In defence of Trevor Phillips

Labour’s expulsion of Phillips reveals a cult-like party on the verge of total irrelevance.

It is safe to say that the Labour Party hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory of late – but, quite incredibly, it has managed to hit a new low.

In a seeming attempt to undermine the reputation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is currently investigating Labour over allegations of institutional anti-Semitism, the party has decided to suspend former EHRC chairman Trevor Phillips on the grounds of ‘Islamophobia’. The suspension reveals an ideologically purist Labour Party that is now under the control of identitarian leftists.

Phillips, who was appointed as head of the Commission for Racial Equality in 2003 before becoming chair of the EHRC in 2006, is certainly robust when it comes to his analysis of identity politics and multiculturalism. As early as 2005, he warned that Britain’s approach to multiculturalism and cultural diversity could cause us to ‘sleepwalk towards segregation’. He elaborated on these views in a 2016 paper published by Civitas, titled Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence.

In it, he argues that a ‘squeamishness about addressing diversity and its discontents risks allowing our country to sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so well for so long’.

Phillips is also a passionate advocate of free speech – placing him at odds with the thoughtpolicing tendencies of the contemporary British left. He has warned that certain regressive elements are out to silence legitimate concerns about orthodox Islamic doctrines and their social implications. This has proven to be well-placed. Recently, an unholy alliance of witless liberal politicians, crank academics and Islamist organisations attempted to force through a definition of ‘Islamophobia’ which essentially represented a blasphemy law through the back door.

Phillips has expressed reservations over the ethnic and religious segregation perpetuated by the multiculturalist championing of ‘difference’. He has not shied away from highlighting the embedding of patriarchal structures, misogynistic attitudes and other problematic socio-cultural values within certain communities. This does not make him an anti-Muslim bigot. These are entirely reasonable points that strike a chord with much of the British population.

What’s more, Labour’s suspension of Phillips is reflective of the left’s ever-growing hostility towards non-white individuals who reject their identitarian ideology and grievance-driven narratives. Phillips is a successful black man who does not hesitate to identify the deeply regressive elements of the left’s multicultural ideology. His mere existence is a major inconvenience to the left. For the Labour Party, Phillips is nothing but an uppity coconut who needs to be punished for not fitting neatly into its political agenda.

The suspension of Phillips is just another demonstration of the Labour Party’s increasingly regressive and authoritarian turn. This is a party led by a man who has a history of fraternising with Islamist organisations. And a party that has witnessed the departure of British Jewish politicians due to institutionalised anti-Semitism – including Dame Louise Ellman, who had been in the party for 55 years before she quit last year.

Yet it is Trevor Phillips who is considered to be so unpalatable that he is undeserving of a place in the Labour Party. A once great party has descended into a complete farce. Labour is on the brink of total irrelevance.

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Canada’s war on women

A women-only rape-relief centre in Vancouver has had its funding pulled for ‘excluding’ trans people.

The Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter (VRRWS) cares for, on average, 1,200 women each year. It offers immediate response and services, including transition housing and a 24-hour crisis line, for women fleeing male violence. Established in 1973, it is the oldest women’s rape-crisis centre in Canada.

But a year ago Vancouver city council plunged the centre’s future into doubt. It approved VRRWS’s annual grant for 2019/20, but also stated that it would cease funding the following year. And so, last month, it came to pass. The city council voted finally to end the centre’s funding. And it did so on the grounds that, by exclusively serving women, the centre was discriminating against men who identify as women.

Driving this defunding campaign was local trans activist Morgane Oger. Oger, a politically active trans woman, spent the better half of the year taunting and shaming the shelter for being ‘transphobic’, simply because it did not serve trans women or gender-variant people – in other words, men.

When the city council pulled the plug on the VRRWS, Oger took to Twitter to gloat, likening the centre to a white-supremacist organisation. Oger also wrote a scathing blog post implying a connection between the rape-crisis centre and various right-wing fringe groups, from the Soldiers of Odin (a far-right, anti-immigrant group) to the Peoples Party of Canada (a populist, far-right political party). This type of behaviour ought to be of no surprise to anyone familiar with trans activists’ bullying tactics.

It is one thing to be ignorant of the critical need for the type of services provided by a women’s refuge. But it is something else entirely to go out of your way to execute a defunding campaign against a women’s refuge. It reeks of outright misogyny. Thousands of vulnerable women rely on the VRRWS’s services to get the critical support they need. And now it is in danger of going under, merely because, as a women’s refuge, it wanted to restrict its services to women.

And why wouldn’t it? To expect women who have been abused and raped at the hands of men to then accommodate a man in a shelter is absurd – even if said man self-identifies as a woman.

Indeed, trans women have no idea what women need because, quite simply, they are not women. To grow up and be socialised as a woman starts before birth. Being a woman is to have experienced a lifetime of being treated, and in some cases oppressed and subjugated, as a woman. Not that any such concerns bother the City of Vancouver.

In its letter justifying the decision, the council stated that: ‘It is [our] view that [VRRWS]’s position does not demonstrate accommodation, welcomeness and openness to people of all gender identities required by the eligibility criteria, because it clearly excludes trans, gender-variant and two-spirit people from provision of at least some of its core services.’

This charge of exclusivity levelled at the VRRWS raises some important issues.

First, in order for a certain group of marginalised people to be effectively served, other groups must be excluded. A women’s shelter would no longer serve its purpose if it started allowing men to have access to its services. VRRWS is often the last lifeline for some women, especially as it is the only women-only rape crisis centre and transition house in the province of British Columbia.

And second, it seems Vancouver’s councilors see justice and exclusivity as incompatible. In this, they are marching in lockstep with the diversity industry – or as proponents call it, diversity and inclusion (D&I). For D&I advocates, ‘inclusivity’ is always the goal, and exclusivity always the enemy. Yet a women’s refuge is necessarily exclusive. It necessarily discriminates. For it is only by discriminating against other sections of society that it can cater to the needs of a particular marginalised and vulnerable social group.

What makes the defunding of VRRWS all the more bewildering is that the city council is all too happy to serve other marginalised groups exclusively. So, just days after it announced that the VRRWS was to be defunded, the council announced it had purchased a $3.8million building to convert into social housing for people who identify as trans or two-spirit.

While I’m not opposed to a trans-only space, I am opposed to blatant hypocrisy and misogyny, especially from misinformed decision makers. The main reason why the city council defunded the rape-relief shelter was on the basis of exclusivity, yet this social-housing initiative will exclusively serve trans and two-spirit people.

It is difficult to ignore the misogyny at work here. To defund one critical service and then prop up another days later shows that modern sex-based oppression is alive and kicking. And so, under the banner of anti-discrimination, women have been pushed to the sidelines, yet again.

The council could have funded the women’s shelter and the new social housing. That way, both marginalised groups would receive the services they need. Instead, the decision to defund one on the basis of being exclusionary, while propping up another on the basis of being, well, exclusionary, makes no logical sense.

Vancouver’s city councillors, like many other decision makers, have succumbed to the dangers of identity politics. They have traded off women’s rights against the rights of others deemed more oppressed and victimised. And, in doing so, they have allowed misogyny to prevail once again.

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The case for an English Parliament

Regionalism has failed. English voters need their own government.

A glaring feature of the Brexit process has been the first ministers of Scotland and Wales demanding to be heard more in the negotiations. And yet no one has spoken for England on Brexit, or indeed speaks for England in any other policy debate. England is being airbrushed from public discourse, in this area but also others.

When New Labour gave national parliaments and recognition to Scotland and Wales, it left a gaping hole. The Blair government ignored English nationhood, offering merely the prospect of it being broken into EU-defined artificial regional bits – an agenda that stalled after the 2004 North East referendum decisively rejected a regional chamber. Further referendums in other regions were eventually cancelled.

Brexit now provides an opportunity to rethink the governance of England. It’s time to forget artificial regional constructs and to acknowledge that, in the post-Brexit world, England deserves a governing institution to represent it as a nation.

Regionalism has failed because it was always artificial and top-down. Isn’t it odd that the supposed English regions, all with their supposedly distinctive cultures and identities, just happen to reflect the regional blocs used by the EU for the purpose of statistics, European Parliament elections, and so on.

The English regions we have are not identifiable, historically defined regions as Spanish or Italian regions are, which is why seven of the nine EU-defined regions in England are referred to using points of the compass – North West, South East, etc.

Post-Brexit ‘levelling up’ requires an all-England view, one that is not currently provided by regionalists or Unionists who think that denying England representation is essential to keeping Scotland and Wales in the Union. England will continue to lose out if it is seen only as a collection of regions, and not as a nation.

One fanciful myth in this debate is that England – population 56million – is too big for its own parliament. And yet, apparently, Italy (60million), France (67million), Japan (127million) and India (1.3 billion) must be the exceptions to the rule.

Government systems manage to accommodate larger and smaller units (as the UK currently does). The US, with states ranging in population size from California (39.5million) to Wyoming (580,000), manages to make its governing system work with size disparities between states.

Some Unionists oppose an English Parliament because they fear it will damage the Union – they made a similar argument during the referendum campaigns for the Scottish and Welsh devolved bodies. They therefore feel vindicated by the rise in support since devolution for Scottish independence.

But it was the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP) which led to the 2015 Scottish independence referendum, not the simple existence of the Scottish Parliament. Still, many Unionists continue to deny England – 84 per cent of the UK population – the right to govern itself.

In truth, it is that imbalance that will ultimately place greater strain on the Union. During the 2019 General Election, the main parties all put out separate manifestos for Scotland and Wales, but none did so for England. This will only feed a sense that England is being overlooked.

The alternatives so far suggested to tackle this problem have been paltry. The parliamentary tinkering of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ is currently in force, whereby legislation which affects only England requires the majority support of English MPs. Then there is the idea of a dual mandate British Parliament, in which English MPs would sit separately on English issues.

But this would require the English voter to think of two mandates held by the same MP for separate purposes – a recipe for confusion and disaffection. And another flaw here is that there would be no English government or first minister to govern England separately in certain areas, and to press England’s case within the UK.

Some Remainers cast Brexit as England’s fault, given Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to Remain. Though this conveniently forgets that the Welsh also delivered a Leave vote, Brexit does reflect particular issues with regard to England. There are concerns about a loss of English national identity and a sense no one gives a damn about England.

Instead of Remainers accusing the Brexit-backing English of being racist, xenophobic bigots, and Unionists continuing to demand that England sacrifices itself for the sake of the Union, both would do well to look seriously at the causes of English disaffection.

The 53million people of England should have what the five million in Scotland, the three million in Wales, and nearly two million in Northern Ireland already have – a parliament, a first minister, and government of their own.

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No more quad bikes on Australian farms?

Rigid new safety laws to blame

For primary producers who have lost loved ones in quad bike accidents, the current situation is complicated.

The conflict lies between providing a safe workplace and the essential role of the vehicles.

Farmer and grazier Warren Jonsson from Ravenshoe in Far North Queensland tragically lost his father in a quad bike rollover in the late 1990s.

But he said the new mandatory factory-fitted roll bars had seen big manufacturers exiting the Australian market.

"They've got to modify their whole production line just to suit probably 2 per cent of the market," he said.

"They've opted to not send quads to Australia; they said 12 months ago they'd pull out, and that's exactly what's going to happen."

"There's got to be some waiver where you can put an aftermarket structure, roll bar on the bikes," he said. "People have got to be a bit accountable for their own doings."

Barcaldine grazier David Counsell said he was not surprised by the industry move, but admitted the safety measures were necessary.

"They're in some cases a necessary farm vehicle, but they've got a terrible track record for safety," he said.

"There's a significant liability there … big companies look at their risk and make according decisions."
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He said he only used his quad bike a couple of days a year, mainly in wet conditions. "When I've really got to go down and have a look along a boggy creek for bogged sheep or something like that, I'm inherently aware of the risks this vehicle presents," he said.

Mr Counsell said there had been fatalities in the region and everyone he had spoken to had a story about the dangers they presented. "Where there's smoke there's fire," he said.

"It's not just the fatalities; there's a lot of situations where people end up in hospitals or really close calls."
Exiting the Australian industry

Supplier Polaris has confirmed it will stop selling quad bikes and All-Terrain Vehicles (ATV) in the Australian market this year.

Honda criticised the legislation and said it would force them to do the same in 2021, when the laws took full effect.

Polaris Australia's Alan Collins says safety measures will cause as many injuries as they save.

However, he said, it was not about the cost of fitting rollover safety measures. "We actually believe they cause as many injuries as they save," he said.

"There's no reliable science or data or evidence that we've seen that actually demonstrates that these devices offer any inherent safety value at all."

In October 2019, the Federal Government gave quad bike manufacturers two years to comply with new rollover protection legislation.

The safety standards required that manufacturers affix rollover safety stickers to new quad bikes within 12 months and install roll-over bars as standard within 24 months.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.

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