Alex Kumar

Alexander Kumar is a musician and political campaigner based in the United Kingdom.
Early life
Kumar read History & Politics at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, where he hosted regular sessions to help the homeless. He publicly rejected a nomination for the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award due to "moral questions".
Musical career
From 2013 to 2016, Kumar worked as a musician and singer-songwriter based in Miami and the southwest of England, playing folk, blues, and latin music. He performed largely on community radio stations. He released a self-titled album in 2013.
Political campaigning
Kumar has campaigned around the issues of homelessness and rough sleeping in the UK. He has been a frequent commentator in the UK press on social responsibility and the treatment of homeless people. In June 2018, he argued in The Guardian that homelessness in the UK must not be viewed "as detached from the housing crisis - a crisis exaggerated, even driven, by speculation on the housing market".
Kumar is also known for his legal reform campaigning. In November 2017, Kumar launched a campaign for the repeal or reform of the Vagrancy Act 1824, which makes it an offence to sleep rough or beg in England and Wales. The campaign gained initial support in the liberal press, and from Christian groups. In February 2018, the Home Office responded to Kumar's campaign to say that the Government had no plans to make changes to the law. The campaign's demands were then raised in Parliament by Layla Moran at Prime Minister's Questions and by a cross-party group of MPs. A private member's bill for the repeal of the Vagrancy Act was introduced to the House of Commons, but its second reading was rescheduled for 2019 in what Kumar called, in an interview with , a "procedural ploy". In August 2018, the British Government announced a ministerial review of the Vagrancy Act 1824.
Kumar caused controversy by heckling and walking out of an address by political commentator Ann Coulter to the Oxford Union in 2018, after which he wrote an op-ed in Cherwell claiming that the "responsibilities" of freedom of speech entail people challenging speech that they deem "evil".

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