The former Labour minister resigned from her post last week.
Jess Phillips was branded an ‘incoherent mess’ (Image: BBC)
Former Labour minister Jess Phillips was torn to shreds during an appearance on BBC politics show Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg as she was branded an “incoherent mess”. In a car crash segment, Phillips admitted that many people had misunderstood her resignation letter, which she handed to prime minister Keir Starmer last week.
On the programme, Phillips told Kuenssberg: “I was expecting to hear something on Monday that said, ‘I get it, I get what’s just happened in the local election and I’m going to be big and bold’, but instead what I heard was, ‘We won’t just have incremental change’, and it just didn’t sound true to me or my experiences. I thought, look, if I have to push for bold change, then resigning is one way that I would do that.
“I don’t think people understand exactly what I am talking about, exactly, in my resignation letter. What I am talking about is stopping 91% of child sexual abuse online. The ability for children to take the naked images of themselves and do livestreaming of their own sexual abuses is something that… I had to try and stop.
“This is one where the technology literally exists to be able to stop that child abuse from happening.
“My experience of trying to push that through has been the most frustrating, and the level of timidity, the level of, ‘We won’t say we’ll legislate, we’ll say that we’ll work with the tech companies’.
“In the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy that came out in December, there was about a week-long argument about what words would be written into that.”
Later on the programme, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wasn’t impressed with Phillips’ speech, as she laid into her: “The Labour Party is the problem. It’s not Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham or Wes Streeting alone. It is all of them.
Kemi Badenoch slammed the former Labour minister (Image: BBC)
“Just listen to Jess Phillips – that was an incoherent mess, that’s one of the former ministers, that’s somebody who is going to be picking the next Labour leader, she can’t articulate a brief which she has held for nearly two years.
“She is talking about Wes Streeting wanting to be more popular, maybe have an election – this is a game to them.”
Phillips also admitted she wants to see a leadership contest, telling Kuenssberg: “I think it’d be better if we had a contest, personally. Not a really long one though – my gosh, they can be quite tedious. Yes, there has to be a contest.”