Trevor Phillips OBE

Welcome by the Public Orator

Chancellor,

Trevor Phillips is the Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality. Its mission is to act as an independent advocate and human rights in Britain. The commission aims to reduce inequality, eliminate discrimination, strengthen good relations between people, and promote and protect human rights. The Chair of the Commission is a position of great responsibility and national significance. The Commission has powers of enforcement as well as promotion, as the responsible body for oversight of the positive duties under law that all public bodies must now perform under anti-discrimination law. It is hard to imagine anyone in public life today better fitted for this role than Trevor Phillips.  

Trevor Phillips was born in London in 1952. His parents had emigrated from Guyana in 1950, and Trevor was sent back to School in Georgetown, Guyana, where he attended Queen’s College Boys’ School. He took to academic life, and won a place to read Chemistry at Imperial College in London. He didn’t however much take to academic Chemistry, and found himself drawn instead to student politics. He became President of the Students’ Union at Imperial in the academic session 1974-5, and went on to develop a career in student politics at the National Level before becoming President of the National Union of Students in 1978, standing in the Broad Left interest. He was the NUS’s first black president, and also, so far, its last. Throughout the 1970’s his interests in Labour politics deepened, and he played a part in the development of what was to become Tony Blair’s New Labour. Important and enduring friendships were forged at this time, with Tony Blair, and also with Peter Mandelson and Charles Clark. By now he was working as a researcher at London Weekend Television, where over a thirteen-year period he rose to be Head of Current Affairs and one of a very small minority of black executives in British television at that time. He also found celebrity as the presenter for many years of ‘The London Programme’ on LWT.

A major turning point in his career came with the publication in 1998 of his book Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racism Britain, which he wrote together with his brother. This book, named after a boat that brought immigrants from the West Indies to Britain in 1948, told the story of the first wave of post-war migration to Britain; the story, as he puts it, of a particular kind of British person. The book formed the basis of a highly successful television documentary, for these achievements Trevor Phillips received an OBE for services to broadcasting in 1999. The following year he stood as an unsuccessful London mayoral candidate, but he was elected to the London Assembly on 4 May 2000, and served as Chair of the Assembly until February 2003, when he registered to take up what has become his current appointment.

Trevor Phillips has often been in the news. His views on multiculturalism, for example, developed in lively public debate with the former mayor of London Ken Livingstone. In that debate Trevor Phillips argued  his position with cogent force. It is right to recognise diversity in our society, and indeed he believes that is something we do well in the UK. But he also believes that there is a point at which the recognition of diversity can ossify into a bureaucratic process, elevating difference above equality, and at that point he parts company with multiculturalism. It is his view that in a world of human difference, the acknowledgement of diversity is what really matters. His views on the legacy of slavery in this country, and indeed in this city, are illuminating, In his view we have to stop thinking about slavery as something done by one group to another; what we have to deal with today is a shared history in which everyone had a hand. In a city such as Liverpool, where virtually the whole city was at one time dedicated to the slave industry, what is an appropriate response today? As Trevor Phillips sees it, certainly not self-punishment and unending remorse. He believes that this history should be understood and acknowledged as part of everyone’s history. Never pretend it did not happen, but accept it as part of what makes us what we are, without embarrassment. Clear-sighted acknowledgment of what happened is what helps us know. He brings the unrancorous understanding and openness to his leadership of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the purpose of which he thinks of fundamentally as the maintenance of good relations across lines of human difference.

Trevor Phillips speaks of his own success as partly a matter of luck. He had a good education, supportive parents and a stable family, the strength that comes from strong relationships and lasting friendship. What he works for is a society in which people from all backgrounds can expect to enjoy these conditions for success not as a matter of good luck, but as the normal conditions for potential to flourish.

He has become a lifelong campaigner on equality issues, with many high-level involvements in the voluntary sector and with charities. His interests and passions are broad, embracing a love of music that began with learning to play an instrument with the Salvation Army, and a love of the arts. Above all, he embraces and celebrates his own distinctive kind of Britishness. This sense of identity draws on many influences, personal, political, and intellectual, but he confesses with disarming directness that he was influenced as a boy by such schoolboy fiction as Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books, and classics like The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. What he took from them was a sense of decency and fairness which he associated with an ideal of Britishness which is authentic and strong, and which assumes that to fight for the underdog is a noble responsibility. It is a responsibility that has guided Trevor Phillips throughout his career.

Chancellor, in the name of the Senate and Council of the University, I present to you for admission to the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, in the University, Mr Trevor Phillips.