A former president of the National Union of Students and chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips was once a leading member of what might be called the metropolitan liberal elite. He had the ear of everyone who mattered in the Labour party, and on matters of race and equality he was the go-to guy.

But then he began to have doubts about many of the political positions he held and started confronting what he saw as right-on shibboleths. Pretty soon he was being denounced as a turncoat in the same terms that he had once denounced others. In recent years, he has made several documentaries, with attention-grabbing titles such as Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, that have aimed to challenge received wisdoms. The latest, which sounds like a homage to a Daily Telegraph letters page correspondent, is entitled Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?

I meet Phillips at his production office in Kentish Town, north London. Now 63, with greying hair and a slight stoop, he’s no longer the youthfully strutting figure who seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s. But as soon as he gets talking, the eyes light up and the old passion comes pouring out.

Political correctness is one of those terms that mean different things to different people. What does it mean to him? “The title is not mine,” he says, a little defensively. “It’s a Channel 4 title. I do not normally ever use the term political correctness, except with a heavy dose of doubt about its usefulness, because basically it has become a stick with which the right beats everyone else.”

In fact Phillips has used the term before. Two years ago he wrote in the Daily Mail and Sunday Times of “po-faced political correctness that cramps all conventional parties”. Still, his thesis in the film is that by trying to corral political debate into a tightly policed acceptability, the political establishment has created the conditions for insurgent figures such as Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump.

It’s a perfectly reasonable argument but the programme is a little too wide-ranging in its targets to make its case. It jumps from the anti-Islamic group Pegida to censorious transgender activists to social media trolls to students banning sombreros. Although worthy subjects for investigation, they don’t quite gel as an explanation for the rise of Corbyn, let alone Trump.

But what they do point to is Phillips’s increasing frustration with the conviction that if we can only control the expression of ideas, we will all be able to live together in peace and harmony. October 2000 saw the publication of a report commissioned by Phillips, then chair of the Runnymede Trust, called The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. It marked perhaps the high-water mark of multicultural thinking, and suggested that Britain should become a “community of communities” in which each community would respect the other by avoiding causing offence.

‘I believe fundamentally in solidarity and reciprocity, and I think most on the left have forgotten both of those things.’ Photograph: Ian Derry/Channel 4

“Well I think it would be fair to say that I made a big mistake,” he says now. “It was a clear statement that some groups can play by their own rules. That to me runs counter to my own political beliefs. Why I am still a supporter of the Labour party is because I believe fundamentally in solidarity and reciprocity, and I think most on the left have forgotten both of those things.”

Four years after that report, Phillips wrote an article in which he compared a critique by David Goodhart of multiculturalism to the “jottings from the BNP leader’s weblog”. Two months later, he suddenly announced the end of multiculturalism and called for “a core of Britishness” to be asserted. Not long afterwards, Ken Livingstone suggested that Phillips had swung so far to the right that he would soon be joining the BNP.

Goodhart and Phillips are now good friends. “I think Trevor has been intellectually and morally brave,” says Goodhart. “He took a lot of flak for looking past the cliches of the anti-racist left. He is regarded as a curious Uncle Tom figure by a lot of the black and ethnic minority establishment. Trevor still thinks of himself as a somewhat sceptical member of the left family and at times has, I think, felt quite wounded by the attacks.”

I ask Phillips if the threat of expulsion from his political tribe does act as a disincentive to speak out about what he really thinks.

“Depends how much of your life you want to spend lying to yourself,” he says. “I think it’s pretty wearying to get up each day and tell yourself to go advocate for something that you know not to be true. And what is even worse is if you’re in public office or politics and everyone you’re telling this to also knows it isn’t true. Not only are you a liar, you’re also an idiot.”

If, as Goodhart says, he has been wounded by his ostracising, he doesn’t appear to nurture any regrets. “I have lost lots and lots of friends. My view is if you can’t tolerate that I want to have this discussion, then we can’t really be friends. What you’re asking me to do is collude in a lie with you rather than argue it out. A big part of it is that on the left, if you look like me, you’re supposed to think in a particular way. And they just hate it if a black person isn’t the person they want him to be.”

He believes that we all have to get used to and get over being offended. “I don’t care about offending people,” he says. “And I don’t really care about being offended. There are quite a lot of people I actually want to offend. And I want to offend them all the time. But if somebody stands on the other side of the street and shouts nigger at me – I’m not going to be thrilled, but I’m not going to argue for him to get locked up.”

Phillips as chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian

Then why was he “appalled” at what he saw as antisemitic bigotry in the Labour party? Surely by his own reckoning, he shouldn’t much care. “Oh the problem with that,” he says, “is not that people were using the word Zio, but that people were making it impossible for Jewish students to have meetings. There is an important distinction between words and actions.”

But his complaints were not just about actions, I suggest. Was he not also concerned that the Labour party had played down antisemitic attitudes by some of its members? “Yes,” he agrees. “There are people who believe there is no real distinction between Jews, Zionists and Israelis. And the party doesn’t want to get into that at all because, let’s be frank, it’s increasingly dependent on a demographic group – Muslims – within which a sizable minority subscribes to that view.”

Phillips studied chemistry at Imperial College, London, and, he says, it’s his science training that made him change his mind about how race was discussed in this country. By the turn of the millennium, he says, it was obvious that it made little sense to classify people as black, brown and white. He has little time for designations such as BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic).

“If you look at Indians and Pakistanis, they have completely different life chances. It’s the same with Afro-Caribbeans and West Africans. I’m not clever enough to have a Damascene conversion. I just look at the numbers and if they clash with how I think the world should be working, I’ve got to change the picture.”

Fair enough, but his critics will say that Phillips is making straw man arguments. After all, who is stopping him from saying what he wants? He’s got a TV documentary and coverage in national newspapers. Where is this politically correct establishment that’s trying to stifle him?

“A ruling elite maintains an idea of what’s good and reasonable by a whole series of methods,” he counters. “Who gets advancement, rewards and status? If you don’t hold to the orthodoxy, you stop being invited to meetings. There’s a phrase that people in centre-left politics use: oh he’s very good. What they actually mean is: I agree with him.”

Phillips has grown used to people not agreeing with him. Perhaps a little too used to it. As one old comrade says: “He can’t resist tweaking the nose of the bien pensant.”

But in these disagreeable times, dissenting voices will make themselves heard. The liberal consensus has broken down, and rehashing the old pieties won’t put it back together again. Whether or not he receives an invitation, Phillips is determined to have his say.

Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? Channel 4, 9pm, Thursday 23 February

This article orginally contained some editing errors, amended on 21 February 2017. The headline put quote marks around words he did not say in the interview. When discussing alleged antisemitism within Labour he referred to the use of the term “Zio” [a shorthand for Ziocon, a perjorative abbreviation of Zionist neoconservative]. This was mistakenly changed in subediting to Zion, a synonym for Jerusalem.











