LONDON: Trevor Phillips, the former head of Britain’s equalities watchdog, has been suspended from the Labour Party following accusations of Islamophobia.
Phillips, who coined the term Islamophobia in the 1990s, is being investigated for public statements he made regarding child sexual abuse involving gangs of South Asian men in towns across the north of England.
The complaint also refers to comments made by him regarding Muslims not wearing poppies — a traditional British symbol for remembering fallen soldiers — during national remembrance events.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Monday that he had been suspended with immediate effect, and accused Labour of “shutting down genuine debate.”
But Jennie Formby, the party’s general secretary, said the suspension was carried out as a matter of “urgency to protect the party’s reputation.”
Phillips was the founding chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a government anti-racism watchdog.
Last year, he joined other prominent Labour members who publicly declared they would not be voting for the party in a general election due to concerns over anti-Semitism.
As chairman of the Runnymede Trust — an equalities think tank — in the 1990s, Phillips released a report on Islamophobia and successfully lobbied then-Prime Minister Tony Blair into developing new laws to protect Muslims from discrimination.
England’s first Muslim MP and Labour Party backbencher Khalid Mahmoud reacted to the suspension by saying: “The charges were so outlandish as to bring disrepute on all involved in making them.”
Dr. Rakib Ehsan, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said: “Trevor Phillips is a leading race equality pioneer who has made insightful contributions on the socially divisive effects of multiculturalism in the UK.
“For the Labour Party to depict him as an anti-Muslim bigot is grossly unfair, and demonstrates Labour’s broader reluctance to discuss problematic attitudes within Britain’s Muslim communities.”
Phillips says he has done nothing to breach the party’s rules.
But Sonia Sodha, a Guardian columnist and chief leader writer for The Observer, tweeted: “All those defending Trevor Phillips as an avowed anti-racism campaigner who can do no wrong should look at his track record of making unfounded claims about Muslims.”
She added: “He made a sensationalist documentary about Muslims in 2016 that claimed that British Muslims were a ‘nation within a nation’ based on a survey that was methodologically unsound and which contradicts better-designed surveys of British Muslims.”
In 2016, Phillips wrote a report titled “Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence,” in which he claimed that “the most sensitive cause of conflict in recent years has been the collision between majority norms and the behaviors of some Muslims groups.”
In the same report, Phillips lamented that only one Muslim wore a poppy at an Islamic conference before Remembrance Sunday.
He added that he later visited an industrial site where many of the workers were Eastern European and African immigrants.
“Poppies were everywhere,” he said. “One group had clearly adapted to the mainstream, the other had not.”
