"I think that people have every right to protest, but freedom of speech is not there to defend the right to harm people with your words. People often mistake the idea of free speech as being 'you can say anything', but you can't."
This week I spoke to Jess Phillips, the Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, from her constituency office in Birmingham Yardley. She has been the MP for the constituency from 2015 and previously worked in Britain's second city for Women's Aid, where she managed refuges for victims of domestic abuse. She was a vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party, telling him "the day that you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I'll knife you in the front."
Jess has been a fierce advocate for elevating the role of women in society, criticising Corbyn's cabinet after reshuffles in 2015 and 2016, and called for an exclusion zone against protesters who objected to school lessons for LGBT inclusion in 2019.
This 46-minute episode begins with a discussion about Labour's route back to power, and we also touch on important balancing acts between religious freedom and societal needs, and balancing the “tribes”, as she says, of working class voters who were tempted away from the party in 2019, with metropolitan progressives.
Jess was appointed the Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding last month (April 2020), and we explore what the government needs to do on domestic violence, and where it went wrong in the coronavirus lockdown. Additionally, we discuss the compatibility of feminism with transgender rights when "one person's rights don't trump another's."
How the Labour Party moves forward, with Jess Phillips MP