Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips (born 1951) is a right-wing British journalist and author, best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail. She is a regular panelist for BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze. In June 2004 she was named one of the world's top 100 intellectuals by the magazine Prospect.

She is married to Joshua Rozenberg, formerly legal affairs correspondent for the BBC, now Legal Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Education and career as a journalist

Phillips read English at St Anne's, Oxford, before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, a local paper in Hemel Hempstead. After a short period on New Society magazine, she joined The Guardian 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 column in 1987, taking it to The Observer and then The Sunday Times before starting to write for the Daily Mail in 2001. This change of newspapers reflected her political drift to the right. She also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and has, since 2003 and unusually for a mainstream newspaper journalist, maintained a lively weblog.

Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

Her most notable work as an author has been the acclaimed All Must Have Prizes. First published in 1996, the book offered a critique of falling standards within the education system and its implications for wider society.

Political views

Her views are right-wing although she says she is a liberal, describing neocons as 'liberals who have had a reality check'. She is Euro-sceptic, supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and supports Israel. Phillips is also dismissive of progressive teaching methods, global warming - which she says is a myth - and supports family values, and is anti-abortion. She is also a critic of the BBC, which she says has a liberal bias favouring New Labour and anti-American attitudes and The Guardian.

In 2003, she won an award as "Most Islamophobic Media Personality of the Year" from the Islamic Human Rights Commission for their readings of her criticisms of Islam. She did not attend the awards ceremony and denies that her views are in any way Islamophobic. In 2004, her profile was raised further at the awards by being nominated for "Islamophobe of the Year" along with George Carey and George W. Bush. She lost to Bush.

She used her Daily Mail column to campaign against Britain's senior gay police officer, Brian Paddick, who was subsequently promoted from the rank of commander to deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

She has written on the subject of the alleged dangers of the MMR vaccine, but, like most journalists, has no background in epidemiology, and been criticised for her lack of understanding of the science. [1] [2]

Quotes

• "After eight years in government, Mr Blair has precious little to show for his ambitious plans to heal the divisions in society" [3]

• "I find that Muslims are often allies. Their critique offers a salutary contrast to western indifference and inertia. Muslims rightly condemn the collapse of western moral authority, the failure of nerve that has created our epidemics of crime, drug abuse, family breakdown and promiscuity. They are right to be horrified at the wholesale destruction of the sacred, and the worship instead of consumer choice. They are right to point to the meaninglessness and vacuity of secular society, its arrogance and the paralysis of its institutions. This is, after all, why so many are turning to fundamentalism in Christianity and Judaism as well as Islam." [4]

• "The Palestinians are a despotic, undemocratic grouping which promotes a religious war against Israel, a democracy, through terror."[5]

• "Thousands of alienated young Muslims, most of them born and bred here but who regard themselves as an army within, are waiting for an opportunity to help to destroy the society that sustains them."[6]

• "Valuable vocational courses have vanished along with the further education colleges that once delivered them. Now all such colleges are universities, every other tutor is a professor and all get degrees which are supposed to be of equal value. But of course this is nonsense on stilts. A degree in golf-course management does not have the same value as a degree in physics". [7]

• "In our libertarian society, where individual choice is all, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ have come to mean something very different. Liberals took for granted that freedom depended upon self-discipline. Libertarians decided that all such restraint was repressive. The individual had to be free from all attachments to family, culture, nation, institutions and traditions that might fetter freedom of choice. Since every individual was equally entitled to such free choices, the distinctions that were the basis of morality became eroded" [8]

• "Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC—which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries—has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’" [9]

External links

• Melanie Phillips' personal website
• Melanie Phillips's Diary—a regular weblog
• Details of Phillips' award as "Most Islamophobic Journalist of the Year"