Labour leadership trio asked to pick a side
Accused of Islamophobia, Trevor Phillips challenges candidates to say if they support his suspension
TREVOR PHILLIPS, the former chairman of the UK’S equalities watchdog, has called on the three Labour leadership candidates to pick a side as senior party figures last night condemned the decision to suspend him over alleged
Islamophobia. Throwing down the gauntlet to Sir Keir Starmer, the favourite to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, he told The Daily Telegraph his case was a “test for the kind of party these candidates want to lead”.
His calls were echoed by a number of party moderates, who criticised the failure of Sir Keir, Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-bailey to denounce the decision to suspend one of the country’s most prominent anti-racism campaigners.
In a warning shot to the candidates, Lord Mann, the Government’s antisemitism tsar, said: “It is a mark of leadership... either back the investigation or back Trevor Phillips. To suspend the first head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not a sit on the fence issue.”
It came as Jennie Formby, Labour’s general secretary, faced a major backlash yesterday over the decision to suspend Mr Phillips over a series of remarks dating back several years.
Lord Falconer, Labour’s former Lord Chancellor, told The Telegraph: “The idea that he needs to be suspended urgently is unsustainable. They act urgently against Trevor Phillips and Alastair Campbell, while anti-semitism continues to prosper in the Labour
Party. What is it that links Alastair Campbell and Trevor Phillips? They are both enemies of the leadership.”
His comments were echoed by a Labour official, who said: “Anti-semite or racist: very hard to be suspended. Critical of Jeremy Corbyn or Jennie: swift suspension or expulsion.” In an 11-page letter sent to Mr Phillips, Labour cited a number of public statements he had made, including concerns about Pakistani Muslim men sexually abusing children in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale. Others included remarks over the failure of some Muslims to wear poppies for Remembrance Sunday.
A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said that Mr Phillips had made “incendiary statements about Muslims that would be unacceptable for any other minority”.
A Labour Party spokesman said:
“The Labour Party takes all complaints about Islamophobia extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.”
♦a university society has been told it must have all its guest speakers vetted and approved. Sheffield University’s free speech society was told to submit applications to the students’ union at least three weeks in advance and that “full and final approval” would be needed before any talks could go ahead.
Trevor Phillips, once head of the Human Rights Commission, and Suzanne Moore, a newspaper columnist, are perfectly capable of projecting and defending their own views against those who would shut them down. One has been a champion of race equality, the other of feminist causes, and yet both are under attack from institutions which in the past might have been considered their ideological soulmates.
Mr Phillips has been suspended by the Labour Party for alleged Islamophobia. Ms Moore is struggling to get her views printed in the Guardian because some of its staff object to what they call her “transphobia”.
We speak out on their behalf because what is happening to them constitutes an insidious attack on freedom of expression from people who claim to support it but evidently don’t.
In recent years, the suffix “phobia” has been deliberately deployed as a means of targeting anyone who proffers a view that a group of selfappointed censors considers inappropriate. Ironically, the term Islamophobia came to prominence here in a Runnymede Trust report in praise of multiculturalism published in 1997 and endorsed by Mr Phillips, among others. We took issue with that then, pointing out that as a religion Islam should not be uniquely inviolate and nor was it racist to say so. He now seems to agree with that observation.
Ms Moore has found herself pilloried because she believes that hard-won women’s rights are being eroded by the trans lobby. A preparedness to debate these issues without craven censorship is a test of any claim to uphold liberal values, either at
The Guardian or in the Labour Party.