And their reaction? “Well, of course, everybody will say, ‘Of course not’. The essential point is that we are saying something slightly different from what we said in the past. I want to be absolutely clear about it. From the CRE’s point of view no subject is off limits for democratic debate. The only thing that concerns us is the manner in which those subjects are debated.”
Phillips’s plan may sound a little woolly but it has more chance of being effective than the CRE’s approach in 2001 when it sent candidates a “compact” on non-racial campaigning and then told tales on those who had omitted to sign it, neatly inflaming things from the start. But I wonder if Phillips does not face a specific problem. This former chairman of the Greater London Assembly, Frank Dobson’s running mate for mayor, is a new Labour man through and through (albeit one who chose to send his daughters to private schools). Peter Mandelson was his best man.
Phillips insists that when his predecessor, Gurbux Singh, resigned in 2002 after a drunken row with a police officer outside Lord’s cricket ground, he was not the Establishment’s favoured candidate. He applied for the job in the normal way and went through “five different bloody interviews”. He has fought to stop the CRE being folded into the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, “a new Labour-linked project if there ever was one”. What is more, he says, his comments in The Times last year that multiculturalism had passed its sell-by date represented an “attack on a left-wing shibboleth”.
Fine, I say, but it was a premeditated attack. He would have cleared it with the Home Secretary first. “Are you kidding? Are you mad?” he asks and Harris, the PR, laughs exaggeratedly from the corner.
But the Government checks things with him, I counter. Charles Clarke tipped him off about his anti-terrorism plans and, afterwards, Phillips said nothing at all about them.
“If the Government is going to say something that might have an impact on what I do, I expect the courtesy of a phone call.”
But why his subsequent silence? He challenges me to say why it is an issue for the CRE. I tell him that it is because in practical terms it is members of ethnic minorities who are likely to be detained under the new legislation. He accuses me of “old thinking”. I mention the Muslims detained in Belmarsh.
“OK, I’m going to agree with you in a moment, but here is exactly the problem. Because the people involved had brown skins you automatically assume it’s got to be my business.”
Too right, I think, but instead I ask about the impact the law will have on the communities themselves. “OK. Now you’re in good territory and there I am agreeing with you. And the reason that Charles will ring me is because he knows that if I suspect for one second the regime that he’s about to impose will actually discriminate unjustifiably, I will have it judicially reviewed. And I will do it.”
He will? “Have absolutely no doubt at all that if I think it’s wrong I won’t just say it’s wrong, I will use all the powers open to me to stop it happening. But this is very interesting because it says something about what people still think about the Commission for Racial Equality. First, we’re not here just to shout every time somebody black cries foul, OK? Secondly, there’s this idea that somehow because we do not like what the Government does, that we should be part of a lobbying exercise to stop it. It’s not my job. If I wanted to do that I would have gone to some voluntary organisation.”
It would be a fair distinction except that in his two and a bit years in the job he has increased his and its profile with various ad hoc pronouncements — that the countryside is unwelcoming to ethnic minorities, for example; that black boys might do better being taught separately in some subjects. He responds that these pronouncements have been considered and are far from “ad hoc”.
“However, here is the answer to what underlines your question. Am I just some publicity-seeking new Labour hound? Well it will surprise you to know that I think the answer is no. I’ll tell you the most important thing about all of this. I’d obviously always been involved to some extent in race and all that, but it wasn’t my day job. What I had not grasped when I got here was the degree to which those who work in race, race relations and those who are in government and people who comment and write about it, were still steeped in the race warrior culture of the Seventies and Eighties. When I got here the word ‘integration’, which is really about how we all live together, was not part of our agenda. I just had not realised how frozen this whole landscape was.”
Phillips, who might give the impression of being a man of words rather than deeds, has, he says, taken a blowtorch to the permafrost at the CRE itself. He has cut back drastically on the number of cases of racial discrimination it backs in court. He gave, as he puts it, the opportunity for “quite a lot” of its staff to leave (and they left). He reviewed and in many cases blocked grants that had been given out annually to the same old outfits and plans to donate smaller grants to individual projects such as we saw in Peterborough. He admits that when he arrived morale was low.
“I realised very, very rapidly that the feeling most prevalent among the staff here was, ‘Why does he want to come here?’ And I was incredibly excited. I was thrilled. I was completely made up when the permanent secretary rang me and said I’d got the job. I ran up and down Hornsey Lane.”
Hornsey Lane in North London is home for him and his wife, the child psychologist Asha Bhownagary, and their two daughters. It is a happy thought imagining this already successful man, who still runs his own television company, being so enthused by his appointment to a quango called in an official report not so many years ago “inefficient, self-serving and faction-ridden”. But the rise of this son of poor Guyanese immigrants to the Establishment and his 24-year marriage to an Asian woman could engender complacency about the black experience in Britain. It is to his credit that he realises, even if we in the white community may not, how exceptional his story remains. It is to his credit also that he can still be shocked by the reality.
“My presumption, like every other middle-class London parent with children who mix with other people, was that we’re all fine. Actually, when we did the survey work we found that young people in this country are less integrated than older people. What we have is a development of a kind of passive co-existence where people aren’t fighting each other, but they aren’t bothering to be interested in each other either. And that’s catastrophic.”
Trevor Phillips is obviously a good man — perhaps the best the CRE has had — but I cannot help but remain a Bolsover-style sceptic about how much he and his £20 million organisation can actually do to foster integration. I even wonder if it is a legitimate political objective, to tell people with whom they must mix. If, however, we miss being deluged in a race storm this election, Phillips will be one of the few in public life who helped rather than hindered.
