Jess Phillips Quotes

[The UK is] in desperate need and our politics [is] in even greater need of cleaning up and I thank everyone in this room for making a really good spectacle of proving that for me.

All the talk about rebuilding the economy post-pandemic, post-Brexit, post-austerity, is always about diggers [...] I mean, do something to make sure everyone gets to play with the digger. What have they done to get more women signed up to digger courses? Make sure I can control a digger.

But what mattered most to [Karen] Ingala Smith were women’s names, not numbers. So in 2016 she was delighted when the Labour MP Jess Phillips – who’d previously worked for Women's Aid – asked to read them out on International Women's Day. Now this roll call of more than 120 stolen lives, recited to a hushed House of Commons, has become an annual commemoration. "Dead women is a thing we’ve all just accepted as part of our daily lives," Phillips said last year, when among the names was Sarah Everard. The list not only put male violence in the national spotlight but, says Ingala Smith, "Family after family have said how important it is to hear their loved one’s name read out in parliament, and know it is recorded in Hansard for ever."

Reading out the list of names of women killed by men compiled by the femicide census as I do every year on International Women's Day will, no matter what I do in the future, never be rivalled by anything else in my political life. It is the thing most strangers approach me about when I am out and about. I've been told so many times that I read out the name of someone's daughter, sister, friend or mother. It catches me off guard whenever this happens. I'm struck by the honour that families feel to see their loved one's name exists forever on the public record; a roll call akin to that of fallen soldiers.

The trouble is that many of those who like what Assange did with WikiLeaks are willing to look the other way about the accusations against him. The same people who would march for women's rights wearing pussy hats and waving banners about what a sexist pig Trump is are not feminist allies when their gods are found to be fallible. Platitudes about how we should never say women are lying when they come forward about rape suddenly don't fit any more and now women are making up sexual violence as part of an American conspiracy.

[To pro-Palestinian hecklers] I will carry on with my speech. I understand that a strong woman standing up to you is met with such reticence.

We punish mothers for falling prey, rather than see how we can help them be the best moms that they can be and support them. We treat people terribly – we tell people that it's their fault that they're victims and that they're going to have their children removed because they haven't protected them.

My only ambition in politics is to halve the levels of violence experienced by women and girls in a decade. Despite two women dying every week there is still no strategy or target around femicide. We live in a patriarchy still. It is 2024 but all our institutions are based on a 1950s, or 1850s or even 1750s ideal that doesn’t work for women

[M]aking women as important as bins.

Assange has, for seven years, evaded accusations of sexual violence in Sweden.

I would do anything that I felt was going to make the Labour party win the general election because if I don't have that attitude then all I’m doing is colluding with the Tories.
If that means making Jeremy better, I'll roll my sleeves up. If that's not going to happen – and I've said [this] to him and to 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.'

The Russell Brand exposé by the Sunday Times and Dispatches for Channel 4 would have not long ago been overwhelmingly applauded as thorough, well-sourced and sensitively managed journalism. Instead, we have seen the exact reason why women don't speak up.

This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered parliament. I have tried to do everything that I could to make it so that this was not the outcome, but it is with a heavy heart that I will be leaving my post in the shadow Home Office team.
On this occasion I must vote with my constituents, my head, and my heart which has felt as if it were breaking over the last four weeks with the horror of the situation in Israel and Palestine.
I can see no route where the current military action does anything but put at risk the hope of peace and security for anyone in the region now and in the future.

[The vandalising of cars used by Phillips' team were filmed for social media postings] The reason they're filming is to drive content, to incite more intimidation [...] In my constituency, the humiliation was by men, to women.
And they wish to drive content ... that's what our politics has become - humiliation. Content-driven grift.

In the Johnson and [Dominic] Cummings era of government, it was often assumed that anything that happened in Westminster was a group of political geniuses playing 3D chess and laying traps for the Labour Party (or opponents from within the government) to fall in to.
It did sometimes feel true, although it was my experience that it was more by accident than design. I think it might be fair to say that they were playing 2D chess with quite some skill – until they weren't. Liz Truss, it would seem, cannot even play 1D chess. In fact, I am not sure her particular operation could be compared to the shape-sorting toys a one-year-old can master.