A Tale of Two Women
Labour MP Jess Phillips made the headlines recently after telling Diane Abbott (a Jeremy Corbyn fan) to 'fuck off', rightly so in my opinion.
Now I'm not sure if this incident is what prompted Julie Burchil to interview Jess Phillips for Spectator Life, but whatever the reason Burchill has come up with a hilarious piece in which she describes Abbott's character to a tee:
"Abbott, of all the parliamentary prigs who needed taking down a peg-bag or two, certainly had it coming. For years this preposterous creature has blotted the landscape of English politics, speaking power to truth in order to advance her career (she once wrote me a note telling me how much she liked my novel Ambition — I should have written back and reminded her it wasn’t a self-help manual) while presenting herself as a humble sister who lives only to pursue social justice for all.
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With her vast pompousness (that oleaginous, am-I-speaking-slowly-enough-for-you-thick-little-plebs-to-under-stand, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger voice, which it seems impossible doesn’t actually leave a viscous deposit in the ear of anyone unlucky enough to hear it), her hypocrisy (sending her son to a private school while criticising colleagues who sent their children to selective grammars), her racism (“I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children . . . I’m coming from a culture where whatever you can do for your children you do”, “White people love playing divide and rule”, “Blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” not suitable to be nurses because they have “never met a black person before”) and her sense of entitlement (recently revealed as being on the books of agencies which tout “celebrity speakers” for sizeable fees — in Abbott’s case between £1,500 and £5,000 — after earlier this year being part of a PLP campaign to prevent MPs from taking second jobs). Abbott is everything that Phillips isn’t, to which we can add: part of the current Old Nuts’ Network that makes up the rotten core of Corbynism."
Not only that the acid-tongued Ms Burchill takes a passing swipe at the rise without trace of Jeremy Corbyn which she refers to as "the election of Keith from Nuts in May".
As for Jess Phillips, she'll go far says Julie Burchill, all the way to the top in fact which would be quite novel since the Labour Party has never had a woman leader.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article4634818.ece
Jess Phillips, MP
By Julie Burchill
On September 2, 1939, as Neville Chamberlain sat down after trying to explain away his latest bout of sucking up to Hitler, and the deputy leader of the Labour party, Arthur Greenwood (standing in for his absent boss, Clement Attlee), rose to reply, the infuriated Tory MP Leo Amery shouted: “Speak for England, Arthur!”
It’s telling that it took the threat of imminent fascism to make a member of parliament a) speak plainly, and b) offer support to a member across the floor. To this day, such incidents are rare, to say the least. Instead, parliament is plagued by a ceaseless cacophony of casual cat-calling, rising to a pitch of parasexual excitement when one side smells blood.
