Abstract
Index’s new chair,
Right now, he is worried about journalists not covering important details, and he uses the example of the recent rise in shootings and stabbings in London. According to the House of Commons library, in the 12 months ending March 2017 London recorded the highest rate of knife crime of any region in England and Wales. There were 137 offences involving a knife per 100,000 population in 2016/17, which is an increase of 23 offences from 2015/16. That same data showed that 91% of those attacked were men.
Phillips says that experts are coming to the conclusion that a large number of the killings are connected to young men who have come from traumatic situations in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan. “If you don’t understand that and you don’t deal with that then you are going to get this going on and on and on.”
Phillips said: “People report where the crimes are taking place, they report on names, and on the ages. I would defy anyone to find a piece of reporting in one of the major national newspapers or television over the past six months that will point out that, of the more than 80, I think all but two of the individuals who have died are black.” Many of the perpetrators are also black, he added.
“The orthodoxy is that if you say that you are stigmatising the community. Now this is just drivel. Most of the communities that these young people come from – Somali, Afghan and so on – don’t care about it [being] identified in that way because they know it is not a secret. What is really striking is that journalism will not address this point.”
He added: “Part of what journalism and public debate is about is working out how we solve problems. You start by nailing the problem and then you debate publicly ‘Is it due to this? Or is it due to that?’ and once you can have that debate honestly, ultimately you can decide ‘Well, we can invest in solving this problem. We are going to put millions of pounds into this solution or that solution’. At the moment, we aren’t doing any of that because nowhere in the public space can we identify the actual problem.
“The silence may make the journalists and politicians who don’t want to talk about it feel comfortable, and may allow them to feel we are not embarrassing or pointing the finger at a particular community, but what it is not doing is preventing more young kids being stabbed on the street.”
Phillips, who joins Index as chair of the board this autumn, says his passion for freedom of expression is deeply embedded in his family heritage. His parents came to Britain from what was then British Guiana.
“Caribbean people are island people, and you have to learn to get along with everybody else. There are only two ways of doing that: either nobody says anything at all or everybody says everything,” he said. “And in the Caribbean we tend to follow the line that everybody says everything.”
Growing up in a feisty family, and one of 10 children, he says he had a lot of freedom to argue. He maintains that debate is important as it brings the public and institutions information that allows them to make decisions to try to solve a problem.
“I think sometimes when people say they are having an argument, they are not doing that at all. What they are doing is making a speech and then going deaf while the other person makes their speech. And you can hear it, you can hear it a lot now on political programmes. The interviewer makes a speech, the interviewee makes a speech, but the two of them are not talking to each other at all. That’s not an argument.”
He adds that argument in public now seems to revolve less around “‘What is the best judgment we can make?’ [and instead is about] ‘Who are you to make a better judgment?’” That, he says, is exceptionally dangerous.
“I am a black person. If I am thinking about race relations it is as important for me to hear what’s in the mind of the person on the other side of that line.” He also worries that for some people censorship is seen as only the state oppressing the individual.
“I think to some extent in North America, here in the UK, and to some extent [in] continental Europe, the problem is reversed. It’s about the failure of the state to stand up for open dialogue, or its institutions to stand up for open dialogue, which has allowed those who shout loudest to shout down everyone else or to make it unpleasant for people to speak their minds or to say what they have found, or to talk about their own real experience.”
Given his involvement in student politics, it’s not surprising that Phillips continues to keep an eye on what is happening on campuses. He accuses British university authorities of not doing enough to protect freedom of expression.
Journalist and new chair of Index on Censorship Trevor Phillips
“That worries me enormously,” he said.
He argues that there is a massive difference between trying to protect students from physical harm and in stopping speakers or other students articulating a view.
He thinks public attitudes to student unions will harden over time if they feel people are being stopped from taking part in debates, and worries that if student unions don’t do more to protect freedom of expression, public funding could be taken away.
“If universities cannot organise themselves in such a way as to protect the right of people to express their opinions then somebody from outside is going to have to police it,” he said. “That will remove freedoms from universities themselves, and then we are in a terrible state.”
