My name’s Tom and I’m a white, privileged man.
Not a difficult thing for me to admit because I happen to believe it’s true. My life of relative ease comes courtesy of loving parents, a good health and education system – and the undeniable fact that I won the genetic lottery.
That’s not to say I’ve not worked hard to get where I am – 28 years old, living in London, leading a happy and (relatively) successful life.
But ignoring the indisputable advantages I had from birth in a society which still discriminates against minorities and women would be extremely blinkered.
Sadly this doesn’t seem to be a problem for Laurence Fox and his one-man crusade against the ‘woke’.
Until Question Time last week, most people probably knew Fox as a successful TV actor and (possibly) a mediocre musician.
But last week he stormed headfirst into the debate about Meghan Markle and racism.
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Piers Morgan slams Laurence Fox for 'insulting Sikhs' in car crash GMB interview
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'Laurence Fox must apologise for bigoted 1917 views – 83,000 Sikhs died for Britain'
He began with a protracted outburst at a woman who had called him white and privileged and ended with him claiming that he was now the victim.
It didn’t stop there. In a kamikaze mission to incite Twitter (and anyone with the most basic knowledge of history), he claimed that the woke were fundamentally racist – and that a Sikh soldier in new film 1917 was an example of enforced diversity.
If he’d been taking lessons from the Piers Morgan Book of Unrelenting Insult, it backfired – the GMB host was as unimpressed as much of the country.
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Andrew Castle jokes he's 'new Laurence Fox' after 'patronising' Greta comment
Fox needs to wake up.
He comes from a famous family of actors and had the sort of wealthy upbringing many envy.
His school was Harrow. That privilege alone gave him opportunities that are unattainable for thousands of BAME children in the UK.
Expelled for smoking, fighting and general indiscipline, he then moaned about struggling to get a university place because of his poor report.
Fox chose to waste his privilege – but still, somehow, has been able to carve out a successful career.
Now he has the audacity to lash out at those who work for a fair society with opportunities for the many, not the few.
His cries of victimhood threaten to invalidate the real, lived experience of people who face racism every day. People not as privileged as him – or me.
Fox needs to stop being so insecure and defensive about himself. He needs to acknowledge that if you are white in the UK, the chances are that you will have benefited from the colour of your skin.
And if anti-woke champions can’t get their heads around something as basic as this, there’s no point in trying to reason with them.
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