Melanie Phillips

Melanie S Phillips (born 4 June 1951) is a controversial British journalist, author and social critic. She has a reputation as an outspoken right-winger but has said she considers herself a 'liberal in the true sense' and 'certainly not of the right'.[[1]]( She has said she has been 'very influenced' by American neoconservatives,[[2]]( and considers neoconservatism as 'the only truly moral response to the times in which we live'.[[3]]( In March 2011 Phillips wrote a column on the murder of an Israeli settler family in which she referred to 'the moral depravity of the Arabs' and wrote that 'the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages'. [[4]]( Phillips was born on 4 June 1951, the daughter of Alfred and Mabel Phillips. [[5]]( Her father was a dress salesman and her mother ran a children's clothes shop. They were 'solid Labour voters' and were Jewish, which Phillips says gave her 'a moral framework of social concern and concern for repair of the world.' [[6]]( She attended Putney High School for Girls, a private school in Putney, South West London, and then read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. [[7]]( In 1976 she joined the New Society as a staff writer. In 1977 she joined the Guardian where she worked for over 15 years. She was social services correspondent 1978–80; leader writer 1980–84; news editor 1984–87; and Assistant Editor and columnist 1987–93. [[11]]( She took her column first to the Observer") in 1993 and then to the Sunday Times in 1998. In December 2001 she moved to the Daily Mail . Phillips began blogging on her own website in October 2003. Four years later, she accepted an invitation to move the blog to the Spectator website. [[12]]( She has two children. Her son Gabriel Rozenberg") is also a journalist. [[13]]( Phillips was involved in student politics at Oxford in the early 1970s but was not radical. A fellow student politician told the Guardian : 'She wasn't on the left. She was a liberal. She was very nice, very organised, and was always going to be a journalist.' Phillips originally wrote for liberal and centre-left publications, but Andy Beckett suggests she has always had a tendency to look at social problems from a more right-wing perspective: This was a risky conclusion for a journal read mainly by left-leaning professionals. Shortly afterwards, New Society published a letter from a Brixton probation officer denouncing the article as selective and sensational. [[14]]( By the early 1990s Phillips was professing views in her column widely considered reactionary. Andy Beckett writes that during the mid-90s 'she was drawn to communitarianism, a slightly priggish strain of American liberalism; and then by the early, idealistic phase of New Labour.' [[15]]( But in the Eighties these ideals began to be perverted. The Thatcher government's control over public life created an alternative establishment on the Left. The result was a remarkable mirror image of political conformity: Conservatives held sway in the public sphere and the Left was confined to using its power over personal behaviour. So it was in the mid-Eighties that I began to become uncomfortably aware that Tory newspapers were saying certain things I realised were true - and which were being denied at the liberal end of the market. In particular, they were making some devastating criticisms of the education system. The charge was that teachers were failing to teach children properly; that emphasis on literacy and numeracy was being replaced by a child-centred philosophy that devalued rules and was inimical to the imparting of knowledge; and that the children who were suffering most were those from disadvantaged backgrounds for whom schools were the one lifeline out of the ghettos of poverty. [[16]]( Phillips also noted in her essay how her belief in the importance of ‘family values’ had alienated her from liberals. She attacked the anti-racism of the 1980s which she said ‘started out with the worthy intenti