Let’s Be Honest by Jess Phillips review – the case for democracy

Let’s Be Honest by Jess Phillips review – the case for democracy

Mixing memoir and polemic, exasperation and enthusiasm, the Labour MP offers a candid account of clickbait politics and Tory misrule

On being re-elected to her Birmingham Yardley seat in July to a cacophony of boos, Jess Phillips declared that it had been “the worst election I have ever stood in”. Quite a statement from a woman who, in her nine years as a Labour MP, has already endured countless threats to her personal safety, leading to the installation of a safe room in her constituency office.

So why does she keep going? The answer is that she “fucking love[s] politics” and she has “not one jot of time for people who lazily think that politics is all pointless or that it is only being done by the same boring bureaucrats who are so far away from the people who vote for them that it will never serve anyone but those who play the game … What a gift that we so lazily dismiss as something that isn’t about us. What a thing to live in a country where, if you don’t like something, you can freely set about shifting it.”

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