| The Baroness Cox FRCS FRCN |
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|---|---|
| Member of the House of Lords | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 24 January 1983 |
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| Personal details | |
| Born | Caroline Anne McNeill Love 6 July 1937 England |
| Alma mater | University of London University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne |
Caroline Cox, Baroness Cox FRCN; born 6 July 1937) is a cross-bench member of the British House of Lords. She also is the founder and CEO of an organisation called the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART). She has campaigned for humanitarian causes, particularly relating to disability,[1] and has championed a range of Christian, eurosceptic and marginal causes, including action on forgotten wars in Africa.
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Baroness Cox was born as Caroline Anne McNeill Love, the daughter of a surgeon from Hertford, in Hertfordshire. 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 three children, 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; as a research assistant at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, she obtained a masters degree in economics.
On leaving, 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. In 1977 she moved to become Director of the Nursing Education Research Unit at Chelsea College of the University of London. She was also made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. She was also concerned with education and backed the reforms to reduce powers of Local Education Authorities in 1993, arguing for a more strongly religious element to teaching. Her background in sociology led her to write books on the subject for nurses, and she also co-wrote a book (Rape of Reason) attacking alleged communist activity at the Polytechnic of North London in 1975. She was founding Chancellor of Bournemouth University.
She is a director of the Educational Research Trust, the Andrei Sakharov Foundation and the Centre for Social Cohesion.[2] In 2006 she received an honorary law degree from the University of Dundee[3] and was installed as the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University in the same year.
Her peerage was announced on December 15, 1982 on a list of "working peers",[4] on the recommendation of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and she took the title The Baroness Cox, of Queensbury in Greater London on 24 January 1983.[5] Cox initially sat as a Conservative and served briefly as a Baroness-in-Waiting, in 1985, but disliked the job and instead became a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 1986 to 2006.
Cox was a Director of the Conservative Philosophy Group from 1983-85 [6]. In 1987 she co-founded the Committee for a Free Britain, “an extreme right wing organization”, funded by Rupert Murdoch which at one point called for “the legalization of all drugs”[7] and which used “ anti-gay material during their anti-Labour campaign in 1987”[8]
During the debates over the Education Reform Bill, Cox worked together with Michael Alison to ensure that a commitment was made that state education was 'broadly Christian' in character.[9] She 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 Christian-dominated Sudan People's Liberation Army,[10] and also criticised the actions of the government of Muslim Azerbaijan in the Armenian Christian breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh.[11][12]
Cox is a Eurosceptic. She rebelled over the Maastricht Treaty, supporting an amendment to require a nationwide referendum on ratification on July 14, 1993.[13] In May 2004 she joined three other Conservative peers in signing a letter published by the UK Independence Party urging voters to support it in the elections to the European Parliament. The Leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, immediately withdrew the party whip, formally expelling them from the parliamentary party. Cox now sits in the Lords as a crossbencher.[14]
In June 2002 Cox hosted a launch event for "Great Britain has Fallen!", a book written by Nigerian missionary Wale Babatunde and also wrote endorsements saying the book "showed the way forward" for reversing Britain's moral decline.[15]
She is one of 18 co-founders of the One Jerusalem organisation,[16] which aims at "maintaining a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel".[17] On January 24, 2005, she became Co-President of the Jerusalem Summit.[18][19] She is the founder of The International Islamic Christian Organisation for Reconciliation and Reconstruction,[20]
Baroness Cox is the Chair of the British Armenia All-Party Parliamentary Group[21]. She is also a strong supporter of self-determination for the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is officially a part of Azerbaijan.[22] Paying tribute to Cox's dedication to the Armenian cause, Frank Pallone, Jr., the co-chairman of the US Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, called her a "true Armenian nationalist who would give her life for Armenia and Karabakh"[23]. On February 15, 2006 she was awarded the Mkhitar Gosh Medal by the President of the Republic of Armenia Robert Kocharyan [24]
She was president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide until 2006, thereafter remaining as its patron[25]. Between 1997 and 2000, Christian Solidarity Worldwide directly intervened to buy the freedom of alleged slaves, and in a letter to The Independent on Sunday Cox claimed to have redeemed 2,281 slaves on eight visits to Sudan.[26] In 1995 she won the William Wilberforce Award.[27]. She is also a patron of the Christian Institute.
Baroness Cox is the Vice Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea[28]. The Group has stated that the Obama administration brings with it an opportunity for a formal cessation of hostilities and normalisation of relations with North Korea[29].
In January 2010 she addressed a meeting[30] organised by Odinic Rite activist Alan Harvey[31] and Gary Cartwright a former National Democrats candidate and organiser [32][33] and contributor to holocaust denier David Irving's historical revisionist Focal Point website [34][35][36]
The Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), founded by Baroness Cox in 2003[37], works to provide lasting change through aid and advocacy for those suffering oppression and persecution, who are largely neglected by the international media. HART believe that in order to adequately meet the needs and requirements of the persecuted , oppressed and overlooked; we must ask the local people for their priorities, giving them the dignity of choice and the responsibility of their own programmes. Lady Cox travels to HART funded aid and advocacy programmes in Nagorno Karabagh, East and West Burma, East Timor, India, Nigeria, southern Sudan and northern Uganda.
Cox supports disability causes as a member of the World Committee on Disability.[1] In 2004 she was a judge for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt International Disability Award, distributed annually at the United Nations in New York to a nation that has met the goals of the UN World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons.[38]
In February 2009, Cox courted controversy when she and UKIP peer Lord Pearson invited Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders to show the anti-Islam film Fitna before the House of Lords. However, Wilders was prevented from entering the UK on the instructions of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.[39] In response, Cox and Pearson accused the Government of "appeasing" militant Islam.[40]