danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Ah, OK. Fair enough.
Claire Fox Goes to the House of Lords
- Thread starter Celyn
- Start date
She did it again today, making a passing comment about "holding a referendum on net zero". Because that's how climatology works.
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
She is beneath contempt: to my eternal shame I helped recruit her to the Left atWarwick University many years ago. Certainly not on the Left now. Mea Maxima Culpa….
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
Clearly not, and neither is Fox.
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
I like the idea of Larry O'Hara recruiting for the Left at Warwick University. I assume he was at a jobs fair on a stall sandwiched between the Leamington Spa Building Society and Legal & General. He probably gave her a wittily designed "Left" biro which leaked in her bag and spiked her off.
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
I hope I'm not on your extensive ignore list because I'm genuinely (a bit) interested in this. How she went from non-political, as she certainly was when she first went to Warwick, to RCP to House of Lords.
I'll declare a couple of things. I have a belief the RCP were always in the hands of the security services, Frank Furedi having a decent track record in splitting the Left from the moment he arrived here, and I kinda knew Fox quite well through my partner who she replaced as women's officer at PNL.
How did you recruit her? To what? What happened next?
PTK
Paul Kegan
PNL? What is PNL?
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
I had melted cheese on my typing finger
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
No you’re not on my ignore list! Very busy right now writing a report but will PM you In a week or so. Remind me if I don’t. Interesting what you say about the RCP yes. And to be fair there are only 6 trolls on my ignore list; wouldn’t have thought that extensive. Is it? We (as in Notes From the Borderland) only write about people/groups where we have extensive inside information, which is why we have only given the RCP a couple of pages over the years. With more data, certainly not averse to covering them more extensively. Next issue almost finished but thereafter….
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tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
Yes but I'm still trollier than thou!Honoured to be officially among the 6 trolliest posters on u75.
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
tim
EXPLODED TIM! (Help me!!!)
The above is definitely by a ‘member’ I have on ignore. What a pity I will be deprived of their pellucidly percipient comments for ever. On second thoughts, probably a very good thing
You told me months ago that I was on ignore, but clearly but you're still getting piqued by peaking at my posts. Personally I find your pomposity very funny, so am unlikely to put you on ignore.
Anyway, as Esteemed Comrade is pretending not to read my posts, could someone ask him on my behalf how he actually "recruited" for the Left? It's a concept that intrigues me so much that I've dedicated a thread to it.
Did he mean that he got her to join one of those obscure mid seventies political cults? I'm trying to imagine Larry as a wannabe Comrade Bala , but he probably has to much integrity and self awareness, and lacks the charisma for such a role.
Larry O'Hara
Well-Known Member
That case is now finished for now and Notes From the Borderland 12 and the Soho Nail-Bombing pamphlet are now finished: see Here
so to answer your question:
We were occupying the admin building (for days) in a protest about fees.
As I am both Catholic and Leftist we kind of conversed: I convinced her the two positions weren’t incompatible. Liberation Theology etc. Do remember womans right to choose was a sticking point for her: may still be!
The next academic year I had left and she was an item with my great friend the late Gary Matthews. None of us liked the SWP: we had been expelled for ultra-Leftism! While I was in Big Flame and back in Liverpool that year they gravitated towards the RCG (I never would have: humourless fuckers). Think local organisers were Eddie Abrahams and Maxine Williams. And of course the RCP was a split from the RCG.
Did encounter her later at a mutual friends 40th birthday party, but not worth speaking to.
As I said above Maxima Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa…
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BusLanes
Pedestrian
Yeah I think so. But a purer, Cold War variant.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
I would say she is less an apologist for Serbia so much as a Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia sentimentalist.
Her politics at the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia hinged around an analysis which focused on a post-USSR/Cold War new global paradigm, in which the United States was asserting itself, but also one in which other victors were promoting their own visions which were in some respects at odds with those of their erstwhile senior ally. So a chauvinistic (West) German administration was encouraging nationalistic elements first in Slovenia and then in Croatia to break away from the SFRY.
To Fox at the time this was Great Power meddling causing the breakup of Yugoslavia, in which there were bad faith actors (right-wing, free market-oriented nationalistic elements in Slovenia and Croatia being supported/led astray/controlled by external trouble-makers) and good faith actors (left-wing elements staying true to Tito's federal pan-slavic, cross-cultural project).
Of course, the latter - those still controlling the rump of the Federal apparatus, and initiating war to retain the seceding constituent republics - were by and large themselves Serbian nationalists, though still wrapped in the garb of federalism. Over time the nationalism came to the fore and the federalism was jettisoned.
Also in the mix: a visceral mistrust of liberals, and a critique of how complex ideas are bowdlerised and ground down into brain-gruel by dominant news media.
Much of her thinking at the time can be summarised in the pamphlet The Empire Strikes Back, written by RCP Alter Kämpfer Mike Freeman, and in the work of Joan Phillips (an early proponent of the just asking questions school of screedery). She certainly pushed both heavily.
The Novo/Living Marxism lash-up around Omarska was a good example of how things snowballed fast. There was a kernel of something - dissecting the little lie (how men in the camp were filmed at a barbed wire fence which did not entirely enclose them), but then flagrantly ignoring the bigger truth which it was used to illustrate (they were still in a camp they could not leave, and most of them would never leave it free or alive).
Short version: at the time I don't recall her being 'pro-Serb'; she was 'pro-Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia', but in quick order one quickly became the other, in shorthand and as a rule of thumb.
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DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
Irony: she was viscerally anti-British (as in: the traditional British state of Empire), and Great Power meddling, but in the early 1990s the British FCO was certainly perceived as, and pursued diplomatic strategies that were considered, pro-Serb at a time when the dominant powers in Western Europe were transparently more disposed towards Tudjman and his nationalistic, fragmented (but Croat-dominated), free market-oriented vision for the Balkans.
Thanks. I was thinking of Julie Burchill as well when I wrote that, IIRC she is pro-Serb. Bosnian genocide apologist, thinks Kosovars had it coming and weren't innocent victims.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
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