Report finds that 98 domestic abuse victims in England and Wales died by suspected suicide in 2023-2024
Domestic abusers are driving their victims to suicide, police have warned as they admitted to past mistakes and pledged to investigate more “hidden” cases of violence against women.
The concession came as a new report revealed that deaths by suicide among victims of domestic abuse surpassed the number of people killed by an intimate partner for a second year in a row.
Continue reading...Jess Phillips says ‘Raneem’s law’ scheme will support ‘force-wide cultural change’ as initial phase is rolled out
Domestic abuse specialists embedded in control rooms receiving 999 emergency calls will help “create force-wide cultural change”, said Jess Phillips as the first phase of “Raneem’s law” was rolled out across England.
The new law is named in memory of Raneem Oudeh, who was killed alongside her mother, Khaola Saleem, in Solihull by Oudeh’s ex-husband, whom she had reported to the police at least seven times, as well as making four 999 calls on the night she was murdered.
Continue reading...Jack Bennett, 39, given 28 weeks for message sent a day after criticism of minister by X owner Elon Musk
A 39-year-old man has been jailed for sending an “utterly deplorable” email to safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, one day after she was criticised by X owner Elon Musk.
Jack Bennett, from Seaton, Devon, pleaded guilty to sending malicious communications to three people between February 2024 and January 2025, including the Birmingham Yardley MP, at Exeter magistrates court on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Technology secretary Peter Kyle has the task of making Britain a leading player in the AI revolution, but says economic growth will not come at the cost of online safety
With the NHS still struggling, a prisons crisis still teetering and Britain’s borrowing costs soaring, there are few easy jobs going in Keir Starmer’s cabinet at present.
But even in such difficult times, the task of convincing Silicon Valley’s finest to help make Britain a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution – all while one leading tech boss uses the Labour government as a regular punching bag and others ostentatiously move closer to Donald Trump – is among the most challenging.
Continue reading...Palestinians trapped in a ‘doom loop of hell’, MPs told
At the end of last week Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary and runner-up in last year’s Tory leadership contest, said the child abuse grooming scandal started with “mass migration” and “importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women”. In response Samuel Kasumu, a former Tory adviser on race issues, said that comments like that could lead to people being killed, while Kemi Badenoch defended her colleague.
In an inteview on the Today programme this morning, asked if Kasumu’s comments made him reconsider his views, Jenrick replied:
That’s complete nonsense. MPs have been killed in this country in recent times by a jihadist and by a neo-Nazi. They were killed because of the views of those individuals, not what anything an MP has said. We have to fight extremism in this country, wherever we find it, and you fight that by standing up to the extremists, you don’t fight it by shying away, by turning a blind eye, by looking the other way.
I’m not going to tiptoe around this issue. Millions of people in our country are listening to your programme this morning, and they are appalled by what is happening to young girls, and they are shocked that there might be girls in that situation today. We have to stop this.
I think some people who come from that country do. I’m not saying everybody.
NR: Did Sajid Javid’s family [the former Tory chancellor] come with a medieval culture to this county?
RJ: I’m saying some people do.
Robert Jenrick’s attempt to exploit this appalling scandal for his own political gain is completely shameless. He didn’t lift a finger to help the victims when a minister, now he’s jumping on the bandwagon and acting like a pound shop Farage.
Kemi Badenoch should sack him as shadow justice secretary and condemn his divisive comments, instead of letting him run a leadership campaign under her nose.
Continue reading...MPs vote to give leave to bring in private members’ bill on PR but it will have no practical effect
Lord Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary and former Nato secretary who is leading the government’s strategic defence review, is giving evidence to the Commons defence committee. He has told MPs that the Americans are being fully consulted about the review. This is from Shashank Joshi, the Economist’s defence editor.
Listening to George Robertson & Richard Barrons, who are writing the UK’s defence review alongside Fiona Hill, giving evidence to the Commons defence committee. They’re in “constant contact” with allies, Robertson says, and have a US officer on the review team.
Continue reading...Phillips says people have to be mindful of their own safety but ‘you can definitely ask if someone is alright’
Q: Are you feeling the pressure? There is a petition signed by 2 million people calling for another election.
Starmer says he is not surprised that people who did not support Labour in the first place want the election to be re-run. But that is not how the system worked.
I’m not surprised, quite frankly, that as we’re doing the tough stuff, there are plenty of people who say, ‘Well, I’m impacted.’
I think anybody who’s turned around an organisation or a business will tell you, and they’re right, if you’re really going to turn something around, you have to do the hard yards upfront. Don’t look at a tough decision and then leave it for a year or two.
So we’re doing the tough stuff. But in the budget, which is probably the toughest, I’m really pleased that we were able to put so much money into the National Health Service … Anybody watching this who uses the NHS will know we absolutely had to make that a priority.
Continue reading...Labour minister says she removed social media platform’s app from her mobile phone when Elon Musk took over
A government minister said she has scaled back her use of social media platform X, arguing it had become “a bit despotic” and was “a place of misery now”.
Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, said although she had previously been “massively addicted to Twitter”, referencing the former name of X, she had removed the app from her phone after Elon Musk took over the company in October 2022.
Continue reading...Ministers will meet to address what home secretary calls an alarming rise in intimidation of politicians
An alarming rise in candidate intimidation during the UK’s general election campaign will be addressed next week at a meeting of ministers and civil servants, the home secretary has said.
Yvette Cooper said there had been “disgraceful scenes” in some areas in the run-up to the 4 July vote, as she announced she would chair a meeting of the defending democracy taskforce.
Continue reading...Lindsay Hoyle tells BBC that level of intimidation is his main worry and ‘is much greater than anybody can imagine’
The speaker of the Commons has said threats and intimidation against MPs are at a level where he has “never seen anything as bad”.
Lindsay Hoyle, who was re-elected to his Chorley seat unopposed because of his role as speaker, said the levels of abuse were acute.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Labour leader is target of growing anger in party over how he has handled vote on Israel-Hamas war
Keir Starmer faces more resignations from Labour’s frontbench if he does not shift his policy on Gaza, amid growing anger in the party over how he has handled the vote on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
The Labour leader suffered the biggest rebellion of his tenure on Wednesday night as 10 frontbenchers resigned or were sacked from his team after voting for a Scottish National party motion that called for a ceasefire.
Continue reading...The lack of response to TV producer Daisy Goodwin’s allegation about a mayoral candidate casts doubt on complaints processes
Two years after the Pestminster scandal about sexual harassment by politicians swept through parliament in 2017, a downbeat speech in the House of Commons summed up how many female MPs and aides felt about its consequences.
The verdict was delivered by Jess Phillips, the Labour MP and women’s rights campaigner. “Nothing has changed since we started the whole Pestminster thing or even the broader #MeToo movement; it feels as if a moment of blood-letting led to no significant material change in the actual working lives of the people we are here to try to protect.”
Continue reading...Labour MP wants inquiries into potential sexual misconduct to be possible before a specific victim comes forward
Sexual misconduct allegations about MPs should be investigated without always needing a victim to formally come forward, Jess Phillips, the Labour MP and victims advocate, has said.
Phillips, a shadow Home Office minister, said it was not right that Boris Johnson used the lack of a formal complaint against Chris Pincher as an “excuse” for the Conservative party not to have looked into widespread rumours about his conduct.
Continue reading...More than 100 MPs write to Boris Johnson saying guidance will lead survivors to avoid seeking therapy
More than 100 female Labour MPs have written to Boris Johnson calling on him to scrap new guidance on pre-trial therapy for rape victims, which they say will make it less likely they will get the vital therapy they need.
Led by the shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, MPs including Yvette Cooper, Angela Rayner and Jess Phillips argue that the new rules “will cause many survivors to avoid seeking therapy, and make it more likely that cases will collapse when the prolonged stress of waiting for trials becomes too much”.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen
From Business Insider’s Adam Payne
Asked Nandy whether she’d work with the Greens/Lib Dems at future elections. She says she supports working “with the broadest possible alliance” but pours cold water on electoral alliances, telling me: “it’s a bit defeatist to say we can only win power through electoral pacts.”
This transition period stuff is catching. The Queen has just released a read-out of her talks at Sandringham about Harry and Meghan and it turns out that their breakaway is also going to involve a transition period. Doubtless there will be calls for it to get extended too.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen
Ian Murray, Labour’s only surviving MP in Scotland, is preparing to enter the contest to become Labour’s deputy leader on a platform of constitutional reform and countering nationalism.
Murray, an arch critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s and an opponent of Brexit, is expected to signal his intention to run tomorrow after being asked to stand by other Labour MPs. His plans to run are thought to depend on getting sufficient early nominations, but it would fuel the brewing conflict between the party’s pro-Corbyn wing and its centrists.
There are no doubts that constitutional and nationalist issues are engulfing our politics. I have the experience and knowledge of dealing with both, and the Labour party has ducked this issue for too long. English nationalism from the Tories and Scottish nationalism from the SNP are squeezing the Labour Party and we must stop it.
[The] danger for our party across the UK is what I have been warning of since 2015. If we don’t tackle the big constitutional issues with reference to our own values and the national interest, then we lose our core purpose.
After listening to Angela Rayner’s speech this morning, my colleague Kate Proctor concluded it was hard to see why she was running for the deputy Labour leadership when she might be a strong candidate for leader. (See 12.23pm.) It is not hard to see why. It’s a good speech, with some compelling lines and a superb opening.
Here is the opening.
I wanted to make this speech here, on the estate where I grew up and lived for most of my life.
I talk about my background because for too long I felt I wasn’t good enough; I felt ashamed of who I was. It took me time for that shame to turn into pride.
We fell into the trap of describing a platform of revolutionary change. By the standards of recent politics, it was, and rightly so.
But actually, we could have told a simpler story.
Many of the friends I grew up with, my own family even, voted to leave the EU.
They felt like we treated them as embarrassing aunts or uncles.
There are also lines beyond which there is no dialogue and no compromise possible.
And the first line in the sand is antisemitism.
Nor should we take for granted the new voters we have won over, any more than we should have done those we have lost.
For all that’s said about London, we made no net advance in seats there either. We faced a fight to hold others like Dagenham and Rainham - a place that, like my own constituency, has so much to gain from a Labour government, but where too many people felt our party had lost touch with them.
Across Europe social democratic parties are collapsing.
The once mighty German SPD, the biggest and oldest social democratic party in the world is on 11 percent
I don’t pretend that I have all the answers. That is the point of being a collectivist. That by the strength of our common endeavour, we achieve more than we do alone.
That final sentence is a quote from the new Clause IV introduced by Tony Blair.
I owe much of my life to Labour.
The Labour governments that provided the welfare state, Sure Start, and the minimum wage, which gave me the help I needed to not just survive but succeed.
Continue reading...MP to join Clive Lewis and Emily Thornberry in race to succeed Jeremy Corbyn
Jess Phillips is due to announce she will stand as a candidate in the Labour leadership contest, it is understood.
The Birmingham Yardley MP will join Emily Thornberry and Clive Lewis as confirmed candidates. Others including Rebecca Long Bailey, Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy are expected to join the race formally in the coming days.
Continue reading...PM’s adviser Dominic Cummings claims that only carrying out Brexit will calm tensions
Boris Johnson has refused to apologise in the face of criticism that he is inciting hatred against MPs, as he briefed his cabinet on preparations for a populist election campaign that will accuse his opponents of “surrender” to the EU.
In the face of widespread condemnation for his inflammatory rhetoric, the prime minister vowed to carry on referring to the Benn law against no-deal Brexit as the “surrender bill”.
Continue reading...Labour MP also calls for political candidates to be banned from discussing raping politicians
The Labour MP Jess Phillips has called for social media companies to stop hate preachers from profiting, calling for political candidates to be banned from discussing raping politicians.
YouTube stripped the Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin’s account from its ability to earn money on Friday, after he joked about raping Phillips.
Continue reading...