There are quite a few useful rules of thumb in life. If something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is too good to be true. If a book is still boring after 100 pages, it’s not going to improve. And if Ken Livingstone violently disapproves of someone, the chances are that they are an admirable person. The London mayor keeps company with Jew-hating, gay-baiting Muslim extremists such as Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi. But he can’t bear the black, liberal chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips. Which is odd, as Phillips has so many brave and sensible things to say. On second thoughts, maybe that’s precisely why Ken hates his views so much.
This week, the CRE hosted a huge conference on race relations, which Livingstone not only ostentatiously boycotted; he set up a rival, free conference on race at City Hall. The mayor’s adviser on equality then e-mailed the speakers due to perform at the CRE event and urged them to drop out and attend the City Hall conference instead.
You might dismiss this as typical Livingstone grandstanding. It is. But it is also a symptom of the old Left’s fury at Phillips’s determination to speak his mind and challenge conventional taboos about race. They don’t expect anyone in his position to do more than mouth the usual platitudes supporting multiculturalism.
Phillips has denounced multiculturalism because it “preserves difference at the expense of equality”. He has cautioned that we are “sleepwalking into segregation”. After the London bombings, these were reasonable concerns. But Livingstone, with typical hyperbole, accused Phillips of being so right-wing that he would “soon be joining the BNP”. This is a bit rich, given that Phillips, through the CRE, has persuaded the police to refuse to recruit BNP members.
It would have been easy for the chairman of the CRE to stay in the comfort zone of “diversity policy” and the unquestioning defence of minority rights. Instead, Phillips supported Jack Straw’s expression of concern about Muslim women covering their faces in his constituency surgery. He criticised “so-called Muslim leaders” for attacking Straw: “They were overly defensive and need to accept that in a diverse society we should be free to make polite requests of this kind.” And he called on the teaching assistant Aishah Azmi to drop her discrimination case after she was suspended for refusing to remove her veil during lessons.
Most of all, Phillips wants us to be able to talk about race freely, to bust the last taboo. “There is a danger,” he wrote recently, “that increasingly we are so afraid to speak to each other about our differences that nobody can say what they mean and nobody can hear what is meant. The opening up of the debate is the most potent defence against bigotry; prejudice is a worm that thrives in the dark and shrivels in the daylight.”
I like that metaphor. When Phillips goes on to talk about “the secret ‘truths’ that we might share with people who look like us: ‘Muslims hide terrorists’, ‘white women are slags’, ‘Jews control everything secretly’ ”, you understand how these assertions wilt once they are exposed to the light of proper scrutiny, but thrive when whispered by people of the same background to each other.
Phillips even acknowledges how unsettling increased immigration can be — and not just to white folk, but also to immigrants already settled here. In other words, he is a man who sees race relations in the round.
Which is all the more reason why white people should examine their own consciences when Phillips challenges them. For instance, a poll he commissioned for the CRE this week found that 70 per cent of Britons don’t have a close friend of a different colour, and this is far more true of whites than of ethnic minorities. We may mix at work or school or college, but we rarely even enter each other’s homes.
Phillips also points out that “white flight” has exacerbated segregation. He is quite right. The other day, I was talking to a community leader from Dewsbury, and I asked him why the town’s Asians all lived together and didn’t integrate more. “We tried,” he said. “But as soon as we started moving in to a white street, the white people moved out.” The school to which he sent his children was mixed when they arrived, but soon the white parents took their offspring away and now the school is completely Asian.
It makes you think, doesn’t it? It certainly made me question my prejudices. On the radio this week, when asked why Livingstone was so hostile, Phillips replied: “The problem with feuds is that they have to be two-sided. I have nothing against Ken Livingstone. I don’t know what it’s about.”
Well, the problem with integration is that it has to be two-sided too. It’s no use us bewailing some Muslims’ failure to integrate into British society if we run away as soon as they try to do so. If we want a Britain that is racially harmonious and at ease with itself, native-born white Britons have to make an effort too.
Forget Ken Livingstone: Phillips talks a lot of sense. And it is not just “so-called Muslim leaders” who should be listening to him. We all should.
Money talks — and Grade walks
There’s an acronym I use for a behaviour that I try to avoid: SBTU. It stands for Something Better Turned Up, and describes the junking of a pre-arranged date for a better invitation. My first reaction on hearing that Michael Grade had dumped the BBC after only two years was: SBTU. It’s shoddy behaviour. But I had to laugh when I heard Jim Naughtie on Today ask the BBC’s media correspondent, Torin Douglas, why Grade had made the move. Douglas waffled about the irresistible challenge of ITV, without even mentioning the money involved. Naughtie would have done better to ask, like Mrs Merton: “So what first attracted Michael Grade to this multimillion-pound job offer then?”
Double 0 heaven
I loved the new James Bond film, Casino Royale. There was so much more depth to Daniel Craig’s Bond. This was no cartoon character, but a fully paid-up human being with insecurities. Which was why, perhaps, my husband complained that Bond was “a bit too gay”. He laughed when I said that my favourite scene was the one in the shower. Here the Bond girl, traumatised by having watched two baddies being killed, sits fully clothed in her evening dress under a running shower.
Instead of whipping her out and taking her off to bed, as the old Bond would have done, Craig sits down and joins her, soaking his own suit. It’s perfect. If you are male and you liked that too, then you must be, in today’s parlance, “just gay enough”. If, like me, you also wondered how he managed soon afterwards to look so immaculate in the same trousers, congratulations: you’re an honorary girl.
