Colin Fox - Campaigning

Campaigning

He is the justice spokesman for the SSP, and has campaigned for the abolition of prescription charges, including putting a Bill to that effect before parliament.

In June 2005 he took part in a peaceful protest, interrupting Question Time in the Scottish Parliament, along with three other SSP MSPs, to highlight their claim that parliament had failed to secure the right to demonstrate outside the Gleneagles Hotel where the G8 were meeting. As a consequence, he was suspended from the Scottish Parliament for the whole of September and the salaries of the four MSPs and their staff were stopped.

In 2007 he supported Greenpeace on board their ship Arctic Sunrise in their campaign against the replacement of the UK's nuclear weapons. He had previously visited a nuclear power station on the grounds that "I am a convinced opponent of nuclear power but an opponent who wants to conduct the debate about new nuclear capacity and our energy needs on the basis of facts. My visit to Torness is at my own request." In the same year he championed the cause of affordable access to housing with his support of Midlothian Council's investment in providing housing.

In 2008 he wrote to the First Minister Alex Salmond seeking an assurance that any future meetings with members of the Northern Ireland Assembly would raise the issue of attitudes towards Lesbian and Gay rights by its ministers. This after 'Ian Paisely Jnr, then the Minister for Equality, had said "lesbians and gay men harm society" and that he is "repulsed" by them.'

More recently he has also been involved in opposing community education cuts, and has marched against cuts to public services.

Other issues he has campaigned around are Climate Change, AIDs, Peace, Education and animal welfare.

In response to proposed tuition fee increases, Fox commented that previous student politicians, such as Jack Straw and Charles Clarke, "were only able to be active in student politics because they didn’t have 10,000 of debt hanging round their neck and they didn’t have to rush off to work in McDonald’s".

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