The Labour Party has suspended Trevor Phillips. What is going on?
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Trevor Phillips has been suspended from the Labour Party after allegations of Islamophobia. Merely to write these words feels bizarre. Nobody has done as much over the years to campaign against racism and every kind of prejudice in Britain. His legislative monuments are the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Equality Act 2010. As head of the Commission for Racial Equality, later the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), he has transformed attitudes and broken down barriers.
And yet it would seem that there is no place in Labour for a man who has belonged to the party all his life and whom many would consider its leading public intellectual. Phillips has been informed that he will be investigated by a process that seems entirely opaque.
Jennie Formby, the party General Secretary, has refused to reveal the identity of his accusers. She was appointed by Jeremy Corbyn and has been widely criticised over her handling of anti-Semitism. Labour has been under investigation by the EHRC since last year and its report, now imminent, is expected to be a damning indictment of the leadership for its treatment of Jewish members. Phillips was among a number of Labour supporters who denounced the party’s anti-Semitism and refused to vote for it at the last election. Some see his suspension as an act of revenge.
However, the specifics of the accusation suggest that Phillips has fallen foul of the new definition of Islamophobia that Labour has now adopted. Under this definition, any criticism of “Muslimness” is deemed to be a form of racism. Thus when Phillips draws attention to the Muslim background of grooming gangs in many towns, or notes the absence of Remembrance Day poppies at a Muslim gathering, he is alleged to be expressing prejudice, rather than legitimate concerns about failures of integration.
Phillips has been a vigorous critic of the concept of “Muslimness”, which he sees as in effect recreating a blasphemy law solely to protect Islam. A new law to prohibit any criticism of an all-encompassing Muslimness would have a chilling effect on free speech. It would do away with the traditional distinction between attacking the religion, which is permissible in a free society, and expressing hostility to Muslims, which may infringe anti-discrimination laws. In Phillips’s view, Labour’s embrace of “Muslimness” is itself racist, because it assumes that all Muslims are the same, for example in their dress or beliefs.
Writing in the Times, Phillips laments the decline into intolerance of the party he loves: “If this is how Labour treats its own family, how might it treat its real opponents if it ever gains power again?” Such concerns surfaced during the election campaign when the Chief Rabbi intervened to warn against the consequences for British Jews of a Corbyn-led government. Even in opposition, however, the Labour Party shows that it has so far failed to learn the lessons of its electoral defeat. There has been little discussion during the leadership contest about the atmosphere of fear that has prevailed inside the party since Momentum and the Corbyn clique took over five years ago.
Phillips is a member of the Holborn and St Pancras Labour Party, whose MP is Sir Keir Starmer. It is hard to imagine that this inquisition would be happening if Starmer were to take over as leader. Last year, however, he came close to being deselected by a hard-Left faction in his constituency. One of those who headed off the coup was Sally Gimson, a Camden councillor who was subsequently chosen as candidate for Bassetlaw. However, a murky process presided over by the Momentum leader and NEC member Jon Lansman deselected Mrs Gimson shortly before the general election. Bassetlaw was lost to the Tories, but revenge was more important to the hard-Left than holding the seat.
“It would be a tragedy,” writes Phillips, “if, at the very moment when we most need a robust and effective opposition, our nation had to endure the spectacle of a great party collapsing into a brutish, authoritarian cult.” If there is no place in the Labour Party for a Trevor Phillips — a man whose record bears comparison with those of the anti-slavery pioneers of the 19th century — then it is time for a radical change in leadership. If Sir Keir Starmer does become leader, he will have the Herculean task of cleaning out the Augean stables bequeathed by the Corbyn camarilla.
