Trevor Phillips Row Escalates

[BovaryX]

The Trevor Phillips suspension highlights Labour's dislocation from its voter base. After crashing out to an 80 seat Conservative majority, Labour have doubled down on its determination to alienate former lifelong Labour voters with the dismal shenanigans of its putative leaders. From blithely signing Stalinist purges, to bleating about babies born without sex, to kicking out Trevor Phillips. What are Labour doing?

^Throwing down the gauntlet to Sir Keir Starmer, the favourite to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, the former chairman of the UK’s equalities watchdog told The Telegraph his case was a “test for the kind of party these candidates want to lead.”
His calls were echoed by a number of Labour moderates, who criticised the failure of Sir Keir, Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey to denounce the decision to suspend one of the country’s most prominent anti-racism campaigners^.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/03/09/trevor-phillips-calls-labour-leadership-candidates-pick-side/

I doubt the millennial woke bro flying monkeys of Corbyn have any real idea who TP is and what he has done. History doesn't seem to be their strong suit (along with science, basic truths and material reality). Starmer is the only one who might stand up for TP, the other 2 are a lost cause.

This move against TP, on spurious grounds about reasonable observations he made several years ago, is pure spite. He is being persecuted for vocally rejecting Labour in the last election.

They are obsessed with racism because they are doubling down on their happy clappy Multiculturalism R Us which they adopted alongside the open doors immigration policy they operated at the turn of the century that has caused radical social change in many communities. They are now trying desperately to police the result.

The transphobia witchhunt? I don't know. It's bigger than Labour. I wonder if the Conservatives are more immune because they have more Old Money available and don't need to bend in the breeze so much.

Paywall. Can someone post the whole article?

First half...

"Trevor Phillips has called on the three Labour leadership candidates to pick a side as senior party figures on Monday condemned the decision to suspend him over alleged Islamophobia.

Throwing down the gauntlet to Sir Keir Starmer, the favourite to succeed Jeremy Corbyn, the former chairman of the UK’s equalities watchdog told The Telegraph his case was a “test for the kind of party these candidates want to lead.”
His calls were echoed by a number of Labour moderates, who criticised the failure of Sir Keir, Lisa Nandy and Rebecca Long-Bailey to denounce the decision to suspend one of the country’s most prominent anti-racism campaigners.
In a warning shot to the candidates, Lord Mann, the Government’s anti-Semitism tsar, said: “It is a mark of leadership...either back the investigation or back Trevor Phillips.

“To suspend the first head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission is not a sit on the fence issue.”
It came as Jennie Formby, Labour’s general secretary, faced a major backlash on Monday over the decision to suspend Mr Phillips over a series of remarks dating back several years.

Lord Falconer, Labour’s former Lord Chancellor, accused Ms Formby of acting swiftly to sanction critics of Mr Corbyn while allowing number of high-profile anti-Semitism cases to drag on for many months.

He highlighted the expulsion of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary, who was last year expelled after admitting that he voted for the Liberal Democrats in the Europeans elections."

Continued...

“The idea that he needs to be suspended urgently is unsustainable,” Lord Falconer told The Telegraph. “They act urgently against Trevor Phillips and Alastair Campbell while anti-Semitism continues to prosper in the Labour Party.
“What is it that links Alastair Campbell and Trevor Phillips? They are both enemies of the leadership.”

His comments were echoed by a Labour official, who said: “Anti-Semite or racist: very hard to be suspended. Critical of Jeremy Corbyn or Jennie: swift suspension or expulsion.”

Meanwhile, Labour’s Khalid Mahmood, the longest serving Muslim MP, described the claims against Mr Phillips as “so outlandish as to bring disrepute on all involve in making them”.

Lord Blunkett, who as Home Secretary appointed Mr Phillips to chair the equalities watchdog in 2003, told The Times: "He would not have obtained or retained this post had I believed that he could be accused of Islamophobia ."
In an 11-page letter sent to Mr Phillips, Labour cited a number of public statements he had made in recent years, including concerns about Pakistani Mulsim men sexually abusing children in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale.

Other included remarks over the failure of some Muslims to wear poppies for Remembrance Sunday and polling showing sympathy towards the ‘motives’ of the Charlie Hebdo killers.

A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said that Mr Phillips had made “incendiary statements about Muslims that would be unacceptable for any other minority.”

However, writing for the Policy Exchange think tank, Mr Phillips suggested his suspension could be seen as a “dog-whistle” bid by Mr Corbyn’s allies to "intimidate" the EHRC, which is currently undertaking an official inquiry into the party’s handling of anti-Semitism cases.

Questioning the timing of his suspension, Mr Phillips warned that Labour could be attempting to warn the watchdog of “the treatment it can expect if it fails to exonerate the leadership”.

He also suggested it could be “payback by elements in the party for public criticisms of the leadership’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism”, highlighting that he had recently signed a letter in the Guardian criticising its approach.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “The Labour Party takes all complaints about Islamophobia extremely seriously and they are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures, and any appropriate disciplinary action is taken.”

Brendan O’Neill has a cracking article in The Spectator about the Labour Party’s decision to suspend Trevor Phillips.

It is also behind a paywall but he begins, “Many of us suspected the Labour party was on a suicide mission. Now we know for sure. The party’s suspension of Trevor Phillips over allegations of Islamophobia feels like a turning point. It is surely one of the final nails in the coffin of irrelevance that has been enveloping this party for a few years now.”

He sets out the Kafkaesque nature of the Labour Party’s actions and summarises the chilling evidence that they sacrificed white working class girls to industrial grade rape in the name of multiculturalism.

Brendan O’Neill concludes, “He [Trevor Phillips] is far more in touch with working-class voters’ concerns than the Corbyn machine is. Many traditional Labour voters abandoned the party over its anti-Brexit extremism and its embrace of eccentric woke nonsense — the party’s treatment of Phillips will make them realise just how right they were to have done this.”

Tom Harris in the Telegraph writes a scathing article about Labour's scorched earth policy and terminal dislocation from mainstream public opinion:

There are scores still to settle and three weeks is more than enough time to do that. Given the rout the party faced in December – a rout entirely of its own making and arrived at via a series of poor choices made over the last four years – Labour is in dire need of a period of calm reflection. Granted, a leadership election is hardly the best context for such reflection to happen, but the contest has been, on the whole, conducted in a civil, if not entirely friendly, atmosphere. But having found itself on the wrong side of so many political divisions – particularly on the vexed question of identity – it needs to take a step back and examine its own motivations and principles and ask why so few members of the British public share them. So a confected controversy over the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is the last thing the new leader will wish to have to deal with

Thanks you, Teds.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/03/09/trevor-phillips-absurd-expulsion-shows-labour-beyond-redemption/#

Trevor Phillips speaks out in the Times:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trevor-phillips-how-i-fell-victim-to-labours-inquisition-9gg9qjk8f

(Sorry, last time I tried a share token it didn't work.)

The Spectator article quoted by Teds is excellent. It highlights how bad this makes Labour look, when its politicos seem more concerned with accusations of bias against grooming gangs than the profound, sustained abuse of young girls, many of whom were living in children's homes while this was going on. Here's a link to article
www.spectator.co.uk/article/labour-will-regret-its-shameful-treatment-of-trevor-phillips

It's like watching an entire group of people commit suicide in slow motion. I'd love to know what they think they're doing.

Share token
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fb566c86-615e-11ea-8024-40a080f12cd1?shareToken=c058fa635eee7386f7199fb63379231e

Melanie Philips has a Times article about the dismal shenanigans at the Guardian in response to Suzanne Moore's column. When comparisons with the Inquisition and Robespierre's reign of terror are being used to describe the Labour party's purge addiction? You would think any remaining adults in the party might dare to defy the dreary identity obsessives who dominate the party....

Thank you for share token mcduffy

No worries, i started another thread with the Melanie Phillips column! My first ever sharetokens (didn't know they existed before this board even though I've subscribed to the Times since it went paid!)

I can't seem to generate a functioning one, so cheers for posting one! I had posted earlier on the Melanie Philips article, but the share token I used doesn't work. It's a great article and it is really good to see this getting a lot of media coverage. I think that there is a significant shift in the way the press are covering these issues.

The irony is that Phillips grew up at least partly and came of age in one of the most diverse, multicultural societies in the world, a country of six races and three official religions which has been on a journey of unifying all these diverse threads since the 50's.

He will have gone to school with Hindus, Christians and Muslims, sat next to boys of African, Indian, Chinese and mixed-race origin at high school and had them as his close friends, at a time when such everyday mixing of races and cultures, with white people a minority, was unknown in the UK. If anyone knows about and applauds diversity, it would be him.

This is woke virtue-signalling ignorance at work.