How did Jess Phillips MP, a proud campaigner for women’s rights, end up cancelling inquiries into the grooming and rape of girls? The MP for Birmingham Yardley and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls has had a sad and ironic career indeed.
Elected ten years ago, Phillips was, the Guardian reported, “the star of the 2015 intake”, who had “made headlines by making as much feminist noise as she possibly [could]”. She was certainly outspoken, but she also had the credentials of someone who had been on the frontlines of women’s issues, working for the Women’s Aid Federation of England.
Before Brexit and Trump, 2015 was the peak of a certain kind of online progressivism — a kind of online progressivism that was serenely convinced of its own cleverness and moral rectitude, and of the inevitable march of progress that lay ahead. Before Black Lives Matter, and before the gender wars, feminism was the dominant theme of this tendency. The forthright Mrs Phillips seemed like the ideal representative of that left-wing moment. She seemed destined to spend many happy years owning dudebros in Parliament.
Well, it hasn’t quite worked out like that. Phillips lost a lot of advocates on the left for her criticism of Jeremy Corbyn and his allies. She said that she would “knife [him] in the front, not the back” and claimed that she had told his friend and supporter Diane Abbott to “fuck off”. Corbyn might have been unpopular with journalists, and with the general public at large, but he was not unpopular among left-wingers. Phillips supported Owen Smith’s doomed attempt to stand against Corbyn in 2016, and then flopped in her own leadership bid in 2020.
But it is on the issues that Phillips’ failures have been most profound. She has struggled, time and again, to combine her commitment to feminism with her commitment to multiculturalism. In the wake of the 2015/2016 mass sexual assaults in Cologne, for example, Phillips said:
A very similar situation to what happened in Cologne could be describing Broad Street in Birmingham every week, where women are baited and heckled.
Being “baited and heckled” is not in fact similar to what happened in Germany, where, as Die Welt reported:
Individual women were surrounded and touched on their breasts, buttocks, and between the legs. In several cases, fingers were inserted into the vagina.
I don’t disagree that there are right-wing people who appear to think that violence against women has been imported — or that it only really matters when migrants are to blame. This is at best purblind and at worst disgracefully opportunistic. But that doesn’t mean that all acts of sexual violence are the same, or that they happen to the same degree. Phillips’ comparison, frankly, was despicable.
But she’s at it again, talking about violence against children in Parliament. Responding to Katie Lam MP, who eloquently raised the issue of grooming gangs, Phillips huffed that there should be “no hierarchy” of child abuse victims. Of course, it is true that all instances of child abuse are appalling. But the grooming gangs were still exceptional in the scale of their criminality and in the extent to which they were ignored and enabled by the state. This is basic stuff.
But Phillips just can’t deal with the dysfunctional consequences of multiculturalism. It doesn’t fit within her model of the world. She won her seat in 2024 by fewer than 700 votes when she came up against an eccentric Muslim candidate from George Galloway’s Workers Party. Phillips faced verbal abuse throughout the campaign, and her victory speech was drowned out by hecklers. When, soon afterwards, Muslims in Birmingham gathered to assault people and harass journalists in response to the anti-migrant riots that followed the Southport stabbings, Phillips was outraged — outraged, that is, with people who reported on the criminal behaviour.
One could also mention her shock and dismay when Muslim activists protested in Birmingham against their children being taught about same-sex relationships. “I don’t agree that you get to pick and choose which equality you can and can’t have,” she said, closing her eyes as if this living, breathing refutation of intersectional politics would vanish, “I fear that you are harming the Muslim community.” This was not, you’ll note, an argument against the activists’ position. It was an argument that they were being ideologically inconvenient.
Phillips has also struggled to apply her instinctive certitude to the trans debate. In 2021 — according to Jordan Tyldesley, writing for The Critic — Phillips took to Twitter to praise a column by a gender critical feminist as “thoughtful and gentle” before deleting her tweet when arguments broke out in the replies. Courageous!
In 2015, Phillips’ self-righteousness and condescension made sense to left-wingers who were convinced that all the arguments in the world had been won and that all they had to do was browbeat pale, male and stale people into agreeing with them. In 2025, amid demographic and ideological instability, it seems desperate. Phillips, it appears, is not shouting from the bow of history, but yelling impotently as its tide approaches.
