Just hours after it came out that anti-racism campaigner Trevor Phillips has been expelled from the Labour Party for ‘racism’, Policy Exchange has published a new paper: The Trial: the strange case of Trevor Phillips, which reveals why he’s been suspended.

The paper features a foreword by Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, who is also a Pakistani-born Muslim, the longest-serving Muslim MP, and a member of the APPG on British Muslims defending Phillips. Mahmood writes:

It was with no small measure of astonishment that I learnt that my own party, the Labour Party, had initiated proceedings against Trevor Phillips on grounds of ‘racism’ and ‘Islamophobia’. The charges are so outlandish as to bring disrepute on all involved in making them; and I fear they further add to the sense that we, as a party, have badly lost our way.

It is seriously bizarre for Jennie Formby – who has defended people accused of antisemitism for years as Labour’s General Secretary – to kick Phillips out forcing Mahmood to have to come to his defence…

The letter from Labour to Phillips, which you can read in full above, accuses the former chairman of the UK’s Equalities Watchdog of breaching rule 2.1.8 – forbidding members from “conduct which in the opinion of the NEC is prejudicial” – claiming that “numerous statements you made on public platforms, as well as authoring the document ‘Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence’. 

The Labour Party in particular point to past statements from Trevor Phillips on “longstanding abuse by men, mostly of Pakistani Muslim origin in the North of England” – the same sort of claims Jeremy Corbyn sacked his Women’s Minister, Sarah Champion, over in 2017. 

Read Phillips’s response to Labour in full below:

As Phillips writes in the Times today, “If this is how Labour treats its own family, how might it treat its real opponents if it ever gains power again?”…