Trevor Phillips may be an establishment man, but that's a good thing

I arrived back in England to the news that Trevor Phillips had got the job as head of the Commission for Racial Equality. I recommended him in this column (4 November 2002), though I am certain that those who appointed him have reasons far different from my own.

His detractors say that Phillips is not very popular with the rank and file in the black and Asian communities, and that is true. He is seen as an establishment man and, some say, a crony of the current Blair regime. To me, that is a recommendation. The CRE does not rest in the popular consciousness of blacks and Asians; it is marginal to what the communities think and do.

It has never initiated anything. The popular social explosions emerge of the communities' own free will. The successful campaign of the Lawrences to bring the police to heel happened without the CRE. It was always on the periphery of that heroic struggle. The CRE's role is to impress upon the powerful that discrimination, prejudice and oppression are the cause of revolts and must be rooted out completely. Phillips has the access to do that if he so chooses, and to do it effectively. He carries the glint of the lobbyist.

He sits on a powder keg as he enters the job. The Caribbean community is gun-crazy, and now that some police officers are patrolling the streets with guns, we have a recipe for disaster. The issue of Asians up north has not been settled. And now there is the growing resentment among Muslims about how they are being targeted in the "war against terror". Phillips has to test his mettle against the most reactionary Home Secretary ever to inhabit a British cabinet. Being Guyanese, Phillips will know the dangers. Guyana is a basket case, torn apart by racial conflict just as our northern towns threaten to be.

To be sure, Phillips brings considerable baggage with him, particularly in schooling. He wants a colonial education system, corporal punishment and all. He will have to find sadists and train them to violently subjugate West Indian youth.

Establishment man? Yes, but with a deep instinctive hostility to racial discrimination and prejudice. He will do for now.

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