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...if not for fear of the government men would swallow each other alive. Rabi Hanina ben Dosa |
Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British journalist and author. She began her career on the left of the political spectrum, writing for such publications as The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she now writes for the Daily Mail newspaper, covering political and social issues from a conservative perspective. She has defined herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".
Phillips is a regular panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She has written many books, including most recently World Turned Upside Down in 2010. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.
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Phillips was born into a Jewish family. Her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop. Both parents were committed Labour voters. She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.
She trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, as her probationary period in the provinces, then compulsory for the profession. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976, she spent a short period at the New Society magazine, before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. Gaining initial attention for articles on the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants, she broke a story that immigrants entering on a fiancée visa from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan (outside of marriage, subject to annual immigration quotas) were being submitted to virginity tests at Heathrow Airport. The policy was quickly changed.
When appointed in 1984 as the paper's news editor, Phillips fainted on her first day. She started writing her own opinion column in 1987. As a writer for The Guardian in 1982 she defended the Labour Party at the time of the split with the Social Democratic Party.
Leaving The Guardian, her relationship with the newspaper's readers had become fraught "like a really horrific family argument,". Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian's sister-paper The Observer in 1993, and then to the Sunday Times in 1998, before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by The Spectator but now to be found at her own website.
She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, former legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph from 2000 to 2008. They have two children.
The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [British] media's leading right-wing voices" and a "controversial" columnist, although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy. She began her career on the liberal left with the Guardian (which she has since described as "an evil newspaper"), and her gradual drift to the right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to discuss, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods, science, Islam, anti-semitism, and Israeli policy; and to support strict anti-drug policies. Condemning what she perceives as Britain's soft stance on drug use she states "consumption of cocaine has fallen by 75 per cent in the U.S. over the past 20 years—suggesting that the American ‘war on drugs’ has been successful."
Phillips argues that Barack Obama believes in "revolutionary Marxism" She also believes he has "adopt[ed] the agenda of the Islamists", being "firmly in the Islamists' camp," and of appointing "fifth columnists" for Iran to his administration. She suggests Obama may be secretly a Muslim, writing: "We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected?". Phillips has also claimed that "for 20 years he belonged to a ‘black power’ church whose pastor, and his own personal spiritual mentor, was an acolyte of the anti-semitic demagogue Louis Farrakhan, and who supported Hamas as a resistance movement"
Phillips states that Britain is "sleepwalking towards cultural suicide" and "has capitulated to Islamic terror." She added: "Britain at this moment isn’t really sane. It is gripped by a kind of collective derangement... This is no longer England, however. It is Lemmingland." This is part of a deeper "moral sickness of the West", causing it to destroy itself and permit the rise of Islamism. She has written in support of Geert Wilders, who she says is being criminalised in Britain "for telling the truth". Phillips explored these themes in detail in her bestselling book Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within.
She opposes civil partnerships for gay couples, and argues that what she calls "the traditional family [...] has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and cultural Marxists who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society." She claimed that giving IVF fertility treatment to lesbians would "help destroy our understanding of human identity", and said the opposition to it represents "a fightback to save our civilisation". She accused the UK government of brainwashing children by including references to gays in lessons about censuses and population movement. Philips called it "an abuse of childhood", part of a "ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very concept of normal sexual behaviour".
She has condemned what she calls "the moral depravity of the Arabs" and argued "the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages," in response to the murder of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar claims which led to speculation in the British press she could be prosecuted for inciting racial hatred. The Guardian reported that she was being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), although Spectator editor Fraser Nelson wrote in his column that this was untrue and PCC had told him that "a complaint has been lodged, but that’s as far as it has gone". Phillips also wrote in The Jewish Chronicle that she had not heard of any investigation by either the PCC or the police.
She described the paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel", and she expressed her astonishment at what she called "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper". She has written that "[c]riticism of Israel's behaviour is perfectly legitimate", and stated that she disagreed with Ariel Sharon's administration in Israel for Israeli targeted killings, house demolition in Palestinian villages, and Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, and that such policies leave her "appalled". She argues that critics of her views are staging a "verbal pogrom" against her.
In December 2008, Phillips wrote that ongoing Hamas attacks on Israel constituted an attempt at "genocide". She further referred to the United Nations as the "Club of Terror UN" and argued that "[t]hose who scream 'disproportionate' think—grotesquely—that not enough Israelis have been killed".
She has said that she supports a two-state solution in theory but that it cannot work in practice, commenting: "I would have no problem with a Palestine that would live in peace alongside Israel [...] I respond to the evidence of what is actually happening. Israel is being demonised [...] If Israel were to leave the West Bank, it would turn Islamist overnight and become an Iranian proxy on Israel’s doorstep. That is why I cannot support a state of Palestine."
Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel have been condemned by Jewish writers such as Jonathan Freedland, Alan Dershowitz, and Rabbi David Goldberg. Freedland was "horrified" that Phillips labeled Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". He wrote in The Jewish Chronicle: "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV [...] but even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide—literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people [...] it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning."
Alan Dershowitz has said that Phillips has committed lashon harah, a Hebrew term for spreading malicious lies, in her commentary about the Obama administration's policies towards the Middle East. More generally, he has also stated: "I support its liberal policies... if Israel were to turn against these values—if it were to become an oppressive theocracy, like all Muslim countries today, that subjugates women, discriminates against gays and subjects science to religious censorship—I would become extremely critical of any such nation. Israel will never become such a country because, fortunately, the vast majority of Israelis reject the extremist views of Melanie Phillips."
Phillips has been supportive of military action against Iran, claiming that "the choice is not between war and peace. War with Iran is almost certainly inevitable" and that "The choice is between war on our terms or on those laid down by Iran". Phillips has also referred to Iran as "the most lethal of all threats to the free world."
In a 2006 column, Phillips criticised the membership and leadership of the Church of England for what she saw as Christian antisemitism, citing a poll in which about 80% of respondents do not believe that Israel is "engaged in a struggle for its survival" and do not "support its efforts to root out its enemies". She also singled out specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, and criticised remarks he made about the plight of Bethlehem Christians under Israeli occupation. The article ended with a condemnation of what she sees as the churches' failure to criticise the President of Iran's desire to "destroy Israel", with Phillips concluding that "the churches in Britain are not only silent about the genocidal ravings emanating from Iran but are themselves helping pave the way for a second Holocaust". She has written in support of Anglican figures Michael Nazir-Ali and Patrick Sookhdeo and against Stephen Sizer.
She wrote for The Spectator in March 2009: "Many will be deeply shocked that the Church of England harbours individuals with such attitudes. But the church hierarchy is unlikely to act against them. Extreme hostility towards Israel is the default position among bishops and archbishops; while the establishment line is to reach out towards Islam in an attempt to accommodate and appease it. With Christians around the world suffering forced conversion, ethnic cleansing and murder at Islamist hands, the church utters not a word of protest. Instead, inter-faith dialogue is the order of the day."
Phillips supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and on-going occupation, and later described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous". She argues that George Bush was right to say Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2003, and they were secretly "excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material...is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran." On the BBC's Question time programme she was quoted as saying, "...the desire to get rid of Saddam, regime change, was adopted as a policy of the American administration in 1988 [sic], under Bill Clinton."
She has also written that James Baker and former US president and Nobel peace prize laureate Jimmy Carter are "the kept creatures of the Arab world" and that "they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel's destruction".
In All Must Have Prizes, first published in 1996, Phillips offered a detailed critique of the British education system, claiming that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos (progressivism; multicultural education) had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.) She criticised John Dewey's "'disastrous influence", although a subsequent academic paper said that "Phillips gets Dewey quite wrong," for example in claims that Dewey promoted ahistoric and cultureless education. Phillips singled out one academic paper—on primary-school children's constructions of British identity—for criticism. Its authors responded to her book with a follow-up study, showing that young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, tended to adopt a pluralist viewpoint with virtually no nationalist or racist comments.
Phillips has commented on what she sees as the politicisation of education, particularly at Aberystwyth University. In 2005, she claimed there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on Aberystwyth University, based on an unnamed student's testimony. In 2008, following further allegations (supported by documentary evidence) made by another anonymous student regarding the biased nature and reading list of a course on terrorism convened by politics lecturer Dr. Marie Breen Smyth, as well as allegations by the same student regarding bias against Israel by Breen Smyth and her colleague Dr. Richard Jackson, Phillips wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the University complaining that Breen Smyth was a "subversive" who should not be allowed to teach. These accusations were denied by Breen Smyth.
Phillips has described the NHS as a "bust, broken, banjaxed, a shattered shibboleth, a sacred cow that needs a bullet through its brain", and claimed that "It has been obvious for years that a top-down, finitely funded health care system simply cannot cope with the infinite demand by the public for medical interventions". Phillips also states that "It has been clear for years that socialised medicine can kill you more surely than disease, since MRSA and other infections are now rife in filthy hospital wards" and "political control is inimical to both efficacy and medical ethics, and that such control is inescapable with a taxpayer-funded system."
Phillips has written on political correctness, and been described as one of "a small band of critics that are cited as representing the backlash". In 2001, Civitas published her book America's Social Revolution, looking at the United States' social policy and drawing lessons for Britain, arguing that the "culture wars" were less entrenched in the US, permitting more open debate.
In her 2006 book Londonistan, Phillips claims that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming this for what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain. She thinks multiculturalism means "the doctrine that gives the values of minorities equal status to those of the majority".
Phillips has cited Winterval (created by Birmingham City Council as a secular, non-denominational, and now controversial name for events around the Christmas seasons of 1997-98 and 1998-99) as evidence of an "onslaught on Western culture through the hijacking or censorship of language. "
In 2010, Phillips condemned the Druidic belief as a "joke", a "cult", "absurd", "totally barking mumbo-jumbo", and described the hospitality towards it in public services as "political correctness gone mad". Phillips states that Druidry fails to meet the definition of a religion. The article garnered over four thousand signatures online calling for a formal apology.
Phillips argues that Darwinism is "merely a theory" and that although many species (including man) have clearly evolved from lower life forms over time, random mutations cannot account for the evolution of the species from the amoeba, and does not explain the origins of life in the first instance. She writes that it "does not explain the irreducible complexity of certain cells for example, which cannot have been formed by simple organisms coming together". She states "Evolution is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it. [...] Scientists such as the physicist Stephen Hawking still haven’t managed to produce their grand theory of everything that can explain the mysteries of creation. And evolution certainly does not have all the answers. It does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began.
Phillips has also supported the teaching of Intelligent Design, alongside the teaching of evolution, in schools.<ref Name="intolerance"/> She believes there is no conflict between Intelligent Design and science and states that "the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science". "Creationism and Intelligent Design are two completely different ways of looking at the world".
Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine, continuing to insist that "urgent questions about the vaccine's safety remain unanswered", shortly after a 2005 Cochrane review of the vaccine, finding "no credible evidence" of a link with autism, led the rest of the media to conclude that the affair was over. Science journalist and physician Ben Goldacre has called Phillips "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science".
Phillips has said of global warming that the current "warm spell is well within the normal cyclical fluctuations in temperature from century to century", that blaming "warming on mankind's activities in producing carbon dioxide" is "utter garbage", and that the campaign to stop man-made global warming is like a "witch-hunt" and is one of the greatest scientific scams of the modern age". She believes environmentalists act in a fascistic manner, writing: "It was no accident that Hitler was a green." She has criticised John McCain for his environmental policies: "Anyone who endorses, as he does, the man-made global warming scam displays an alarming absence of judgment and common sense". Further comments by Phillips on the general issue of global warming include: "there is no evidence for global warming", "the ice is increasing, it is not decreasing", and "polar bears are increasing in number, and the temperature is going down, not up".
She has endorsed a number of scientists and authors who oppose the global warming thesis. For example, in her blog on the Spectator website for 1 June 2009 Phillips declared that Ian Plimer's book Heaven and Earth was "the definitive last word on the subject".
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