FEATURE
Jess Phillips MP
FEMICIDE, REFUGES AND THE MOON ON A STICK JESS PHILLIPS Q&A 11TH MARCH
T
he day after she had read out in Parliament the names of the 127 women killed in the UK over the past 12 months where a man was charged or convicted, Jess Phillips MP came to talk to SLS members at the Mercure Hotel in Telford.
Turning to her work as an MP, Ms Phillips talked about her role in the drafting of the Domestic Abuse Bill, which received Royal Assent last year. ‘It’s not my Bill, it’s the Government’s’, she pointed out, ‘but it’s got more of me in it than it has of the Government!’
It was a grim rainy day, but the Yardley MP was on ebullient form. ‘People ask me why I’m so cheerful’, she grinned. ‘When I worked in the refuge we had a proper laugh.’
It was four years’ work, and she described how she became a party to Gina Miller’s Supreme Court action to oppose the attempted prorogation of Parliament in 2019 partly because, had Boris Johnson succeeded, all legislation would have fallen, and work on the Bill would have had to start again from scratch. Ms Phillips commented ruefully that, after Theresa May stepped down as PM, the Bill wasn’t seen by the Government as a priority: In opposing Miller’s action, the Government told the court that the prorogation ‘wouldn’t affect any really important legislation’.
Ms Phillips began by describing her own feminist upbringing: ‘[as a child] I went to Women’s Liberation Playgroup, which was a feminist collective set up by my Mom*… we would make things like banners for the women at Greenham Common’. By the time she had her own first child, she was working with refugee women from Sierra Leone and Rwanda. ‘I could make myself sound really worthy’, she said with her trademark down-to-earthness, ‘but I set up Stay and Plays for the women partially because it meant I could go to work and also take my child with me.’ 10 S H ROP SH IR E L AW YER
The part of the Bill that Ms Phillips is proudest of, she told our audience, is that there is now a statutory duty to provide refuge accommodation in every Local Authority
