The Anti-Lockdown, Anti-Woke Actor Running for London Mayor: Exclusive with Laurence Fox

With every passing day, the lines in the sand grow deeper and deeper. There are things we can say, and there are things that we simply cannot say. And the rules keep changing. Some champion this as progress towards a better society, while others see its logical conclusion as the establishment of authoritarian control over once-free societies. There's 50% of this country that will not speak their mind for fear of losing their job. Today I sit down with Lawrence Fox, the UK actor and singer who launched the new Reclaim Party last summer in the UK. Free speech and open discourse are centerpieces of his platform. Well, how can you create decent policy without a full debate? Just today, Lawrence Fox announced he is running for mayor of London. Well, I am going to stand to be mayor. Why? Well, I want to reclaim your freedom. He's been a harsh critic of woke ideology. It's a religion, it feels to me, a new secular religion, as Douglas Murray says, with no redemption and no forgiveness. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Lawrence Fox, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much, Jan, for having me. Congratulations on the run, of course. But you have a very, very specific idea behind running. From what I understand, winning isn't your goal. Sharing information is your goal. Tell me about this. Similar to America, the United Kingdom is really struggling with their principle of freedom of speech. Without full and honest debate, we will end up in a place where the whole center of gravity of democratic communication is shifted so heavily over to one side that it becomes very unstable. And therefore, it's actually much more serious than people... In England, we call it political correctness. This is an extremist form of political correctness that has resulted globally in entire countries and nations being locked down without full scientific debate, with people being forced to wear masks, even though it says on the box that this is not to protect you from a respiratory virus. And we're not being able to have discussions about our history, about anything for fear of offending people. And I think one needs to accept that you have the right to offend, and you do not have the right not to be offended. And it's through that conversation that mankind is going to actually progress and be a progressive. And these words that are hijacked about inclusion and diversity and equity, they've just been hijacked and dragged away from their genuine meaning. It's not much more than over 100 years ago that women got the vote in the UK, and that gay men were chemically castrated. So we are a genuinely progressive, tolerant, and warm society. And I want to give people an opportunity to speak to that and also learn from it, rather than have to navel-gaze and self-hate in the way that universities are giving year after year of graduates who are told to hate where they come from. And I think that's a negative way of looking at that progress. It's regressive rather than progressive. You make this connection between this stifling of debate around the issue of race, with the stifling of debate around the issue of what does the science say about coronavirus, or are lockdowns a good idea or not, or what kind of policy even is appropriate. And I find that quite interesting without necessarily even talking about what the actual right policy is. How are these things connected? Well, how can you create decent policy without a full debate? So there is definitely an argument to say, are lockdowns effective in any way? Because if you look around the world, from Sweden to Peru, interestingly, you have very severe lockdown measures. In the UK, we're still under extremely heavy lockdown measures. And yet we've had a very, very high number of deaths per capita. And so I think there's a debate to be had about whether lockdown is a decent approach. It's not to say that my personal opinion will get in the way of that, because my personal opinion is an instinctive one and a moral one, which is that lockdowns are incorrect and wrong, even for a virus as deadly as Ebola. I think you have to allow people the freedom to look out. If you're seeing bodies pile up on the street, then you're going to not leave your house. And then in the same way, it's exactly the same with our cultural heritage. If someone says, this man was a slave trader, we're going to remove his statue and throw it away. How do children learn? How do we broaden the debate? Why not say, yes, this man or this woman or this person did do something wrong in our current view of the world, but wouldn't it be better to teach your children what happened and also to be intellectually consistent with that? So I think ultimately, without the freedom to debate and the freedom to allow people to express themselves, it's through speaking that often we understand what we think. All of these things are linked, everything, just through that debate, inquiry, genuine intellectual curiosity, not stifling of it. Well, so I want to dig into how you got into the middle of this whole discussion about free speech and cancellation and so-called woke culture. Give me a sense of this path into today that you took. Well, I grew up in a family where my mother didn't say many words because she had five children who screamed and chatted across a table because that table was the bastion of free speech. But the few things she did say was she would always say things like, he who states his case first seems right until another comes to examine him. So we had as children and as young adults ingrained in our psyches the idea that one must be free to express oneself. And I noticed through my acting career, having worked with a very traditionally, well, I think in America they would call him a liberal, rather than a leftist actor. And we spent 10 years disagreeing, but talking very friendly about issues. And then there seemed to be this new wave of performers coming through who were very, very stringent about what can and not be said on set. And things began to become very tense. And then Trump got elected. Actually, what happened mainly, I think it really began to fizz in England with the Kavanaugh hearings in America, where people were getting very much into this idea of believe the victim. And I thought that was a very much a hatchet job at the center of what our society is based around, which is you don't believe anybody, you examine them. You know, he states the case first seems right until another comes to examine them. And I made these points publicly and I made them privately to friends. And I was astonished by how many members of the acting community were like, no, no, one must, you just have to believe the victim in this situation. So I then ended up writing a song, because I also do music, called The Distance, which said, They have put something in water, they seek a cure for the conversation. They stole a march on your indecision. And the first to fall was laughter, just to quell the unoffended. They seek to murder your opinion. The light has been turned out on the age of reason. Replaced by blinding fires that burn wild across the region. For the wrong to rule, the good must just stand idly by. So I need you more than ever I need your hand in this resistance If we're going to go the distance And I went to promote this song around the UK and I did a TV show called Question Time and that's when I trod on the time bomb and I responded to a woman who said to me that Meghan Markle had been bullied out of the United Kingdom via racism and I thought no, that's just not true. There's a huge amount of goodwill towards Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in the UK. And then the woman proceeded to call me a white privileged male. And I think those words in that tone adopted a pejorative term. I thought that that was active direct racism. So I said to her, I think that's direct racism. And then everything exploded. So after you actually spoke out about this in the most public way possible, I suppose, what happened? Ah, yes. So when I spoke out about it publicly, I went to bed that night thinking, Oh, good. I just said, well, you know, anybody who I know a lot of people that think the same as I think. So I went to bed and I woke up in the morning and I turned on my phone and it just melted with sort of pinging. And I got on the train down to London, I got off the train and someone came out to me and went, good on you. Thank you for saying that we needed to have that said, I was walking around and people were saying brilliant. I thought, Oh, good. I've started a conversation. Lovely. And then the actors union who equity decided that they would weighed in and say that I bullied and hectored a woman of colour, which again, I find peculiar as well under what authority is it woman of colour or coloured woman, I don't understand who decided which one was the appropriate term. So they then said they called on all actors to denounce me, which essentially was the end of my acting career in one moment, which I found very sad and hurtful because actually, I was calling for tolerance and understanding, but I was being accused of racism. So I then sued them. And I said, you will retract that statement. So I threatened to see them, they did and we settled out of court, but the damage was then done. And I lived in a in a sort of period of shock for a while. And I was very sad because I obviously 22 years and I was enjoying my acting career. I love creating. And then I thought, no, something needs to be done about this. So I turned my back on acting for the time being, I hope to go back to it one day. I mean, goodness knows what society is going to look like in a few years. But I hope it's I hope we're putting up the walls in the UK to the most egregious parts of identity politics, which America is being consumed by now. And I thought I have to do something about this. And I have to be a representative for people who do I have a platform, I obviously became hugely famous very quickly. And I thought I'm going to use that platform to constantly remind people that it's important that we talk and we don't judge people on things that are just skin deep. You know, it's not the right way to do it. Well, and you caught the attention of a very prominent, at least at one point, conservative donor, Jeremy Hoskin, who is actually supporting the efforts of Reclaim and your efforts and so forth. Tell me about that. Yes, I was approached in a sort of quiet way. And I said, Would you like to meet someone? And I said, Sure. And I went to an office and they said, What do we do about the problem that's going on in the UK? And I said, I think it needs to be media, because obviously, I've been a fan of yours. And I've been a fan of lots of American video casters, you know, in the modern in the new media. And I said, I think it needs to be media. And he said, No, it's more dangerous. Now we need it needs to be political, it needs to be a political voice. And I think he actually turns out to be right. So he says to me, he says, if you the only way you're ever going to be able to change anything in this world really is to threaten the people threaten the government that you'll take their votes off them. Hence why I'm going to stand for the mayor because if you think about it now, the debate over Coronavirus or the debate over statues, both of which are relevant to the UK, if I turn around and I say to the constituency in London, this is what I believe, I believe in broadening up the debate, and I will stand against us being locked down and I will stand for preserving our cultural heritage, my my power to challenge the government and make the government change is much bigger than it would be as a political movement. There are many wonderful political movements in the world. And there are very few political parties that are, you know, will have enough clout. So I hope to grow the party and, and, you know, essentially become I want to make the I want to make both political both sides of the political spectrum be more sensible. That's essentially what I want to do. And if they won't do it, I will go and attack them where they're being very woke, where they're being anti nation and not patriotic. That's what I'll do. And I'll stand candidates there as well. If they don't understand that people need to be represented, there's 50% of this country that will not speak their mind for fear of losing their job. They need representing too. So as we speak, actually, it's World Book Day, curiously, and we're in the midst of the cancellation, or at least some of the works of a very famous American author, Dr. Seuss. I'm just going to quote from John Gizzi, a US journalist. Today's left may call Dr. Seuss' cartoons racist and offensive, but in the 1940s, the black press cheered him for cartoons mocking segregation in the armed forces and his early support of civil rights. So it's very interesting. I think it speaks to a whole bunch of issues that we want to talk about today. At the same time, you just sent me a photo of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reading Dr. Seuss in what's apparently a very heavy troll. Tell me about what's going on. The cancellation of Dr. Seuss is very, very interesting, isn't it? Because he would be considered very much on the left in the UK and a very woke, not woke, but very free and artistic man. So, and writer said, it's fascinating to see him get cancelled. And it draws into this brand new concept about digital book burning, I suppose, the vanishing of things that we hold dear to ourselves. I think it's terrifying, really. And the argument from the left is, well, there's only six books that we're banning. And there's another, however many, I think there are another 29 or something like that. And so it's not really cancellation or digital book burning. But essentially, this is what it is. It's the modern equivalent of saying these books are not appropriate and we have decided ahead of you. And one has to say, under what moral authority do you decide what I can and cannot consume? There's a sense in the US that most of the major institutions in the US have been thoroughly occupied by people believing or at least forwarding this woke ideology. Now, is this the same situation in the UK? How does this look? Yeah, it's very bad in the UK. Well, I mean, we have this massive inconsistency at Oxford, you know, with them, they'll change their Wickham Chair of Physics to the Tencent Wickham Chair for Physics. So it takes 700,000 pounds off the CCP, who's practising, you know, religious-based, massive religious-based discrimination of people. And then they will go, which is racism as well, and then they will also want to tear down the statue of Cecil Rhodes, who they call a racist, these young students, under very dubious circumstances, a lot of which is anecdotal and via novel, actually via fiction. So universities are dreadful for it at the moment. There are some okay universities, but we're also looking even to the point of our National Health Service are saying the Brighton National Health Service Trust has renamed breastfeeding as chest feeding. And these are abuses of language that need to be questioned. But for some reason, people have just asked to just accept it. It's tolerant, it's kind, but it's not tolerant and kind. It's controlling, and it's severe. So let me jump on this example that you gave of Oxford. On the one hand, it seems like Oxford is perfectly happy to accept money from the Chinese Communist Party, while with full knowledge that the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide in Xinjiang. This has, of course, been discussed in the House of Commons and determined in the Senate. The U.S. government understands this to be the case. And of course, all sorts of other crimes against humanity level abuses in China. At the same time, many of us have heard about the famous Rhodes Scholars. It's a huge, huge laurel to have, to be one. And I think it's based on a supposition that there was some kind of racism. There isn't even any direct evidence that his statue is being called to be removed, and perhaps his name may not be used anymore. Now, why do you think there's this kind of bizarre juxtaposition? Why one in one direction, the other in the other? I think it's really interesting, isn't it, the inconsistency of the ideology of what we loosely call wokeism, but is essentially progressivism, which is, it doesn't balance the idea of genocide of the Uyghur Muslims in China, compared to the way that we look at ourselves as a culture and how we operated in the past. Hilary Mantel said very well, it's not our position to tick off the past. But we seem in civilisation and Western free democracies to have reached this sort of apotheosis of, we have now, we've worked everything out, it's all our fault, and we're very sorry. And we started in Bristol Council today, started talking, voted through reparations for slaves in the United Kingdom. And you're just saying, there is three generations, four, five, six, seven generations between us, we didn't commit these crimes. Why are you so angry with us? So there's a desire to tear down what we are, rip it away, and feel ashamed. But at the same time, you'll allow a global superpower to commit horrendous acts of genocide against people, and it's fine. It's consistently inconsistent. And it's very anti-reason, and it's very anti-rational, which is all the things, enlightenment values, that our societies were built on. And it's worrying, actually. It's a religion, it feels to me. It feels like the rise of a new religion, a new secular religion, as Douglas Murray says, with no redemption and no forgiveness. With the creation of Reclaim as a political party, from what I understand, its initial purpose, at least, isn't necessarily to win the House, so to speak, but it is to change policy. And you've actually had a bit of an impact already through these efforts. Yes, our lovely Conservative government, who aren't Conservative at all, whenever I make an announcement, they tend to make one at the same time. So we released some polling saying, I commissioned some polling, because I was interested to know how people feel about how free they are to speak in the UK. And it came back that half of the people are frightened of saying what they think. And also a huge percentage of people are very upset about having their statues removed or their history rewritten. So on the same day as I... Well, the first day I announced the party, the government said that they were going to present some very Conservative-leaning people to running the BBC. And then when I released the free speech polling, the government said that they were going to create the position of a free speech champion in university. So I took that as one of my first great political wins. So all I'm asking them to do is accept the fact that there are people in our country and across the Anglosphere who aren't ashamed of what we are, who can look at things in a balanced way. And actually, if you think about this reactive Conservative government that we got in the UK, to suddenly install the position of a free speech champion, imagine what in the wrong hands that free speech champion becomes. It becomes your biggest and most direct censor. So we're in a very reactive place as a culture at the moment, and our Conservative government will not stand up against it, bearing in mind that our Prime Minister is a trained classicist, a lover of language. And he'd had nothing to say about the difference between breastfeeding and chestfeeding, which I find astonishing. You've had some pretty prominent people step up and appreciate your work. I was just reading an article about how a former head of the BBC and Channel 4 was actually speaking about this specific example of your interview and commentary of Meghan Markle, and basically saying, hey, what you're doing is racist, that this was a healthy change that someone was actually speaking with their mind, as opposed to, as you described, being sort of cowering and not being able to speak. Yes, it was Lord Grade who used to run the BBC back when the BBC actually used to be the BBC, and they were impartial. And also, they were sort of gently supported culture. Now the BBC are as bad as any other institution in the UK who are trying to undermine it. So that was very reassuring. I think probably the thing I'm accused of in a positive way is sort of saying the things that people think that are a bit frightened to say. And then when they look at someone like me and the way that people go after me on a relentless, on a daily basis, they go, oh, well, I'm actually quite pleased I stayed quiet. But also the way I was raised and the values I was raised in, I think are worth protecting. We don't exist in a state of freedom. You have to nurture it, protect it. And I've got two young sons, and they're very filled up with this language of racism and stuff. My eldest son said to me, I'm sorry if this is racist, but I think mum is a better cook than you. So they're having it ingrained in their heads from a very, very young age. And I'm just like, no, you're not. You're you, and you're as valuable as anybody else is. And that's what matters in this world. And you can't rip apart families and make people feel bad about things that they haven't done, which is essentially what this modern revisionist history does, which is anyone with white skin is fundamentally evil. And you don't want the reaction to that. What's going to happen as society moves forward, at some point, someone's going to turn around and go, enough. And you don't want identity politics from the right or from the white people, particularly. I don't think you want that in a majority white country. You want tolerance and love and understanding between people. That's what I think is most important, identity-based, skin color-based hatred. It's racism. That's what it is, modern racism. Something that just struck me as you're speaking now, traditionally, we think of this left-right spectrum as you described it. Lately, I've been thinking of it more as authoritarian-free spectrum, or at least that spectrum seems to be becoming more relevant. What are your thoughts? I completely agree. I think that it's not really a left-wing problem, censoriousness. I can see why left-wing people are more sympathetic to the idea of re-evaluating history, but I don't think it's left or right at all. I think it's captured or free. That's what I think it is. Are you into freedom or are you into control? Anyone who wants to mandate the way that you speak, the way that you treat people, the relationships you can have, the groups of people you can hang around with at work, we're bringing pro-segregationism into supermarkets in England. They're saying we have to have safe spaces for different skin-colored people. This is really dangerous. Freedom is about looking beyond someone's skin color. It should be as much as one notices that we are different skin color. You have to encourage yourself through reason and rationality and love to make that as incidental as humanly possible to your relationships with people. It seemed like we were getting there. It seemed like we were there and all of the fruit had been picked off the tree, the really solid fruit being picked off the tree in terms of civil rights movement and in the UK. Suddenly, we're looking for racism everywhere and finding it everywhere. It's very depressing for children. I just think, no, this is not right. We must challenge the causes of direct racism. We must face up to them and say this is wrong. Any form of direct racism is wrong. To label a nation in the UK's case of 70 million people as being a systemically and fundamentally racist country, I think is very, very damaging for the cohesiveness of society. We want to bring society together. We don't want to go, you're all racist, by the way, if you're white skinned, then you're not entitled to opinion either because you're oppressors. It's very, very unhealthy. I hope that it's not something that we've made, that this identitarianism is the end of capitalism. It feels like very much the end of an empire almost. It feels like end of empire behavior, doesn't it? Very decadent and peculiar. Lawrence, you've been actually working with Calvin Robinson on a number of things, I suppose, in the Reclaim Party. Tell me about what's happening with that. I was very lucky to have seen Calvin emerging over social media, actually, and being someone who happened not to have white skin standing up for the fact that he wasn't an oppressed victim. He was a real solid believer in the values that make Britain a wonderful and tolerant place to be. I approached him and said, can we work together and can I get some understanding over things that are quite complex, like critical social justice and critical race theory and all these things. He's been fantastic. One of the reasons why he and I work well together is because he finds this whole thing extremely racist and patronizing. He said, what are the obstacles between me succeeding in life in this country? Truly, what are those obstacles? The amount of racial abuse he has received is astonishing. He has been called a house N-word, or all of the worst things. Someone said the other day that he needed to have the black beaten back into him. He's been so courageous and so steadfast. Ultimately, what he's trying to do is set an example for young kids of whatever skin color, so you must stand up. He's a hero of mine. I'm lucky enough to get to work with him and collaborate with him on things. What a great privilege. What an annoying irony for those that would wish to destroy positive, good relationships to say, it's really hard to call someone a racist when the person they're working with is not white skinned. What is this thing with skin color? Honestly, I can see in the past how dreadful it's been, but we're so much more than this. So what's next? What's next? Well, I've commissioned a legal review into some of the laws actually that America is starting to want to bring in, in terms of an Equality Act. I see that the Democrats are trying to use that to supersede the First Amendment. I have commissioned some top barristers, actually some really influential people are quite keen to get involved. So I have to be a bit secretive about that until it's announced, to look at where freedom of speech is impinged and where equality under the law is damaged. We have an Equality Act in the UK where there are protected characteristics. It's the same as what's going on in America, where you're protected by certain things, which I think removes equality under the law. Because if someone is more protected than somebody else, then that's equality gone. So I've got that coming out. I've commissioned a big long paper on the effects of lockdown through various disciplines from mental health, cancer, all of these things. A lot of that's going on in the UK at the moment. I'm just going to say to people, I have the backing and the confidence to know that my position is a good one. So I'm impartial. Whenever I commission someone, I say, I don't want you to tell me what I want to hear. I want you to tell me what is the truth. We're going to release over the next few months, several papers that will give people the power to decide what they think. I hope to create discussions in people's houses and homes, dinner tables and hearts, not me banging a drum saying that I know what the answer is. I don't know what the answer is, and my views are not the answer. The answer is the conversation. I'm just one of millions and millions of voices. Where can people get more information about this movement that you're leading? They can follow me, which is at Lozofox, as long as on Twitter, as long as they don't mind videos of my annoying dogs, who I love, or the Reclaim Party on Twitter. I think the ReclaimParty.co.uk is that. We have Facebook and all of these things as well. You'll find us. If you type in the Reclaim Party, you'll end up staring at a picture of my ugly mug. Any final thoughts before we finish up, Lawrence? I'm so pleased that I was introduced to you, Jan, because my dad, who's got so much admiration for and has always encouraged so much free thought in his children, managed to find you and introduce me to a whole world of what's going on. It's been a great privilege and an honor to talk to you. Well, that's very, very kind words, Lawrence. It's such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you.