THE head of Britain’s race relations watchdog has warned there will be “fire” on the streets unless growing racial tensions can be resolved.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, says divisions created by the recent row about Muslim women wearing the veil risk becoming “the trigger for the grim spiral that produced riots in the north of England five years ago. Only this time the conflict could be much worse”.

In what will be seen as his swansong before he becomes head of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights, Phillips says: “All the recent evidence shows that we are, as a society, becoming more socially polarised by race and faith . . . In many of our cities things cannot get any worse.”

His warning is made in an article in The Sunday Times today about the need for a “civilised” debate on race. He paints a picture of a society whose institutions appear to be helpless in the face of mounting racial conflict.

In a warning about what might happen in Britain if his call is ignored, Phillips refers to the writer who correctly predicted race riots in Los Angeles and other US cities: “In 1963, the great African-American writer James Baldwin quoted an old spiritual in a famous essay, correctly predicting the civil strife that was to come: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. Said no more water, but the fire next time.”

Phillips said Jack Straw, leader of the House of Commons, had been right to make public the fact that he had asked Muslim women to remove their veils during his constituency surgeries. He criticised Muslims who had attacked Straw: “The so-called Muslim leaders who initially attacked Straw were wrong. They were overly defensive and need to accept that in a diverse society we should be free to make polite requests of this kind.”

Phillips said the debate was becoming dangerously polarised: “On one side of the trenches we have those who want a fully fledged auto-da-fe against British Muslims, in which anything any Muslim does or says must be condemned as a signal of their wilful alienation and separation; on the other hand the defensiveness of some in the Muslim communities has hardened into a sensitivity that turns the most neutral of comments into yet another act of persecution.

“This is not what anyone intended, and it is the last thing Britain needs.”

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