30 Quotes by Trevor Phillips

There's this naive belief in our soccer that everything is going to be solved by naming a new coach. These plans are based on the idea that if we get the system right then the new man has a better chance of succeeding.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

Most liberal-minded folk would like to think that since they are not hostile to people of a different race, racism is a disease of the uneducated, unenlightened and socially backward - football hooligans, British National Party supporters, policemen. You could call this the Bad Guy Theory. But the Bad Guy Theory does not explain why Indian-heritage children do nearly twice as well as Pakistani-heritage children at GCSE.

You can’t say ’because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws.

Human rights are not worthy of the name if they do not protect the people we don’t like as well as those we do.

There’s no question that there is more anti-religion noise in Britain.

It’s perfectly fair that you can’t be a Roman Catholic priest unless you’re a man. It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church or mosque.

Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law. Institutions have to make a decision whether they want to do that or they don’t want to do that.

To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.