He
was a vociferous champion of Labour in the late
1970s but Hollywood actor Brian Cox has little
faith in the Blair government's promises on
education, education, education.
The
actor, who was born in Dundee, is due to become
a father again ... but he told the Sunday Herald
that the child would not be going to school
in Britain. 'I wouldn't send children to school
here, the system is horrendous,' he said.
Mobile
He
said that education should have been nationalised
after the war. 'If that had been done in 1947,
the world would have changed in a much more
discernible way now. You wouldn't have had the
educational mafias that have sprung up. I think
we're rife with it in this country, and it's
something that I would be very, very wary about
bringing a child into.'
Cox
lives in London, but he is about to move to
Los Angeles to play the lead in a TV series
called The Court. He will be joined in
LA by 31-year-old German girlfriend Nicole Ansari,
who is expecting their child.
Cox,
who won Hollywood fame after roles in Braveheart,
Rob Roy and the Boxer, was dumped
from a Labour party broadcast after a 1999 interview
with the Sunday Herald.
European
Capital
Labour
officials, who had planned to use him in the
promotional film, told the actor his services
were no longer required after he spoke publicly
about his hopes for an independent Scotland.
'I'd like Scotland and England both to have
their own states,' said Cox at the time. 'I'm
quite heartened by the way Scottish politics
is developing and Edinburgh is feeling more
and more like a real European capital. But I'm
more worried about the English. They're having
the worst time of anyone. No-one wants to be
English nowadays.'
Despite
the rebuff, Cox said at the time that he would
continue to support Labour. But the party's
efforts to reform education have left him unimpressed.
His
grown-up children from a previous marriage,
Alan and Margaret, both went to British private
schools. Margaret was boarding at Cheltenham
during Cox's split with her mother and he described
it as a difficult period for her.
'I
think the most important thing is the accessibility
of parents,' said Cox. 'And I think that's probably
the thing that I need to be this time: more
accessible.'
Pederast
Premiere
Cox
plays the lead role, a supreme court judge,
in his new US series. His forthcoming film,
L.I.E., in which he plays a pederast,
will have its premier at the Edinburgh International
Film Festival later this month. The film provoked
a storm of protest in America, despite critical
plaudits garnered at the Sundance film festival.
It flopped at the US box-office thanks to an
NC-17 certificate, which made it out of bounds
for children under 17, major cinema chains and
the Blockbuster video store chain.