We need Trevor Phillips’s candour more than ever
Millions still value his bold challenges to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy
Every so often, a reader sends me an email that reveals something so striking, so heartrending, that I can’t get it out of my mind. So it was when a teacher from Bradford got in touch to say that she was mystified when some of her brightest pupils failed their exams and had to do retakes. It took the teacher a while to figure out that the girls were deliberately mucking up their papers.
You see, once they completed their education, they knew they would be sent back to Pakistan or Bangladesh to get married to a total stranger, or even a cousin or an uncle. As British girls, born and bred, that prospect made them feel sick. They would gladly face their parents’ wrath for failing GCSES so long as it postponed their cruel fate.
How many Muslim girls in the UK are trafficked every year against their will? A Bangladeshi friend tells me that it’s not unknown for desperate teenagers to put a spoon in their underwear so they set off the metal detector at airport security. That’s their last chance of being rescued. It’s a serious problem. In 2018 alone, the
Home Office’s Forced Marriage Unit reported it had supported 1,764 cases.
How the hell did our country, a beacon of fairness and equality, end up with something called a Forced Marriage Unit? These girls come from Huddersfield, not Helmand; they’re loyal to Topshop, not Taliban. An appalling failure of integration is the grim answer. For decades, a cowardly policy of cultural appeasement was adopted by the authorities towards people who had imported attitudes that were incompatible with our way of life.
And just look at how well that worked out: an epidemic of so-called “grooming gangs” the length and breadth of the UK raping thousands of young girls whom they regard as subhuman because they are white “slags”. Not to mention sharia courts where female plaintiffs are treated as “minors” and – this really is incredible – have even fewer rights than women in Islamic countries.
One of the very rare people in public life who has been brave enough to speak out on this unfolding disaster is Trevor Phillips. The former chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, now head of Index on Censorship, has made superb documentaries like Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True and What British Muslims Really Think.
His voice has always been particularly powerful because he was a black man from the Left who was prepared to challenge his own party’s policies.
Far from encouraging integration, he said, they had given rise to a situation where it was “in the interest of community leaders to preserve the isolation of their ethnic groups”.
A pioneering anti-racism campaigner, Phillips worried we were “sleepwalking towards segregation”. Observing that a “chasm” was opening up between Muslims and non-muslims on key issues such as sexuality, freedom of speech and even the validity of violence, he advocated a more “muscular” approach to integration. In short, he was so sane, intelligent and willing to challenge “liberal self-delusion” it was hard to figure out what he was still doing in the Labour identity-politics madhouse.
Well, he isn’t. Not any more. Phillips has just been suspended from the party over allegations of Islamophobia.
Pretty strange when you consider that it was he who he first alerted the UK to the problem of anti-muslim feeling in the Nineties and has Muslims in his own extended family.
You can forget about fairness and the facts. It’s enough that this notably genial 66-year-old has expressed concerns about men of Pakistani origin sexually abusing girls in northern towns like Rotherham, and that a poll a few years ago showed an alarming proportion of British Muslims sympathised with the Islamists who massacred the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine.
Not coincidentally, those concerns are shared by the vast majority of voters in Labour’s so-called red wall; the one that came tumbling down so spectacularly at the general election.
I last met Trevor Phillips a couple of weeks ago at the launch of the Free Speech Union in London. Trevor gave a terrific talk in which he mischievously observed that some might wonder what on earth he was doing there with a bunch of “Right-wing nutters”. He did a masterly demolition of those who claim that Boris comparing the ghastly burka to letterboxes is racist. Phillips understands that once you start forbidding people to think and say certain things, the feelings of discomfort and dislike don’t just disappear. They may intensify.
Reflecting with characteristic eloquence on his expulsion from a party he had belonged to for decades, Phillips pointed the finger at the zealots who now threaten him with excommunication for questioning the true faith of identity politics. He wondered whether it was a way of intimidating the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is presently investigating Labour’s appalling handling of anti-semitism. “Pure political gangsterism,” he snapped.
With free speech suppressed daily now, I reckon we need Phillips’s fierce, compassionate candour more than ever. The party he once loved may have become an “authoritarian cult”, but there are millions of people who still value his bold challenges to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. Trev, if you don’t mind a few Right-wing nutters (so much nicer than the Left-wing kind), we’d love to have you.