Fatuous Mr. Fox

Laurence Fox’s solutions are entirely limited to glib tweets demanding yet more liberalism – more personal freedom, more worship of the individual, and less observance of the rules and norms of society.

On Friday, Laurence Fox, who leads The Reclaim Party, tweeted a picture containing the following text.

People aren’t actually bothered by you not wearing a mask. If they were, they would just stay away from you. They are bothered that you are disobedient. They are bothered by your strength and non-compliance because it shines a light on their weakness.

Mask wearing has almost certainly passed its sell-by date. In Britain, the dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 is now Delta, and some estimates suggest that those infected with it have a viral load 1,000 times greater than they would have had with the original, Alpha strain. This is probably far too much to be meaningfully contained by the cheap surgical masks most people wear. Furthermore, the majority of Britons, including almost all those vulnerable to serious illness, have been double-jabbed with vaccines that offer near total protection against hospitalisation and death. It is therefore reasonable to ask what use masks are anymore – even if they had some marginal use in the past.

Mr. Fox, though, was instead making the sort of vacuous, clickbaity point that has come to characterise his political career. It is a British characteristic to follow rules, and grumble at those who do not, even as we loathe sticking to them ourselves. The British response to idiotic laws and overweening governments is to have them turfed out – usually after a great deal of derision. Societies in which people follow rules only when it suits them tend to be either chaotic, clannish or far less free, as the state is forced to discipline a polity that will not discipline itself.

Since the late 1960s, British politics has been dominated by liberalism, first of the social kind, introduced by the Wilson ministries, and then of the economic kind, starting with the Thatcher government. The former was led by the intellectual muscle and legislative cunning of figures such as Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, who made radical changes to the laws governing areas divorce, criminal justice, education, obscene publications and drug use. They created ‘the permissive society’ (or, as Roy Jenkins wished it, ‘the civilised society’), which emphasised personal freedom and pleasure ahead of responsibility to family and community.

If Roy Jenkins created ‘the permissive society’, Margaret Thatcher introduced ‘the permissive economy’. Her government’s economic liberalisation encouraged individuals and businesses to act in their own selfish financial interests. Corporations laid down the burden of caring for their workforce, community and country, and instead focused on their fiduciary duty to maximise returns to their shareholders above all else.

We see the deleterious effects of this double-barrelled liberalism everywhere in Britain – from Gilded Age levels of inequality, through the human tragedy of mass drug use and ubiquitous single parent families, to a venomous political discourse. It has also produced a monstrously selfish generation of students, academics and journalists, whose entire lives are defined by increasingly atomised categories of personal identity, and who rail against the ‘oppression’ of the laws and rules that often defend the greater good of society as a whole. When we are told that natal males who ‘self-identify’ as female must be given access to the changing rooms, domestic abuse shelters and sports teams that afford women privacy, protection and opportunity, we are simply witnessing the logical conclusion of the victory of the ‘I’ over the ‘We’.

Mr. Fox has built his popularity on attacking the extremist progeny of liberalism – and liberalism’s social and economic consequences have fostered enough discontent to offer him a large addressable market. The targets of his Twitter broadsides usually deserve the opprobrium he throws at them, and the anger of his followers is undoubtedly justified; however, Mr. Fox’s solutions are entirely limited to glib tweets demanding yet more liberalism – more personal freedom, more worship of the individual, and less observance of the rules and norms of society.

In September 2020, Mr. Fox revealed he had raised £5 million to fund his political ambitions. With this, and the year of thinking time he has had since, he has shown no sign of developing a serious policy platform, or even the intellectual foundation upon which one could be built. The website of his Reclaim Party, for instance, still does not contain a single legislative proposal.

Double-barrelled liberalism has failed, but our elite is so irrecoverably enmeshed in its policies that they cannot think of anything better. Thus, Britain is stuck in an interregnum – a period between the discredited old political consensus and whatever comes next – during which a feckless and cynical chancer can stay in Number 10 because the opposition is tormented by a bitter internecine war between failed Blairites and woke zealots whose main commonality is that they are equally unelectable.

In such an environment, even somebody as wantonly ignorant as Mr. Fox can make political hay by squawking on Twitter about rainbow flags and masks, like a thespian Donald Trump.