Sir Mark Trevor Phillips OBE ARCS FIC (born 31 December 1953) is a British writer, broadcaster and former politician who served as Chair of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2001 and from 2002 to 2003.

[4][5] Phillips worked initially as a researcher for London Weekend Television (LWT), before being promoted to head of current affairs in 1992, remaining in the post until 1994.

[8] Phillips was invited to analyse and interpret the survey[clarification needed] for the documentary What British Muslims Really Think aired April 2016, which followed similar themes to Things We Won't Say About Race (That Are True) relating to exploring racial truths through statistics.

[citation needed] Phillips was chairman of the Runnymede Trust, a think-tank promoting ethnic equality, from 1993 to 1998, and a commissioner for a number of other charities.

His long-standing friendship with Peter Mandelson, who worked with Phillips at LWT and was best man at his first wedding, brought him close to the New Labour project, and he became friendly with Tony Blair.

When Blair called for the party to swiftly unite behind one candidate, Ken Livingstone, a left-winger and favourite to win the nomination, offered to form a joint ticket with Phillips as his running mate.

[12] Following this and other controversies, including his decision to send his children to a private school, Phillips withdrew from the race a few months later and was not on the final shortlist of candidates.

In a Times interview in April 2004, Phillips said the government should stop supporting multiculturalism, saying it was out of date and legitimised "separateness" between communities, and instead should "assert a core of Britishness".

[21] Phillips wrote in May 2016: "Rome may not yet be in flames, but I think I can smell the smouldering whilst we hum to the music of liberal self-delusion" by ignoring the effects of mass immigration to the United Kingdom, explicitly comparing his warning to Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech.

[24] In early June 2008 Phillips as EHRC head said that he "remain[ed] unpersuaded that the government has yet provided compelling evidence for what our legal advice shows would be an effective suspension of some human rights".

[25] Phillips was responding to the growing uproar surrounding proposals to amend counter-terrorism legislation to permit 42 days' detention without charge.

In The Spectator, political commentator Douglas Murray praised Phillips's ability to "break taboos which too many liberals in the UK are keen to continue enforcing", calling Islamophobia a "fraudulent concept", while his colleague James Delingpole said it was a "brave and honest programme", and the British public knew "large numbers of Muslims don't want to integrate, that their views aren't remotely enlightened".

[29] Simon Woolley, founder of Operation Black Vote, said the documentary pandered to prejudice, treated Muslims as a monolithic group and gave "no historical or social/political context".

[30] Writing for the Middle East Eye, Peter Oborne said Phillips had employed a double standard to attack social conservatism by comparing British Muslim views against Britain as a whole, rather than against other UK religious groups.

[33] Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party pending investigation into alleged Islamophobia based on his past statements, a move which he called "Corbynista payback" and "pure political gangsterism".

Conservative Member of the House of Lords Sayeeda Warsi responded that "Phillips cannot treat Muslims as a homogenised group when it suits him, then later deny they are racialised".

[citation needed] He has been a member of the board of the Barbican Arts Centre,[40] the Council of Aldeburgh Music, and a trustee of the Social Mobility Foundation, among other charities.

He would have been the first non-politician in over half a century to be convicted of contempt of Parliament, but the Lords Committee found that the allegations were "subjective, and that no firm factual evidence is presented in their support; nor are they borne out by the submissions by individual members of the JCHR.

[48] He expanded on these views in 2016 in a publication by Civitas entitled Race and Faith: the Deafening Silence, in which he said that "squeamishness about addressing diversity and its discontents risks allowing our country to sleepwalk to a catastrophe that will set community against community, endorse sexist aggression, suppress freedom of expression, reverse hard-won civil liberties, and undermine the liberal democracy that has served this country so well for so long.

In a March 2008 article for Prospect magazine, Phillips supported Barack Obama as a potential Presidential candidate, and speculated that if he did become President it might "postpone the arrival of a post-racial America".

[60] Phillips married Asha Bhownagary, a Parsi child psychotherapist with Indian ancestry, in 1981 and they had two daughters,[61] one of whom, Sushila, died in April 2021 due to anorexia.