According to The Times, he said: ‘Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect.
‘Because what you are essentially saying is the fact that they behave in a different way, some of which we may not like, is because they haven’t yet seen the light. It may be that they see the world differently to the rest of us.’
Mr Phillips added that people of certain backgrounds in the UK are not going to change their views ‘simply because we are constantly telling them that basically they should be like us’.