Jess Phillips’s two-tier feminism

Jess Phillips, the UK’s safeguarding minister, likes to think of herself as a no-nonsense, straight-talking defender of women and girls. A ‘gobby’ feminist, unafraid to stand up to bullying, misogynistic men. Unless, that is, those men are from a migrant background.

We saw this once again on LBC this morning in a discussion about sexual offences in Britain. Host Tom Swarbrick asked the UK safeguarding minister: ‘Do you think there are people in this country who have, culturally, a very, very different view of women, and therefore are more likely to be engaged in these kinds of activities?’ She struggled to give a convincing answer.

Forget mansplaining, Phillips’s response deserves its own coinage – let’s call it Jess-splaining. ‘Which culture doesn’t have patriarchy and misogyny in it?’, she tried to counter.

Swarbrick even raised specific crime data regarding migrants from Afghanistan, who are 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual assault than the average Briton. For Phillips, such statistics don’t matter, as she has ‘seen victims and perpetrators from every single walk of life’.

Clearly, Phillips was just trying to avoid the question entirely. It’s hard to imagine that if she were to meet, say, an Afghan girl upset that she cannot go to school under the Taliban, she would comfort her by saying: ‘Oh, but patriarchy exists everywhere, my dear.’

It would be one thing if Phillips were simply avoiding an uncomfortable discussion, as gutless as that might be. But there have even been times where she has appeared to downplay men’s bad behaviour, presumably with one eye on the ‘optics’. Last year, groups of masked British Muslim rioters descended on Bordersley Green in her Birmingham Yardley constituency, openly brandishing weapons. Some men in balaclavas surrounded a female journalist, made gun gestures towards the camera and forced her off air. Phillips’s response? ‘These people came to this location because it has been spread that racists were coming to attack them’, she kindly Jess-splained to us racist thickos on X. Her ire was reserved for Reform UK’s Richard Tice because he had shared a video of the incident.

Back in 2016, Phillips expressed her, er, solidarity with the women who were sexually assaulted by migrants in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by similarly downplaying what had happened. Appearing on BBC Question Time, she told a concerned member of the studio audience that, ‘A very similar situation happens on Broad Street in Birmingham every week, where women are baited and heckled’. Except, I don’t recall the last time a single night out in Birmingham ended with 509 sexual offences being reported to local police, including 22 rapes, as happened on that awful night in Cologne. Perhaps Ms Phillips knows something us less-wordly types do not.

Phillips’s ‘sensitivities’ haven’t just led to a few foot-in-mouth moments on TV interviews or some ill-advised tweets. They have clearly had an effect on policy, too. As UK safeguarding minister, Phillips had been among the most vocal opponents of holding a statutory national inquiry into the grooming-gangs scandal – crimes, as is now well known, that disproportionately involved men from Pakistani Muslim backgrounds. Had it not been for Louise Casey’s review, the Labour government would have happily continued to avoid any serious reckoning with this atrocity.

Sadly, the staunch refusal to admit that certain cultures might hold more misogynistic worldviews than others is common among a certain type of feminist. Whether you call them ‘progressive’ or ‘intersectional’ feminists, they are keen to help women and girls, only as long as they don’t have to say anything that might be a bit uncomfortable, or earn them a disapproving look at dinner parties.

Phillips’s LBC interview concluded with the host trying to extract from her whether she considers Britain to be ‘a fundamentally misogynistic, patriarchal society’. Instead of answering the question, she responded triumphantly by saying: ‘I’ll tell you the group of people who are most likely to abuse – that is men.’

And there we have it – the pinnacle of all Jess-planations. Another difficult discussion successfully swerved.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.