Trevor Phillips on Equality

What has Bleak House, your first choice, done to shape your political views?

This is probably Dickens’s best evocation of a society in which your origins more or less determine your destiny. My job is essentially about trying as best you can to detach people’s life chances and their destiny from their origins, so that where you are born doesn’t determine where you die. Of course the whole point about Bleak House is that both its heroes and its transgressors are involved in that struggle against their origins. Esther Summerson, the slightly weedy central character, is born into these rather rocky circumstances, nobody quite knows where she comes from and therefore it’s unclear where she’ll end up. Lady Dedlock, the most interesting character, is transgressing because she has risen to a place where she should never have been. She gets her comeuppance: that’s the Victorian idea that you have to be careful and you can’t overdo your rising up the scale.

At the other end of the scale you’ve got poor Joe the crossing sweeper, whose fate is marked in his genes. He’s never going to be anything other than the dreadful, tragic figure that he is in the book. What Dickens is trying to do is to undermine, by satirising it, the idea that people get stuck in their fixed social positions.

The other point of the book, in terms of what I do at the commission, is about the role of the law. Bleak House tells us not to rely on the courts for justice. In the end, a just society can’t be delivered by people in a courtroom. We do quite a lot of that, but it’s fundamental to the way I approach anti-discrimination and social justice, to believe that in the end what will change things is how people behave rather than judicial remedy.

In Bleak House the extreme stratification of society is not changed by the ridiculous court cases, but in our world…?

We have a vast range of judicial remedies, but the idea that you can tackle racial or sex discrimination, or indeed, much more significantly, class discrimination, as a feature of our society either by legal action or by the laws that are passed in parliament really seems to me rather limited – it’s a mistaken strategy.

The Wind in the Willows – I’m intrigued.

This is a very personal choice. I come from a standard immigrant, urban background and reading Wind in the Willows opened my eyes to the way the English upper middle classes lived and the things they thought were important. Countryside. Woods – what the hell were woods? Picnics. So before I had even discovered Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, all these details – sandwiches, lemonade – were just jaw-dropping to me.

Essentially there is a bad reading and good reading. The bad reading is that it is a parable about class, where the stoats and the weasels are working-class oiks who invade an Edwardian perpetual summer in which we go boating and chasing lambs in the fields and whatnot. They take over Toad Hall and it’s all very unjust and revolutionary. Later in life I had a flirtation with Maoism – maybe it was because I had sympathy with the revolutionary stoats and weasels, they were on the right side against someone as repulsive as Toad.

But the good reading is what underlies all this: Badger as a sort of maven, a symbol of the values of decency and fair play. He’s a bit stodgy and dull but in the end he is somebody who will take people for what they are and treat them decently. He believes in protecting, in this case the property rights of the aristocracy, but more broadly the rule of law.

Wind in the Willows is tied up with an age of Englishness which I think had a great many things to recommend it. People were a lot less embarrassed than they are now to talk about values – even if those values might not be ones you would share today. I think it’s good for young people, these ideas that you should be fair to people, and that there are certain ways of behaving that are reasonable in a good society. If you want to translate it into political terms, Badger would be a one-nation Tory. I have got a lot of time for his horror at Toad’s selfishness.

So is Toad a nouveau riche or an aristocrat who doesn’t understand his responsibilities?

Well, Toad has inherited his wealth from his father, who was Badger’s friend: these are country types who have a great sense of responsibility for keeping the community together, giving a shilling or to the poor, the sort of things today we gulp at. But underlying it all is a fundamental idea of fair play. Toad is a conspicuous consumer, a materialist, a faddist. And bear in mind one of the most interesting moments is when Toad has to pretend to be a washerwoman, which means he has to put his hands into washing water and they become wrinkled and he sees it as terribly ghastly – and actually this was what the upper classes used to be like.

As long as they exist, the upper classes have to be drawn into recognising that they have some relationship with the rest of society and something in common with society – that’s what the humbling of Toad is about.