Trevor Phillips Quotes

To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.

It’s perfectly fair that you can’t be a Roman Catholic priest unless you’re a man. It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church or mosque.

The most likely victim of actual religious discrimination in British society is a Muslim but the person who is most likely to feel slighted because of their religion is an evangelical Christian.

Human rights are not worthy of the name if they do not protect the people we don’t like as well as those we do.

Prison service vans that travel 90 miles to take a prisoner 90 yards; paedophiles free to leer at children in the very parks where they have committed horrific crimes.

We need more male black teachers, tempting them with extra cash if necessary.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

Across the board, people are looking at the problem, but simply not changing anywhere near fast enough.

Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward – football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE.

You can’t say ‘because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws.

There’s no secret about my ambition, I do not want to go into the House of Commons. My only real political interest is in London and if one day I’m in a position to run for mayor, then terrific.

I think there’s an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face – that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.