Sir Trevor Phillips is the founder of the Policy Exchange’s History Matters project, the UK chairman of the Index on Censorship, and was longest-serving equalities commissioner in British history. Here he gives his characteristically trenchant views on the subjects of history, race, and free speech.
>> Andrew Roberts: Sir Trevor Phillips was chairman of the London assembly from 2000 to 2003, before he was appointed by Tony Blair as head of the Commission for Racial Equality and later the chairman of its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, until 2012, making him the longest serving leader of any British equality commission.
Trevor, in June 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Black Lives Matter, you wrote Principles for Change, which was the founding document of Policy Exchange's History Matters project. It sought to set out the universal principles that ought to govern the changes to history teaching and the public display of history.
And you wrote it at a time when statues were being pulled down, streets renamed, curricula changed and museum exhibits being removed. Tell us about that, tell us about that time and tell us about the principles. And later we'll go on and talk about whether or not you think they've been implemented properly.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, thank you, Andrew. I think that the first and most important thing, perhaps, to say about that exercise is to remind people, sometimes I have to remind myself of this, that I am basically progressive politically, and my ambition in the world has always been to advance some of the principles of the center left principally to do with equality.
One of the central issues for me about the Black Lives Matter episode was whether the title meant what it said. And to some extent, I think I began to take the view that the last thing that mattered to the Black Lives Matter campaign was black lives. In a concrete display of this, if you looked at the pictures of people rolling the statue of Edward Colson, the supposed slave trader in Bristol, down and throwing it into the harbor.
Being a chemist by trade, I always like to count things. I counted the hand on that statue, 80% of them were white. The point for me about that episode was that this was not really about black folks at all. It was not about our representation, it was not about our ambitions, it was not about our desires to better ourselves.
What it was really about was atonement on the part of some people who are part of the white population. Who wanted to demonstrate that they cared about something that maybe their ancestors had done or somebody else's ancestors that they knew had done. Now, I'm not against that. I'm not against people atoning to the past, but I don't want them to pretend that they're doing it for me.
So, in a sense, if you like the emotional background for me about the History Matters project, was much more to restore a balance about what was important. Not the emotional insecurities or the angst of a particular sect, if I can put it that way, of highly educated university graduates in English towns or in Seattle or wherever it happened to be.
But what really matters in terms of social justice today, and one aspect of that social justice should always be that people who are affected by some issue should have a voice in it. When we set out the principles by which change should take place, it was not to say that change should not take place, that we can't move statues around or change exhibitions, because people do that all the time for very good reasons.
But what I wanted to do was to make sure that everybody was actually upfront about their reasons, didn't pretend that they were doing it for some reason, which was not true. Secondly, that they really consulted and talked widely to the population and listened to people. So you don't change somebody's street name because you think you don't like the name Rhodes, or so as in Cecil Rhodes.
And in that particular case it turned out that the street wasn't named after Cecil Rhodes at all. You don't change things without talking to the people who live in that street and asking them whether they feel embarrassed by it or cross about it or whether, frankly, it doesn't matter to them very much.
So my view about this was simply to say, let's have a process and some principles by which people are clear about what they want to do, why they want to do it. They stand up for whatever it is they happen to believe in, and they make sure, and we make sure that if we're going to make decisions, we're going to make things change, then everybody is involved.
Rather than get into a situation where the people who are shouting loudest are the people that get their way.
>> Andrew Roberts: And it seems to be, doesn't it, that when people do have a vote on this, when people have a say, they tend not to want to have the streets named, changed and the statues pulled down.
I mean, so far, whenever it's been voted on in British towns and district councils and so on, it's been stopped. Obviously, the history matters campaign has been very powerful in this, but. And I suppose it's very helpful that the government listened to policy exchange. But do you see that as being an innate conservative, small C nature of the British people?
Or do you think that Black Lives Matter doesn't have quite the same purchase here as it does in the UK?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, I think certainly the latter is true. To be absolutely frank, it was pretty much a fashion statement in this country. I mean, our police don't carry guns.
It's very rare for a young black person to be shot on the streets, and that was one of the other things that rather offended me. I come from a very large family, I have four sisters who live in New York. Most of my family has lived in the United States for the best part of 40 or 50 years when my parents left here and went to America.
So I know America very well. I've paid the taxes, I've worked there and so on. We're a very different country and we approach things in a very different way. So I was always a bit fed up that people simply transplanted the demands of, let's say, Detroit or Los Angeles, into Birmingham or London.
That doesn't make any sense at all. Defund the police. All of that made no sense at all in this country. But I think in answer to your question about whether in a sense the fact that when asked most people most of the time in this country do not want statues to be pulled down, they do not want streets to be renamed.
For arbitrary purposes. They do not want the school curriculum to be ripped apart and have only, let's say, modern authors of color to be taught and Shakespeare put outside in the outside toilet. Most people don't want that. But I don't think, except for a rather small minority, I'm not saying that this isn't true.
There is a small minority who are basically reactionaries who think nothing should change. But I think most people in this country take that view for two reasons. First of all, quite a lot of the claims that are made are based on nonsense. So, for example, there are a lot of streets in this country which are called Black Boy Lane or Black Boy Road or something like that.
By and large, they have nothing to do with color. They're probably more likely to be a reference to, you remember which Charles it is, Andrew, Charles II, isn't it? Yeah. Who was nicknamed Black Boy because he had a dark complexion. It had nothing to do with slavery. I think, though, there is another point of view, which is the one that I hold, which is that all of these objects, all of these memorials, and they might be statues, they might be street names, they might be.
The names of buildings are part of our past. You cannot erase that past. AJP Taylor said, the difference, I'm paraphrasing here, between past and history is the past is what happened. History is what we tell ourselves. Well, we can always tell ourselves a new story, but we can't make the past not what it was.
And the thing that I object to about the way that the history is now being retold is that it is all now becoming about this atonement issue. And when it comes to people like me, who are black, whose ancestors were slaves and so on, essentially, in the name of supposedly atoning for sins against us, we're actually being written out of the history.
It's now all becoming about what white people did and their feelings of angst and so forth. But actually, every time you take out one of these remembrances of the past, what you're doing is taking a piece of the past away so it doesn't form part of our history.
And the consequence of that is that over time, we will forget. We will forget what was done. We will forget that history. We won't be telling our children that's where sugar came from. We won't be telling our children we had colonies and this is what it was like.
And this is why this statue is here and that's why that person is there. We will not be telling. We won't be telling the story of the past. We'll be telling some story about what we want to be in the present. And I really object to that, because, to put it crudely, what the whole Black Lives Matter and defunding and statues being torn down movement has become is the movement for historical amnesia by which a majority of the population actually will, in the end, be able to forget what happened.
And those of us who lived the wrong side of that past will no longer figure in that story.
>> Andrew Roberts: I seem to remember you writing an article in the Times about a university that actually wanted to minimize the story of slavery because it had too many trigger warnings and sort of pain and offensiveness to the people reading it.
That is a classic example, isn't it?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Yeah, it's not just one university. There are many of them who basically said, we mustn't, for example, one of the things that has now become very difficult, I think, for some universities, what do you do about slave narratives? That is to say, the books written by slaves like Ignatius Sancho or Olaudah Equiano in this country telling of their own experiences as slaves.
Now, for me, that is absolutely essential. And I want to know the story as they wrote it at that time so that I can understand what they, and in my particular case, what my ancestors might have experienced. Now, what's happening in some places is that people are being.
Students are being discouraged from reading those narratives because they are said to be too painful. Well, people can't have it both ways. They can't say, we need to recognize the awfulness of the transatlantic slave trade, all that went with it. But at the same time, we must never encounter the reality as told by those who suffered it.
And that's the contradiction that the people who claim to be waking up our conscience have got themselves into. But they're only in that contradiction because, to be blunt, I don't think they really care very much about my feelings or my past. What they really want to do is to demonstrate what good and compassionate and caring people they are.
And unfortunately, one reason I fell out with quite a lot of those people is that in the end, I don't really care. I don't care whether they are good or compassionate. I don't want them to bury me or my ancestors under their pity and their virtues.
>> Andrew Roberts: In this case.
You're a former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In fact, also before that, obviously, the Commission for Racial Equality, longest serving leader I saw of any British equality commissioner. So I'd be fascinated to hear where you think we are in the state of race relations in Britain today.
Because you've got the UN working group of experts on people of African descent saying that basically Britain is an irretrievably racist society, which is something that the New York Times seems to also plug. But at the same time, you've got the Sewell report which came out recently saying that while there's undoubtedly still racism in British society overall, we're one of the least racist cultures.
Where are you on this? You've said that multiculturalism sort of legitimizes separateness. So what's your feeling at the moment in this great debate?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Okay, well let's separate some things and let's look at the short term historical record. Well, when I was born early 1950s, this was a country which is very unfamiliar with the idea of having people of color on its soil.
Prior to the war you might have met some rather. Posh Indians who were in public schools here and so on. But by and large, since Georgian times, there had been relatively few people of color circulating in England. And then after 1948, the symbolic arrival is the Windrush, 492 then, most of whom had served in the RAF, actually, during the war as bomber pilots, navigators, so on, engineers particularly.
>> Andrew Roberts: And you and your brother-
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed.
>> Andrew Roberts: Wrote a book about this-
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed.
>> Andrew Roberts: Didn't you, about the.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed, we wrote a book called Windrush, The Irresistible Rise of Mult-Rracial Britain, which, by the way, this year is the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush.
And that book, there'll be a new edition of that book in all good bookshops in June.
>> Andrew Roberts: Extremely subtle plug there.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed.
>> Andrew Roberts: Well done, well done.
>> Andrew Roberts: You win the prize for that so far, Trevor, I have to say, for this podcast. We'll keep that in the record.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: As you know, Andrew, it doesn't pay to be subtle with your books.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: But it's the 75th anniversary, and I think when that first group came here, and the group of South Asian workers, Punjabis and so on came not long after, to work in textile mills and so on in this country, there was a history of what you have to describe as overt racism and discrimination.
That is why, say, for example, in 1963, the Bristol Bus Boycott took place. And I think this is a very important point to make here, because employers and trade unions are united to exclude black workers from being conductors on buses on the grounds that white passengers, particularly women, would be afraid to travel with black bus conductors at night.
An important point I want to make about this is that it wasn't just nasty, racist employers, everybody thought that. In the same way as, by the way, going back to the whole slavery thing and Edward Colson and Bristol, if you wanted to get rid of the taint of slavery from Bristol, you would have to flatten the entire city because every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker depended on the triangular trade and the slaving leg of that.
So the important point here is we lived in a society when I was born, in which it wasn't just a sort of accident, it was part of life, that people of color were second class citizens. Well, legislation began to change that and habits have changed and sentiments have changed.
When I talked about multiculturalism, encouraging separateness, I think what I was really trying to get at is that things had changed and there was a great and welcome recognition of ethnic difference and that people from different communities had different habits and they should be allowed to get on with those.
But I think at some. In some places, it had become warped to the extent that what would happen is that people would say, well, I know that in that community, women are not treated very well. They're not given an equal say. They're not allowed to go to places of worship on the same basis as men, but that's just the way they are, so let them get on with it.
Well, my view is we live in a society where there are some basic, the fundamental values. And one of them in this case, for example, is that men and women have equal rights. Another one, and this was the case that absolutely changed my mind, the case of an eight-year-old girl called Victoria Climbié, who was killed by her carers, by her foster carers, with whom she'd been placed, a West African family.
They were also West Africans, and they tortured her and killed her. There were 17 different occasions on which the social services might have rescued that child. On several of those occasions, the social workers said, well, we can't interfere because this is a black family, and that's what they do, that's how they work with their children.
And at that point, my view about this idea that you allow communities to do whatever they want because they are different, absolutely changed. I don't think you can have a civilized, democratic society that is under the rule of law that allows that kind of thing to go on, so that changed.
What I think is true about more recent events is that, actually, Britain's done something really quite special, and here's a symbol of it. This is the only country in the world where there is a substantial mixed race population, which has grown up voluntarily. The other countries where there is a substantial mixed race population, South Africa, Brazil, the United States, all of which took place under coercion or slavery.
Our mixed race population, which is now knocking on to about a million people, most of whom are mixed, black and white, has come about almost entirely. Not entirely, not 100%, but almost entirely since the war, this has been a population that has arisen out of romance, love and freedom.
And that is a very special. And as far as I know, a unique thing hasn't happened in France, hasn't happened in Germany, hasn't happened in even the Netherlands or Sweden. Why do I think that's important? Well, I think it's important because it tells you that, and we're talking history here, the ancient, not that ancient, actually, that the Elizabethan doctrine of toleration has been parlayed into a kind of modern.
But I know it's not exactly the same, parlayed into a modern version of tolerance in which we as a society accept difference, and to some extent, we like it. We think we benefit from it, and we treat it as a virtue in our society rather something to fear, which I think was true 60 years ago, but it's not true now.
>> Andrew Roberts: On the 70, sorry, the 50th anniversary of Windrush, the queen invited you to Buckingham Palace at a reception for the passengers. And in an article that you wrote about it in the Times, you said that she will be mourned in Malawi, as she will be in Manchester.
Why is that, tell us about Queen Elizabeth II's role in bringing the Commonwealth from empire into a family of nations and why the Commonwealth still has relevance today.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Crikey, Andrew, you really have punished yourself by reading what I've written.
>> Andrew Roberts: I've done my background reading, but it's been fun, I promise you, there hasn't been a moment of punishment.
It's all great stuff.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, what do I think? Why do I think this matters? First of all, I was invited to that reception, but to be clear, I was a sort of hanger on behind these incredible men and women who had come on the Windrush and boats like it.
By the way, and one thing that I think, I want to say about immigrants is that we always talk in this country, is that immigrants are people who are fleeing war and poverty and they're coming with hands outstretched. Well, actually, that's not true. Certainly, now, lots of people come to this country because they have special skills and capabilities that could go anywhere, but they choose this country.
And those men and women came here because after the war, the Caribbean was a back water, it was boring. These were the adventurous spirits who wanted something better for themselves and for their children, and they thought they could find it here, and they thought they could do something better here, and many of them actually did.
Now, the queen herself, the important thing about the queen is she once said that she had to be seen to be believed, and she was as good as her word. Others will know the truth of this better than I, but I think it is probably true that she has been seen in the flesh by more people than any other person in human history, because she toured the world when she started as monarch.
We had an empire that covered much of the globe, so she was everywhere and physically, and she went there physically.
>> Andrew Roberts: I think that's statistically accurate. She went to 162 countries for so much longer period than anybody else. I think you're right that she's the most physically seen human being.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Why does that matter? Well, it matters because certainly when I was growing up, and I grew up, for the most part, I was here for four or five years. It was my childhood, but most of my childhood I spent in what was first British Guyana and then Guyana, and we were part, if I can put it this way, of an international, well, what became the Commonwealth.
It's often forgotten, by the way, that the Commonwealth and the empire weren't just about London and the periphery. The people from the periphery met each other. So for example, the 1945 Manchester Pan African Congress, which was a springboard for independence all over Africa, brought together activists and politicians from Africa and the Caribbean, indeed, one or two from Asia, who were perfectly able to talk to each other without having the Foreign Office, the colonial office, I beg your pardon, sitting there telling them what to do and what to say.
So the point about the queen is that she didn't, I think, represent for most people in most territories, the authority of London. What she represented was the binding force of all the members of the empire, all the territories of the empire. So in the Caribbean, we would probably see the newsreels of her going to India.
In Africa, they would see the pictures of her in Australia, and that would mean that we were thinking of ourselves as part of this international fellowship, rather than just as the sort of subjects of some guys in a big office somewhere in Whitehall. So I think one of the reasons that she was so important was that she brought people together.
And if I may say this also, this might not be the best way to express it, but I will essay it this way. In recent times, it has become a sort of sneer at the royal family, that they aren't that good with people who aren't like themselves or people who are of a different race or background.
I can say with absolute certainty because I had the privilege of knowing several members of the royal family, worked with them in various ways. But people need to remember that that family has probably met and worked with and spent time with more people of Alack or Asian background than any typical white family anywhere on the globe.
It was a queen who decided she was going to dance with calendar at a time when it would shock Britain to have a Black man dancing with a white woman. You remember-
>> Andrew Roberts: Back in 1961-
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Might be Nkrumah, yeah.
>> Andrew Roberts: As well.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: You're right, it was Nkrumah.
>> Andrew Roberts: In 1961, an extraordinary moment.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Exactly.
>> Andrew Roberts: An extraordinary moment.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: And the point is, she didn't have to do it, she didn't have to do it. And she, she would know what it would mean. So this.
>> Andrew Roberts: It was making a statement for 1961, wasn't it, when you still had racial segregation in the south?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed, and indeed in this country, without bringing oneself too much into this, being a country where if you were a student and I'm now talking ten years later, you're a student, and you took up with a girl who happened to be white, it was tricky to visit her parents house because the parents wouldn't think much of it.
So for a person of color of my generation, the fact that this person was a white person who displayed no fear or distaste of black people was a major, major issue. It was, if I can make the comparison, this is the sort of thing that gets you into trouble saying in much the same way as the then princess of Wales did something in relation to make people.
Let me start that sentence again, and I need to phrase this carefully. In much the same way as the then princes of Wales made it possible for people to stop fearing someone who had AIDS, I think the queen did something remarkable in the 50s and 60s to make it possible for a person who's white to feel that it was okay to be friendly, to dance with, and to have social relations with a person who was Black.
And I would go so far as to say, I think, that the queen's courage in doing that. Was probably greater.
>> Andrew Roberts: And staying on the royal theme, you've written that you suspect that after a thousand years, even a single moderately unpopular reign wouldn't deliver what Cromwell, the Levellers, and Adolf Hitler could not.
It sounds like you're pretty bullish about the chances of the House of Windsor getting through this century.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, I think any objective observer, I mean, you don't have to be a particularly pro monarchist individual to take the view that this institution does matter to the British people.
And as much as there might be noise, whether the noises are here in London or there are noises off to the west, it's not going anywhere. It really isn't, I mean, the institution has been far more unpopular in the past. In fact, in some points in the past, it's been not just unpopular, but invisible.
Now it's very visible. I think that when I wrote that, I think I slightly anticipated that there would be quite a lot of noise about the new king. But in fact, actually, I think he's handled himself extremely well. He has been aided by what I regard as an incredible transformation in public esteem, and that is of the queen, who you will remember is, 25 years ago, was probably the most unpopular woman in Britain, possibly in the world, but has now been.
>> Andrew Roberts: Can I give you the quote that you came up with about Queen Camilla? Because it is such a great quote. You said that she's the kind of jolly, book-loving, naughty great-aunt you might nip out and have a cigarette with.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Yeah, exactly, I mean, she's turned-
>> Andrew Roberts: And, by the way, I couldn't agree more.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: I mean, I don't know her, I've not met her, but she's sort of been transformed into this sort of person that you think, yeah, yeah, I could like her. So I think they've done pretty well. But the truth is that actually, in the nature of things, you know, the king is in his seventies, relative to his mother.
His reign will be short. His son's presence as a figure in our lives will be long, we hope, anyway. I mean, he will live a long time. And you can already see, if you like, the transition in the public mind to the prince and Princess of Wales, who are.
If I can put it this way, if you had to make them up, they'd look pretty much like these two.
>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, yeah, no, couldn't agree more. Tell me, you've in the past criticized the way in which our politics has tended towards character assassination. You see it in the House of Commons every Wednesday with one side shouting weak and the other shouting hypocrite and so on.
Do you see a way out of the way that modern politics has descended? I noticed you've mentioned the wonderful Civic Future organization. Do you think that organizations like that might give us a sense of how we might be able to get out of that politics and get onto a more sort of service-driven side of public life?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, I think that will be part of it. I think that getting people who actually know something would be helpful. But I think there are a series of things that one has to think about. One is, to be frank, the influence of my trade journalism, which I think, if I'm honest, seems to have given up on the basic project of trying to explain the world to readers and listeners and viewers, and now seems to focus entirely on a sort of political and public equivalent of Saturday night.
Who is up, who is down, who's gonna get the prize, who do we like, who's gonna get voted for off strictly? There's a sort of Strictly-ization of public life. There are two problems with that. One is, of course, it trivializes politics. The other is that, and my friends who produce Strictly will never forgive me for this, it glorifies mediocrity.
One of the things that really offends me about a lot of the talent shows now is that there are people who have spent their whole lives learning to be really excellent at something, dancing or singing. But that we now shows which make stars of people who have spent three weeks and frankly, I thought of all right, as in a karaoke sort of way, but aren't anything like in the class of the professionals.
And I think that's affecting politics as well. I think that one of the differences, for example, between a previous generation of politics and this generation politicians is that you look at men like Roy Jenkins or Dennis Healy, and these people were biographers, they were intellectuals. They were very deeply imbued with knowledge about things.
Or there would be people who came from a scientific background who would become politicians. We now have a generation of politics and politicians for whom, I hate to say this, apparently being good on television, and frankly, most of them aren't that good, is enough. They don't lead, they repeat what they're told to say.
Now, that's not true about everybody, but it is true about far too many, and I think the standards are too low. And a large part of that last point I want to make on this is down to my trade in journalism we lack curiosity. We are not, by and large, doing the sort of work.
When I came into television journalism, we had programs like Weekend Worlds and so on, which focused on trying to understand what is the issue here, what's the problem? And then say to the politician, what are you going to do about it? Because underlying the political debate should be a very simple premise.
Good and bad decisions are not what politics are about. If everybody knows what's good, then you don't need politics, everybody goes in that direction. Killing children is not good. You don't need any political debate about that. The issue for politics is always that there are choices to be made, usually between bad and worse.
And the point of politics is to decide which is which. And which one you're going to choose. Now, I think journalism at the moment does not bother itself with delineating and articulating those choices and really giving politicians the opportunity to explain why they're making the choice that they're making.
All we tend to do these days is to start from the premise that the politician is bad, is neglectful, has evil motivations, wants to do down the poor, and that's it.
>> Andrew Roberts: Tell me, this is something I ask all my guests. What's your favorite, what if, your favorite historical counterfactual?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Well, I thought a lot about this and there were lots like I, in my corner of the world, the thing that we often think about is what would have happened if the West Indian Federation had worked? Would we have been a better. Would the Caribbean have been a better place?
And so, but I think in my lifetime, if I had to choose a what if that could well have changed the world, it would-
>> Andrew Roberts: It doesn't have to be your lifetime. It can be any period of history, whatever you like.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: I'm thinking about now.
>> Andrew Roberts: Go on.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: What if Bobby Kennedy's assassin had missed?
>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, very interesting. So what do you think? Do you think he'd have made a great president?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: I don't know if he would have made a great president. I don't think John F Kennedy was a great president. I think Bobby Kennedy would have been a better president.
But what it would have meant was no Nixon, no Watergate, no Kissinger. Possibly, I think Kissinger is an extremely important figure.
>> Andrew Roberts: I bet you're gonna say, no Vietnam. I bet you're gonna say, no Vietnam, but let's remember that JFK was the person who started putting men in.
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Indeed, I would've never said no Vietnam. What I would have said about that is that we might have been out of Vietnam faster. What we don't know, actually, and this would be the big thing, is what effect Bobby Kennedy would have had on the cold war. Would he have handled it differently?
Would he have been able to find a different approach to the Soviet Union that might have meant that the Soviet collapse or the Soviet Union changed a little earlier and didn't collapse in 1989 the way it did with the consequence of what we now have, for example? I think Bobby Kennedy's surviving and becoming president, I just think that it's something that might have made a lot of difference.
>> Andrew Roberts: And he'd have been president till, what, 1976 and 77 if he'd won in 68?
>> Sir Trevor Phillips: Yep.
>> Andrew Roberts: And on that note, on that utopian, highly utopian note, Sir Trevor Phillips, thank you very much indeed.
>> Andrew Roberts: I want to thank Trevor for that stimulating conversation. Join us next time on Secrets of Statecraft, when our next guest will be John Bolton, who was the US ambassador to the United nations from 2005 to 2006, and national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.
>> Hoover Representative: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.
