Labour suspends Trevor Phillips because he identified who made up child grooming gangs

[jadefinch]

Trevor Phillips is the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission - and he's recently been accused of 'transphobia' for saying women's same-sex spaces should be protected.

He's now been suspended by Labour for accurately saying that the majority of members of northern grooming gangs, which sexually abused tens of thousands of vulnerable girls, were Pakistani Muslim men.

One of the main reasons why the girls were put at risk was because the police and local authorities didn't want to intervene in case they were accused of Islamophobia.

Labour's war on both women and the freedom to say things that are true is not going away.

news.sky.com/story/labour-veteran-trevor-phillips-suspended-over-islamophobia-allegations-11953457

I also think a lot of people, if they’re brutally honest with themselves, have been the ‘TRAs’ of the scenario in the past, and as soon as heard a comment regarding religion would just shut down and think ‘racist/bigot’ etc and not engage in genuine concerns. The grooming gangs are a prime example of this.
I think looking at other scenarios through a ‘TRA’ lens, of you will, has been extremely helpful in perhaps not being too quick to judge and shut down debate on other topics as well.
I’ve read people here saying that this logic has helped them understand things like why people voted Brexit, whereas previously they might have dismissed them off hand. (Although they obviously still might not agree, there’s an understanding).
Labour on the other hand, are going the complete opposite way, and just doubling down.
It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion

If you say all Pakistani men are like x, of course that makes you a racist.

There is a lot of racism in society and a lot on MN.
There is also a lot of misogyny and homophobia in society.

Islam needs a reformation like Christianity had. Although there are a small number of more liberal Muslims, they are very much in the minority. Instead it is the more rigid misogynistic Islam that dominates. And in Britain Labour have encouraged that by cosying up to the Council of British Muslims. This is not new to Corbyn, it happened under Blair too. But white people did not care about the implications of that until it affected white girls. Meanwhile it has had a devastatingly negative impact on Muslim girls and women.

For example Sharia courts in Britain are a national disgrace.

Gosh, that documentary was really good. I felt like Tony Blair didn't really get what he was trying to say, though.

Islam needs a reformation like Christianity had.

I really don't think this would mean quite what people think it would mean. The Reformation didn't make Christianity more liberal or more philosophically sophisticated. Arguably quite the opposite.

In any case, Islam has varied in its tone over the centuries, and different streams are present even when they are not dominant. But even the most sophisticated and modern form of Islam (or any other religion or way of thinking) isn't necessarily going to come to all the same conclusions as the modern (or postmodern) secular west. I would have said that valuing diversity includes some real diversity of thought and not just diverse skin colour or family recipes, but I am no longer sure that is really a mainstream view.

If you say all Pakistani men are like x, of course that makes you a racist.

But that's not remotely what TP is saying. He's having a few quotes out of tens of thousands of words of detailed analysis of incredibly complex problems taken out of context. Even then I don't think any of those are terrible unless you deliberately interpret them in the worst possible way.

Is anyone seriously saying that TP's comments are worthy of expulsion?

I also think a lot of people, if they’re brutally honest with themselves, have been the ‘TRAs’ of the scenario in the past, and as soon as heard a comment regarding religion would just shut down and think ‘racist/bigot’ etc and not engage in genuine concerns.

I think this is very true. I feel embarassed about some of the comments of my youth (and indeed a few years ago on brexit).

Isn't Trevor Phillips the present Chair of Index on Censorship? With a five year term, that started just a handful of months ago?

Index's articles in support of Maya Forstater.

Index's articles in support of Harry Miller.

Purely coincidental, I'm sure. I mean, Labour wouldn't be targeting a man who has just been put in charge of a charitable organisation with a long and illustrious history in defending free speech (and who has made it glaringly apparent that he intends to continue defending the right of all sides to discuss the law as it pertains to the rights of women and girls, because it's a human rights issue that affects us) without the very purest of motives. They wouldn't dream of seeking to discredit the former head of the Equal Opportunities Commission - who was part of the creation of the Equality Act, with all that pesky recognition of women as equally protected - and accuse him of racism to do that. No. Definitely not.

I'd just like to reflect for a moment on what Labour's attitude would have been, were the Israeli community provably involved in organised grooming gangs, targeting vulnerable female children. Something tells me tender concern for that community's reputation might have been a tad slower to arrive. Just a hunch.

I also think a lot of people, if they’re brutally honest with themselves, have been the ‘TRAs’ of the scenario in the past, and as soon as heard a comment regarding religion would just shut down and think ‘racist/bigot’ etc and not engage in genuine concerns.

Yes. Me. I'd have shuddered, and assumed it was a Tommy Robinson arsehole saying it. Couldn't be true. Of course "you got bad apples" but nothing so organised and systematic. That attitude was part of why so many girls were raped so many thousands of times, and nobody did anything.

That, and plain old fashioned misogyny. As with the TRA attitudes, women are disposable. Men are not: their needs must be considered at all times, and if possible met - especially if they tick an Equality Act box, and are therefore marginalised. Our marginalisation is so normalised, it's invisible to most men (and plenty of women, too). Conveniently enough. Even when 13 year old girls are plied with drugs and alcohol and passed around a group of adult men, and the police assume that's a choice.

I am a person of colour, with a family heritage of Fulani and Mandinka Muslims going back 1,000 years until ripped apart by transatlantic slavery. Some of my relatives have made the return journey to embrace Islam. It also seems peculiar to make an example of someone who introduced the term “Islamophobia” to British politics by commissioning the Runnymede Trust’s 1997 report on the issue; and who then, as head of the Commission for Racial Equality, worked closely with Labour on the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 that protects Muslims from incitement.

Labour are so far up their own purity spiral by this point I can't see any way back.

I thought Trevor Phillips was Ok with men self id'ing as women, but had an issue with white people self id'ing as BAME. It is late and I have no links to any articles but I remember thinking how hypocritical, so I am sure I havent made that up. Last year, year before last?

He wrote an article back in 2018, when it was far less socially acceptable to voice such reservations, opposing the suggested changes.

The disaster of the public consultation process on gender recognition has revealed a government so terrified of being labelled transphobic that it is ready to destroy half a century of painstakingly assembled anti-discrimination legislation to the detriment of every woman, person of colour and disabled individual in Britain. Under the current law, a change of gender requires a two-year period of reflection, medical checks and possible physical alterations. It is a gruelling process and proposed reforms to the Gender Recognition Act rightly aim to make the process less bureaucratic.

However, agitation by a guilt-tripping band of “trans” activists has corralled MPs into contemplating a wholly unnecessary and dangerous further step. It is seriously being suggested that we should do away with any objective test of gender, and leave the decision as to whether an individual should be treated as male or female entirely in the hands of the person themselves. In short, a man would be able to declare himself a woman, and immediately have every right to enter spaces reserved for women — changing rooms, lavatories, prisons.

The feminist objection to “self-declaration” has already been made on these pages, not least by Janice Turner, who has been subject to shrieking abuse by some bullies from the trans lobby. Many of these people were born — and still are — male, by most people’s standards. The fact that in at least one case women in prisons have been sexually assaulted by a “woman” who happened to possess a penis would give most of us pause for thought. Yet the otherwise sensible MPs on the women and equalities select committee have backed self-declaration and startlingly, David Isaac, my admirable successor as chairman of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, has announced that he favours “de-medicalisation” — a way of allowing men to become women without the inconvenient step of ceasing to be male.

The article goes on to point out that if you accept self-ID on this, what logic would there be in refusing it on disability, or race. He directly equates all three.

People scoff when certain people say they’re ‘not allowed’ to say anything, and then these same people sit in wonderment at how the likes of Tommy Robinson become so popular.

Exactly. If mainstream politicians and journalists will not comment then those outside of it certainly will. It gives them a credibility that is frightening to think about. People start to think “if they’re right about this then what else are they right about?” It’s very unhealthy for a society.

If you say all Pakistani men are like x, of course that makes you a racist.

Who has said that?? What an extraordinarily brazen use of the straw man.

No one is saying all Pakistani men are abusers, or that all abusers are Pakistani men, for that matter, before you try and sneak that one in too. That’s so far-fetched it’s actually offensive - I can’t believe you would even try to pretend that’s what anyone is saying. Is it because you can’t address what’s actually being said?

In any case, you have again demonstrated how and why the situation in Rotherham and other towns was allowed to continue unchecked for so long. Any reference to the abusers’ (and the victims’) ethnicity and the part that played in the dynamic of the abuse being falsely categorised as racism against all the members of that ethnic group.

I don't agree with everything Trevor Philips has ever said but this appears to be a deliberate attack on a decent, principled man, in the purity spiral of current Labour politics.

It also appears to indicate that the people doing the attacking have no idea which Labour figures the public respects and which it does not. Or, alternately, that they know very well and are making it clear that they don't give a shit what the public thinks, which is all very well until the next general election rolls around.

I know. I really can't tell which. I don't think it's necessarily a joined up approach. Some people are doing it for one reason and others for the other. Incompetence and malice.

I think they are so convinced by their moral purity that they don't care what everyone thinks. It's not about being elected for this lot, it's about being superior. And they are so enjoying it, they have no perspective of how fascistic their authoritarianism seem to everyone else.

If you're familiar with the history of how various communist governments veered into horror this is all extra disturbing. It would be lovely if people learned from history but apparently that's too much to ask. It's also why I'm angrier with the grownups about this than the kids even though the kids are effectively acting as the Red Guard in the current scenario - the adults should know better, and should never have let it get this far.

This reminds me of student-age politics, where the most important goal was to show you were totally pure. I was always a bit intimidated by knowing I wasn’t pure enough, but I kept trying to be. I admired China’s Cultural Revolution (because I had no idea what the Chinese people suffered during the ’Ten years of Madness’).

Thank God people like me never came to power over here, back then. My only excuse is that I was very young.

The tragedy is, this is the Labour Party. This is the main opposition to the shitshower now in government. Run by teenage zealots, apparently.

Agreed, Kittens. It’s astonishing that those old enough to have lived through the Cold War aren’t reacting responsibly to all this.

The only “comfort” is that they are making themselves totally and utterly unelectable, so at least we don’t need to worry about this becoming our future just yet. But that’s an odd sort of comfort, altogether.

That, and plain old fashioned misogyny. As with the TRA attitudes, women are disposable. Men are not: their needs must be considered at all times, and if possible met - especially if they tick an Equality Act box, and are therefore marginalised. Our marginalisation is so normalised, it's invisible to most men (and plenty of women, too). Conveniently enough. Even when 13 year old girls are plied with drugs and alcohol and passed around a group of adult men, and the police assume that's a choice.

Yy to this, wellbehavedwomen.

Agreed, Talking. It's why I'm glad Labour lost the election, which I couldn't have imagined myself saying even a year or two ago. I'm genuinely scared of what the wannabe Red Guard kids and their idiotic adult enablers would unleash on us all if they got anywhere near government.

Prodigal I crossposted with you, I was typing Cultural Revolution while you were typing Red Guards. This is exactly it, isn’t it? This is being inflicted in the Labour Party because adults are allowing it. I mourn the Labour Party.

And the problem is that the longer it's allowed to continue and the more het up the overenthusiastic young people get the harder it is to stop.

Lisa Nandy is on Victoria Derbyshire now discussing this while talking about the leadership contest. I can only back up what a few people have said about attitudes amongst some Muslim men. Years ago when I was involved with left wing politics and living in Birmingham a male friend who was Muslim by birth but an atheist told me about some of the attitudes to white women being easy and worth nothing in the eyes of some, this is about 25 years ago. He said because they will have pre marital sex and not cover up they were seen as no better than prostitutes. The person that told me this, way before any of the abuse and grooming gangs became public was himself a Pakistani male. A revolutionary Marxist who hated the Labour Party back then as they were reformists in his eyes.

I was told "all white women are whores" once by an adult Muslim man (in a MENA country - the attitude was made clear enough on other occasions, that's just one where I remember it being said right to my face). I was about 11 at the time. It's definitely not all Muslim men, nor is it a majority ime, but it's common enough as an attitude that pretending it doesn't exist and isn't factoring into what's been happening with the grooming gangs is stupid. Which is what Trevor Phillips was trying to say.