Melanie Phillips

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Melanie Phillips (born June 4 1951) is a British journalist and author, best known for her column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail newspaper. Phillips is a regular panelist for BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze.

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

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 newspaper in Hemel Hempstead, England. After a short period on the New Society magazine, she joined liberal-left 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 SDP, alongside Ian Aitken and Michael White and against Polly Toynbee.

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 conservative Daily Mail in 2001. Phillips also occasionally writes for the Jewish Chronicle and other magazines. Since 2003 she has also maintained a weblog.

Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

Books

Her most notable book as an author has been the acclaimed All Must Have Prizes (1996). The book offered a detailed critique of falling standards within the British education system, and the implications of this for the wider society.

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.

In 2006, her latest book called Londonistan was published. Londonistan is a study of how radical Islamism established London as a base of operations, and Phillips claims it found a home in the city because of the broader failures of multiculturalism, cultural relativism and appeasement in Britain.

Political views

Phillips defines herself as a progressive and a defender of liberal democracy. ["Why I am a progressive"], Melanie Phillips, January 01, 2000. Phillips 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 blog to criticise, among other issues, progressive teaching methods [The national literacy debacle], Melanie Phillips, March 03, 2005 and anti-semitism.

A turning point in her political journey appears to have been the 1996 success of her book All Must Have Prizes (taken from the description of the caucus-race in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland); this criticised the perceived egalitarian and non-competitive ethos in British education as leading to an alleged catastrophic fall in standards.

Controversies

Phillips has written on the subject of the alleged dangers of the MMR vaccine, and was the author of the substantial book Doctors' Dilemmas: Medical Ethics and Contemporary Science (1985). But, like most journalists, she has no background in epidemiology. She has thus been criticised, along with various other journalists, for a lack of understanding of the science involved in the debate. ''["The MMR sceptic who just doesn't understand science"], Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, November 2, 2005[Letters: "When medicine, science and the public collide"], The Guardian, November 9, 2005

Phillips also contributed to the debate around the controversial paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" citing it as a "particularly ripe example of the 'global Zionist conspiracy' libel" and expressing her astonishment with "the fundamental misrepresentations and distortions in the paper" ["The graves of academe"], March 21, 2006. Accessed April 6, 2006.

In 2003 Phillips was named the "Most Islamophobic Journalist of the Year" by the Islamic Human Rights Commission.[link]

External links

• [Melanie Phillips' personal website]
• [Melanie Phillips's Diary—a regular weblog]
• [The multicultural menace, anti-semitism and me. An interview in The Guardian], 16 June 2006.

References