Good riddance to Jess Phillips

Jess Phillips resigned yesterday from her role as the UK safeguarding minister, citing prime minister Keir Starmer’s poor leadership.

In her resignation letter, she described Starmer as a ‘good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things’, while warning that this is ‘not enough’ to get results. Ironically, that it is not simply enough to say you care about an issue is something Phillips herself could have been reminded of. Safeguarding children from sexual abuse, as well as fulfilling Labour’s promise of halving violence towards women and girls, would have required, at times, a willingness to stick one’s neck out for those at risk. Phillips repeatedly proved that she was unwilling to do this.

‘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?’, LBC host Tom Swarbrick asked Phillips in an interview last year, in the wake of several incidents of sexual assault perpetrated by illegal migrants. Phillips was unable to give him a straight answer. ‘Which culture doesn’t have patriarchy and misogyny in it?’, she tried. When Swarbrick brought up crime data regarding migrants from Afghanistan, indicated as 20 times more likely to be convicted of sexual assault than the average Brit, Phillips still refused to engage. ‘I’ve seen victims and perpetrators from every single walk of life’, she stressed. She skirted further questions surrounding culture and misogyny by concluding: ‘I’ll tell you the group of people who are most likely to abuse – that is men.’

It was a disappointing show. When given the opportunity to stand in solidarity with Afghan women living under genuine patriarchal oppression, not to mention with those British women who have suffered as a result of the government importing those norms, Phillips’s self-professed ‘gobby’ feminism seemed to lose its bite. The fear of being labelled as problematic was simply too much. Hence why she, and so many others, continue to pretend that men socialised in countries where women can be legally beaten, raped and imprisoned in their own homes would never dream of doing the same things in Britain.

This is also why Phillips managed to resign from her post as safeguarding minister without a single word about the biggest safeguarding scandal in British history. For decades, grooming gangs made up predominantly of Pakistani Muslims raped thousands of vulnerable, working-class English girls as the establishment looked the other way. And yet, Phillips had been among those most resistant to holding a statutory national inquiry into these appalling crimes. When she was later made responsible for organising and overseeing such an inquiry, several survivors urged her to quit. They cited tight controls on what they could say publicly, as well as attempts to widen the topic of discussion beyond grooming gangs – a not-so-subtle attempt to dilute the inquiry’s focus. If such accusations are true, Phillips’ actions read more as narrative preservation than an attempt to seek justice for the industrial-scale rape of women she had vowed to protect.

One recalls a Question Time appearance back in 2016, when Phillips was asked about a spate of sex attacks that had taken place on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Germany. In a single night, there had been 509 sexual offences reported to local police, including 22 rapes, the majority of which had been committed by men who appeared ‘north African’. In true Jess fashion, she responded with evasion: ‘A very similar situation happens on Broad Street in Birmingham every week, where women are baited and heckled.’ In other words, ‘Stop looking over there, and look instead at this safer, less polarising thing that won’t get me cancelled’.

‘Politics is as much about feelings as policy’, Phillips concluded her resignation letter. If that’s the case, then let’s hope – for the sake of thousands of vulnerable women and girls who have been thrown on the scrapheap over the past few years – that our next safeguarding minister actually ‘feels’ like doing their job this time.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.