TREVOR Phillips has said that Britain risks “flames” of racial and religious conflict because of a “liberal self-delusion” over the impact of mass immigration.
Phillips, the former head of the equality watchdog said that decades of multiculturalism and diversity policy the UK is being allowed to “sleepwalk to catastrophe” by leaders too “touchy”, “smug”, “complacent” and “squeamish” to talk about race.
Echoing Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, he said British politicians, media and educated elite in general to the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned, unable even to recognise the “dark side of the diverse society”.
Ominous “muttering in the pub or grumbling at the school gate” about foreigners could, he insists, be the first signs of a backlash many thought could not happen in Britain because of a history of relative success in integrating new arrivals.
Significantly, he claims the arrival of some Muslim groups in particular who are actively “resistant to the traditional process of integration” threatens to shake the foundations of “liberal democracy” itself.
“Squeamishness about addressing diversity and its discontents risks allowing our country to sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so well for so long,” he said.