Hawzah News Agency - (London - UK) - Trevor Phillips, the former head of the equalities watchdog, has condemned Labour’s decision to suspend him from the party over alleged Islamophobia, while defending his view that the UK Muslim population is “different”.
Phillips, a pioneering anti-racism campaigner who previously chaired the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), has been suspended from Labour pending an investigation and could be expelled.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Phillips said he was surprised and dismayed at the move, and defended his comments about British Muslims.
“I’m kind of surprised that what is and always has been an open and democratic party decides that its members cannot have a healthy debate about how we address differences of values and outlook,” Phillips said.
“They say I am accusing Muslims of being different. Well actually, that’s true. The point is Muslims are different. And in many ways I think that’s admirable.”
Asked about his warning in 2016 that Muslims were becoming a “nation within a nation” being adopted by the far-right anti-Muslim campaigner Tommy Robinson, Phillips said he had not heard about this, adding: “As my grandmother says, just because the devil picks up a tune doesn’t mean it is a bad tune.”
But critics said that they were concerned over some of Phillips statements, with Miqdaad Versi, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), saying that he found the comments “seriously problematic”.
Versi told Today his organisation had not made a complaint to Labour, but added: “What we can say very clearly is that the statements he has made on a number of different things would not be statements that he would make against other communities,” Versi said. “He keeps on cherry-picking information to create this narrative that Muslims are different from everyone else.”
Phillips rejected the contention that comments such as his “nation within a nation” remark amounted to sweeping generalisations about a disparate population of around 3 million Britons.
“There’s all sorts of differences in our society, and the central point of my pamphlet was to say we cannot continue simply to say that differences won’t matter,” he said. “In my view it’s a form of disrespect to say to people: ‘Oh, don’t worry, the differences of values that they have, the beliefs that this or that group have, they’ll get over it.’”
It was correct for Muslims to be judged collectively, he argued. “You keep saying that I make these generalisations. But the truth is, if you do belong to a group, whether it is a church, or a football club, you identify with a particular set of values, and you stand for it. And frankly you are judged by that.”
Later on Monday morning the Conservative peer and anti-islamophobia campaigner Sayeeda Warsi posted a series of tweets which appeared to refer to the Phillips case, saying: “If you take a negative characteristic of an individual and impose on a whole community that’s racism... the “racialisation” of a group is how we stereotype and demonise groups/communities not whether they all share the same skin colour.”