Caroline Cox, Baroness Cox
Caroline Anne Cox, Baroness Cox, is a cross-bench member of the British House of Lords. She is also the founder of an organisation called Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust. Cox was created a Life Peer in 1982 and was a deputy speaker of the House of Lords from 1985 to 2005, as well as being a minister in government. She was also a Baroness-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. She was Founder Chancellor of Bournemouth University, Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University from 2006 to 2013, and is an Hon. Vice President of the Royal College of Nursing. She was a founder Trustee of MERLIN Medical Emergency Relief International. She is a recipient of the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
She is a prominent lay Anglican, closely identified with the Church of England. According to a biography by Andrew Boyd, she is a practising third-order Anglican Franciscan.
Background
Cox was born on 6 July 1937 in London. She is the daughter of Robert McNeill Love, a surgeon and co-author of the textbook known as "Bailey and Love". She was educated at Channing School in Highgate. She became a state registered nurse at London Hospital from 1958, and a staff nurse at Edgware General Hospital from 1960.She married Dr Murray Newall Cox in 1959, remaining married to him until he died in 1997. The couple had two sons and one daughter. In the late 1960s she studied for a degree at the University of London where she graduated with a first class honours degree in Sociology in 1967 and a master's degree.
Academic and thinktank career and subsequent activities
On graduating, Cox became a sociology lecturer at the Polytechnic of North London rising to become Principal Lecturer. From 1974 she was head of the Department of Sociology. An Evangelicals Now article sympathetically describes her approach to her discipline: "As a committed Christian she presented a Christian view of Sociology." According to Evangelicals Now: "It was a time of student unrest and the students organised demonstrations to disrupt lectures or meetings which they considered anti-Marxist. Cox bore the brunt of this and in 1974 the students passed a vote of no confidence in her." Her background in sociology led her to write books on the subject for nurses.In 1975, Cox co-wrote The Rape of Reason: The Corruption of the Polytechnic of North London, published by Churchill Press, attacking "Communist activity" at her workplace. She resigned from the Polytechnic in 1977 and was a tutor at the Open University. She was involved in the thinktank Institute for the Study of Conflict and contributed to its report, the Gould report, on left-wing activism in British universities, in which she focused on "Marxist bias" in the Open University.
In 1977 she moved to become Director of the Nursing Education Research Unit at Chelsea College of the University of London and remained in this post until 1984. She was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in 1985. She was also made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. She was later founding Chancellor of Bournemouth University. In 2006 she received an honorary law degree from the University of Dundee and was installed as the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University in the same year.
The Right To Learn
After experiencing politically motivated educational disruption whilst working as Principal Lecturer, Sociolology at the Polytechnic of North London, she co-wrote The Pied Pipers of Education for the Social Affairs Unit and worked with the Centre for Policy Studies, for which she wrote the influential pamphlet The Right to Learn. She co-founded and co-directed the Educational Research Trust, founded in 1980, with John Marks; they were consulted about the drafting of the 1988 Education Reform Act, which introduced the National Curriculum, grant-maintained schools and City Technology Colleges.She was involved in the Institute for European Defence and Security Studies, an organization funded by The Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s for which she co-authored Peace Studies: A Critical Survey in 1984 with Roger Scruton, which published by the conservative think tank Civitas. She was a director of the Conservative Philosophy Group from 1983 to 1985. With Scruton and others she wrote Education and Indoctrination. In the mid-1980s, she worked with Scruton as part of the Hillgate Group of Conservative activists; their pamphlet Whose Schools? A Radical Manifesto, which she co-authored, was published in 1986. In 1987 she co-founded the Committee for a Free Britain, funded by Rupert Murdoch, which at one point called for "the legalisation of all drugs". She was the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Terrorism in 1985–1990.
Since its founding in 2007, she has been closely involved, first as an advisor and from 2009 as director, in the Centre for Social Cohesion. She is a director of the Gatestone Institute.
Member of House of Lords
Her peerage was announced on 15 December 1982 on a list of "working peers", on the recommendation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and she was granted the title of Baroness Cox, of Queensbury in Greater London, on 24 January 1983. Cox initially sat as a Conservative and served briefly as a Baroness-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. She served as a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 1986 to 2006.Foreign affairs
Shortly after receiving her peerage in 1983, Baroness Cox became involved in advocating for humanitarian efforts in then Soviet Poland, lobbying Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for government support, and personally delivering medical supplies by truck convoy. This approach of personally visiting areas of humanitarian need would become a hallmark of her international advocacy work because she could then speak to The House with greater authority having 'been an eyewitness', and having 'been with the people and seen the reality'. For her work in Poland she was awarded the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.Cox then became a frequent contributor to Lords debates on Africa, and also raised other "forgotten conflicts" in letters to the press. She was already highlighting fighting in Sudan in September 1992, criticising Sudan's Islamist government and backing Dr. John Garang's Sudan People's Liberation Army.
After spending two years investigating the situation in Azerbaijan, Cox criticised the government's treatment of Armenians in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1993. She has stated that her stance is the "advocacy for Karabakh Armenians". In 2015, she was a member of the Armenian All-Party Parliamentary Group. She is a strong supporter of self-determination for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. By 2003 she had made more than 60 trips to the region. Frank Pallone, Jr., the co-chairman of the US Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, praised her devotion to Armenia and Karabakh. On 15 February 2006 she was awarded the Mkhitar Gosh Medal by the President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan.
Cox is one of eleven officers of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea. The Group stated that the Obama administration brought with it an opportunity for a formal cessation of hostilities and normalisation of relations with North Korea.
Religious Freedom and Women's Rights
Since the 1980s, Baroness Cox has advocated for religious freedom for all religions internationally, especially in regions of religious persecution. She has petitioned many questions to the House of Lords advocating religious freedoms, stating to The House that, 'Diverse faith communities suffer persecution in many countries, including the Baha’is in Iran and Egypt, Ahmadyyia Muslims in Pakistan, the Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims in China, Rohingya Muslims in Burma and multi-faith communities of Muslim, Christian and African traditional believers in the states of Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan in Sudan. All deserve the support of the international community for protection of their fundamental human right to practise their faith freely.'.She has also campaigned to ensure that religious fundamentalism does not infringe on the 'rights enshrined in UK law'. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and growing militant Islamic movements, she wrote in 2003 The 'West', Islam and Islamism: Is ideological Islam compatible with liberal democracy? with John Marks, published by Civitas, which argued "that Islamist terrorism was only part of a broader ideological challenge of fundamentalist Islam, comparable to communist propaganda efforts during the Cold War".
In order to protect women's rights in the context of religious tribunals, Cox introduced the Arbitration and Mediation Services Bill to the House of Lords, initially on 10 May 2012. It was 'motivated by concern for Muslim women, with the observation that "Equality under the law is a core value of British justice. My bill seeks to preserve that standard. Many women say: 'We came to this country to escape these practices only to find the situation is worse here.". It had its second reading and debate on 19 October 2012, but went no further.
The bill aimed to prevent discrimination against Muslim women and 'jurisdiction creep' in Islamic tribunals, which would be forced to acknowledge the primacy of English law under her Bill and would have introduced an offence carrying a five-year jail sentence for anyone falsely claiming or implying that sharia courts or councils have legal jurisdiction over family or criminal law. The bill included clauses to protect women's rights by banning the sharia practice of giving women's testimony only half the weight of men's. In a similar way to Jewish Beth Din courts, sharia tribunals can make verdicts in cases involving financial and property issues which, under the Arbitration Act 1996, are enforceable by the County Court or the High Court and Baroness Cox stated that "We cannot sit here complacently in our red and green benches while women are suffering a system which is utterly incompatible with the legal principles upon which this country is founded. If we don't do something, we are condoning it." The Bill was described by critics as "inflammatory". It did not reach a vote as it ran out of time.
Cox continues fighting to stop sharia 'seeping' into enforcing divorce settlements. Cox re-introduced her legislation on 11 June 2014. One leading Muslim Conservative Party activist said "the Bill will not help to achieve any of its intended goal but will alienate many Muslims".
Cox, speaking at a 2014 event organised by the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security at Tel Aviv University and The Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies, mentioned the alleged ‘Trojan Horse plot’ in her speech as an example of secret takeover strategies by ‘Islamists’ in Africa made in order to ‘Islamize’ the continent. She said "“Islam is using the freedoms of democracy to destroy it.”
In 2014, she hosted the parliamentary launch of Sharia Watch UK, an organisation led by UKIP candidate Anne Marie Waters aiming to 'document the implementation of Sharia law in Britain'. Cox said Sharia law "undermines the most fundamental principles of equality enshrined in British law" in respect of its treatment of women.
In February 2023 it was reported in The Guardian that Cox and Lord Pearson were members of a secret group called the New Issues Group, which had been operating out of the House of Lords for over a decade and had worked with far-right anti-Muslim activists. Cox has been described as part of the counter-jihad movement.
She has also campaigned for greater protection of young women at risk of Female Genital Mutilation, raising to the house in 2013 that, 'There is a child somewhere today in this country, in school, in a hospital A and E Department or on a bus, who has had FGM or is at risk of this torture, who is counting on us to help her with her physical or emotional trauma—or crying out to stop it happening. That child’s protection is our responsibility.'