Mr Trevor Phillips Puts His Foot In It …

Civitas, 18 November 2004

The Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) was set up by the Race Relations Act to foster racial equality by rooting out racial discrimination and racial hatred.
In recent years, the CRE has become one of the most vociferous advocates of a change in the law so that the current prohibition of incitement of hatred towards racial groups becomes extended so as to cover religious groups too.
The chief intended beneficiary of the extension are British Muslims. Not coinciding with any single racial group, they currently remain unprotected in law from hatred being incited against them on account of their religion.

This extension of the law is in the pipe-line and destined to reach the statute book within the lifetime of the present parliament.
Its critics claim the extension of the law is bound to curb free-speech and legitimate criticism of religions. They argue adherents of any religion subjected to criticism will be able to suppress it by claiming it will incite hatred of them.
Advocates of the extension respond by denying legitimate criticism will be curtailed by the change in law. One to have so argued is Trevor Phillips, current Chair of the CRE.
In a conference in July of this year organised by the IPPR, Mr Phillips welcomed this extension of the law, denying it ‘would lead to people not being able to criticise other religions; these changes would protect the believer, not the belief’.
On Tuesday of this week, Mr Phillips delivered at Oxford’s Centre for Islamic Studies a public lecture entitled, ‘Why Muslims will make Britain a better place’. The lecture was largely given over to an elaboration of the multifarious ways in which the speaker saw a Muslim presence in Britain as enhancing the life of that country.
Given its title and contents, plus Mr Phillips’ other credentials as a champion of this country’s minorities, it might hardly have been expected his lecture would have given British Muslim leaders any cause for complaint.
Yet, yesterday’s newspapers carry reports that some of them at least are up-in-arms with Mr Phillips, metaphorically speaking of course, for his having supposedly upbraided them in his lecture for not doing enough to exhibit public condemnation of acts of terror carried out in the name of their religion by the likes of Al Qaeda.
Their complaint is that, since they have repeatedly given public expression to their abhorrence of Islamist terrorism, what Mr Phillips said went beyond legitimate comment and amounts to ‘Islamophobia’, something the public expression of which Mr Phillips has called for to be banned.
At first glance, or even after closer scrutiny, the published text of Mr Phillips’ lecture fails to disclose anything in it that can remotely be construed as Islamophobic. All Mr Phillips said in it about the need for Muslim leaders to display public opposition to Islamist acts of terror was this: ‘Though I know it is irritating to many of you, and feels unjust that you have to do this time and again, it remains important for mainstream Muslim leaders to point out that British Muslims have no time for terrorism, and call on anyone who practises it in the name of Islam to cease.’
Given the manner in which, since the Macpherson report, racist acts have become officially construed as being any that a racial minority finds such, it would seem the mere fact some Muslim leaders consider Mr Phillips’ remarks to be an expression of Islamophobia will, in time, suffice to render them such in the eyes of the law after it becomes changed in the manner for which, among others, Mr Phillips has called.
If the Chair of the CRE cannot be trusted to know where the line is over which no one should be allowed to tread in publicly speaking about different religious groups, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Either Mr Phillips must be considered unworthy of his job on account of his harbouring unconscious Islamophobia, or else the extension of the law for which he has called must be considered unworkable and hence undesirable — in which case his suitability for the job he holds becomes equally suspect through having called for it.
Alternatively, the appropriate lesson to be drawn from the furore occasioned by Mr Phillips’ lecture is that the entire enterprise of seeking to achieve racial and religious harmony by legal diktat as to what may or may not be said about any religious or racial group is a legal quagmire into which it would have been better for this country never to have allowed anyone to step, including the Chair of the CRE.