Multiculturalism: disagreements with Ken Livingstone

Phillips and Livingstone had a frosty relationship throughout Phillips's time on the London Assembly, and Phillips's opposition to multiculturalism saw them clash time and again during his tenure at the CRE. In a Times interview in April 2004, Phillips said the government should stop supporting multiculturalism, claiming it was out of date and legitimised "separateness" between communities, and instead should "assert a core of Britishness".^[16]

In 2006, Livingstone accused Phillips of "pandering to the right" so much that he "would soon join the BNP".^[17] Phillips replied that his views had been "well documented" and "well supported". Phillips has made speeches stating that "it was right to ask hard questions about multicultural Britain". Although he apologised for his presentation of research by the Australian academic Michael Poulsen of statistics on levels of segregation, which had led to some controversy, he welcomed the focus on integration of different communities after the launch of A Commission for Integration and Cohesion.^[18] Phillips has subsequently cited recent work by, amongst others, Professor Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, London showing that white and non-white segregation in London and Birmingham has increased during the census period to 2011.^[19]

After the 2005 riots in France, Phillips warned that "inequality, race and powerlessness" can be "incendiary". He was invited to advise the French government and in September 2007 was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.^[20]

Phillips wrote in May 2016: "Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion" by ignoring the effects of mass immigration to the United Kingdom, explicitly comparing his warning to Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech.^[21]

Views on free speech

Phillips has spoken on the need for free speech to "allow people to offend each other". These comments came after the protests against the Danish cartoons satirising the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which sparked protests in the Muslim community. He stated in an ITV interview: "One point of Britishness is that people can say what they like about the way we should live, however absurd, however unpopular it is."^[22]

While supporting free speech, Phillips has spoken out against providing the far-right with a platform. Discussing the Oxford Union's invitation to BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving, he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "As a former president of the National Union of Students, I'm ashamed that this has happened. This is not a question of freedom of speech, this is a juvenile provocation." Griffin has since hit back at Phillips by declaring him a "black racist" in an interview given to Channel 4.^[23]

Opposition to 42-day detention

In early June 2008 Phillips as EHRC head said that he "remain[ed] unpersuaded that the government has yet provided compelling evidence for what our legal advice shows would be an effective suspension of some human rights".^[24] Phillips was responding to the growing uproar surrounding proposals to amend counter-terrorism legislation to permit 42 days' detention without charge. He raised the possibility of the EHRC legally testing the legislation by judicial review. In the event, the Brown government maintained the limit on detention without charge at 28 days (although in practice a 14-day limit was observed). Following the installation of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, the limit was in January 2011 allowed to revert to 14 days.

Views on Islam

In 1996 Phillips initiated and sat on the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, whose report Islamophobia: a challenge for us all reviewed the state of anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK. The report helped establish the term "Islamophobia" in UK discourse and it noted that abuse against Muslims was often racialised therefore "a legal term such as ‘religious and racial violence’ is required". It also stated that Islamophobia stemmed from closed views seeing British Muslims as monolithic, separate, and different.^[25]

The Commission's proposals were in part implemented in UK legislation in the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010, both of which he influenced as Chair of the EHRC. Phillips later developed his views and in 2016, as part of his Channel 4 documentary What British Muslims Really Think, he said that the commission had correctly recognised the existence of incidents of abuse against British Muslims "but we got almost everything else wrong".^[26] Phillips's own analysis for The Sunday Times asserted that the reference to the creation of a "nation within a nation" is not to Muslims as a whole, but to a significant minority and that the documentary acknowledged the diversity among British Muslims.

He went on to say that far from suggesting that Muslims as a group are in some way at fault, he questioned whether the rest of Britain needed to re-examine its own norms and behaviours.^[27]

Responses to the documentary were mixed. In The Spectator, political commentator Douglas Murray praised Phillips's ability to "break taboos which too many liberals in the UK are keen to continue enforcing", calling Islamophobia a "fraudulent concept", while his colleague James Delingpole said it was a "brave and honest programme", and the British public knew "large numbers of Muslims don't want to integrate, that their views aren't remotely enlightened".^[28] Simon Woolley, founder of Operation Black Vote, said the documentary pandered to prejudice, treated Muslims as a monolithic group and gave "no historical or social/political context".^[29] Writing for the Middle East Eye, Peter Oborne said Phillips had employed a double standard to attack social conservatism by comparing British Muslim views against Britain as a whole, rather than against other UK religious groups. In terms of views on homosexuality, religious devotion, and the role of women, Oborne said "Phillips could have carried out a similar poll of Conservative Party activists, of Roman Catholics, of orthodox Jews, or many other religious minorities and come up with something roughly similar."^[30]

In August 2017, following the conviction of 17 men and one woman in Newcastle for child sex abuse offences Phillips wrote that the description of the men as simply "Asian" was an injustice to the majority of the UK's Asian population, including many Muslims.^[31] A Home Office report subsequently showed child sexual abuse gangs were typically divided on race lines, but more widely that the majority of child sex offenders were made up of white men under the age of 30.^[32]

Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party pending investigation into alleged Islamophobia based on his past statements, a move which he called "Corbynista payback" and "pure political gangsterism". Labour MP Khalid Mahmood defended Phillips saying the "charges are so outlandish as to bring disrepute on all involved in making them".^[33] Phillips defended his statements on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, reiterating his view that Muslims should not be treated as a racial group and saying "Muslims are different, and in many ways I think that’s admirable". Asked about his generalisations about British Muslims he said "if you do belong to a group...you identify with a particular set of values, and you stand for it. And frankly you are judged by that". Conservative Member of the House of Lords Sayeeda Warsi responded that "Phillips cannot treat Muslims as a homogenised group when it suits him, then later deny they are racialised".^[34]

Phillips has pointed out that his actual remarks were reported by The Times on 27 January 2016.^[35]

Phillips's suspension from the Labour Party was lifted in June 2021, though investigations had not concluded.^[36]

Equality and Human Rights Commission

Phillips became head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003, and on its abolition in 2006 was appointed full-time chairman of its successor, the EHRC (initially called the Commission for Equality and Human Rights), which had a broader remit of combating discrimination and promoting equality across other grounds (age, disability, gender, race, religion and belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment).^[41] The EHRC also had the role of promoting and defending human rights, and secured recognition as the national human rights institution for England and Wales (alongside separate commissions in Northern Ireland and Scotland). Phillips's tenure as EHRC chairman (which at his request became a part-time position in 2009) was at times controversial.

Phillips's tenure as EHRC chairman is the longest for any individual in any similar position in the UK. It was said to be dogged by controversies and internal dissent. Under his leadership, six of the body's commissioners departed after expressing concerns about his leadership and probity and others were reported to be considering their position.^[42][43] However, they were replaced and Phillips later completed his term in September 2012.

In 2010 Phillips was investigated regarding alleged attempts to influence a Parliamentary committee (the Joint Committee on Human Rights) writing a report on him. He would have been the first non-politician in over half a century to be convicted of contempt of Parliament, but the Lords Committee found that the allegations were "subjective, and that no firm factual evidence is presented in their support; nor are they borne out by the submissions by individual members of the JCHR."^[44] He was cleared of contempt of Parliament and the House of Lords recommended that new and clearer guidance about the conduct of witnesses to Select Committees be issued.^[45] However, he was told his behaviour was "inappropriate and ill-advised".^[46]

Phillips completed his second term of office in September 2012, which, together with his term at the CRE made him the longest serving leader of any UK equality commission.

In 2006 Phillips said that Britain's current approach to multiculturalism could cause Britain to "sleepwalk towards segregation".^[47] He expanded on these views in 2016 in a publication by Civitas entitled Race and Faith: the Deafening Silence, in which he said that "squeamishness about addressing diversity and its discontents risks allowing our country to sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so well for so long."^[48]