Jessica Rose Phillips is a British Labour Party politician born on 9 October 1981 (age 39 years), Birmingham, United Kingdom.
Phillips was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Lucy Powell, the Shadow Education Secretary, in 2015. She was a vocal critic of the former Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn. Phillips resigned as a PPS in protest over Corbyn’s leadership and threatened to resign from the Labour Party and sit as an independent MP if Corbyn was re-elected as Labour Leader. She did not complete her pledge to resign as a Labour MP.
Phillips was a candidate for Labour Leader in the 2020 leadership election but withdrew from the later stages of the contest.
Jessica was born Jessica Rose Trainor where she was the youngest of four children. Phillips went to King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls, a local grammar school. Her childhood ambition was to become Prime Minister. Phillips studied economic and social history and social policy at the University of Leeds from 2000 to 2003. From 2011 to 2013, she studied for a postgraduate diploma in public sector management at the University of Birmingham.
From 2010, Phillips worked for the Women’s Aid Federation of England as a business development manager, responsible for managing refugees for victims of domestic abuse in Sandwell in the West Midlands. Her period at Women’s Aid as an administrator made Phillips “I learned that my principles don’t matter as much as peoples lives.”
In the 2012 local elections, she was elected as a Labour councilor for the Longbridge ward, taking the seat from the Conservatives. She was then appointed as the victims’ champion at Birmingham City Council, where she mainly protested police and criminal justice organizations on behalf of victims.
She also served on the West Midlands Police and Crime Panel.
In October 2019, Phillips said she thought Labour was unlikely to win a majority in a general election. She said if Labour was not elected the biggest party, Corbyn should resign as party leader, whereupon she might stand for the position. In November 2019, it was announced Phillips would stand for the Labour Party in Birmingham Yardley in the 2019 general election. She went on to win the seat once more, with 23,379 votes in her favor ( a vote share of 54.8%).
Following Corbyn’s decision to step down as Labour leader after the party’s defeat in the 2019 general election, Phillips was suggested as a potential successor.
The first poll of Labour members suggested she could secure 12% of first-preference votes in a leadership competition, putting her third behind Sir Keir Starmer, and Rebecca Long-Bailey. She announced her bid for the leadership on 3 January 2020 in Grimsby, a seat the Conservative party had gained from Labour in the election.
She dropped out of the leadership election campaign on 21 January, during the second stage of obtaining nominations from trade unions, affiliate bodies, and local parties, and subsequently announced her support for Lisa Nandy. Phillips was appointed by Keir Starmer to serve as Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, a position in the Shadow Home Office, on 9 April 2020. It is the first time she has served on the frontbench.
CONTROVERSY
In 2019, a controversy emerged as local Muslim parents in Saltley, Birmingham, associated with the Parkfield Community School, objected to lessons on relationships and inclusivity, being taught to their primary school children as part of Andrew Moffat’s “No Outsiders” program, on the grounds that LGBT relationships were immoral.
One campaigner stated that they saw homosexual relationships as an invalid sexual relationship to have, while others misunderstood the lessons to be teaching children about gay sex. Phillips spoke out publicly against the objecting parents, claiming to feel “bereft about this” and that the material was in her view not “inappropriate.”
FEMINISM
In October 2015, Phillips caused social media outrage after she mocked the Conservative MP Philip Davies for trying to get a debate about International Men’s Day. He cited men’s issues like increasing male suicides, lower life expectancy relative to women, male victims of domestic violence, low educational achievement by working-class white boys, and male experience of child custody cases.
Phillips openly laughed and then stated that: “You’ll have to excuse me for laughing. As the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day.”
Phillips criticized the gender makeup of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle in January 2016.
In March 2021, following the disappearance of Sarah Everard, Phillips read out the names of all women killed in the previous year where a man was subsequently convicted. She said, “killed women are not vanishingly rare, killed women are common”.
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ONLINE ABUSE
Following her objections in 2015 concerning International Men’s Day, Phillips started getting online rape threats on social media.
In May 2016, after campaigning against online bullying, Phillips received thousands of threatening or demeaning tweets within a 36-hour period. After she complained to Twitter and was told the tweets did not break its rules, she accused the company of “colluding” with her abusers.
In an interview published in October 2019, Phillips said of the hate she had experienced, “Fear and hatred can be the things that drive you. I don’t always think of fear as a bad thing, it gives you fight-or-flight”.
BOOKS
On 23 February 2017, her first book, Everywoman, One Woman’s Truth About Speaking the Truth. In May 2019, the book was optioned to be adapted as a television drama by RED Production Company.
Her second book, Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on B.S., was published by Octopus on 3 October 2019.
PERSONAL LIFE
Jess Phillips is married to her childhood friend Tom Phillips.
Previously a lift engineer, he served as her constituency support manager until February 2019. They have two sons, Harry and Danny.
