Bedders is a precinct fish and chip shop beside a busy traffic island in Small Heath in Birmingham. It is not quite in Jess Phillips’s constituency, but she hopes she might claim it in the next round of boundary changes. Sitting in its back room, with a plate of cod, chips and mushy peas and a cup of builder’s tea in front of her, the MP is explaining to me why she feels she has a family stake in the place.
“My nan and grandad lived round the corner,” she says. “And we would always come here when I was growing up. After my nan died at 92 in 2005, Grandad Fred – her second husband – would come and do his shopping at Asda over the road and then in here for his dinner. They would look after him. He’d been wounded in Burma during the war, but was fit as anything – in his 80s, he’d be up a ladder, always in his suit and tie, clearing his gutters. One time though, crossing the road to here, he was knocked down by a car and shattered his pelvis. After that, one particular woman, Janet, who used to work here, if she hadn’t seen him for a few days would take a bag of chips round to his house and check he was all right. When he died, he had a little bit of money left in his savings and he left a third of it to Bedders fish and chip shop and to Janet.”
Phillips is, understandably, therefore right at home here. While we eat, a few people come over to give her a thumbs up, or to wonder if she can help with parking issues or anxieties about housing or schools or health. She knows their stories, speaks their language. Watching her in action, even over lunch, is to have your faith restored in what big-hearted, plain-speaking local representation might look like. “I never wanted to just be a Labour MP,” she tells me. “I wanted to be the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. The only good bit of my job is this bit. It is the thing that gives you life for the rest of it.” She doesn’t doubt that MPs can be effective in places other than where they grew up, but she has a head start. “I always start in the middle of the conversation.”
She’s on an Easter break from parliament. Getting enthusiastically stuck into her chips, she suggests April is the cruellest month for her always on-off diet regimes. It’s not only a cupboard full of chocolate eggs, but also Ramadan, which in her patch means a round of invites to fast-breaking Iftar suppers at sundown. “This time of year I tend to put on a ton of weight,” she says, “because I’m obviously not fasting, but still eating a massive dinner every night. Tonight it’s the Bangladeshi community. I was on no carbs the first night of Ramadan, but the school I was at made such an effort and the food was so good, it seemed rude not to.” Come Eid, she insists, she is back on a thousand calories a day.
Jess and Tim both had Fish and chips, mushy peas, a round of white bread, and a cup of tea £9.50 Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Observer
I know her area a bit myself. My own grandparents also lived a mile away, and my parents met when they worked in the offices of the now demolished Lucas factory which once employed about half of Phillips’s constituents. We compare notes on the changes.
In many ways, the city centre has had a major “glow up” in recent years, Phillips says, with redevelopment and the (distant) prospect of HS2, but the effects haven’t been felt this far from it. What she has heard from people visiting her weekly surgery in the past couple of years is more extreme than anything she’d known before. “There’s always been some serious poverty around here,” she says. “But the Yardley my parents grew up in is completely different to the situation now. My mum’s mum was a single mother dinner lady. But my mum went off to university and they didn’t lie awake worrying about how to pay the bills. My dad’s dad was a postman. I used to think that they were rich, mainly because they had a hostess trolley with a hunting scene on it. There was never much money, but they had a council house and stability.”
Now, she says, housing has become an endemic problem, with knock-on effects for health, crime and employment. “There are thousands of families on every waiting list. Evictions are back after the pandemic with a vengeance. You can still buy a big Victorian house round here for under 200 grand. Private landlords whack them full of vulnerable people, and the taxpayer pays for the consequences.” But in common with the crises in health and criminal justice and education, none of this gets any interest at all from the government. “They can bring in three or four bills about how loud you can shout at a protest,” she says, “but the fact that £100m of taxpayers money, just in Birmingham, is being spent on this terrible exploitative accommodation never gets a mention.”
Phillips, like all gifted politicians, moves in and out of this kind of outrage easily. She never forgets that life has its lightness as well as its struggles. She grew up in a Labour household – her dad was a teacher, her mum was an NHS administrator who became chair of South Birmingham mental health trust. The youngest of four, she insisted on going to grammar school, against her parents’ principles. “At the time I think my dad was so pissed off with the Tory government bringing in the national curriculum that they thought ‘sod it’. And also I was absolutely determined. I liked taking tests.” She married her boyfriend from school, a lift engineer, and had the first of her two sons at 22.
She talks in cheerful bursts about her family. “My husband likes building things,” she says, with a smile. “His idea of a hot date might still be to take me to a ball-bearing factory, or a place where they make casters. He knows how to treat a lady.” A prime ambition of her sons, she suggests, is to feed her false information, that she might trot out on Question Time. “They will tell me the cost of living crisis means they have no Bunsen burners at school,” she says. “Things that are not true. My eldest son recently altered my Wikipedia page to say I liked to eat Quavers in the bath…”
The generational rootedness keeps her sane, you guess. She’s only been an MP since 2015, which means she’s only known opposition and car-crash crises. On the day we meet, the controversial Labour advert about the state of the justice system is in the news. The ad said: “Do you think adults convicted of sex offences against children should be in prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t. Under the Tories 4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time.”
What does she make of it?
“Just before I came here, I had a woman come in to see me with her barrister,” she says. “She is on disability benefits, paid for by the taxpayer at a rate higher than Rishi pays on his millions, because she has had no rape trial. She first came forward when she was 13, about abuse she had suffered earlier in childhood. She has now waited years for the criminal justice system to put her alleged abuser on trial. At the same time he is free to walk the streets. I want Rishi Sunak to explain why that is acceptable. The advert is nowhere near angry enough.”
Does she not think the personal attack on the prime minister will license the same in reverse next year?
“You think they need a licence?” she says. “I have spent my entire career being accused of propping up [grooming gangs] in Rotherham. All that pearl-clutching drives me mad…”
She’s finished her fish and chips now but she’s just getting going on how this government has failed the country across the board. She was 14, she says, when Tony Blair became Labour leader. “It’s not that long ago, but I was able to buy my first house when I was 20,” she says. “My son is 18. He might as well piss in the wind as imagine that. We are getting to the point where people in their 20s and 30s are relying on someone they love to die so they can afford somewhere to live.” When she does her rounds campaigning on the doorstep these days, she says, one phrase often comes to mind: “Do you remember when things used to get better?”
I can almost feel a song coming on, I say.