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" "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."
Jessica Rose Phillips (née Trainor; born 9 October 1981) is a British politician serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Birmingham Yardley since 2015. A member of the Labour Party, she was Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding in Keir Starmer's Opposition frontbench from 2020 to 2023, when she resigned over a vote on the Gaza conflict. In July 2024, following the 2024 general election, she was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office with her previous responsibilities.
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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.
I have seen again and again how women's lives are considered a niche issue rather than the main event. If there are no powerful women in the room, it will continue to happen. I can already hear the rebuttal that Liz Truss was a woman and she was dreadful, but that argument only holds if you think that Liz Truss is the embodiment of all women and her failure belongs to us all.
Liz Truss didn't fail because she was a woman, she failed because she was a right-wing ideologue who was unfit for the job. I can see plenty of those left around the cabinet table so they can't be too fussed about that.
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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.