Former Brexit Party MEP Baroness Fox of Buckley banned from lecturing at a university about canceling culture – for retweeting a comedian’s joke Ricky Gervais considered “transphobic”. The colleague, formerly known as Claire Fox, was left stunned and angry after being uninvited by the University of London’s Royal Holloway debating society and expressed her grievances in a speech delivered to the House of Lords last night.
Baroness Fox was set to speak about “the importance of debate” in the association’s first personal speech since the pandemic, having been given permission to do so by the Royal Holloway Students Union after what was told to colleagues yesterday was “heavy checks who concluded that there was “no evidence that I was a hate monger or a threat”.
But a week before she was to speak, the debating society canceled her scheduled performance.
She added: “What happened? Once the event was announced, the same student union bureaucrats claimed that six unions expressing concern about my arrival on campus was proof that I had seen an excerpt from a comic on Netflix.”
Baroness Fox read an email she said was sent to the debating society by student union president Maia Jarvis asking officials if they had “considered the impact of bringing a person who is an advocate of hate to trans people and publicly ridiculing them, and whether you’re comfortable with the fact that that’s the message your society is sending to our trans students.”
The 62 year old ex-member of the Revolutionary Communist Party continued: “This email was used as a form of coercive scrutiny and pressure to bully the sorority into canceling my lecture, based on the misleading slur that I have a history of ongoing hate speech.
“The message to the debating society was clear: my presence on campus would cause problems and damage the reputation of the debating society officials.”
She continued: “The Student Union bullied an association into not inviting a speaker they wanted to hear.
“This is not about me. Yes, my freedom of speech was curtailed, but much, much more importantly, while the student union did not formally cancel the lecture, their hostile response created a situation where students eager to hear differing opinions were denied the right to do so on a college campus .”
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Baroness Fox said she then invited a small delegation of students to Parliament “for tea and cake”, adding: “We went through this matter and their frustration was completely real and so was their anger.
“A young woman he described herself as a trans ally had always believed that canceled culture was an exaggerated culture.
“She told me she knew I had bigoted views, but they weren’t that bad and at least I was tolerant.
“She came to see me and said she was shocked by the events.
“She said she would have included me in the debate, and that was the reason for inviting me in the first place, that we would have a debate and a discussion.”
The offensive tweet, posted on May 24, shared a clip of a joke from the former Office star in which he compared “the old-fashioned women, you know, the ones with wombs” to “new ones we’ve been seeing lately.” with beards and c****”, which he broadcast in SuperNature, his last Netflix special.
Baroness Fox commented: “The whole trans identity ideology has been pierced in just 1, yes 1 minute.
“And all delivered through the prism of an exasperated mockery of ‘old-fashioned’, ‘dinosaur’ women with wombs, like me. i own it. And I laughed. Kudos to @rickygervais for this.”
Express.co.uk has contacted both RHSU and Royal Holloway, University of London for comment.