Is Jess Phillips okay? I can’t be the only one wondering. The safeguarding minister’s increasingly erratic, shirty performances at the despatch box would suggest she is crumbling under the scrutiny. Scrutiny that she and her government have brought entirely on themselves.
This week, she lashed out at Tory and Reform MPs for daring to criticise Labour’s woeful handling of the grooming-gangs inquiry, which is disintegrating following the resignation of five victims from its liaison panel, some of whom accuse Labour of trying to engineer a ‘cover-up’. She dismissed this as ‘political pointscoring’ and told Lee Anderson to ‘question his own morality’.
Despite Jess Phillips’s supposedly unimpeachable feminist credentials, her principles have abandoned her at the darndest of times
Perhaps she should take her own advice. Because ever since this national inquiry was first mooted, Phillips and her party have managed to summon more outrage about critics daring to question their integrity than they ever have about the mass rape of thousands of girls, by gangs of disproportionately Pakistani Muslim men, covered up and ignored to protect ‘community relations’.
When Elon Musk suddenly found out about the grooming gangs in January, and began denouncing Phillips and Starmer to his hundreds of millions of X followers, Starmer accused him of spreading ‘lies and misinformation’. Famously, he also accused Tories calling for a national inquiry of ‘jumping on a far-right bandwagon’ – one he would board himself just a few months later, when Dame Louise Casey’s rapid review of the scandal bounced the PM into changing his position.
Starmer – director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013 – is clearly keen to defend his own reputation. But for Phillips, the criticism over grooming gangs seems to particularly sting, given her career both inside and outside parliament has been devoted to tackling violence against women and girls.
Well, tough. Because Phillips’ failures here are very real. Indeed, she has now personally become a block to the inquiry proceeding, with some survivors saying they will only re-engage with the process if she has nothing to do with it. After these survivors protested that the scope of the inquiry was being expanded, to downplay the role played by race and religion, Phillips dismissed this as ‘categorically untrue’. Believe the victim, except when they are dissing Jess Phillips.
Phillips has form here. Despite her supposedly unimpeachable feminist credentials, despite telling endless Sunday-supplement interviewers that she is a politician who ‘tells it like it is’, her principles have abandoned her at the darndest of times. Like when the perpetrators happen to be migrants or Muslims, and thus talking about it gives her the ick. She was on Question Time in 2016 in the wake of the New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Cologne, in which hundreds of women were assaulted by Arab and North African men. She likened it to women being ‘heckled’ on your average Friday in Birmingham. Women were raped that night.
Right-wingers are routinely accused of only caring about grooming gangs because brown people happen to be overrepresented among the abusers. This is a despicable accusation, and one big act of projection. These rape gangs were ignored, downplayed and covered up, in no small part, because Labour, the liberal-left, the Great and Good, do not care about sexual violence when they are presented with the wrong kind of victims and the wrong kind of perpetrators. With poor white girls abused by groups of Pakistani Muslim men. With a decades-long horror story that raises deep and searching questions about the multicultural state.
We cannot trust them to preside over the reckoning.
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