Right-wing British political activist and actor Laurence Fox was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of “conspiring to commit criminal damage” against cameras used to enforce a contentious anti-pollution scheme in London, authorities said.
Fox appeared in an interview broadcast on Rumble on Tuesday in which he expressed support for a group of saboteurs who have started vandalizing and tearing down Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) cameras. “I encourage them to tear down every single camera there is and I will be joining them,” Fox said in the interview.
Speaking on Maajid Nawaz’s show Warrior Creed, Fox went on to say he was “pretty close with several and I will be out there with my angle grinder” alongside members of the saboteur group, who call themselves “Blade Runners.”
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“Are you interested in testing the law around this, if some people get arrested?” Nawaz asked.
“I would be happy to be arrested myself,” Fox answered. “When I go out and take their cameras down—which I will be doing—I won’t be… I will be taking my phone with me so they know exactly where I am.”
On Wednesday, Britain’s right-wing Reclaim Party—which Fox founded—shared a video of police officers inside Fox’s home.
“Look how many coppers there are in my house,” Fox, sitting with a lit cigar in his hand, says in the footage. “Coming to steal everything, take everything out of my house. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the country that we live in.”
“On Wednesday, 4 October, officers arrested a 45-year-old man on suspicion of conspiring to commit criminal damage to ULEZ cameras and encouraging or assisting [offenses] to be committed,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
It added that Fox had been taken to a south London police station “where he remains in custody.”
Almost simultaneously as news of his arrest broke, the conservative GB News channel announced it had fired Fox after he made sexist comments about a journalist on-air.
The ULEZ scheme has become a political flashpoint in Britain in recent months. It was originally announced in 2014 by the then-mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and was designed to ease traffic congestion and reduce vehicle emissions in the English capital by imposing a daily charge on drivers entering certain areas of the city if their vehicle didn’t meet certain emission standards.
The scheme actually came into effect in 2019 under Johnson’s Labour Party successor, Sadiq Khan, who has since repeatedly expanded the ULEZ area—including in August, when it was widened to cover all London boroughs. Motorists with vehicles breaching the emission standards now have to pay about $15 a day to drive in the city or run the risk of a $220 fine.
Conservative Party figures have condemned the latest expansion as an unfair tax on working Britons and used it to score political points against Labour, which has argued the scheme is necessary for public health.
In July, the Conservatives won a narrow victory triggered by Boris Johnson’s resignation as the member of parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip—a constituency in Greater London—with the unpopularity of ULEZ credited as a major factor in deciding the vote.
