Jess Phillips
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Jess Phillips MP for Birmingham Yardley 2015- Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding April 2020- 4 December 2020 Arriving in Westminster UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE): When you were elected in May 2015, did you think, ‘Okay, this is going to be a Parliament that is going to be dominated by the referendum on Europe’? Jess Phillips (JP): Not at all. This is a terrible thing to admit, but I’m going to say it, I’d be happy to stand by it. I think I even missed, in the 2015 election, that the Tories had even made a manifesto pledge to have a referendum. It’s hard to remember, because there is so much water under the bridge and so much has changed. It certainly was never something that anyone said to me on the doorstep in the 2015 general election. It was not a thing I campaigned for or against or had really any opinion, going into Parliament, about. Certainly, it would never have been a feature of anything that I was saying, in order to be elected, and it wasn’t something that I was ever asked about. So, no, I didn’t expect for Europe even to be a major factor in what I was going to be doing in Parliament then. UKICE: And then, obviously immediately after the election, Ed Miliband stood down and there was a Labour leadership contest. I just wondered whether Europe featured at all in that? In particular, when it looked as though Jeremy Page 1/20 Corbyn was in with a shout, whether you felt his position on Europe was a big issue at all in that leadership contest? JP: Not that I can remember. My first memory of it being an internal Labour Party issue was – and you’ll forgive me, I can’t remember the exact chronology of when this happened – was some talk about Chuka Umunna being in his Shadow Cabinet, so it must have been immediately after he was elected as the Leader of the Labour Party. I remember Chuka asking him a question about how they would campaign in the referendum, and not liking the answer. But in the election of Jeremy Corbyn, I don’t remember the EU issue featuring. The single issue in that was the Welfare Bill vote. It was the only real legislative platform around what had happened in Parliament that became a feature of that contest at the time. So, no, I don’t recall. I don’t recall knowing even who Jeremy Corbyn was before the leadership election, or knowing his particular view on Europe even, throughout it. The referendum UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE): Do you remember when you first started campaigning in the referendum, when you first started going out and making the case for Remain? Would it have been the start of 2016? Jess Phillips (JP): To be honest, I don’t think it was until the referendum was in full swing that we actually went out and campaigned. Obviously, the chronology of us voting to have the referendum was just after Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, and everything was just so up in the air. And, as a new Member of Parliament, you were a bit like, ‘Well, we are going to have to vote for the referendum to happen.’ I wish now that I had given that considerably more thought, as a new Member of Parliament, with a new leader that I knew very little about. But I don’t recall the timeframe between voting for the referendum and the campaign getting into full swing. I imagine it was relatively quickly, wasn’t it? Because the things we were voting on were what day it was – it got down to that level of granular detail of ‘It’s got to be on this day.’ There was quite a lot of ‘Who can vote in it?’ debates. There was a huge amount of votes, I seem Page 2/20 to recall. We filed through the lobby a lot, on the particulars of the referendum. And you’re never quite sure … I actually recall, on one occasion, being in the same lobby as David Cameron and turning around to him. Lots of people, people on the Tory side, whether they like him or not, whoever is the Prime Minister of the day, they revere them. So you feel you can’t have an idle chit chat. Now, I don’t feel like that about anyone, so I remember turning to him in the lobby on one of the referendum votes, and saying, ‘What are we voting on? Why am I in the same lobby as you? I shouldn’t be in this lobby with you?’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t know.’ And I just thought, ‘If the Prime Minister doesn’t know exactly what we’re voting on, as a newly-elected Member of Parliament, I felt slightly better, that maybe I wouldn’t always be across the detail every single time. UKICE: Were you or he in the wrong lobby? JP: You do that, when you walk into the lobby, you look around and think, ‘Am I in the right bloody one?’ Because there was quite a lot of granular detail about that. But there was certainly no campaigning, from my perspective, while that was even going on. It wasn’t really an issue in my constituency, it wasn’t something that people were talking to me about or that I was talking to people about, particularly. I suppose, to me, it felt similar to how it must have felt in the Scottish referendum, as a process that we’re going to go through. So, it became very ‘processy’, like this is the day, these are the people who can vote… So, when you say ‘campaign’, I didn’t start feeling like I was campaigning until the campaign was launched. We had to go through all that, ‘Who is going to be the official campaign?’ nonsense, I seem to recall. And I suppose, for me, the starting pistol was when Stuart Rose? – made that first speech. UKICE: As a new MP, were you mainly campaigning in Birmingham and so on, or were you going around the UK? JP: No, I didn’t go elsewhere, actually, particularly. I did some in London, because obviously I’m based in both places, so I did some referendum Page 3/20 campaigning, phone banking, attack unit sort of thing. Like when we have those debates, there were loads of debates that went on, on the telly, and I would go to the Remain campaign place and be one of the people, meeting, responding. So, I did some of that in London. But no, mainly in Birmingham. UKICE: And what did you make of the official Remain campaign? JP: It’s very hard to judge it from the point of view of knowledge at the time because I was not somebody who had been heavily involved in anything other than grassroots campaigning in a local area. I’m not man and boy in the movement to change the ILO on this or that convention or whatever. So, it seemed to me to be distant. But I didn’t know to expect anything else, particularly. But it wasn’t like any campaigning I’d ever done before, it was completely different. UKICE: Did you expect more from Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership in the Remain campaign? JP: If I’m honest, I never really expected much of Jeremy Corbyn. I think I wanted the Labour Party to be more firmly and clearly Remain, I expected that. I expected the Labour Party to work as part of the official campaign. I know they had their fingers burned in the Scottish referendum, appearing alongside the Tories. And, you know, we’d just seen all of our MPs wiped away in Scotland, so I could understand the need for a specific Labour campaign. But yes, I remember somebody was telling me – and doesn’t this bloody speak volumes – that the best rating Remain got was when David Cameron appeared on the television, talking about it. I remember somebody in one of the campaign centres saying that to me, that he was actually a trusted voice as the Prime Minister. But I remember my husband saying to me – and my husband is a deeply passionate European – ‘I feel like I want to vote the other way because David Cameron is telling me to say it.’ So, I was getting two counter-views on that particular point. But yes, I definitely wanted the Labour Party to be out there, campaigning about it. Yes, I think I was quite disappointed. UKICE: Even if your constituency hadn’t been very exercised about EU, were your constituents fussed about immigration? Was that a big doorstep issue? Page 4/20 JP: Yes, it is always a big doorstep issue, even in a place like Birmingham, where the vast majority of people are immigrants. Largely, if you are Caucasian in Birmingham, you’ve got Irish heritage. So, I would be lying if I said people didn’t moan about immigrants to me on the doorstep, they absolutely do. During the referendum campaign, people did talk about immigration, yes. UKICE: Was there a moment when you suddenly thought, ‘We are not going to win this one, this is going to go Leave?’ JP: Yes, there was a moment when I thought that. It’s a very sombre and sad moment, I’m afraid. In the recall of Parliament, after the murder of Jo, Jo Cox, I was sat in the chamber and David Cameron was on the front bench.