Massie quit over leadership style

By Ian Macrae

For someone who, by his own admission has spent 35 years as a member of various quangos, and at the forefront of the struggle for greater equality and more rights for disabled people, Sir Bert Massie is usually possessed of a pragmatic and gently optimistic outlook.

But in giving his reasons for resigning from his post as a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) he abandoned his usual disarmingly persuasive tone in favour of something rather more direct.

In his letter of resignation to equality minister Harriet Harman, a copy of which has been seen by Disability Now, he said: “As I cannot agree with the way in which the Commission is led, I must, with regret and sadness, offer my resignation with immediate effect.”

The letter went on to describe how Phillips has damaged the EHRC externally.

“The Chairman’s conduct in various ways has damaged the Commission’s external reputation and standing in the media and among stakeholders.  He has now become the constant bad news story over many months.”

Speaking to Disability Now about the decision to quit, amid a storm of controversy surrounding Phillips’s reappointment and silence on calls for him to resign, Massie elaborates: “The story is now about the Chair.

And when it comes to that it’s wrong. When the personality becomes the issue, I think the honourable thing for him to have done would have been to walk away.”

Massie also says he warned officials in the Government Equality Department of the likely impact on the Commission of Phillips’s reappointment.

“I spoke to a senior civil servant in the department and I told him that one consequence of this decision would be resignations.”

To illustrate his claim of the negative impact Phillips had on perceptions of the EHRC, Massie refers back to the Chair’s famously controversial assertion that multi-culturalism is dead.

“Whether multi-culturalism is dead or not,” he says, “there are a lot of black and Asian people who don’t believe it is, and they believe it’s about their identity. Quite often, what Trevor says is the personal view of Trevor, but it’s put forward as the collective view of the Commission. That’s no way to run a commission.”

Asked whether, in the face of Phillips’s failure to resign, Harriet Harman should have sacked him, Massie says: “However we create a vacancy we need another Chair.”

In addition to Massie, two other leading disabled members of the Commission, Baroness Campbell and Alun Davies, also resigned. This raises, says Massie, fundamental questions about the EHRC’s ongoing viability and standing.

“The worry is that we may not get good quality people applying to be commissioners.

“There is no disabled commissioner at the moment. The law requires there to be a disabled commissioner. If there isn’t one, is the Commission itself legal?”