Get out of our country, says racial equality guru Trevor Phillips
Remark aimed at British Muslims who want sharia law

London, 27 Feb 2006 | Get out of Britain - that's Commission for Racial Equality chief Trevor Phillips's message for British Muslims who want sharia law for the UK.

Mr Phillips made the remarks, reported in the Guardian today, to ITV1's Jonathon Dimbleby. He rejected the idea that British Muslims should be allowed to practice and enforce sharia law in their own communities.

But his comments come despite any real evidence that a meaningfully substantial number of members of the Muslim community wish to live under sharia law.

The Sunday Telegraph splashed with a big poll on 19 February, declaring that 40 per cent of British Muslims "want sharia law introduced into parts of the country".

The poll suggests that a total of 640,000 British Muslims (40 per cent of the total of 1.6m counted in the 2001 Census) might support the idea of sharia law in some communities.

On the face of it this seems like a substantial number of people -- and we should bear in mind that just 36 per cent of the electorate voted for Labour at the 2005 election.

But dig deeper into the story and it begins to fall apart.

In the same ICM poll, a slightly higher proportion of Muslims (41 per cent) said that they would oppose sharia law. And for those who supported it, the question clearly concerned sharia law in certain majority-Muslim areas - not a nationwide change in the law.

And the response to another of the poll's questions should have been heartwarming for Mr Phillips, who (says the Guardian) has "stirred controversy with his [...] calls on ethnic minorities to integrate" -- 80 per cent of respondents to the poll said that they agreed with the statement: "Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live within it and not seek to bring it to an end."

A mere seven per cent agreed with the statement: "Western society is decadent and immoral and Muslims should seek to bring it to an end, if necessary by violent means."

So what does the poll really indicate? Yes, you could say that it suggest 40 per cent of British Muslims want sharia law imposed in Britain.

However, the full story is that those people want sharia law in just a few places in the UK, that they are opposed by an equal number of their fellow Muslims, and that they are part of a community which (in general) wants to live within Western society.

That should have been the story - 80 per cent of Muslims happy to live in Western society - not 'Poll reveals 40pc of Muslims want sharia law in UK'. Had the Sunday Telegraph taken a leap into the dark unknown and led with the positive, then we wouldn't have to listen to Trevor Phillips getting his knickers in a twist a week later and demanding an exodus of British Muslims.

Correction: The Guardian described Trevor Phillips as 'Sir Trevor Philips' in its 27 February article. We initially respected this erroneous knighthood. Correction applied: 28 February 2006.