RACE AND CULTURE: ‘Schooling people to be strangers’

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 integrated 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.