‘Schooling people to be strangers’
Rod Liddle talks to Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, who calls for an end to segregated education About halfway through our interview, Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, lets out a snort of exasperation. It had been building up for quite a while, I think; every time I quoted some good old leftie shibboleth about race relations I sensed a hidden snort or a stifled guffaw. Eventually the man could hold back no longer. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can’t make people love people of other races. You just can’t. And you can’t have a law which says we have to love each other. That’s bonkers.’ Phillips is, to his many detractors (mostly on the Left), an unequivocal Blair toadie who has been rewarded for his unstinting loyalty to The Project with a prestigious sinecure at that whining old quango, the Commission for Racial Equality (having failed in an attempt to become the mayor of London). Hell, I’m no straight-A student of Trevor Phillips’s brilliant career. But the toady jibe is truly difficult to sustain when you examine what the man has been up to recently and the patent discomfort it has caused in government quarters.
Phillips has, almost single-handedly, expunged the grand old notion that Britain’s ethnic minorities are defined by the simple fact that they are not white and therefore uniformly, inevitably, discriminated against. He has brought intellectual rigour and a dose of reality to a previously lazy and self-serving organisation — and with it a transformation in how the liberal Left perceives race, religion and culture.
For the boss of the CRE to suggest that some of our minorities are inadequately inte grated and feel insufficient allegiance to the nation state and that, furthermore, it might just be their fault, is more than the rest of us could have believed possible as little as five or six years ago. And — as a self-proclaimed ‘progressive’, he will not thank me for this his bold and frankly brave comments about the danger posed by Muslim ghettos do not diverge wildly from what you might have read in a Monday Club pamphlet of 20 years ago. You can’t make people love those from other races and legislation designed to do such a thing is barking mad: indeed. But for years, for countless years, that’s precisely cities. This has been interpreted as a broadside against the government — something Phillips denies, although with a slight lack of conviction. What does he mean, sleepwalking? ‘I think we’re pretty much in denial. The Right sees racial tension as something got up by the race relations industry; the Left says it’s all about poverty.’ The problem, surely, is partly of your own organisation’s making, isn’t it? The idea that diverse cultures should be allowed to thrive and flourish despite the deleterious effect upon the national culture, whatever that might be? ‘Certainly,’ he says, ‘tolerance of diversity is hardening into isolation. The United States allowed this to happen as an expression of what it believed was freedom. But New Orleans held up a mirror to this whole idea, that you could allow different cultures to flourish in isolation from each other.’ This is implicit agreement with the David Goodhart thesis that encouraging a multiplicity of cultures to flourish in isolation from each other can undermine national cohesion. It is also, one has to say, rather close to agreement, if expressed with a tad more sophistication, with Lord Tebbit’s famous cricket test. On the same issue, the latest CRE survey, published this week, has shown that if anything, people in Britain of whatever colour are slightly less likely to mix with those of other races, regardless of the political imperatives and propaganda. Sad and dispiriting though that fact might be, people naturally prefer to mix with people of their own kind, don’t they?
‘Ye-es, I think that’s partly true. Inherently that is one tendency,’ Phillips says. And you think to yourself, listening to such an answer: how far we have come! When Nick Griffin, the leader of the BNP, tentatively expresses such an opinion, he is denounced as a racist and a primitive to boot. Trevor Phillips can say effectively the same thing and get away with it: partly because he is black, and partly because he quite plainly and simply wishes to understand the mechanisms at work in inter-racial relations.
He becomes most animated during our discussion about education. ‘We are schooling people to be strangers,’ he says, which has the whiff of the soundbite about it. The new CRE survey suggests that there is even greater self-segregation at school than there is in neighbourhoods and, at the further education level, some urban institutions rarely mentioned in the top ten academic institutions are hideously black, while Oxbridge remains hideously white.
Phillips says: ‘I am not in favour of quotas. I do not agree with busing. But there might be a solution if we start to redraw the catchment areas of our schools. The interesting thing is that the religious schools, the church schools, have a tendency to be more mixed and more integrated.’ But not Muslim schools, surely? He laughs. ‘The Catholic schools have a healthy mix of races and the Church of England schools somewhat less so. But with Muslim schools the faith hurdle is of a different order: it’s set a lot higher.’ Well indeed — that’s the point. If you come back to your original problem — not one of racial conflict but of a clash of cultures — aren’t Muslim schools precisely at the heart of the problem?
‘Oh, come on. Do you know how many Muslim faith schools there are? We have 400,000 children from Muslim families in Britain and the total number of Muslim schools is five.’ But that notwithstanding, it is the principle of the thing. Why allow British children to be inculcated into a culture which is in many areas antithetical to our own? And while we’re on the subject, to what extent is Islam itself an issue for the CRE? Does it have anything to do with race, or is it merely a matter of culture?
Phillips replies, ‘Well, privately, I would go quite a long way down the route you’re taking. It is not primarily an issue of race. And it is certainly true that the problem did not — how can I put this? — worry my predecessors here at the CRE.’ It was assumed by his predecessors at the CRE that being Muslim and being nonwhite were synonymous, even if the converse were not true and even if the very statement itself were not true in its entirety: ergo, criticism of Islam was seen as a de facto attack upon a racial minority.
‘I’d like to encourage the British Muslim communities to construct a British Muslim identity,’ he says.
What does that mean? ‘That it does not have to translate as a Saudi Arabian or Pakistani society here.’ So where do we demand that our values, the values of the dominant culture, be respected — and where do we allow leeway? It is the one area where Trevor Phillips does not quite — for whatever reason — bite the bullet, it seems to me. If you hold fast to the notion that most of the tension in Britain today is caused by cultural antagonisms rather than by racial differences, then Islam should be the first issue for examination. You either insist that the nation state should have a coherent ideology or culture within which all the disparate groups are, to use a familiar term, stakeholders, and from which deviation is a cause for worry. Or you adopt the American model and allow different cultures to flourish in isolation from one another. You cannot, surely, have it both ways?
But still, Phillips is way ahead of the pack — most obviously that baying pack on the Left. Just this week the Guardian journalist Gary Younge had demanded that people like Trevor Phillips stop ‘fetishising’ integration. By this he meant, presumably, that integration was not per se a good thing. Then he developed his thesis: the white slave-owners in the southern states of the USA and their black slaves were pretty well integrated, but this didn’t mean that the social system was right or just. This level of bone-headed, non sequitur, ur-reasoning is what Phillips has to fight. ‘I’m hardly in tune with the cosy nostrums that the Left has always insisted are correct,’ Phillips says, with some justification.
He has a way to go, Trevor Phillips. I do not envy him the task of eventually separating, for once and for all, the issues of race and culture and, in doing so, recognising within Islam itself a profound challenge to the dominant culture of the country. Perhaps that will be a bridge too far. He is accused, on occasion, of facing both ways at once not an unfamiliar charge for a politician. But he has lost a lot of friends and allies already by challenging the mistaken assumptions which have kept the race relations wheels rolling for the past three decades. For that alone, he deserves an awful lot of credit.
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