Jess Phillips Quotes

One of the things I want to achieve in the potentially short time I'm in Westminster is to stop people thinking we're all the same. Because while they believe that, the establishment stays in the same people’s hands. Nothing changes. It is awful to hear people on the doorstep saying: "You politicians are all in it for yourselves." But that's nowhere near as bad as hearing that people feel they have no one to represent them. That's the disaster, not the fact that I have to weather a Twitter storm.

[Referring to domestic violence.] It took until the third [statement during the first lockdown] for the prime minister to even mention it. And the first penny that reached the frontline was five months after the crisis started. It’s not for the want of people like me, in the beginning, being like "we should think about this". When Covid-19 was still just a thing in China, we were talking about rising rates of domestic abuse that were being reported by Chinese charities.

[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.

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."

[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.

I am, however, still dubious about the need for an international men's day in and of itself. For me it is up there with needing a white history month, or able body action day. Men are celebrated, elevated and awarded every day of the week on every day of the year. Being a man is its own reward. You hit the jackpot when you are born a boy child. Yes within your group things are tough for all sorts of reasons. None of them are because you are a man. You might be a poor man, a sick man, a marginalised minority ethnic man. Brother, I'm with you. I'll carry your banner, sing your song of freedom, I'll even carry your coats and make the sandwiches.

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.'

[Entering the elevator in Portcullis House] My husband's a lift engineer and he always takes the stairs.

You get low-level sexism all the time. I've defended other women in the chamber. I know women who work for me, certainly Black women, have found Westminster to be oppressive.
Lots of men shush me because I'm quite rowdy. I get lots of comments like "calm down, the honourable lady acts with her heart". In the post-Me Too world, you get joking comments like "am I allowed to ask you to pass the milk?" or "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this to me, but you look lovely". ...
Quite a lot of Tory men treat me like I'm some sort of exotic bird. People act like I'm either a pain or something to be marvelled at. You can see sometimes in meetings, women are asked to do things like get the tea. The expectation of them being stupid and annoying is quite common – that is very irritating. There is a power imbalance, there is an element of impunity.

[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.

I roundly told her to fuck off .... She fucked off. People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t as the opportunity presents itself every other minute.

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.

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.

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.

She compares activist-journalist Owen Jones and Novara Media writers to noisy, overexcited children who have had too much sugar – "Who cares what they think, frankly."