards, she began teaching special needs
adults in further education and started writing for local newspapers about
the issues she was dealing with. She moved from the North to London to work
full-time in further education. She loved teaching but rowed with her
bosses. She finally resigned to work on LM. Throughout all this, her
inspiration and succour was the RCP.

And, meanwhile, what happened to her personal life? "Did I have one? Yes. It
's had its ups and downs. Well, I'm not married and I haven't got children,
that will do, but I'm an enthusiastic auntie."

Boyfriends? Girlfriends? "I have boyfriends."

Why won't she talk about it? "I don't talk about this to anyone. No one. My
sister if she's lucky. My sister said only the other evening, 'Claire's
private life has always been a mystery to all of us'."

For a moment, listening to her reject the personal in favour of the "real
issues", I think she sounds like a Marxist. It's the only time in 90
minutes. It would be simplistic to suggest that such ideological swings are
a symptomatic of a Catholic who, having lost her faith, has spent two
decades pursuing alternative theologies. It's no more simplistic, however,
than believing her opinions have been bought by the "secret" backers who pay
her a salary which, she assures me, is so low that she's too embarrassed to
disclose it - circa £20,000, I'd guess.

As it happens, unless there is concealment of Cherie-like proportions going
on, the institute is open about where its money comes from. Sixty per cent
is from individual donations, the rest comes from corporate or institutional
sponsors, a list of which they e-mail me. Some names, such as Saatchi &
Saatchi and the Adam Smith Institute, certainly lean to the Right, but the
British Council and Relate are on the list too.

I ask if the IoI has received cash from America's leading right-wing think
tank, the Heritage Foundation. She says it has not. A conference in America
last autumn was sponsored by the pro-gun, pro-GM Reason Foundation, but the
venue for the event was the New School in Manhattan, a radical left-wing
bastion.

Whom else might we object to? "Novartis."

Who are they? "Pharmaceuticals, I think. I don't know who they are. That's
not very good for future sponsorship, is it?"

Do sponsors ever tell her what not to say? "Never. Well, one company, a
private company with a lot of money in a trust, wanted their chief executive
to speak at an event and we said no. But, in fact, and I hate to say this
because of my background, but who does interfere in debate? The only people
who interfere are politically correct liberals who would have you kicked out
of every polite dinner party for querying their sacred orthodoxies."

I just wonder if she ever notices her knee jerking against an orthodoxy that
actually has right on its side? "That is a really good question. Actually, I
hate professional mavericks, and I know I keep saying 'challenging
orthodoxies' in a bit of a buzzword type way. I think you have to query
everything without being silly about it. Sometimes orthodoxies may be
 right."

A little after seeing her, I ask John Vidal, co-author of the The Guardian
investigation, what he thinks of her now. He speaks warmly of her personally
but remains convinced that the institute is intellectually, at least, part
of a business-funded network of American libertarians. Tactically, on the
other hand, its attempts to infiltrate the media recall the heyday of the
far Left. He is "spooked by the clones, the boys and girls looking for a
life view", at IoI meetings. In short, though, he would have no great
objections if the institute were more open about its beliefs, if it renamed
itself, perhaps, the Institute of Libertarian Ideas.

Myself, I think Fox is right that liberal pieties can forestall debate. The
IoI's discussions are therefore stimulating, even if her own contributions
are sometimes so unnuanced that they sound dotty. But then, having had the
courage to discharge two otiose theologies from her life, she might yet
abandon her latest. Her real agenda, secret even from herself, perhaps, may
be the promotion of Claire Fox. In which case, good luck to her. If my
invitation still stands, save the last seasonal canapé for me.