Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips. Picture by Flickr user Get Down

Melanie S Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a controversial British journalist, author and social critic. She has a reputation as an outspoken right-winger but has said she considers herself a 'liberal in the true sense' and 'certainly not of the right'. She has said she has been 'very influenced' by American neoconservatives, and considers neoconservatism as 'the only truly moral response to the times in which we live'. Her 2001 book America's Social Revolution, which laments 'family breakdown' and 'welfare dependency', was published by the right-wing think-tank Civitas in association with the Sunday Times.

Biography

Phillips was born on 4 June 1951, the daughter of Alfred and Mabel Phillips. Her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop. They were 'solid Labour voters' and were Jewish, which Phillips says gave her 'a moral framework of social concern and concern for repair of the world.' She attended Putney High School for Girls, a private school in Putney, South West London, and then read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.

She graduated in 1973 and in 1974 joined the Evening Echo in Hemel Hempstead as a graduate trainee. That year she married her long term boyfriend Joshua Rozenberg who a year later joined the BBC and trained as a solicitor.

In 1976 she joined the New Society as a staff writer. In 1977 she joined the Guardian where she worked for over 15 years. She was social services correspondent 1978–80; leader writer 1980–84; news editor 1984–87; and Assistant Editor and columnist 1987–93. She took her column first to the Observer in 1993 and then to the Sunday Times in 1998. In December 2001 she moved to the Daily Mail. Phillips began blogging on her own website in October 2003. Four years later, she accepted an invitation to move the blog to the Spectator website.

She has two children. Her son Gabriel Rozenberg is also a journalist.

Political trajectory

Phillips was involved in student politics at Oxford in the early 1970s but was not radical. A fellow student politician told the Guardian: 'She wasn't on the left. She was a liberal. She was very nice, very organised, and was always going to be a journalist.' Phillips originally wrote for liberal and centre-left publications, but Andy Beckett suggests she has always had a tendency to look at social problems from a more right-wing perspective:

During the boiling, jittery summer of 1976, the now-defunct liberal journal of British social research, New Society, sent a young reporter to Brixton in south London to talk to residents about the local crime rate. Melanie Phillips was 25; she had been at New Society for four months. But she was not intimidated by her assignment, judging by what she wrote afterwards. ‘Delinquency among young West Indians is causing serious concern,’ her long, confidently reported article concluded. ‘[This] alienation cannot be blamed entirely on white society... Some of it seems to stem from their own family background.’

This was a risky conclusion for a journal read mainly by left-leaning professionals. Shortly afterwards, New Society published a letter from a Brixton probation officer denouncing the article as selective and sensational.

‘Becoming reactionary and right-wing’

By the early 1990s Phillips was professing views in her column widely considered reactionary. Andy Beckett writes that during the mid-90s 'she was drawn to communitarianism, a slightly priggish strain of American liberalism; and then by the early, idealistic phase of New Labour.'

In 1994 Phillips contributed a chapter to a book called The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate, extracts of which were published in the Daily Mail under the headline ‘THE NEW TYRANNY DESTROYING BRITAIN’. In her essay Phillips wrote: ‘A few years ago, something very strange happened. People started to reproach me for becoming reactionary and right-wing. Since I came from a liberal, Left-of-centre background and had worked for most of my professional life for a Left-of-centre newspaper, The Guardian, this was a disconcerting experience.’ Phillips described how her views on social and cultural issues had increasingly put her at odds with liberals colleagues and explained this in terms of the trajectory of left-wing thought in the 1980s:

I grew to adulthood during the Sixties and formed a strong attachment to the great movements of the time - for women's emancipation, the wariness of authority, the promotion of intellectual dissent and the determination to sweep away prejudice. I believed all these causes to be noble, and still do.

But in the Eighties these ideals began to be perverted. The Thatcher government's control over public life created an alternative establishment on the Left. The result was a remarkable mirror image of political conformity: Conservatives held sway in the public sphere and the Left was confined to using its power over personal behaviour.

So it was in the mid-Eighties that I began to become uncomfortably aware that Tory newspapers were saying certain things I realised were true - and which were being denied at the liberal end of the market.

In particular, they were making some devastating criticisms of the education system. The charge was that teachers were failing to teach children properly; that emphasis on literacy and numeracy was being replaced by a child-centred philosophy that devalued rules and was inimical to the imparting of knowledge; and that the children who were suffering most were those from disadvantaged backgrounds for whom schools were the one lifeline out of the ghettos of poverty.

Phillips also noted in her essay how her belief in the importance of ‘family values’ had alienated her from liberals. She attacked the anti-racism of the 1980s which she said ‘started out with the worthy intention of righting a wrong, [but] has developed into a zealotry which creates instead fresh victims.’ Later she claimed that incompetent black social workers were being kept on because ‘to challenge them is likely to produce allegations of a racial witch-hunt.’ On education policy she wrote:

I recall vividly an encounter with a young West Indian community worker in Tottenham, who was angrily denouncing the ideology that had given young black people like himself an inferior education, all in the name of some white middle-class fantasy of equality that was actually going to keep them trapped in disadvantage. … Unlike white liberals, whom he despised, he didn't want his council to have more money to spend on schools. Instead, he said he wanted West Indian children to be helped to be educated in private schools. He had understood that black youngsters like himself had been cheated by liberals misdirecting their own middle-class guilt.

Education and ‘relativism’

Education policy was the focus of Phillips first major book All Must Have Prizes, which was published two years later in 1996 whilst she was still a columnist at the Observer. The book described a decline in literacy and numeracy in British education and attributed this to the prevalence of moral and cultural relativism in British society. Phillips argued that post-modernist thinking and a misconceived commitment to egalitarianism had undermining excellence in education by eroding concepts of authority and truth and by ignoring what they claimed were natural differences in ability between students (hence ‘All Must Have Prizes’). Whilst the book focuses on education, Phillips treats this as symptomatic of a wider crisis in British society. She wrote in the closing paragraph of the third chapter:

This [relativism] is not some fringe ideology which, although troublesome, has left the majority of people untouched. These attitudes now course through the bloodstream of our culture. They permeate the establishment and govern the running of our institutions. The effects upon the family, and upon the social order itself, are discussed later … Britain is in the grip of a culture war, and the most fundamental aspects of education are now in the front line.

The themes of the book anticipate many of the anxieties which would come to dominate Phillip’s writings and which characterise much neoconservative thinking. In the book the perceived collapse in order and authority is attributed by Phillips to a fundamental weakness in liberal thought:

The progressive erosion of respect for other institutions such as the church, the civil service, the police, Parliament and the Royal Family, stemmed from the same cause: the collapse of external authority and its relocation in the individual. And at the heart of this profound change into a liberal individualistic society lay a paradox: that liberal values came to turn upon themselves and began to threaten the very order and liberty on which they depend.

‘Right from the beginning,’ Phillips writes, ‘liberal values contained the seeds of their own destruction.’ Later she added that, ‘The great paradox of the Enlightenment was that, in liberating human thought in order to enhance civilisation, it lit a slow fuse beneath it.’ Ultimately Phillips argued that liberal individualism without moral and social authority led to chaos or tyranny. In the eighth chapter, ‘The Destruction of Morality’, she wrote: ‘If rightness is simply what is right-for-me, then who is to say that Nazism was an absolute wrong? … Moral relativism leads directly to despotism and tyranny. It was no accident that Nietzsche, in whose long shadow our relativist society was formed, represented a significant milestone on the road to the Final Solution.’

Neoconservatism

In an article published shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq Phillips told the Guardian's Andy Beckett: 'I've been very influenced by what's called the neo-con movement. They're not conservatives. They define themselves famously as - and this is exactly how I would define myself - as liberals who have been mugged by reality.' Three years later she posted a review of Douglas Murray's book Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. She praised the book and described neoconservatism as 'the only truly moral response to the times in which we live'.

When the influential neoconservative Irving Kristol died in late 2009 Phillips praised Kristol (along with his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb) for being 'the first public intellectual to understand and articulate a defence of western civilisation against the onslaught mounted by the moral and cultural relativism of the nihilistic left.' She recalled meeting Kristol on a number of occasions:

I had the privilege of getting to know Irving Kristol a little in the last years of his life. His mind was still razor-sharp and his moral and intellectual analysis as unflinching as ever. ‘Explain about Britain’ he would say to me more than once. ‘Why hasn’t anyone done there what we did here, set up publications and think-tanks and talk radio to break the power of the Left in the universities? I just can’t understand why everyone is just sitting there and letting it happen! What’s wrong with them all?’

Links with right-wing think-tanks

In 1996 the Health and Welfare Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs (which later became Civitas) published a report called 'Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Developing Debate.' The report reproduced two essays by the controversial American political scientist Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute. Both essays had previously been published by the Institute of Economic Affairs after being printed by the Sunday Times Magazine. In his essays Murray claimed that welfare in Britain had created a dangerous and sexually promiscuous 'underclass' and that punitive cuts were required to address the problem. Alongside his essay, 'Charles Murray and the Underclass' contained a contribution by Phillips as well as a number of other commentators. In her contribution Phillips criticised Murray's condemnation of the 'underclass' but agreed that crime and family breakdown was a serious problem. She argued that contrary to Murray's claim it is not caused by the welfare state and was not limited to the lower classes.

In 2000 the Health and Welfare Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs had been spun-off as Civitas. In 2001 it published 'Underclass +10: Charles Murray and the British Underclass 1990 - 2000' which again revisited Murray's thesis. This time Phillips was the only other contributor. In her section she again questioned Charles Murray's focus on the 'underclass' and attributed the social problems not to economic conditions but to a liberal cultural agenda imposed on the 'underclass' from above.

The Charles Murray essays were the result of his visit to the UK sponsored by the Sunday Times. Phillips's 2001 book America's Social Revolution, which laments 'family breakdown' and 'welfare dependency', was the result of her visit to the United States for the Sunday Times. It was published by Civitas and based on three articles which appeared in the Sunday Times.

Londonistan

Londonistan is Phillips's variation on the Eurabia theme. In 2006, Phillips published Londonistan: How Britain Has Created a Terror State Within. In a 2008 foreword, she wrote that "Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation."

Some people will read that sentence and think this is mere hyperbole. That's the problem. Britain still doesn't grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation. The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried either as 'Islamophobes' or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Londonistan Conclusion

The cover of Melanie Phillip's 2006 book Londonistan.

In Londonistan Phillips concludes that Islam "Has a responsibility to address those aspects of its culture that threaten the state". She argues that "Britain would first have to take robust steps to counter the specific threat posed by Islamist terrorism", a new threat which sits somewhere between war and terrorism". To deal with this new threat Phillips argues that:

• Set up special courts to deal with "particularly sensitive cases in which intelligence could safely be brought forward as evidence".

• Repeal the human rights act and either derogate or withdraw from both the European convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees, "To enable [Britain] to expel foreign radicals.

• Stop the funding and recruitment of terrorism under the "umbrella of charitable work"

• "Shut down newspapers and television stations spreading incitement to terrorism in the war against the west.

• Ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Association of Britain.

• "Set about the remoralisation and reculturation of Britain by restating the primacy of British culture and citizenship" by recognising that "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country’s Judeo-Christian values".

• Stop the practice of [Muslims] "marrying their young people to cousins from the Indian subcontinent", because "that has got to stop because it is a threat to Social Cohesion"

• "Abolish the doctrine of Multiculturalism by reaffirming the primacy of British values".

• "Ensure that British political history is once again taught in schools, and that Christianity is restored to school assemblies".

• "Stop the drift towards the creation of a parallel Islamic jurisdiction under Sharia" and "no longer turn a blind eye to polygamy".

• End "the culture of entitlement ushered in by the application of secular human rights doctrine".
• "Finally, it [Britain] would undertake a major educational exercise for both Muslims and non-Muslims. It would teach Muslims what being a minority really means, and that certain ideas to which they may subscribe are simply unacceptable or demonstrably untrue. It would say loud and clear that the double standards from which Muslims think they suffer are actually a form of doublethink. Any administration that was really concerned to fight racism would educate the nation in the historical truths about Israel and the Arabs, and would tell Muslims that they have systematically been fed a diet of lies about Israel and the Jews".

Focus of articles

Melanie Phillips has written a column in various British newspapers since 1987. It is therefore possible to track the subject of her articles over a quite extensive time period. The graph on the right was produced using the newspaper database Lexis Nexis. It compares the number of articles year on year between 1990 and 2009 which contain references to ‘education’ with the number that contain references to ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims’. Articles containing the term 'education' are displayed in yellow and those containing the terms 'Islam' or 'Muslim' are displayed in blue.

The graph shows Melanie Phillips's growing preoccupation with Islam in the post September 11th period. In the years before 2001 Phillips had little interest in Islam, mentioning Islam or Muslims in only a handful of articles a year and in no articles at all in 1993, 1997 and 1999. The exception is 1998 when Phillips wrote seven articles containing these terms. The majority of these however make only passing reference to Islam or Muslims. Only one article showed any particular interest in the politics of British Muslims. It concerned a novel loosely based on the Salman Rushdie saga. Another article published in May that year focused on anti-semitism but also noted that, 'Muslims too suffer greatly from the stereotype that they are all hysterical fundamentalists, ignoring not just the diversity of Muslim life but the contribution it is making to our civic values'

The graph also suggests that although Phillips is perhaps best known for her controversial views on Islam, she has remained preoccupied with broader social issues. Although her articles on education decline in the post September 11th period at the same time as her articles on Islam increase, the latter are only more numerous after 2006 and even then only by a small margin.

Attacks on academics

Lecturers at Aberystwyth University have twice been attacked by Phillips over the university's terrorism courses. In April 2005 Phillips published an email on her website which she had received from a student at Aberystwyth. The student complained that:

[T]he only way to really succeed within the university industry is to pander to the prejudices of the academic staff; anything that differs with the anti-Semitic orthodoxy results in rather harsh marking. When I first went to university, I came with the naive belief that study at such an institution was about the pursuit of knowledge and truth; it is about lies, propaganda and the worst sort of prejudice.

The student claimed that ‘most of the academic staff [believe] that all the world's current ills can be attributed to the activities of the US and Israel, and those that can't are the result of our colonial legacy.’ The student also criticised fellow students at Aberystwyth, claiming that the student union had been ‘filled with rabid Amnesty International types’ and that there had been ‘a rash of frankly laughable and ridiculous activities to show support for the oppressed Palestinian victims’. Phillips claimed the complaint was evidence of an ‘anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning’.

Phillips had at that stage already launched several attacks on British universities in response to the proposed academic boycott in protest of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In one blog entry Phillips had labelled SOAS the ‘School of Orchestrated Anti-Semitism’, and wrote that an article she had read in a School magazine ‘should surely be brought to the attention of the police’. In another article in the Jewish Chronicle, she referred to what she called: ‘A virus of anti-Jewish hatred,' which she claimed was 'coursing through this country’s arteries — and the universities are the swamp in which it breeds.’

In April 2008 Phillips received another email from an Aberystwyth student, which she published on her Spectator blog. The student complained that they were being pressurised to ‘tow the line’ at the University, and that, ‘although Islam is quite clearly at the heart of anything to do with terrorism nowadays, it is never mentioned directly except alongside non-Islamic terrorists’. The student included a copy of an email sent to students by the convenor of the course, Dr Marie Breen Smyth. In the email Breen Smyth had sent students a piece of writing by Dr Richard Jackson in which, having been challenged to do so, he gave an account of incidents of Israeli state terrorism. Dr Jackson's work was also included on the course’s reading list and he subsequently joined the department. Phillips complained that the course was ‘skewed towards an ultra-left perspective on terrorism’. She sent the following message wrote to Noel Lloyd, Aberystwyth's vice-chancellor:

I am writing to ask you if either the university or Ms Breen Smyth has any comment to make, first about this student’s allegations of gross political bias on this course along with pressure on students to toe a particular line; and second, about whether it is appropriate to include on the reading list for students on this module someone with Dr Jackson’s apparent animus against Israel and his tendentious recycling of hateful propaganda, taken from either Arabs or their left-wing Israeli sympathisers, as facts; and indeed whether the whole ethos of this module, as set out in its handbook ‘Understanding terror: perspectives on terrorism’ as being ‘…to introduce students to a distinctly “critical” approach to the study of political terror through a thorough critique of orthodox terrorism studies and a clear articulation of an alternative "critical" approach’, is not simply a form of subversion.

The Vice-Chancellor replied that the ‘module handbook includes a wide variety of sources, written from a variety of perspectives’ and noted Richard Jackson's academic credentials. Phillips concluded by comparing the university's critical scholarship with Soviet propaganda. Dr Breen Smyth told The Cambrian News:

‘The course takes a critical approach, and students may respond to that approach according to their own views, but since it is a course of academic study, students should support their views with evidence, reading and reasoned argument. I would further add that I have taught in higher education both in the UK and elsewhere for many years, and there is no evidence that I have ever penalised a student for their political views. Indeed, I am a strong advocate of respectful political debate and freedom of expression.’

Views

On Walt and Mearsheimer

In March 2006, Phillips attacked the London Review of Books for publishing The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:

This LRB travesty is not a one-off. It is but the latest example of a poisonous pathology which has gripped the intelligentsia of the west, centred around a visceral loathing of America, Israel, the neocons and the Jews. Indeed, neo-conservatism seems to have induced a kind of madness, a total eclipse of reason among its political opponents; it is not surprising, therefore, that those within the intelligentsia who have developed such an obsessive loathing of the neo-cons have ended up in bed with white supremacists and clerical fascists.

On Ed Husain

A one time champion of Ed Husain, Phillips went on to denounce him after he wrote an article critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza. She called Husain's piece 'stupid and ignorant' and 'poisonous' which placed him on the wrong side 'in the great battle to defend civilisation against barbarism'. Ed Husain has in turn accused Phillips of 'zealotry and ignorance' and of living in a 'McCarthy-style paranoid parallel universe'.

On Multiculturalism

The doctrines of multiculturalism and minority rights, themselves the outcome of a systematic onslaught by the British elite against the country’s own identity and values, have paralysed the establishment, which accordingly shies away from criticising any minority for fear of being labelled as bigoted...Britain effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or “anti-racists” who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people’s livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands.

On the BNP

In November 2006, Phillips criticised the BNP's attempts to exploit hostility to Islam, while insisting that the party was tapping into a genuine issue:

Like all fascist parties, the BNP manipulate for their own ends genuine concerns that the political class has brushed aside. The concern today is radical Islamism. But the BNP’s platform against Muslims masks a racist hostility towards all immigrants, foreigners and Jews.

Despite the manifest absurdity of the BNP’s attempt to cosy up to the Jews, however, the left has seized on its manoeuvrings in order to smear Jews and Zionists as being the neo-fascists’ natural allies.

In the Daily Mail a few days later, Phillips criticised the decision to put the BNP's Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on trial for inciting racial hatred.

There was never any chance of a conviction, for the simple reason that such statements were an attack on a religion rather than a race. It is perfectly legitimate, after all, to say that the enforcement of extreme Islamic precepts poses a threat to the lives of millions of Asians — including, in fact, many Muslims.

It didn’t take a genius to work out that this trial was a win-win situation for the BNP. If Griffin and Collett had been convicted, they would have posed as martyrs to free speech. Their acquittal, on the other hand, has provided a tremendous boost for their repellent platform.

Affiliations

Joshua Rozenberg - husband
Gabriel Rozenberg - son

Resources

• Andy Beckett The changing face of Melanie Phillips, Guardian, Friday 7 March 2003
• James Silver, 'Truth, justice and the Melanie way', Independent, 9 May 2005
• Melanie Philips Speech at IAB anti-Boycott Conference -- Text of Speech, January 2006