Sir Mark Trevor Phillips (born 31 December 1953) is a British writer, broadcaster and former politician. He served as Chair of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2001 and from 2002 to 2003. Phillips was appointed head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2003 and was the chairman of its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), from 2007 to 2012.
Phillips presented Trevor Phillips on Sunday, a Sunday morning talk show on Sky News, from 2021 to 2022, and Sunday Morning on Sky News from 2023 to 2026.
Phillips has chaired numerous corporate and social boards. He was the President of the Partnership Council of the John Lewis Partnership from 2015 to 2019.
In 2026, Phillips was hired by CBS News as their Senior Global Affairs Correspondent. He will also contribute occasional stories to their news magazine 60 Minutes.
Early life and education Mark Trevor Phillips was born in Islington, London, the youngest of ten children. His parents emigrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1950. He spent his childhood partly in British Guiana, and partly in Wood Green, north London; he attended Wood Green County Grammar School, but took his A-levels at Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana. He returned to England to study at Imperial College London, where he obtained a BSc degree in chemistry in 1975.Chemistry Alumni Profiles (including Trevor Phillips) - website of Imperial College London."Housing some of the best minds" - website of Imperial College London.
Broadcasting and writing career 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. He produced and presented The London Programme for LWT and has worked on projects for the BBC and Channel 4. With his brother, the crime writer Mike Phillips, he wrote Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain. He has won three Royal Television Society (RTS) awards, including Documentary Series of the Year for Windrush in 1999. He is a Vice President of the RTS.
In March 2015, Channel 4 broadcast Things We Won't Say About Race (That Are True), a feature-length documentary written and presented by Phillips and co-produced by Pepper Productions and Outline Productions. Phillips was invited to analyse and interpret the survey 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.
Since 2015, he has been a regular columnist for The Times.
From 2021 to 2022, Phillips covered for Sophy Ridge's Sky News Sunday morning programme Sophy Ridge on Sunday while she was on maternity leave. His programme was temporarily rebranded as Trevor Phillips on Sunday. Sophy Ridge on Sunday aired its final episode in June 2023; Phillips hosted Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips from 2023 to 2026.
In June 2026, it was announced that CBS News had hired Phillips as a senior global affairs correspondent, based in New York. In July 2026, 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton announced in an employee memo that Phillips would be joining the broadcast as a contributor.
Political activity As a student at Imperial College London he became president of its students' union, Imperial College Union. In 1978 he was elected president of the National Union of Students as a candidate for the Broad Left.
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. He also served as chairman of the London Arts Board. 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. Phillips joined the Labour Party in London in 1996.
In 1999 Phillips ran to be Labour's candidate in the 2000 election for the first Mayor of London. Phillips was initially Blair's preferred choice for the role. 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. Phillips described Livingstone's offer as "patronising" in a response that was seen as an accusation of racism, though Phillips later denied this."Phillips accuses Livingstone of racism", BBC News, 16 June 1999; Minnette Marrin, "Playing the race card" , The Sunday Telegraph, 20 June 1999. 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. Instead, he accepted an offer to be running mate to Labour's Frank Dobson. Although Dobson won the nomination, his candidature was harmed by the perception that the contest was "fixed" by the use of an electoral college. Livingstone ran as an independent and won. The Labour Party designated Phillips as a member of the London Assembly on 4 May 2000 as one of its "top-up" candidates. Phillips served as chairman of the Assembly until February 2003, resigning his seat to take up his appointment at the Commission for Racial Equality.
In March 2020, Phillips was suspended from Labour following allegations of Islamophobia. Following the suspension, Phillips defended his comments about British Muslims on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. The suspension was lifted in July 2021 after the party's Executive Director of Legal Affairs, Alex Barros-Curtis pursued the resolution of the case.Holden, Paul (2025), The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy, OR Books, London, pp. 385 - 389,
In 2026, The Daily Telegraph wrote that in recent years Phillips had moved further toward "small-c conservative liberalism".
Views on multiculturalism Phillips and Livingstone had a frosty relationship throughout Phillips's time on the London Assembly, and Phillips's opposition to multiculturalism saw them clash time and again during his tenure at the CRE. In a The 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".
In 2006, Livingstone accused Phillips of "pandering to the right" so much that he "would soon join the BNP"."Mayor's BNP outburst at Phillips", BBC News, 1 September 2006. Phillips replied that his views had been "well documented" and "well supported". Phillips has made speeches stating that "it was right to ask hard questions about multicultural Britain". Although he apologised for his presentation of research by the Australian academic Michael Poulsen of statistics on levels of segregation, which had led to some controversy, he welcomed the focus on integration of different communities after the launch of A Commission for Integration and Cohesion."UK race chief in ghetto apology", BBC News, 30 August 2006. Phillips subsequently cited later work by, among others, Professor Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck College, London University, showing that white and non-white segregation in London and Birmingham increased during the census period to 2011.
After the 2005 riots in France, Phillips warned that "inequality, race and powerlessness" can be "incendiary". He was invited to advise the French government and in September 2007 was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.
In 2006 Phillips said that Britain's current approach to multiculturalism could cause Britain to "sleepwalk towards segregation". 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." Phillips wrote that "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.
In 2026, Phillips said "my views on multiculturalism have intensified", noting that "In our society, not all cultures are equally desirable or legitimate" particularly referring to cousin marriage and "societies in which the status of women is inferior".
Views on free speech Phillips has spoken on the need for free speech to "allow people to offend each other". These comments came after the protests against the Danish cartoons satirising the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which sparked protests in the Muslim community. He stated in an ITV interview: "One point of Britishness is that people can say what they like about the way we should live, however absurd, however unpopular it is."
While supporting free speech, Phillips has spoken out against providing the far right with a platform. Discussing the Oxford Union's invitation to BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving, he told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "As a former president of the National Union of Students, I'm ashamed that this has happened. This is not a question of freedom of speech, this is a juvenile provocation." Griffin has since hit back at Phillips by declaring him a "black racist" in an interview given to Channel 4.
Opposition to 42-day detention 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". Phillips was responding to the growing uproar surrounding proposals to amend counter-terrorism legislation to permit 42 days' detention without charge. He raised the possibility of the EHRC legally testing the legislation by judicial review. In the event, the Brown government maintained the limit on detention without charge at 28 days (although in practice a 14-day limit was observed). Following the installation of a Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, the limit was in January 2011 allowed to revert to 14 days.
Views on Islam In 1996 Phillips initiated and sat on the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, whose report Islamophobia: a challenge for us all reviewed the state of anti-Muslim prejudice in the UK. The report helped establish the term "Islamophobia" in UK discourse and it noted that abuse against Muslims was often racialised therefore "a legal term such as ‘religious and racial violence’ is required". It also stated that Islamophobia stemmed from closed views seeing British Muslims as monolithic, separate, and different.Islamophobia A Challenge For Us All. Runnymede Trust. Retrieved 6 July 2021.