Times Racist Editorial EXPOSED

Why are ethnic minorities disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus? Public Health England has decided to conduct an inquiry, and at first invited Trevor Phillips to join the show. However, new Labour leader Keir Starmer demurred. He was right to do so: Phillips’ record of anti-Muslim bigotry is as infamous as it is well established.

Trevor Phillips - press favourite

Given that Starmer is heading a party that most of our free and fearless press do not want to see in power any time soon - and they are scared shitless that he will be more than a match for alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson in the Commons and elsewhere - they have decided he needs pulling down a peg or two.

So it was that the Murdoch Times, still pretending that it is a paper of record, and having sufficiently pretentious ambitions that it tells anyone gullible enough that it aims to model itself on the New York Times (ho ho ho), went after Starmer in a patronising, sneering and viciously racist editorial yesterday. The paper claims he is “Missing in Action”.

What’s their beef? “Mr Phillips’ involvement drew criticism from previously obscure doctors’ groups and from the Muslim Council of Britain … That criticism rests on two allegations, first that Mr Phillips does not possess the relative expertise to advise PHE, and secondly that he is guilty of expressing ‘Islamophobic’ opinions. Both … are palpably false”.

Why so? “Mr Phillips is a graduate in chemistry of Imperial College London”. I don’t care if he has a black belt in origami, or ranks as high as any in Rome: it does not make him an epidemiologist. But do go on. “As for the Islamophobic slur (circular logic there, chaps, must try harder), that derives from Mr Phillips’ comments that the sex-grooming scandals in Rotherham and elsewhere were largely perpetuated by men of Anglo-Pakistani origin”.

This is bullshit. Phillips is on record saying “I thought Europe’s Muslims would gradually blend into the landscape. I should have known better”, “Muslims are not like us”, and that British Muslims are “becoming a nation within a nation”. His dishonest and ignorant attack piece on the “Muslim fostering” case was dripping with bigotry.

It included these claims: “The decision to put a five-year-old Christian girl into Muslim foster care is like child abuse and the council must pay … It's an outrage officials in Tower Hamlets, East London chose to value their pro-Muslim reputation above the welfare of the child … The child was deprived of her own cross, and encouraged to learn Arabic - presumably because the women of the household were less than ­proficient in English”.

His article, in the Murdoch Sun, was a pack of lies, and demonstrably so. Yet on goes the Times editorial, pontificating “It is hard to escape the conclusion that [Starmer] was trying to shore up Labour’s traditionally loyal Muslim constituency”. Nudge, wink, they all vote Labour, y’know, postal vote harvesting, electoral rolls, know what I mean?

But enough: there is one test as to whether the Times is indulging in blatant racism, and it is simply this: if their editorial had been not about Muslims, but Jews, would it have been acceptable? No it certainly would not. The paper, and indeed all others, would have rightly come down on anti-Semitism like the proverbial tonne of bricks.

So let’s cut out the double standards. Racism is racism, and the Times is doing it. The end.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by adding to its Just Giving page at

https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/zelostreet5