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.
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