Melanie Phillips

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Melanie Phillips (born June 4, 1951) is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications. Phillips is a regular panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme, The Moral Maze.

Contents 1 Personal life, education, and career 2 Books 3 Political views 4 Books by Phillips 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Personal life, education, and career

Phillips was educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, England.^{[citation needed]} After a short period at the New Society magazine, she joined The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer. After a stint as the paper's news editor, 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, Phillips first took her opinion column to the Guardian sister-paper The Observer, and then to the Sunday Times, before starting to write regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has maintained a blog at www.melaniephillips.com [1].

She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, formerly legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper.^[1] They have two children.

[edit] Books

Her most notable book is All Must Have Prizes (1996), which offered a detailed critique of the British education system, claiming that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. (The title comes from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.)

In 2003, she published The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement. As well as the history, the book also detailed the evolution of the various ideas that lay behind the movement.

Her latest book, Londonistan, was published in 2006. In it, Philips claims that radical Islamism has established London as a base of operations, blaming what she sees as the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain. The historian William Dalrymple has been particularly critical of the book, describing it as written by someone who shows "no evidence of having spent any time in Muslim company, or of having set foot within the Muslim world".^[2]

[edit] Political views

Phillips defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy.^[3] She began her career on the liberal left with the Guardian newspaper, and her gradual drift to the right of the political spectrum has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the conservative Daily Mail. She has used her Daily Mail columns and her blog to criticise, amongst other issues, progressive teaching methods ^[4], Islamism ^[5] and anti-semitism, as well as to defend Israel, ^[6] to oppose equal partnership rights for homosexuals ^[7][8] and to call for stronger action on drugs.

MMR vaccine

Phillips has repeatedly questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine, ^{[9][10][11][12]} insisting that "urgent questions about the vaccine’s safety remain unanswered."^[13] In response, science writer Ben Goldacre criticized her in The Guardian, calling her "the MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science". ^[14]

Global warming

Phillips has written sceptically about global warming, calling it a "con-trick"^[15], a "witch-hunt"^[16] and a "fraud".^[17] George Monbiot has accused her of "scientific illiteracy" and says she is aligned with a "denial industry" funded by oil and tobacco companies.^[18]

Evolution

“	For many, the claim that evolution enabled life to cross the species barrier so that humans are merely the last link in the evolutionary chain remains a step too far — not least because, by the standards science itself sets, it fails the test of evidence. It is merely a theory. — Melanie Phillips [19]	”

She has made a number of statements about evolution, arguing that it is "merely a theory." She writes that evolution "does not explain the irreduceable complexity of certain cells, which she argues cannot have been formed by simple organisms coming together." ^[19] She writes that it "does not explain human self-consciousness; it does not explain altruism; it does not explain how existence began." She has also defended the teaching of creationism in schools. ^[20]

Israel

Phillips has described the paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel" and expressed her astonishment at "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper". ^[21]

In a recent article, she criticized the membership and leadership of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in Britain, and specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, accusing them of antisemitism because of remarks made by the Archbishop about the plight of Bethlehem Christians under Israeli occupation; another factor was an opinion poll showing that the majority of Anglicans were opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The article ended with the statement that "The churches in Britain are helping pave the way for a second Holocaust". ^[22]

Iraq Study Group

Phillips has described the members of the Iraq Study Group as being "as intellectually deficient as they are morally malodorous".^[23] She has also written that James Baker and Jimmy Carter are "the kept creatures of the Arab world" and that "they are intent on smoothing the path to Israel’s destruction." ^[24]

Accusations of Islamophobia

The controversial Islamic Human Rights Commission has regularly accused Phillips of "Islamophobia". At its Annual Islamophobia Awards in 2003, she was nominated in the category of "Most Islamophobic Media Personality". ^[25]

[edit] Books by Phillips

• Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. Gibson Square Books Ltd, 2006. ISBN 1-903933-76-5.
• The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement and the Ideas Behind it. Little, Brown, 2003. ISBN 0-316-72533-1.
• America's Social Revolution. Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2001. ISBN 1-903386-15-2.
• The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male. Social Market Foundation, 1999. ISBN 1-874097-64-X.
• All Must Have Prizes. Warner, 1998. ISBN 0-7515-2274-0.
• Doctors' Dilemmas: Medical Ethics and Contemporary Science by Melanie Phillips & John Dawson. Harvester Press, 1985. ISBN 0-7108-0983-2.
• The Divided House: Women at Westminster. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980. ISBN 0-283-98547-X.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Melanie Phillips' personal website
• Melanie Phillips's Diary Her blog
• "The multicultural menace, anti-semitism and me", The Guardian interview, 16 June 2006