Press Office of Eva Phillips MP

[Eva Phillips]

[Eva Phillips]

LAB PR: Phillips endorses Harrington for Labour Leadership

WESTMINSTER: Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, Eva Phillips, has announced that she will be supporting Hilda Harrington in the Labour Leadership Contest.

"Since 2005 I have been enormously proud to sit alongside Hilda Harrington on the Labour benches and am always inspired by her commitment to social justice and equality", Ms Phillips said, "When I entered parliament in 1997 alongside women such as Oona King, Jacqui Smith and Rosie Winterton, I felt very much that we were building on the work undertaken by Barbara Castle, Betty Boothroyd and Mo Mowlam to make our party a strong voice for the representation of women. Hilda shares that vision and I know she has the drive and the commitment to lead the effort we must make to deliver a kinder, more compassionate Britain".

Ms Phillips served as Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care under Ed Miliband's leadership but declined to continue in the post under Jeremy Corbyn. She voted against Corbyn in the 2016 Vote of No Confidence and supported Angela Eagle's leadership bid. "In recent years, we have been found wanting by the British public but I believe the majority of people want to see bold and positive change and I know that we can deliver that change". Ms Phillips said she was saddened by the internal difficulties Labour had faced since 2015 and said that the public expected more from their politicians. "We simply cannot afford this endless battle of personalities played out to a public who don't have the luxury of waiting time. They need a Labour government now and we must prove that we are not a party in opposition but a government in waiting. With Hilda at the helm, I'm quite certain that shall be our future".

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[Eva Phillips]

LAB PR: Phillips says new PM ignorant of reality

WESTMINSTER: Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, Eva Phillips, responded to the Downing Street address made by the new Prime Minister, Arthur Stanley. She said the Prime Minister was "totally ignorant of reality, of what his party has done in government and what his party must address now he leads the government".

Ms Phillips said; “The new Prime Minister seems to think that he’s just wandered into Downing Street with a fresh slate but hasn’t given one single reason for anyone to believe that this 'bright new future' he promised will be any different from the disaster of the past nine years. Whilst he repeats tired old cliches from the Leave campaign, the poor of this country are simply an afterthought”.

Speaking at a meeting of the Barking CLP, Ms Phillips remarked; "The Prime Minister made a throwaway claim that poor communities will receive more investment but that certainly can’t be substantiated by the Tory record so far”. In the House of Commons yesterday, Ms Phillips shared statistics from The Trussell Trust that over one and a half million people are now regularly accessing food banks, a 3,900% rise since the Conservatives took office.

"That doesn't matter to this Prime Minister", Ms Phillips commented, "An Australian-style immigration system isn’t going to put food on the table of a pensioner who can barely afford to keep the lights on and yet that’s the priority of this Prime Minister. When Theresa May took office she spoke about burning injustices and then did nothing about them. This Prime Minister can't even acknowledge those injustices exist".

She went on to say; "We have disabled people cut adrift by cuts to the welfare budget, we have schools begging parents to supply toilet paper and pencils, we have families up and down the country struggling to make ends meet. They don’t want a patronising pep talk about their genius, they want swift action to be taken now. Instead, I fear the level of poverty in this country will simply continue to increase. If the Prime Minister wanted to take this country forward he could have used his little speech outside Downing Street to commit to scrapping the Bedroom Tax, he could have promised to reverse cuts to local government budgets so that food-insecure families get access to the free school meals they so desperately need, he could have pledged to end austerity once and for all so that our elderly can have access to meals on wheels and regular home care visits from social workers as they did under a Labour government”.

“Arthur Stanley has inherited a broken Britain and the British people will not be fooled into looking the other way. These are very real and very urgent problems and they need immediate commitments from the Prime Minister today”.

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[Eva Phillips]

LAB SPEECH: Eva Phillips speaks to the Labour Women's Movement*.

Eva Phillips, Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, has addressed a meeting of the Labour Women's Movement. In her speech, she criticized the Prime Minister for reversing gender parity in high office and called on the Conservatives to do more for childcare, social care services and equal representation. She also called for justice for the WASPI women.

Sisters,

On my way here this evening I picked up a copy of the Metro to find the details of our new, and incredibly diverse, cabinet. The tailors of Saville Row will be delighted to find they’ll be kept in grey suits and blue ties for the duration because 78% of Arthur Stanley’s cabinet look just like him; stale, pale but above all – male. Indeed, since Mrs May was forced to abandon ship, the makeup of the new cabinet has gone from 62% male to 78% male. I wonder what this means for the Conservative pledge to “work towards gender parity”. Then again, Stanley’s cabinet represents the Tory parliamentary party perfectly. Just 21% of women sit on the government benches today, the glass ceiling of CCHQ remains spared the slightest crack.

Not so for our party. In 1997 I was proud to stand outside the Houses of Parliament with a wave of new female Members of Parliament. I was less proud of the moniker the press gave us. I am not now, nor have I ever been, anyone’s “babe”. But that Labour landslide marked the culmination of years of hard-working women fighting for their place in our movement and we delivered with a 173% increase in female Members of Parliament in the parliamentary Labour party. And this was not a blip. In the last election, 45% of Labour MPs elected to the Commons were women. When we made a commitment to gender parity, we delivered and now we find ourselves poised to elect our first woman leader of the Labour Party in a contest comprised of three amazing female candidates.

Now already I can hear the Old Tory Boy’s network braying and bawling; “But we gave the country two female Prime Ministers!”. We know how the Tories rewarded those women too. But what did those Prime Ministers do for the women of this country? Did Mrs Thatcher lift up others of her sex? No. Her Cabinet had fewer women than Arthur Stanley’s in it! Thatcher said she owed nothing to the women’s liberation movement but more than that, she did nothing in 11 years to aid the liberation of women, introducing policies designed to keep women in the kitchen and out of the Commons. It was the Labour Party that finally gave women a voice in elected office, a voice we are using today to fight this wicked Tory government and its cruel policies which have made the lives of working women so much harder in the last nine years.

Tory cuts to children’s services have seen a real term loss of 4.5 percent, early years providers tell us that they simply cannot give the high quality of care and education on the Conservative’s miserly offerings to the childcare budget. And what does this mean in real terms? Women must once again make a choice between a career or motherhood. The former robs them of their freedom to pursue their goals, the latter is now almost inevitably a fight against slipping further into poverty. The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership has found that women favour higher taxation and higher public spending services than men do, in particular, they are less likely to support cuts in expenditure public health and education budgets. And this is because they know the pressures placed on their shoulders by this government after 9 years of austerity. The message is clear. The Tories won’t listen to women, they won’t legislate for women, they don’t care about women.

For many years now I have worked in social care and I am only too well aware that women are more likely to be carers but, because we live longer than men, we are also more likely to be the recipients of social care ourselves. For elderly women living on their own, the state pension simply isn’t enough to make ends meet. For those who need advanced help such as meals on wheels services or regular visits from care workers, the services are now a postcode lottery - if they exist at all - as a direct result of Tory cuts and a disastrous approach to social care that cost Mrs May her majority. It is ironic perhaps that to secure her tottering government after losing that majority, Mrs May magically found £1bn to bribe the DUP with. That £1bn was not only desperately sought by our carers but also by the WASPI women, the victims of another Tory cock-up for which they still have no justice. The Tories simply do not care about women.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At the last General Election, the Labour Party pledged to increase our social care budgets by £8bn and to lay the foundations of a new National Care Service. We promised to conduct a gender impact assessment of all policy and all legislation, we pledged to give the WASPI women what is rightfully theirs, to extend the provision of free childcare and to reverse the disgraceful employment tribunal fees introduced by the Coalition government which unfairly target women. The result? In 2017, significantly fewer women voted Conservative than men and those women abandoned by the Tories put their faith and trust in the Labour Party. Sisters, we are once again building our movement and with a woman leader at the helm we can go forward and smash that glass ceiling hovering over the United Kingdom once and for all.

So as we hold this new government to account, as indeed we will, let us do so knowing that the women of Britain are right there with us in the fight. They want what we want. Equality, social justice, compassion, representation. When I sit on those Opposition benches with powerful advocates for women’s rights such as Hilda Harrington and Margaret Beckett, we do so knowing that this movement, the Labour Women’s Movement, has been entrusted with a sacred duty by the women of this country – to cast this atmosphere of male privilege in our politics into the dustbin of history for good. The Tories uphold it. But we shall be the ones to smash it. Thankyou and Goodnight.

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*Permission given by Amelia.

[Eva Phillips]

LAB PR: Tories admit they can't manage

WESTMINSTER: Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, Eva Phillips, said today that she was surprised to hear an admission by Grant Kingston, Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, that the Conservative Government isn't managing. "I know the Tory Party under Mrs May made a commitment to the 'Just About Managing' but I had no idea they included themselves in that bracket", she said, "Quite frankly it's astonishing that we have a Tory MP suggesting the government can only deal with one issue at a time".

Ms Phillips said, "We have children living in poverty, homelessness has dramatically increased, social care is in ruins, the disabled and vulnerable are fighting tooth and nail for the meagre allowances the Tories will grant them but they apparently must wait until Mr Kingston and his colleagues get the Brexit they want through parliament". Mrs Phillips said that this was not just a display of incompetence and poor management but that it raised serious concerns about the government's attitude to parliament".

"We were not elected to rubber stamp Tory legislation, we must have the proper time allocated to us to scrutinize government proposals and bills and respond to them as we believe our constituents would expect", she said, "The idea that parliament must do as it's told by the Tories before they can consider any other issue is not just baffling but it's actually a slap in the face to the British public who are essentially being told that until we back the Withdrawal Agreement, their problems will just have to wait".

Ms Phillips said she was supporting the Motion of No Confidence in the Government "not out of any opportunism, which frankly is a lazy response" but because; "The Tory Party has allowed itself to become solely focused on Brexit at the cost of every other issue. I believe we must implement Brexit but I refuse to accept that it is the only issue parliament may discuss or that it is the only issue the government can deal with. Unless of course, Brexit is the only issue the Tories care about, in which case, they should make way for a government which recognizes other priorities and which need immediate attention too".

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[Eva Phillips]

LAB PR: Tories delay urgently needed Social Care Reform yet again

WESTMINSTER: Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, Eva Phillips, today called on the new Secretary of State for Health, Education and Social Care to commit to reversing cuts to Health and Social Care budgets as soon as possible. She said that it appeared "business as usual" for the Conservatives who seem unwilling to address the Social Care Crisis.

"Since 2010, we have seen the largest increase in excess deaths in care homes for over 50 years", she said, "1 in 5 older people are going without meals and more than one and half million older people have had their requests for care refused or ignored. AgeUK informed the Government last year that a million more older people have developed an unmet need such as being unable to wash, dress or prepare meals. Nothing was done. In other words, since 2010, the Tories have created a crisis which did not exist and now have absolutely no intention of introducing a real solution to eradicate it".

Ms Phillips said, "I asked Daniel Redmayne what his immediate plans were to deal with this crisis. He has none. Indeed, the solution now is for the Tories to walk away from the crisis they created and ask for cross-party help in finding a way out. Now I welcome this, Labour has a very clear plan on how we would approach the Social Care Crisis. We want to see caps on care costs, we want to see the introduction of free personal care for older people but most importantly we want to see reforms to provisions of care matched by proper funding".

The former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care said it was shameful that Daniel Redmayne had attempted to use Brexit as an excuse for yet another delay to much needed urgent action. "To date, we have been given nothing but excuses. We have been promised white papers, committees, legislation, cross party talks, tax reforms and spending increases and yet none of them have materialised over the past nine years. Families with desperately sick older relatives do not have time for Tory excuses and dithering, they need real commitments and real solutions now. 15 people a day approached their local authority for help in 2018/19, an increase of 38% on the previous year, the vast majority were refused care. I thought it was because the Tories had taken an axe to social care budgets, according to Daniel Redmayne it was because the Tories were too incompetent to focus on anything other than Brexit for the past three years".

Ms Phillips said that she would demand an agreed deadline for the proposed Green Paper from the Secretary of State but warned that Mr Redmayne must see the social care crisis in terms of human beings and not statistics. "Ultimately those waiting for care plans to be agreed and funded today can not wait another two or three years for a Green Paper which may or may not be implemented. For the elderly and vulnerable, that's two or three more years of going without food, heat and medical care. No more excuses, no more delays, no more broken promises. We need action now".

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[Eva Phillips]

Lab PR: Phillips endorses Harrington for Leader

WESTMINSTER: Eva Phillips, Former Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health and Social Care and MP for Barking, today announced her support for Hilda Harrington in the Labour leadership contest. Ms Phillips said that she had been greatly encouraged by both of the remaining leadership candidates but that Hilda Harrington's platform was "exactly the sort of principled and detailed vision we need to rescue Britain from the Tories".

Ms Phillips went on to say; "When I heard Hilda's speech at the Open Labour Conference, there really was no doubt in my mind. The Labour Party is a party of activists, of committed members who work tirelessly to bring about social justice and change in Britain. Hilda comes from that background but she also understands that we're a movement that is at it's best when it comes together and makes things happen".

"I was particularly pleased to see concrete policy promises which are based in reversing the brutal, evil Tory cuts which have wrought havoc on our communities, especially among the poor and most vulnerable", she said, "I am delighted and enthused by Hilda's commitments to a National Care Service which will undoubtedly become as monumental a legacy for Labour as the NHS has and will bring hope but also tangible and immediate change to so many in our country cut adrift by Tory negligence".

"As an MP, I have been disgusted and heartbroken in recent years at the growing number of letters from my constituents who find themselves consistently fighting against the government, particularly the DWP, to get access to the basic living allowances they need which are being so cruelly denied them", Mrs Phillips said, "Look at the WASPI women and those affected by the disastrous outsourcing of benefit assessments to ATOS. They deserve immediate financial assistance but they also need justice through inquiries. Hilda has committed to this and I think it's absolute the right path for us to take".

Ms Phillips said that she would support whichever candidate was elected Leader but said she felt, "Hilda has the ambition, the principles but most importantly, the policies to take us back into government at the next General Election". She added, "Nobody could be more committed to this movement than Hilda. She's going to be a great Leader - and a great Prime Minister too".

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[Eva Phillips]

LAB Speech: Eva Phillips MP addressed a rally at Westminster organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament*. The rally was prompted by recent comments made on nuclear weapons in the public arena.

Friends,

In 1981, 250,000 of us marched in a demonstration in London with a clear and simple message; Nuclear Arms, NO. Peace, YES. I have never forgotten the unity of this movement on that day and that’s why when I was elected to parliament I did so on a clear principle of campaigning for nuclear disarmament. In 2007, I voted against the process of replacing Trident and in 2016, I voted against building new submarines. As we stand here today, absolute child poverty has increased, the social care crisis is punishing the vulnerable and the elderly and our NHS lacks the vital investment it so sorely needs. We all know these public services need better funding. We know how they could be funded too. By scrapping the barbaric, Cold War albatross that is Trident.

The cost of those submarines this government demanded? £31 billion. The Missile Life extension programme? £350 million. The cost of conventional military forces directly assigned to support Trident? £1 billion. The total cost of this archaic irrelevance? £205 billion. When you see your elderly relatives begging for a care plan this government refuses them, when you see your children going to school and being denied their free schools meals, when you see the disabled fighting for the benefits so cruelly taken from them by the DWP, you are seeing a country where weapons of mass destruction are prioritized over care. Is that a country we want to live in?

Now we know that nuclear weapons have no legitimate purpose in our world today. We know there can never be a justified circumstance for them being engaged. We know that no politician, whatever his or her bluster on a campaign trail or in elected office, would ever use them. I am stunned when I hear politicians who, in one breath talk about doing all they can to save our planet, and in the next? Commit themselves to destroying it at the push of a button. I call on my friends here today to write to their Members of Parliament and make this clear; you do not protect us by condemning us to nuclear Armageddon.

Thankfully, many of us in the Labour Party have long since joined this cause and we have spent years in parliament trying to force Britain to honour her international commitments to nuclear disarmament. In 1968 we signed the NPT. It bound this country to concrete disarmament efforts which did not include investing in new nuclear-weapons systems. Replacing Trident smashes that agreement and be under no doubt, that is the policy Tories and their allies on this issue want to pursue. It makes Britain a liar, it makes Britain a threat, it makes Britain a participant in a new nuclear arms race. And Britain could lead on this issue. We could play a key part in a process of global nuclear disarmament and make this world a safer place to live in for all. Into the bargain, we could usher in a new era of social justice, equality and peace in our country. No wonder the Tories and their allies prefer to fund the bomb.

Nuclear weapons are no deterrent to war. They are a deterrent to peace. There are those in my party who stand by Trident. They seem to believe that boasting of their support for nuclear weapons is a sign that they are tough on national security. Friends, it is a sign of hypocrisy. We can never begin to build a Britain where every child is fed, where every pensioner is kept warm and where every school and hospital has the resources it needs whilst we pour billions down the drain every year into our nuclear arsenal. We can never solve the climate crisis, we can never improve air quality, we can never clean up our oceans whilst we sink tax payer’s money into a 1950s argument that was proven false decades ago. And any politician who tells you they can do both is deceiving you. We know what the choice is. It’s the same choice we made on that march in London in 1981; Nuclear Arms, NO. Peace, YES. Now say it with me;

Nuclear Arms, NO! Peace, YES! Nuclear Arms, NO! Peace, YES! Nuclear Arms, NO! Peace, YES!

*Permission from Amelia