Jess Phillips

It's hard not to like Jess Phillips - and I wouldn't want to. She's no doubt a good constituency MP and a tenacious fighter for gender equality. But I do wish she'd give at least as much attention to the most fundamental inequality of all: class (including the UK's offensively unequal distribution of wealth and income). Because of this blind spot, Phillips is essentially a conservative. She believes in the 'rungs of the ladder' approach to improving people's lives while failing to question the need for a ladder in the first place. She wants to remove barriers to 'opportunity' while retaining much of the existing structure of society and its gross inequalities. In this book, Phillips spends more time dissing members on the left of her own party than she does in opposing the rabble of self-serving clowns on the government benches. If not for her own family background, I get the feeling she would be just as content in the Lib-Dems or even in a Conservative Party of fifty years ago.… (altro)

Everywoman is part memoir, part feminist manifesto. I generally don’t talk politics on here – I am kind of loathe to do so now, but I feel I need to state my position. I didn’t vote for Jess Philips – I had lost confidence in the Labour Party – and loathed her predecessor (a Lib Dem MP) and so having decamped to the Greens, I knew nothing about Jess Phillips until after she was elected. She’s a kick ass feminist, who wears her heart on her sleeve, she spends her life fighting for women who have no voice – or feel like they have no voice – she’s heroically fierce, and very funny – she’s a normal woman, who has a demanding full time job, and two kids I really liked her. However, normal women, with full time demanding jobs and two kids don’t generally have to run a sickening gauntlet of daily, vile rape threats and online abuse – Jess Philips does. Why? Because she’s a woman, she says just what she thinks, she isn’t a Corbyn supporter and she has been marked out as an angry feminist (*sigh*) – that is basically all it takes to be so abused. Jess has been criticised for the silliest things; showing too much cleavage on channel 4, and writing the word Mom, rather than mum – yeah well, we say mom in Birmingham so get over it – I’m with Jess on that one, though I tend to write mum (I don’t know why) I know when I speak it comes out mom.

There is a wonderful honesty in this book, she really does tell the truth, about pretty much everything that matters. Jess Philips admits to her own mistakes, those gaffs – which when you’re in the public eye stay with you for ever (haven’t we all opened our mouths at work before fully engaging our brain?). Her detractors are pretty unforgiving, leaping on any little error with whooping glee – it’s all depressingly nasty. It is a wonder to me that anyone sticks their head above the parapet – thank goodness however for the rest of us, that they do. In this book, Jess tells us just what it is like to win an election, and then find herself having to report for duty (in Parliament!) just seventy-two hours later. Four months later she was told by Rt Hon. Harriet Harman MP that she would never be popular – blimey!

“Being told that you’ll never be popular might seem harsh. Especially when it was said to me by the woman who, aside from my mother, had probably had the greatest effect on my life. This is the woman who fought for women like me to get where I am. She was elected around the same time I was born. Every moment she has spent in our democratic palace has been to make sure that girls like me from outside the Establishment can have a couple of kids, make some monumental mistakes and still stumble upon success and, in my case, one of the most powerful jobs in the land.”

Today, even in 2017 there are those (frequently, lets be honest they are men) who seek to silence those who speak out against violence and inequality – they attach labels to them – angry feminist being one. It’s a dangerous world out there, and the abuse that Jess Phillips is subject to would have me hiding under my bed with a baseball bat. Jess, is braver than me. Going on to tell us about her own self-doubts, not always as confident as she may appear she must often force herself out the door to attend whatever meeting she has lined up. Motherhood and politics are not an easy mix – (and she doesn’t claim that male MPs’ family lives are not affected) but she doesn’t see her kids everyday – and she knows she couldn’t do her job without the support of her husband and her mother-in-law. There are plenty of people who don’t think Jess Phillips should be an MP – I rather love her response.

“I have made no secret of the fact that I was selected on an all-woman shortlist (AWS). People often use this to assert that I was not the best person for the job, merely the best woman. Because, you know, women aren’t people apparently. I wonder if Jessica Ennis-Hill was ever told this? ‘Er, sorry, Jess, your Olympic gold medal isn’t a real one because you only competed against other women; instead we’ve given you this medal we call girlie gold.’”

She pays homage to her mother, who died a few years ago – a woman who was a fearless campaigner herself, she helped make Jess the woman she is today. A woman who continues to fight for the women who have had all the fight (literally) knocked out of them, who gives an empowering voice to those whose voices can’t be heard. She is a proponent of the Universal Basic Income, and is the chair of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party, and has (two years on the trot) read out the names of all the women murdered by men in the previous year. One of the names she read out this year was that of Labour MP Jo Cox (one of the people to whom this book is dedicated) a colleague of Jess’s she was also a friend. What happened to Jo Cox was so dreadful it gave us all pause for thought in June of last year– and yet a few days later the madness continued, and we all know what happened then.

I could probably say a lot more about this book, (but I have gone on long enough) empowering, honest, illuminating and funny – it is as the title suggests, a book for every woman, and I would suggest every man.… (altro)