Jess phillips

Saturday

Cindy Yu

Elon Musk and the outrage about Britain’s grooming gangs

19 min listen

The grooming gangs scandal is back in the news this week after Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips rejected calls for a government inquiry into historic child abuse in Oldham, prompting a conservative backlash. Robert Jenrick, the Shadow Justice Secretary, called it ‘shameful’; Liz Truss, the former Prime Minister, labelled Phillips’s title ‘a perversion of the English language.’ Even Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, has piled in, arguing that the Home Office minister ‘deserves to be in prison.’ As the grooming gangs story continues to gather traction, will we see an inquiry? And how should we assess the Home Secretary’s success six months into the job? Cindy Yu speaks to James

Thursday

Sam Kriss

How depressing when people over-identify with their ethnicity

I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day

Tuesday

Posie Parker

Jess Phillips and Labour’s ongoing women problem

Last week, Intelligence Squared put on a debate called ‘Is Labour unelectable?’ Unsurprisingly, Labour MP Jess Phillips spoke against the motion – yet in doing so she managed to prove exactly why Labour are in fact hopelessly sunk. The key moment was when Spiked’s Ella Whelan challenged Phillips for having quote tweeted and then promptly deleted an article that was supportive of Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor hounded out of her job for her audacious view that women deserve some of their own spaces.  ‘This is worth a read. Thoughtful and gentle,’ said Phillips on Twitter, though apparently she quickly decided it wasn’t worth a read and removed the tweet. Some

Sunday

Debbie Hayton

Jess Phillips and the assault on biology

Jess Phillips thinks that transwomen — like me — are not female, but we should be treated as women. She has probably succeeded in upsetting both sides of what has become a toxic debate. Politicians entering these shark-infested waters do so at their own peril. If, like Rosie Duffield or Joanna Cherry, they stand up for science and reason, they put their careers at risk. If they go with the programme that we all have a gender identity, and biological sex doesn’t matter, they end up looking ridiculous, like the ‘jiggle on the stairs’ crew. Phillips worked for Women’s Aid before becoming a Labour MP. She knows about sex-based discrimination

Sunday

John Sturgis

Jess Phillips is wrong about football’s double-barrelled surnames

As the nation went football mad last week, nowhere was there a more stark expression of the ‘I’m-new-to-this performative fandom’ phenomenon than in Westminster. We were treated to the Prime Minister wearing an England top over a shirt and tie, Jacob Rees-Mogg bizarrely recreating the John Barnes ‘World in Motion’ rap and so on and so on. But amid this stiff competition the MP who most – unwittingly – revealed their apparent real lack of interest in or knowledge of the beautiful game was Labour’s Jess Phillips. ‘My youngests question for tonight “why do footballers never have double barrelled names?”’, she asked. Phillips no doubt intended to score a culture