Jess Phillips knows how to make a convincing argument. While so many politicians lose themselves in soundbites and word salads, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley takes a straight-talking approach. Whether taking aim at Conservative austerity policies, right-wing culture warriors or the leadership of her own party during the Corbyn era, her interventions during her nine years in parliament have earned her a reputation as someone prepared to speak her mind.
Let’s Be Honest: Truth, Lies and Politics (published 8 August) is the third book Phillips has written since 2017, and picks up on the same theme as its predecessors (Everywoman, One Woman’s Truth About Speaking the Truth and Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on BS). Phillips herself acknowledges in the opening lines that “‘politicians lie’ is not an original thought”. But dishonesty and spin is so rife in the political arena that she “can hardly believe a single thing that I am told”. This is a book that examines why our leaders have such a flexible relationship with the truth, and asks what can be done to “end the era of political lying once and for all”.
The culprits of this dishonest culture may be familiar: social media, the “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am media environment”, the rise of misinformation and the endless obsession with political point-scoring. The solutions are somewhat more nebulous. Phillips advocates for politicians to be given time and space – by the media, by voters and by each other – to be honest about which issues are easy to fix and which will take longer to solve. She argues for more personal accountability and less finger-pointing; for us to both demand more of our representatives and show more forgiveness when they get it wrong. The obvious question is whether change should start with the public or with politicians, but as Phillips details the myriad ways the current situation is failing everyone, you suspect the answer is both.
Phillips has a knack for drawing on her own experience to blend the personal with the political, enabling her to be funny one moment and blisteringly sharp the next. She can use humour to tackle even the darkest subjects: the book opens with Phillips’ midnight trip to a drastically underfunded A&E unit, where she is one of six patients rammed into a hospital cubicle meant for one, struggling to breathe and struck by the absurd juxtaposition as she reads on her phone of Jeremy Hunt’s plan to abolish inheritance tax.
Other passages are simply unflinchingly direct. In a section on the row over trigger warnings, she recounts being “triggered” by news of the murder of MP David Amess, as her body “quantum-leaped” back to the moment she first learned about the death of her friend Jo Cox five years before. A chapter on immigration, Rwanda and asylum seekers includes a searing exposé of the chaos in the Foreign Office when the US announced it was withdrawing from Afghanistan and the UK was forced to follow suit. “As the evacuation from Afghanistan played out, my office became like a war room you might see in a disaster movie,” she writes, detailing the desperate Zoom calls and WhatsApp messages between MPs and their constituents whose relatives assisted UK forces but were effectively abandoned by the British government. These stories are raw, heartbreaking reading.
But this is a book written in opposition, and though Phillips is no doubt delighted that Labour won a historic victory barely a month ago and that she is now serving in the government as a junior minister, the timing of its release is awkward. It is a polemic directed at a Tory government, and her most cutting swipes are aimed at people who now have virtually no relevance at all: Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Liz Truss. It would have been a powerful rallying cry ahead of an October election, but politics has since moved on.
The government failures Phillips so clearly identifies are now very much Labour’s problem. Having nodded along throughout her devastating assessment of the insanity of the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan, the misleading conflation of legal and illegal immigration, and the real forces driving small-boat Channel crossings, I was taken aback at her suggestion that human trafficking could be solved by interviewing arrivals and tracking down smugglers. “I honestly may be missing something here,” she writes, “but I really cannot for the life of me assert that the Tory government did everything it could to stop this trade it claims to hate.” Those words may come back to haunt her if Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper struggle to tackle the issue.
Another uncomfortable episode concerns her resignation from Starmer’s shadow cabinet to vote in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza. Phillips, whose constituency has a large Muslim community, writes with admirable frankness about her dilemma, weighing the chance to serve in government as minister for domestic abuse (“it would have been the realisation of my life’s work in this field”) against voting with her conscience. She emphasises that the views of her constituents, though important, did not dictate her decision, and denies she faced any pressure or “aggression” to vote in a particular way. “I literally suffered not even one single moment of that,” she insists, saying of her constituents, “some were impassioned, none were aggressive”.
This may well be how Phillips felt when writing this book. I wonder if it’s how she feels now, having faced a pro-Gaza challenger from George Galloway’s Workers Party during an election campaign she described as “absolutely horrible”. In her acceptance speech at the Birmingham Yardley count, protesters tried to shout her down, and Phillips, shaking with anger, spoke of the abuse and intimidation she and her team had faced. She described how one campaigner had had her tyres slashed, and revealed she hadn’t felt safe bringing her sons to the count. It’s a harrowing video that jars with this book’s already outdated perspective.
None of this, though, should detract from this powerful, blunt and cathartic takedown of everything wrong with our politics. With her straightforward, expletive-laden prose style, Phillips takes the reader into her confidence, delivering scathing assessments such as: “The internet has well and truly leaked all over politics. Westminster f**king reeks of the shit.”
She is at her best in the area she knows best: violence against women. Leaders have ultimately decided that it is “just too expensive to stop women being abused by men”, Phillips writes in disbelief. If they admitted that this is what they really mean, “perhaps the country would express how appalling that sounds, perhaps they would demand that we do pay for things like this”. Here, you sense the outrage that drove Phillips into politics after years working for Women’s Aid. In a chapter entitled “How it should work”, she meticulously details how many women are abused and murdered in the UK, the woeful state (and attitudes) of the police, what can be done about it and how much it would cost – set against the £14.1bn in lost economic output and £4.7bn cost to public services due to domestic violence. This evidence-based policy proposal should be required reading for the Home Office. It’s also a reminder of what Phillips gave up when she resigned her shadow ministerial role.
For all its bleakness, this is a more hopeful appraisal of what is achievable in Britain than you are likely to find at the moment. When Phillips writes that she “f**king loves politics”, you know she means it. She is clear-sighted about the political forces that terrify her (populism, apathy, despair), and candid about why those in power so often choose to go down the spin route. Let’s Be Honest is a call for a more authentic type of politics, where politicians trust voters to understand difficult truths and reject sloganeering, and voters in turn give politicians the time and space to make the tough choices needed to solve systemic, long-term challenges. Now let’s see if the Labour government can live up to it.
Let’s Be Honest: Truth, Lies and Politics
Jess Phillips
Simon & Schuster, 256pp, £20
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