| Melanie Phillips | |
|---|---|
| Born | 4 June 1951 United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Journalist, author |
| Spouse(s) | Joshua Rozenberg |
| Notable credit(s) | Daily Mail columnist The Spectator correspondent Former columnist for The Guardian Author of Londonistan |
Melanie Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a British journalist and author. She started on the left of the political spectrum, writing for The Guardian and New Statesman. In the 1990s she moved to the right, and she currently writes for the Daily Mail, covering political and social issues from a conservative perspective. She defines herself as a liberal who has "been mugged by reality".[1]
Phillips has often appeared as a panelist on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze and BBC One's Question Time. She has written a number of books, including most recently World Turned Upside Down. She was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.[2]
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Phillips' family was Jewish. Her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop. Both parents were committed Labour voters.[1] She was educated at Putney High School, a girls' independent school in Putney, London, and later read English at St Anne's College, Oxford.
She trained as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local newspaper in Hemel Hempstead,[1] as her probationary period in the provinces, then compulsory for the profession. After winning the Young Journalist of the Year award in 1976,[1] she spent a short period at the New Society magazine, before joining The Guardian newspaper in 1977 and becoming its social services correspondent and social policy leader writer.
She was named in 1984[1] the paper's news editor, and was reported to have fainted on her first day.[3] She started 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. While working for The Guardian, Phillips wrote a play called "Traitors" which was performed at The Drill Hall from January 1986. The play was set at the time of the 1982 Lebanon War and centred around the moral dilemmas of a Jewish journalist who as political editor of a liberal magazine has to decide whether to veto an article written in anti-semitic tones, and also whether she is right to publish a leaked document about the Falklands War. The play was reviewed by John Peter in The Sunday Times as "a play of blistering intelligence and fearless moral questioning", although he considered it bordering on implausible.[4]
Phillips left The Guardian in 1993, saying that her relationship with the paper and its readers had become "like a really horrific family argument".[1] She took her opinion column to the Guardian's sister-paper The Observer, then to the Sunday Times in 1998,[3] before writing regularly for the Daily Mail in 2001. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other periodicals. Since 2003, she has written a blog, once hosted by The Spectator, but now at her own website.[5]
She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, former legal affairs editor for the BBC.[6] They have two children.[7]
The BBC has said that Phillips "is regarded as one of the [British] media's leading right-wing voices" and a "controversial" columnist,[8] although she defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy. She began her career on the liberal left[7] with The Guardian. Her drift to the political right has been mirrored by her journalistic career: she now writes for the Daily Mail, and Nick Cohen wrote in 2011 that she has become vilified by The Guardian,[9] while Phillips herself stated in 2006 that her views are often misrepresented by her former newspaper.[7]
She has said that she supports a two-state solution in theory but that it cannot work in practice, commenting: "I would have no problem with a Palestine that would live in peace alongside Israel [...] I respond to the evidence of what is actually happening. Israel is being demonised [...] If Israel were to leave the West Bank, it would turn Islamist overnight and become an Iranian proxy on Israel’s doorstep. That is why I cannot support a state of Palestine."[10]
Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her positions on Israel have been condemned by Jewish writers such as Jonathan Freedland, Alan Dershowitz, and Rabbi David Goldberg. Freedland criticised Phillips's labelling Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide". He wrote in The Jewish Chronicle: "Now, as it happens, I have multiple criticisms of IJV [...] but even their most trenchant opponents must surely blanch at the notion that these critics of Israel and of Anglo-Jewish officialdom are somehow in favour of genocide—literally, eager to see the murder and eradication of the Jewish people [...] it is an absurdity, one that drains the word 'genocide' of any meaning."[11]
Alan Dershowitz has said that Phillips has committed lashon harah in her commentary about the Obama administration's policies towards the Middle East. More generally, he has also stated: "I support its liberal policies... if Israel were to turn against these values—if it were to become an oppressive theocracy, like all Muslim countries today, that subjugates women, discriminates against gays and subjects science to religious censorship—I would become extremely critical of any such nation. Israel will never become such a country because, fortunately, the vast majority of Israelis reject the extremist views of Melanie Phillips."[10]
In All Must Have Prizes, published in 1996, Phillips offered a critique of the British education system, saying that an egalitarian and non-competitive ethos (progressivism; multicultural education) had led to a catastrophic fall in standards. She criticised John Dewey's "'disastrous influence." A subsequent paper said that "Phillips gets Dewey quite wrong," for example in claims that Dewey promoted ahistoric and cultureless education.[12] Phillips criticized one academic paper—on primary-school children's constructions of British identity. Its authors responded with a follow-up study, showing that young adolescents, in common with their counterparts in primary schools, adopt a pluralist viewpoint with virtually no nationalist or racist comments.[13]
Phillips has commented on the politicisation of education, particularly at Aberystwyth University. In 2005, she said there was an "anti-Jewish witch-hunt going on in our seats of learning" with particular focus on Aberystwyth University, based on an anonymous student's testimony. In 2008, following further allegations (supported by documentary evidence) made by another anonymous student regarding the biased nature and reading list of a course on terrorism convened by politics lecturer Dr. Marie Breen Smyth, as well as allegations by the same student regarding bias against Israel by Breen Smyth and her colleague Dr. Richard Jackson, Phillips wrote to the Vice Chancellor of the University saying that Breen Smyth was a "subversive" who should not be allowed to teach. These accusations were denied by Breen Smyth.[14]
In January 2011, Phillips objected to the British government's educational curriculum because she believed it promoted "the gay agenda."[15] Philips called it "an abuse of childhood", part of a "ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very concept of normal sexual behaviour".[15]