Actor Laurence Fox has claimed there has been a 'concerted drive' in the industry to make him 'be quiet'.
It comes after he appeared on BBC's Question Time programme in January and faced backlash after arguing the Duchess of Sussex had not been the victim of racism.
The 41-year-old told talkradio today that he felt there had been an effort to silence him, motivated by people finding his views controversial.
He then took aim at black and working-class actors for complaining about the industry once they have “five million quid in the bank”.
READ MORE: Laurence Fox labelled a ‘disgrace’ following BBC Question Time race row
Fox said that there has since been “quite a concerted drive to make me be quiet”.
He added: “You can’t just shut everybody up, there’s an emotional and an intellectual fragility to people who won’t tolerate dissenting voices.”
Fox added that cancel culture, where people face calls for their careers to be ended over perceived missteps, is “very dangerous”.
Society needs to “talk and debate”, he said, adding that “cancel culture creates an even more myopic monoculture and who wants that”.
The “woke religion lacks a lot of rationality”, he said, adding: “Their approach is to try and destroy lives.”
READ MORE: Lily Allen and Laurence Fox in online spat over BBC Question Time appearance
“I think this very leftist agenda has been marching through our institutions for decades,” Fox said.
“It is a very divisive tactic and people don’t want to be divided, they want to be united.”
The actor suffered a barrage of criticism after saying that the treatment of Meghan Markle was not racist, with the Lewis star being dubbed a "white privileged male"
Equity’s minority ethnic members committee described his words on the programme as “disgraceful playing to the gallery” and labelled him a “disgrace to our industry”.
Responding to a claim from an audience member that the media’s treatment of Meghan amounted to “racism”, Mr Fox responded: “It’s not racism… we’re the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel