Jess Phillips

Jessica Rose "Jess" Phillips (born 9 October 1981) is a British Labour Party politician who became the Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Birmingham Yardley at the 2015 general election.

The youngest of four children, Phillips is the daughter of a "bearded (English) teacher", and a mother who was Deputy Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation and Chair of South Birmingham Mental Health Trust. Her parents were politically active: "Growing up with my father was like growing up with Jeremy Corbyn" she told Rachel Cooke of The Observer in March 2016. Her childhood ambition was to become Prime Minister. Phillips studied Economic and Social History/Social Policy at the University of Leeds between 2000 and 2003. With her parents, she marched against the Iraq War. Between 2011 and 2013, she studied a postgraduate diploma in Public Sector Management at the University of Birmingham.

From 2010, Phillips worked for Women’s Aid. She had a post as a business development manager at the domestic sexual abuse charity, responsible for refuges of sexual abuse in Sandwell in the West Midlands. Before her work for the charity, she was employed at her parent's company Healthlinks Event Management Services Limited.

Philipps left the Labour Party during the years of Tony Blair's leadership. "I didn’t rejoin until after the 2010 election", she told Rachel Cooke. Her period at Women's Aid made Phillips "utterly pragmatic… I learned that my principles don’t matter as much as [people's] lives.” In the 2012 local elections, she was elected as a Labour councillor for Longbridge ward, taking the seat from the Conservatives. She was then appointed as the victims champion for Birmingham City Council, lobbying police and criminal justice organisations on behalf of victims. She also served on the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel.

2015 election and first months in the Commons

Phillips was selected to contest Birmingham Yardley in June 2013, a constituency at the time represented by John Hemming of the Liberal Democrats who in 2010 held the seat with a 3,002 majority. For the 2015 general election, Labour required a swing of 3.7% to take the seat, and after a swing of 11.7% Phillips achieved a majority of 6,595 or 16% of votes cast. She made her maiden speech on 28 May 2015, highlighting the issue of homelessness. In the 2015 Labour leadership election, Phillips nominated Yvette Cooper for leader and Tom Watson for deputy leader.

Phillips verbally clashed with fellow MP Diane Abbott on 14 September over the gender composition of Jeremy Corbyn's first shadow cabinet. After she asked Corbyn why he had failed to appoint a woman to shadow the great offices of state, Abbott accused her of being "sanctimonious" and pointed out that Phillips is "not the only feminist in the PLP (Parliamentary Labour party)". Corbyn did not intervene in the dispute. Owen Bennett wrote for The Huffington Post that Phillips recounted: "'I roundly told her to fuck off.' When asked what Ms Abbott did after that suggestion, Ms Phillips replied: 'She fucked off.'"

During the 2015 Labour Party conference on 28 September, she had an exchange on Brighton beach with the former MP George Galloway in which she called him a "rape apologist" (a reference to Galloway's comments in August 2012 about the allegations made against Julian Assange). In a tweet, Galloway said that he had never heard of Phillips, accused her of being a liar, and rejected her assertion that they had an exchange. A few months later, in February 2016, Galloway referred to the "many times" he had made the comments about Assange, when asked if he regretted making them, and "I'm not minded to respond to" Phillips "whose role in life seems to be to slander and insult people". In September 2015, Phillips was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Lucy Powell, then Shadow Education Secretary.

In October 2015, Phillips was subjected to rape threats on social media after she opposed a proposal from the Conservative MP Philip Davies to hold a debate in Parliament on issues affecting men in observance of International Men's Day. Davies said opportunities in the Commons to discuss issues relating to men were "very limited". Phillips told Davies in response: "As the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day. When I've got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate". Davies told BuzzFeed the request was "in the spirit of gender equality" as International Women’s Day also has an annual debate.

Colleagues from both the Labour and Conservative parties agreed with Davies about the need for such a debate, and permission was eventually granted for one to be held in Westminster Hall on 19 November. Phillips was not present at the debate, partly because she did not want her clash with Davies to become the dominant issue. She wrote in The Independent on 19 November: "I want to commend Philip Davies for changing the thrust of the debate from an international men's day event to a debate about the significant and important issue of male suicide".

In November 2015, Phillips said to Helen Pidd of The Guardian: "There’s something wrong with the Labour party. There’s something wrong with the fact that women never rise to the top", pointing to female leaders of the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives. Phillips told Owen Jones in December 2015, that she had told Corbyn and his staff "to their faces: 'The day that ... you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I'll knife you in the front'", if it looked as though he was damaging Labour's chances of winning the 2020 general election. John Mann said Phillips would make "an ideal Labour leader" and had been a "breath of fresh air ever since she arrived and an antidote to the internalised battle between New Labour and Momentum". Responding to criticism about her use of language in the interview with Jones, Phillips said on Twitter: "I am no more going to actually knife Jeremy Corbyn than I am actually a breath of fresh air, or a pain in the arse".

Since January 2016

In January 2016, Phillips said on Question Time that events akin to the mass sexual assaults in Cologne happened every week on Birmingham's Broad Street. She insisted any "patriarchal culture" must be challenged, but the UK should not "rest on its laurels" where two women are murdered every week. Her remarks provoked criticism in Birmingham from the local police and the general public, including calls to resign, but were sustained by others, "This isn’t something that refugees have brought into our country. This is something that’s always existed", she told the Birmingham Mail in response to the criticism. Joan Smith wrote that the attacks on women in Cologne were on a such an organised mass scale that any comparison with incidents in Birmingham was misleading. An "injudicious remark" was doing "incalculable damage" to the cause of challenging violence against women.

In the month's Labour reshuffle, she accused the Labour leadership of giving women a "pat on the head", rather than appoint women to positions in the party. "I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn hates women – I don’t think Jeremy hates anyone", she wrote in The Guardian, but "in the hard left of British politics lurks a gruesome misogyny" which has "a special talent" for discriminating against women. She stepped down from her role as PPS to Lucy Powell, the former Shadow Education Secretary, in June 2016.

After several thousand threatening or demeaning tweets, including rape threats, were sent to Phillips within 36 hours during May 2016, which Twitter said did not break its rules, Phillips in The Daily Telegraph accused the social media company of "colluding with my abusers". Her response to the murder in June 2016 of her friend, the Labour MP Jo Cox, was that it "makes me want to fight harder". She wrote of them both receiving online abuse and threats: "Usually, we both shrugged it off, never feeling any real fear. Conversations usually ended with a defiant, 'we won't let the bastards grind us down' and a cuddle". In August 2016, she told The World at One on Radio 4 that a "panic room" was being installed in her constituency office which now has an alarm system. At her home, improved locks have been fitted.

She became chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party following a vote in September 2016, defeating her predecessor Dawn Butler, who is considered loyal to Jeremy Corbyn. Since being appointed to the position Phillips has said she thinks men should be banned from standing for Labour in all by-elections until at least 50% of Labour MPs are female.