An Unacceptable Level

For her failure to rule out sitting as an Independent when Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected, Jess Phillips deserves to have the Labour Whip withdrawn.

She monopolises coverage of MPs elected for the first time last year, especially of Labour MPs  elected for the first time last year, and most especially of women Labour MPs elected for the first time last year.

But the present Shadow Cabinet includes five women who are in their first term as Members of Parliament. Three of those are in their thirties, while even the other two are still only in their forties.

One of those five is very probably the next Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. The next Leader of the Labour Party has told me so.

Meanwhile, the highly capable and engaged young (and I mean young) men whom Jeremy Corbyn's economic and foreign policies have brought into political activism are frequently suspicious of what feminism has become, of identity politics in general, of Political Correctness, and often also of the EU and of the policy response, at least, to anthropogenic global warming.

Jess Phillips is old enough to be the mother of some of them, and very nearly so of the rest. She is the past, not the future.

But then, she got famous by telling a woman who was old enough to be her mother to "fuck off". There is indeed an unacceptable level of abuse in politics at the moment.