Claire Fox

Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox of Buckley (born 5 June 1960), is a British writer, journalist, lecturer and politician who sits in the House of Lords as a non-affiliated life peer. A right-wing libertarian, she is the director and founder of think tank the Academy of Ideas, formerly known as the Institute of Ideas.

A lifelong Eurosceptic, she was previously a member of the Trotskyist British Revolutionary Communist Party but later began identifying as a libertarian. She became a registered supporter of the Brexit Party shortly after its formation and was elected as an MEP in the 2019 European Parliament election. She was nominated for a peerage by the Boris Johnson-led Conservative government in 2020, despite her past opposition to the existence of the House of Lords.

Fox was born in 1960 to Irish Catholic parents, John Fox and Maura Cleary. She spent her early years in Buckley, Wales. After attending St Richard Gwyn Catholic High School in Flint, she studied at the University of Warwick where she graduated with a lower second class degree (2:2) in English and American Literature. She later gained a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education. From 1981 to 1987, she was a mental health social worker. She was later an English Language and Literature lecturer at Thurrock Technical College from 1987 to 1990 and at West Herts College from 1992 to 1999.

Fox joined the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) as a student at the University of Warwick. For the next twenty years, she was one of the RCP's core activists and organisers. She became co-publisher of its magazine Living Marxism. When Living Marxism rebranded as LM in 1999, she organised its first conference.

LM closed in 2000 after it was found in court to have falsely accused Independent Television News (ITN) of faking evidence of the Bosnian genocide. In 2018, Fox refused to apologise for suggesting that evidence of the genocide was faked.

Fox stayed with her ex-RCP members when the group transformed itself in the early 2000s into a network around the web magazine Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, both based in the former RCP offices and promoting libertarianism.

After founding the Institute of Ideas, Fox became a guest panellist on BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and appeared as a panellist on BBC One's political television programme Question Time. She was criticised in The Guardian for rejecting multiculturalism as divisive and for her libertarian beliefs in the desirability of minimal governmental control and free speech in all contexts.

In 2015, Fox was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. Her book, I Find That Offensive!, was published in 2016.