'Get a grip' and act on reality, not prejudice, MP Liam Fox tells his Tory colleagues

A whirlwind six weeks looms for Sir Liam Fox and his Conservative colleagues fighting to keep their seats. As general election campaigning gets underway, the MP and former cabinet minister has spoken exclusively in this week’s Big Issue and called on his fellow politicians not to act on “instinct and prejudice” over “reality and empiricism”.

“Get a grip and make your judgements based on reality and empiricism, not on instinct and prejudice,” Liam Fox tells today’s Big Issue, out now. “The data is there and unless we want to fall back into an anti-Enlightenment society, we better wake up and not smell the coffee but read the figures.”

Fox was David Cameron’s first defence secretary, serving from 2010 until he resigned in 2011, after controversy about being accompanied on official Ministry of Defence trips by friend and lobbyist Adam Werrity. He later returned to Theresa May’s government as secretary of state for international trade, wrestling with the post-Brexit political landscape.

Now urging governments to make global water and food security a top priority, Fox thinks that, all too often, his peers in parliament politicise issues that should be seen as scientific fact.

“I still hear people on both the left and right of politics saying ‘I don’t believe in globalisation.’ Well, that’s nice, that’s like saying, ‘I don’t believe in nighttime.’

“In business they’ve understood globalisation much better than in the world of politics. Politicians don’t really like globalisation very much because it limits their ability to have an impact over their own domestic events.”

So Fox takes a different view on climate-related issues which includes migration, a situation he notes in his new book as being “made worse by simplistic rhetoric”. Rhetoric from government focuses on demonising people coming to our shores and “not the causes,” Fox admits.

“We have got to try to get our debate out of the weeds and start to focus on bigger issues, because those bigger issues will have a huge impact on us, whether we want to think about them or not.”

Liam Fox wrestles with these issues in his new book, The Coming Storm, which tells the story of water from how it arrived on Earth eons ago to how it influenced our evolution. It also points out potential pressure points regarding scarcity, global security and its importance in healthcare and climate change.

“When Boris [Johnson] relieved me of my cabinet duties in 2019, I decided to spend some time doing quality reading on climate,” Fox tells the Big Issue. “From my own position with a science background [Dr Fox was a GP before an MP], what did the science actually tell us?”

Being out of the thick of it helped Fox appreciate the bigger picture. “It’s not so much being outside as having the time. Government is very siloed. We think of our economics in one place, we think of security and risk in another and so on. We need to learn to join the dots.”

To read the full interview with Liam Fox, buy this week’s Big Issue. You can find your local vendor here.