Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 22: Jess Phillips

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

I really wanted to meet Jess Phillips. We are just about the same age and I have followed her career with interest and affection. I was very glad to say that I liked her just as much in real life as I have done from afar. Jess is the Labour MP for Yardley in Birmingham, serving the same area she grew up in. It's also where she has brought up her 2 sons with her husband Tom, who has always done the lion's share of the childcare and cooking. Jess jokes that she sometimes feels like a 1950s househusband asking Tom why dinner isn't on the table, when she's finshed work. She is pleasingly happy in her own skin and has a turn of phrase that really tickles me. She talked to me proudly about her mum and dad's political activism, and happy memories of watching Prime Minister's Questions after school with her nan every week. She talked about how every woman should be able to choose to have or not have a baby. And she described how she sometimes deals with aggression by fighting back with humour. She revealed that having two children made her feel she could do anything. And she also has one of the best stories I have ever heard invoving paving slabs. Though I realise the bar for that may not be very high. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Sophia Lispector and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work. I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself. Being a mother can be the most amazing thing, but can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Hello, good morning. It's very presumptuous of me. Just because it's morning for me doesn't mean it's morning for you. For me, it's just got nine o'clock on Sunday and I'm recording this some might say it's a little risky my two-year-old's in the garden I can see him I can hear him he's chatting

but he's busy uh so I thought I'd seize the moment I've got two others my five-year-old and eight-year-old are watching a movie in the other room I've just made them pancakes so they'll be fine for a minute and then my 12 year old and 16 year old are still fast asleep I'll probably have to get them up at some point um and yes I'm having a cup of tea just have my breakfast and I thought I would chat to you and let you know about this week's podcast thank you so much for the lovely feedback about last week's it's good to be back with the third series I loved my chat with Jack Monroe. And I'm so happy that you all liked it as much as me. I felt like, again, a lot of wisdom in there.

How lucky am I that I get to hear so much brilliant advice? And I would genuinely say every single podcast chat I've had, I take something away from the conversation. It stays with me. And that is a lovely feeling. So this week is no exception i spoke to jess phillips who is labour mp for birmingham yardley and my producer claire and i traveled up to see her in person we went must have been sort of october november kind of time when we

were allowed to go i know that much but uh now that feels just like a weird idea because obviously we haven't been going anywhere for a while. But anyway, we went to Birmingham. We arrived a little early, Claire and I, so we had a little fried egg and bacon sandwich outside the office. And then Jess arrived bang on time. We went into her office on the road, which was very, very Jess, actually, because it was completely accessible. She had loads of cards up all over the place from her happy constituents and messages and um lots of information there from from what was going on in their lives and so she's brilliantly engaged with her constituents but also the place itself had no heating it was

pretty pretty basic um but i guess that's not the priority which is what i like about jess and why i want to speak to her because to me she represents what as a kid I thought all MPs were like um engaged with the people she represents very outspoken very bright funny about life but also very aware of what needs to be done where and how to help um social change from the ground up that's honestly what I thought MPs were all like I didn't it took me a while to realize um that's not how it always is Jess has two little boys with her partner Tom she like me got pregnant very quickly into that relationship and the other thing that resonated with me Jess and I are about the same age and she also found that having her first kid really harnessed her ambition and I felt like that too I did a lot of work before I had my

first baby sorry it's the sound of my two-year-old pulling a truck along outside. Yeah, I did do a lot of work before I had Sonny, but after I had him, I thought, right, every minute when I'm working away from him has to count, and it really focused me, so I totally get that as well. But anyway, enough of my blabber. I've already got my cup of tea, so I won't be here enough to make my tea like I normally do.

It's here. It's getting a bit cold, to be honest with you. So I'll sit here, drink my lukewarm tea and listen in and see you on the other side. Thanks for lending me your ears once more. Yeah, thank you so much for letting me come and speak to you. I really wanted to speak to you for so many reasons. Not least, I think, because as an MP, you're kind of what I always, when I was growing up, imagined what an MP would be like. Someone that's really engaged with her constituency,

speaks up for what she believes in, is passionate, pretty ballsy, just sort of firmly ensconced in the politics of our society rather than in all the sort of society that's in politics, I guess. But, I mean, I don't know if it's true, but I heard that you wanted to be Prime Minister from when you were really small. I did, yeah. Which I first think is adorable, by the way. I mean, I think the only thing you can describe it as is adorable

because, I mean, it's just sort of slightly, you know... I can only... The worst thing about it is I can only really put it down to Margaret Thatcher, who was the Prime Minister when I was four years old, and I must have just thought, I'll do that job. She's, you know, she's doing it. I definitely wasn't going to do it like her, though,

because we weren't even allowed to say her name in our house. Yeah, well, actually, it's the same in my house. And funnily enough, we're pretty much the same age. I'm just a little bit older than you. And at my school, we had to do something where we had to fill in, like, a sort of mock-up of a newspaper front cover and do My Hero. And I decided to draw the night that my dad had gone down the road

and stood up on top of the local car wash to rip down a massive Margaret Thatcher poster, which is probably something you can get in big trouble for but i did this very detailed drawing of my dad ripping down this well your dad and my dad both my dad used to go around with with like a bread knife on a stick to to get down the posters for the opposing political parties because they were done like high up on string so he had manufactured essentially like a shillelagh to uh to take down the posters uh yeah absolutely we don't allow it in birmingham anymore and actually you don't see it in london it used to be like at election time there would be posters and stuff everywhere but we don't allow it on the lamppost anymore there was some sort of you know by law set in the west midlands that it doesn't allow it but you know that's really put

people like my dad out of a really good election job that he used to have he used to put the posters up as well and there was always this like battle of who could get their poster on the top the highest bit yeah well your dad's bread knife on the stick would reach um is he still very politically engaged your dad oh yeah really really uh in fact he just rang me to talk to me um and i was in the middle of doing an unconscious bias training uh that parliament has put on and my dad had rung me twice and sent me a message saying call me as soon as you can the first thing that he wanted to know was when my nephew's his grandson's birthday was it's not for like weeks, so it was not an urgent call.

And the second thing was he wanted to talk to me about Dominic Cummings and whether he will leave before Christmas. And I was like, OK, all right, Dad, this was not the urgency that I expected. Well, from my father, who is nearly 80, has cancer and is shielding. When you say call me ASAP, i would like it not to be about dominic cummings and month and a half away birthdays oh yeah well it's i suppose you you grew up in that political house like your dad being obviously very engaged and your mum as well i gather was very sort of active with her campaigning she was she was um she was a political

i mean she was a political activist in in the local Labour Party as much as anything else. But my mum's activism was much more issue-based, so around feminism and around injustices. So when she was quite young, so she was 24 was 24 25 it seems phenomenal to me now that a that my mum was ever that age but uh that and she had two kids like me she had her kids at a very similar age to me so she was quite young although back then she was probably considered geriatric um she had taken on a big, massive pharmaceutical company, ICI, the biggest pharmaceutical company in the country, because they had given my nan a drug.

They'd developed a drug that was given for heart disorders, angina, and they gave it to my nan and it basically made my nan go blind and stopped it. It's like the most poetic thing that happened so they tried like to cure my nan's broken heart and they dried up her tears so it's literally like the most poetic poetic injustice that has ever occurred my nan actually didn't have any sort of heart problem but because she was a woman and they don't test it they don't do any proper medical research that you know she'd maybe been a bit breathless once they gave her this medication and it dried up her tears so when i was little we used to have to every hour we used to have to like drag uh tissues wet tissues across my nan's eyes to clear out her eyes uh because it was like for

her any light going into her eyes was like sandpaper on her eyes because it was full of grit um and my mum successfully found with other with a number of other campaigners thousands of people who'd suffered this same effect across the country in a day in this is in 1976 yeah how on earth did she find anybody how i've read some of the newspaper archives about it and it is just like you know going in having local church hall meetings and wow just unbelievable that she sort of traveled around the country trying to find these people she had a two-year-old and a newborn baby and um and but she they were successful and when all the claims were in by like the 1983 um they'd sued them for like 12 million pounds in total back then that's obviously

an enormous fortune and giving it out to all the people who had suffered uh so yeah and you when you grow up in that sort of environment where if something is wrong you do something about it then that will inevitably rub off on you it's like being raised by Erin Brockovich although I have to say I wasn't really cognizant of all this work that my mum had done when I was little because why would you be but we had a cupboard in our house that was called the Araldin cupboard and I thought that an Araldin cupboard was like a cupboard that everybody had in their house like an airing cupboard but Araldin was the name of the drug and it's where she kept all the case studies of my dad had gone out and found in an auction this big cupboard

so she could keep all the case studies from around the country. And so it's forever... We still call it... The glasses are now kept in the Araldin cupboard. We call it the Araldin cupboard, but I just thought it was like... Like everybody's got the Araldin cupboard. Like, you know, like a poang. Like, I thought that everybody had an Araldin cupboard,

like a Billy bookcase. Exactly. If you see something similar in someone, they'll be like, oh, you've got an Araldin cupboard. Exactly. And they would be like, is that what it's called? And I'd be like, yeah, that's definitely, that's the official name of that.

That's an Araldin. I want to put one on eBay. I'm going to let one up. Well, I suppose as well when you're a kid, actually having a very, you've always automatically got a very good sense of what's fair, actually. Children are born with that quite innately, aren't they?

So maybe your mum acting upon it felt quite logical. It's only really when you reflect when you're older you realize the energy and effort and also the fact that most people grow out of feeling the impetus to actually do anything absolutely but then what your nan went through sounds horrible and you know uh very um unjust and so i suppose yes that's a big fuel to put on the fire isn't it yeah but my nan was my nan had raised my mom to be like that uh so you know my nan was one of the like she was she was just from around the corner from here she was a single parent in the 1950s which was unheard of and she was a dinner lady at one of the local schools and but she i remember in the 80s like my nan would be the first person who'd, like, chain herself to something. Wow. Like, you know, she would stick up against, like, skinheads on the bus and things if they were being racist.

And she was, like, deeply offended by South Africa, my nan. Like, the fact that the South African team didn't have any black players or didn't allow black players. I remember my nan literally spoke of nothing else when... And she used to pick me up from school every Thursdayursday and give me a kit kat and ham sandwich um an update yeah an update on what is happening and back then um parliamentary uh pmqs uh prime minister's questions was on a thursday it's now on a wednesday but my nan would always pick me up from school on a thursday and when we got home she would stand and do all of our ironing make it sound like a scullery maid uh she would do all the ironing so the smell

of the iron reminds me of my nan like fresh clean washing um and watch um prime minister's questions and I would just sit there with her watching prime minister's questions and so to me like the most working class people were deeply politically engaged and deeply activated to do things and change things so that is the environment that i grew up in it wasn't like you know i never even considered that my nan was a kind of person who might not have much agency because she was born in 1913 left by her uh she was put into as an orphan when her mother died because her dad didn't want her anymore but he kept her son uh their son and married someone else and raised a family and my nan was literally sent into service of a wicked aunt where she was basically a maid and then she got out of that by marrying my grandfather who i liked but was a terrible philanderer and sexist and treated her appallingly my mum used to tell this story about how um

uh my nan never knew this even before she had died but my mum had kept this secret for her dad that my nan had taken off her engagement ring to do the washing up um and then couldn't find it and like you know made had the drains cleaned out and everything but what had happened was that my granddad had stolen it from the side of the sink pawned it to pay for an abortion for a mistress so yeah so you know I really loved my granddad and he he lived with me when I was a child he was one of the people who brought me up but you know he wasn't a cracking husband but he was probably better than living in servitude and so you know I knew all this sort of folklore and stories about my nan and my granddad who like I say lived with me till I was 16 moved in when I was two until I was 16 that these were deeply working class people

who'd been born in areas of Birmingham that had been cleared in the slum clearance and they were deeply politically activated and they owned politics as far as I was concerned so that is what I grew up with that politics is for those people so I was shocked when I met other people who were like really posh and in politics yeah or even meet so many people where politics is almost kept in a box um like it's something yeah exactly like compartmentalized whereas you know one of my overwhelming thoughts after we had the referendum was that i must make sure my kids don't feel that way about politics i must make sure that to them it's not a kind of an add-on to their life but they understand how all those strands affect their everyday life. I mean, you were telling me that normally when your constituents can come and see you,

it's all manner of everyday life that they bring you. I mean, it's literally anything that you can imagine, like from the sublime to the ridiculous. Like one woman rang up once and said, you know, I had a new patio done and there's some slabs in my garden. They're at the bottom of the garden and I can't clear them she had a private house their own slabs it's just like what are you gonna do about these slabs i'm not sure i'm not sure that is political i don't think that is but eventually in the end it's my husband going clean that clearly he's got a van i was just like can you just get rid of this woman's slabs, please?

Because I can't bear this anymore. And you can't fight every battle, actually. You can't fight every battle. Someone's calling you out with that. Just like, oh, God, do you know what? I'll censor one round. I've got a good husband. He's got a van.

He'll come and clear the slabs. And so, you know, you get everything. And when I go into schools, I try and explain to kids that literally the sort of fabric that are in the clothes of their uniform is decided by a piece of legislation. There is nothing that anybody eats or wears or does that there isn't some piece of legislation that governs what way that has to be done.

And people don't realise that it's... I mean, I didn't realise until I had to sit on some of those committees discussing literally the tiny minutiae of some regulation. I was like, Jesus, who knew there was rules about this? No, I know. I bet not small Jess Phillips, back when she wanted to be Prime Minister, thought, is this really what I thought politics would be like? But you mentioned that your mum was a real feminist. And to what extent was that displayed in the marriage she had with your dad?

Because I know you've spoken a lot about being very equal with your husband. Is that something that you saw growing up? Yes, absolutely, 100%. Maybe my brothers would have a different answer to this question um because they were born in the 1970s and so you're one of is it one of four one of four where are you in the lineup i'm the end i'm the last one she definitely has popular enough i'm definitely the most popular yeah there's literally no two ways about it and the big family it's a peachy spot also the only girl as well like you know they're quite although my

mum used to say she hated it when people were like oh god are you relieved you got a girl like she hadn't loved the boys yeah um but the answer was absolutely yes if she'd been honest she was delighted to have a daughter um but um yeah the the when I was growing up my mum went back to work when I was about 18 months old and I have since she died I'd read this uh she'd been obviously like writing a diary or not not like in any sort of organized way just some random pieces of paper that I found after she died and it is I mean it is the most sort of harrowing true account of what it is like to have a tiny baby and it's literally talking about how I've dragged myself up in my cock bars and I'm screaming and she cannot do anything to stop me crying I just think that

maybe I was such a pain in the arse that she thought you know what I'm gonna go back to work I'm gonna go do something with my life um so for actually for for most of my mother's life as a mother before me she had worked and done bits and she got a degree um before she had um my eldest brother um but she and she'd been a civil servant um at the gpo and done bits and pieces helping out in academic research and stuff but she didn't really work and my dad was the main breadwinner but it was the 1970s you know it was um if you basically if you're from around here and you're a woman who works you you work in a factory or you're a teacher I think those were the two options um but she um yeah so I think at that point she went back to work and she was like a sort of

personal assistant uh in a sort of big public sector sort of charity in big public sector and charity organizations and then worked her way up but by the time I was about seven, my mum was like a sort of top executive in an organisation that was around how health authorities work. And my dad had retired early and was sort of dwindling down. And so to me, the person who cooks your dinner is your dad. My dad did all the cooking all the cleaning my granddad moved in with us to help with child care when my mum went back to work when I was two um and so he was the person who picked me up from school my granddad picked me up from school before my dad got home from weather my dad did all the cooking and cleaning my brothers

were always encouraged much more to do that sort of thing than I ever was. They can all cook considerably better than me. I married a man who can cook incredibly well. So that life skill is lost on me forever. And so they definitely lived that out in their lives. And my dad never, ever, I don't, never, ever got any sense of him feeling emasculated or that being uh an issue in my parents marriage which actually is pretty modern thinking considering totally that decade and they definitely didn't necessarily come from that they came from much more traditional women although they to be fair both my nana Granny, you wouldn't mess with either of them. And both my, the people they went on to have successful marriages with, not my actual biological grandfather, but my step-grandad and my dad's dad were both very calm, nice, gentle men.

And the women were tough. And has it trickled down? I'm curious to know if your brothers have quite equal marriages in that way. Does it trickle down to how they are? You don't have to go into loads of detail about their marriages, their relationships. Yes, they do.

In general. They definitely do an equal share of childcare, without question. The ones that have children, one of my brothers doesn't have any children but they definitely do have yeah, they definitely take the lion's share of the cooking

and my brother Sam who's married to a French woman she cannot stop cleaning, I literally have to tie her down I mean, it's actually more annoying than you think think you think it's a service she comes to stay with us at christmas and she never sits still i'm like we really we don't we don't iron sheets no some people iron sheets oh yeah yes most t-shirts some people iron

knickers what the hell um but she she does she she just loves to clean but yeah my brother does all the cooking and things and shopping and looking after but it's not even no it doesn't feel particularly noteworthy it is the way that we and and to my husband it's not a shock either no i think that's all really positive and i'm i mean i'm raising five boys and I would say that they're all going to be... The ones that are old enough to know about it are already firmly in the feminist camp. In fact, I was having a really good chat yesterday with my 16-year-old because we were flicking through one of the shopping Christmas catalogues

and got to the bit with the toys, and there's all this very traditional role play already in the kids' toys with all the little girls playing with the dolls and with the buggy and the bag for the baby. And then you get the boys' stuff and they're playing with guns and dinosaurs and construction. And it's so disappointing. I find it such an uphill, like, come on, it's 2020.

We were aware of this when I was a teenager. It sounds like your parents were aware of it when they were younger. It's like, you know, come on, haven't we really got a bit more expansive in our idea of... Why is there girl Lego now? There is like a girl Lego? So disappointing. Like we were fine with just Lego.

Yeah. We all just had that moon base that you had to stick the things to. It's actually only like three colours when I was a kid, isn't it? Like grey, white and red is all I really remember. It's just ridiculous that there is girl... Lego friends as they call it. You can make a little cafe and yeah, it's, you know, it is... All anybody ever made out of Lego, in my experience,

was cars or just, like, a house that never had a pitched roof or was a flat roof. And just that, why do we need girls? Unless you're talking to me, in which case I made a five-storey Lego Ninjago City during lockdown, which is really beautiful, obviously following instructions. I mean, we made... Yeah, I mean, my kids do that I mean my kids my kids do that now I did it on my own we made uh well and when I say we I had literally no part in it other than watching the friends marathon while we made it

we made the friends oh my gosh it's amazing I love the little cameras and everything attention to detail it's so amazing but now we want the whole soundstage we want all of the different apartments and everything yes but my son danny he was like that's what he wanted for his birthday so we bought that and we said let's just watch friends and make the uh the friends set so that's what we did and i just i just watched the friends and how old are harry and danny now they are so harry is 15 um in the last year of doing his GCSEs or whatever is going to happen. Yeah, question mark. And Danny has just started secondary school, so he's just turned 12.

So there's something we have sort of in common, because I understand you met your husband and found out you're having a baby quite early on. Literally within weeks. Yes, same for me. To be fair to me, I can't speak for you, I didn't meet him then i had met him many i've known him a long long time but i just started going out with him that's actually similar again okay that's okay yeah no judgment here you can do it it'd be fine but yeah no i knew richard for

about a year and a half before we started dating um but yeah after six weeks we found out there was a baby on the way which was a bit of a surprise um so I think you'd been maybe beat me a bit so maybe you're four weeks is that right like a month yeah we've been going out for about a month or so and so obviously like I hadn't had a period in the time but I just thought maybe I just haven't had it's only been four weeks yeah you know that's perfectly reasonable reasonable um so when you did find out um who were the first people you spoke to about it first person i spoke to was um tom uh i'd i was in um new street station when i took the pregnancy test very glamorous as in a toilet a public toilet which back then I'm glad to say, that thanks to the Comedian Joe Lysette who campaigned about it,

you don't have to pay 20 pence to go into the New Street Station toilet anymore. But, yeah, so I paid 20 pence and I bought, it's like a ridiculously, one of those ridiculously expensive ones. You can get them much cheaper now. They really have come down in price. Pregn pregnancy tests in the boots at new street station and uh it was one of those ones that flashes pregnant at you like you know pregnant it's an excited um and i just was like totally flabbergasted but in that

second and every single time i've taken a pregnancy test I've had the same feeling I knew exactly what I was going to do within the first second and so I just knew that I wanted to have the baby um and I spoke to Tom about it I rang him and uh told him that I'd taken a pregnancy test and I was pregnant and then uh and he said uh well what do you want to do about this and he didn't say one way or another what he thought and I said I'm just going to take some time even though I knew I felt like I had to pretend that I didn't know and that we were going to go through a process of thinking about it that was a total lie I was going through literally no process uh but I pretended that I was going to uh so and he was like that's absolutely fine and then I told my mum my mum was the first I went around to my

mum's house um and I told her and she I just said I just don't think I'm ready uh And she just said to me, you will never be ready. And then she made me that day go to Ikea. I feel like this was a ploy on her part to be like, look at all this baby stuff and look at these people who are having babies and people buying things for their houses and things. That was literally the same day. It was like, she was like, well, I'm going to Ikea, why don't you come to ikea you know i like the meatballs so i was like yeah i'll go to ikea um and the whole time we just sort of walked around there's something easy isn't there about walking with

somebody and talking to them purposeful outing where you can let thoughts come and go and she just said to me you're never ever ever going to be ready to have a baby don't kid you she she was she was not she definitely wasn't campaigning for me to definitely have it she'd never met tom at this point um so she was definitely not campaigning for me to have it although deep down she definitely was we were both lying to ourselves on each other um and yeah she just was like i just don't want you to make the decision based on this idea of a perfect future that you think is going to occur was basically what she was trying to do meanwhile his ikea showing you the perfect vision of his look you could have all these things in your nice room exactly it never actually it's never perfect but just have a

gaze at what you could that literally never turned out to be the case but um but yeah that that i i remember vividly just walking around ikea yeah um but yeah then we you know we told her uh i didn't tell anybody external from us until we decided what we were going to do but I think we must have decided pretty quickly I don't remember anything like I don't remember me and Tom ever did your friends know you're already dating a bit oh yeah yeah yeah I mean it was very dramatic when we were in our early 20s everybody was involved in everything weren't they like you know everything is a drama yeah so how old were you then i was 22 when i uh got pregnant and which is pretty young isn't it yeah oh yeah but my mum was 22 when she had her first baby and

was considered to be geriatric so um yeah 22 is was quite young in your peers presumably that my new friends no no no no definitely not uh and sometimes this is a terrible admission about the boy that i love very very much and i'm very glad that he's here on this earth i sometimes think that maybe i decided that i wanted to keep the baby to have something different and interesting to say at the first like genuinely like you know the drama yeah i think that the reality of it is that you know when you make those decisions i think there was some element of like check it out like I'm growing up yeah well I think you know I whenever I've been pregnant or had a

baby there's definitely a part of me that feels like I've done something really clever even though it's not like particularly clever it's just I just have sort of sensation of like check this out yeah like that I mean when people used to congratulate Tom, I used to be like, well, he had a broken leg. He literally did nothing. Just lay there. Don't congratulate him. Focus your attention on me.

Yes, please. This is miraculous what I am actually managing to do. Also, I'd been told that I would struggle to have babies. So that definitely made me, like, sort of crystallized my mind as if this was my only chance but I think that that was just an excuse to try and make an outlandish decision on my part that other people wouldn't have expected me to make yeah and sometimes I think you know you're either one of those people that gets quite excited about the twists and turns that life can throw and sort of runs a bit towards it or you're not really and i'm like that as well i quite like the fact that you know all sorts of crazy stuff can happen

like so much of life is so reactive making plans is never really i don't make plans for anything i never make a plan ever did you do news resolutions or anything like that uh every year i say that i'm going to moisturize my skin this year every year i do it for three days. I would say don't bother. Like, honestly. Can I just say, you're literally the only person who's ever said that to me. Because people cannot believe the idea that I do not moisturise my skin. I had a revelation a little while back. I'm like, I know so many blokes that never moisturise.

And, you know, your skin is what it is, right? I mean, do it if it feels nice. But I don't do that. I'm glad my mum put it on her hair because she's been cleansed tone moisture was always the man see the reason that i don't do it is because my mum washed her face with spare soap every day and nothing else and i am one of many boys and like nobody like did like nobody ever brushed my hair or anything it was just like i didn't have pretty plaits or anything or have any sort of feminine regime to aspire to. And then when I went to university,

I was literally like, why am I spending all this time doing all this? This is unbelievable. The level and the amount of stuff that people take on holiday. I'm like, you could fill up with like gin and duty free with the amount of potions that you are bringing on holiday. So yeah, I don't moisturise my skin, but every year I make the sort of first attempt attempt but i never had spots as a teenager so maybe

that's why i don't think you need moisturizer i think you're fine just i'm saying just don't you know new year new different years resolution i'll just yeah mine is always to be a better ebay because i never leave feedback even though i'm very active on ebay so i always like i've got to start leaving feedback for these people sending me things. That is the most niche New Year's resolution I've ever heard. I must give better feedback on, not generally, just on eBay. I don't really buy things on eBay anymore.

I used to. And when I was first pregnant with my son and off work when he was little, I became like obsessed. That was back when people, the jig was not up and you could still buy stuff in charity shops and then vlog it for more on eBay. Everybody's at it now.

Yeah, I know. So what was happening in your life? Where were you on your sort of political trail? Had you stayed clear in your mind from when you were small about about working in politics was that still on your horizon no when I was 16 years old my mum at that point was like quite high up in um this organization around the health service and when I was 16 years old it was the 50th anniversary of the NHS it was 1997 Tony Blair had just been elected and i did my work experience uh at my mum's organization that was running this massive conference and i did it for the week of the

conference um and so i was put in with the press team of this conference for the the whole national celebration of the 50th anniversary of the nhs And I watched what the press team, two people who now, obviously Alistair Campbell and Angie, who I know well now, I watched what they did before Tony Blair went somewhere. And they came the day before and they did a walkthrough of the exact people he would talk to and this, that. And I was literally like, oh, this is not for me. I could not be this controlled about

anything um and then that made me want to have a job in politics that wasn't frontline politics it like I was like that this is still very much like the area the public sector the area that I am interested in working in but I don't think that I can i don't think that i can basically be told what to speak think and i'm not saying tony blair was told what to speak think but it was very the job side it was just very controlled and i just thought i'll be shit at this and my my mom was like you would be really rubbish at this don't do this um so then i thought oh i'll maybe go to the civil service or work in charity lobbying and that sort of thing and my mum used to do she used to get the Guardian on a Monday doesn't exist anymore this

used to have all the public sector jobs in it on a Monday and we would sit and go through the jobs together about the kind of jobs that I might want to have when I grew up and there was all sorts of like and everybody seemed to be being paid so much in the public sector. But that was because it was the 1990s, not now. I think it's not quite so good now. No. But so when you were 22, what was going on with your work? I'd finished university. I was working in the pub when me and Tom got together.

I was working in my local pub and doing like sort of temporary jobs in different offices um and stuff but then when I took uh I took maternity leave I decided at that point that I wanted to a go and work in the civil service or do something like that or become a social worker um and so to become a social worker you had to have sort of like to get onto the master's course because i already had a degree rather than doing an undergraduate degree you had to go and do like uh you know frontline support work uh experience so at that point i went and i set up like a stay and play group for asylum seekers because that was easy for me to do with a baby it was helpful to me as well um and in ladywood uh in birmingham at the time was during the the wars and uh civil unrest in sierra leone and

the end of the civil war in rwanda and birmingham was full of um uh refugees um specific lots and lots of female women refugees from that area so we did and there was terrible my mum at the time was doing a piece of work on how in that bit of uh birmingham one in three babies died of infant mortality and one in three yeah yeah terrible yeah um and so my mum was doing this big piece of sort of equalities work around the health service um and so i'd gone on with this charity and set up this stay and play to try and get better access to services for women i worked with young offenders um i was a support worker for people with alzheimer's because i wanted to sort of try every discipline if I was going to be a social worker to see what I would want to do and I just absolutely loved doing that sort of work um and so then when

I went back to work when Harry was about 18 months and I started looking for jobs and things I decided that that was what I wanted to focus on so I then went and worked at various different charities that worked with various different groups in society until I wound up working at Women's Aid. And standing as a candidate with the Labour Party didn't happen until you'd had both your boys? Both of yeah yeah both of them were uh and even when i became a local councillor yeah daniel must have been about three so that was 2012 did that feel like a big shift from working at women's aid um well not really because i just basically um i mean it's different very different working environment when you work in a place that is only staffed by women and is

um everybody has common cause common endeavor and an outcome and you're you you're all largely pushing in the same direction to then going to work in frontline politics when i became a local councillor was eye-opening but um the the i made it about that thing though so i became the victims champion for the city and i made my role be about the commissioning of vulnerable people's services people with substance misuse offenders uh people who've suffered uh violence against women and girls and so just i just took the skill that i had and adopted it to that new workplace and I suppose from the outside looking in I do feel like politics seems so dominated frontline politics so dominated by men and also this sort of boys club type feel is that an accurate thing

for when it's on the inside of it it is it is a very accurate thing. It's got better, I think. And it's certainly the numbers have got better since I was there. Maybe that sounds like that's all down to me. It's really not. It's down to years and years of the women's movement struggling for that. boys club even when Theresa May was the prime minister and I was there still felt like a boys club you still have to constantly work to remind people that female life experience is a thing and that is your job often is just to say oh come remember in this policy girls exist and you know what about women who work should we remember that women have jobs as well when we're talking about the economy um so the default is still very much a boys club but there there is quite a lot of structure now in place to try and check the default yeah i mean i was reading in your book when you're talking about you know being a working mother and also just being a woman at work and how especially as women get over the age of 40

the the gender pay gap it's still very much a thing yeah very much and also about the inequality of how um maternity leave and paternity leave is structured at the moment and whilst correct me if i'm wrong with this whilst men can still take they can apportion it in a couple about who has which but but there's no incentive for the man to do that and i think it was sweden you said it's got there's a financial incentive for for the father it's less of a financial incentive more of a disincentive is that you lose your benefits if you don't do it so oh yeah yeah so it, yeah. So it's called Use It or Lose It in Sweden. I spend my whole life working in equalities being like, oh, I bet it's better in Sweden.

Like, I've started to be really like, oh, your furniture's better and things are just better. Oh, let me guess, Sweden, the land of milk and honey. So I've become like an unconscious bias against the people of sweden it was that one ikea trip that must have done it it's not perfect yeah that's it stop with your

perfectness it can't be this good um but well some of my friends went to live in sweden and they said you know you're absolutely you know it's all right there's much better things work much better maternity leave all this sort of it's all much better but it is much more controlled society than we have and i thought yeah sweden we're free free and unequal but free nonetheless terrible reaction um but um yeah the the the way that these things are structured is that men it basically you're given essentially nine months of some sort of pay and you share it between you in fact david who is here the office he did that with his partner um they shared the the leave but to me that means it's better than where we were and if i had could have taken that up i would have my husband a was in a much more

secure employment environment that had far better he worked for a big company they you know they they would have had better pay structures whereas I only ever got um basic the most basic maternity state statutory state-based maternity pay and actually I wouldn't have made those decisions not necessarily on my emotions but on my finances the ability to pay the rent but at the moment that it sort of says okay but a man has to take it away from a woman so you get this nine months or up to a year and you have to split it which is better than it was but still like why can't they both have it yeah I don't see why they can't both have it that to me seems and even if they wanted to take it

together i would never have taken it together because you know if you took it separately you've got 18 solid months of child care there yeah and then free child care starts to kick in so you're solving two crises there yeah i mean it's funny because you mentioned your husband i know he does you've spoken about how he does the majority of the childcare. But, and that really shouldn't be a thing. But, and yeah, I think it still really is actually. Oh, it's totally abnormal. Yeah, I don't know very many.

I do know a couple of examples, but it's kind of cut on one hand type examples. Oh yes, it's totally abnormal. Did he have to give up work to do that or was he working alongside that? No, luckily, I mean, and this is again why it's slightly abnormal. My husband was a lift engineer when my children were born he worked a night shift oh wow um so he was and he worked a shift pattern honestly if you can work out the logistics of how we had to organize our child care on a shift pattern that is not the same any week after the next and it rolls so it's a four-day rolling so it's four days on four days off so start on a Monday this week and then the next week it'd be starting on a Tuesday and it just constantly rolls and so nurseries when they're like you have to book in I was literally

like this is the worst there's so many things that fall outside of all that stuff it's just like just just like a shift pattern that's not that's not new a shift pattern that's that's really quite basic part of the environment that we all work in yeah but so but because he had four days on four days off um for four days of the week and that could be monday tuesday wednesday thursday remember and sometimes he had to work the weekend it just worked out so much better for us that he was that i mean he didn't sleep a lot in the first because i even if you're a night shift worker if i'm awake in the day right and you're are there's something disconnect about the amount of sleep that i think you need i think you need

to be in bed till about midday even if you only got into bed at eight o'clock yeah yeah there's this sort of like okay you've had your peace you were asleep upstairs now yeah get up now yeah definitely and I feel that I definitely had that bad attitude towards his night shift working so he was able to um like you know and my mum was alive then and she uh had retired um and so she was able to do some of it both his parents were still in work but um so that really like worked out that it would be whereas i worked a nine to five job that he would do the the vast majority of it it's just much better editor than me he likes playing boring games well also i think it's good if i don't know about like for me the guilt i guilt I associate when someone is looking after my kids that's not me if I'm working, it's significantly less guilt if it's Richard that's got them than if I've got my nanny with them.

Yeah, I feel zero guilt if it was Tom with them. That's brilliant. The only thing I feel guilt for is him, I think. Now, looking back, I feel more guilt that I wasn't more sympathetic because it's really hard looking after. It is. Definitely. It's like the hardest job in the world. And I think I was a bit like, well, why isn't dinner ready?

I was probably like a 1950s house husband. Yeah. And still now, because our kids are older now and they really take no looking after and then they're seriously no bother at all they're more emotional strain than they are physical labor it's no cold face anymore but um i still there is an element i can't believe i'm gonna say this where even though i'm working from home most of the time at the moment and he's my husband has a manual job so he doesn't work from home it's impossible for him to work from home so he goes out to work and still I expect him to make the dinner even though I'm there

and like he'll come in and he'll sometimes say what we're having for dinner and I'm like oh I don't know what I fancy and he was like no I wasn't asking you what you want me to make you I was suggesting you know you've been here all day yeah you could have popped a chicken in the oven like oh yeah like I've forgotten that I could put the dinner off because I never had to do any of that stuff I'm a terrible wife no you're not but it does make me think that if you're someone like me that finds yourself very much um you know as i said i'm already i'm hoping to raise five feminist kids i very much believe in equality i'm passionate about women feeling they have all the opportunities and getting that playing field as level as it can be and yet my husband as well he's he's got all the same ideals as me but our roles are still quite traditional and sometimes I wonder how much of this is something that's individual as in something

I should call out and try and um address myself and how much of it is just sort of the fabric of how everything is set up it's both I should imagine but most of it is fabric I would have thought most of it is fabric because I'd have thought. Most of it is fabric. Because it's much, it's like socialism. The people who espouse socialism the most are usually the ones who practice it the least, in my experience. And it's very, very hard, even when you have the certainty of your ideals to get everything right

and do everything right and not feel like you're sort of whether it's environmentalist whether it's feminism you know we're all guilty of getting it wrong yeah and not even getting it wrong just just putting up with the simpler thing and that's okay too like I want women to be able to feel like when they make a choice that it doesn't have to be really like thinking consciously about which is the best choice that just like the path of least resistance is okay too it's okay to be like just good enough I just want people to feel like they're good enough you don't have to be bloody perfect at anything you don't have to be a perfect feminist you don't have to be that's why the whole sort of idea of the guilty feminist is a great concept and it is so true i

remember um watching a thing about me giving voice to all these women from northern ireland who got to travel for an abortion i stood in the house House of Commons and I read out the words because their own representatives are entirely anti-abortion who sit in the House of Commons and thought, well, I'll read it out then if these people won't represent the people who are voting in their area, I'll do it. And when I watched back the video, it's really, really moving. The whole time, all I could think was, I wish I'd put some dry shampoo on my fringe.

the whole time all I could think was, I wish I'd put some dry shampoo on my fringe. So, you know, none of us is doing it perfectly and none of us is the perfect feminist. No, and actually sometimes when you admit that thing of going good enough is good enough. Yeah. I think my most unhappy times as a mum are the times when I've put myself under pressure

for some sort of other woman out there somewhere who's getting it done. She's got exactly the same challenges as me, but she's nailing it. And then I'm like, that person doesn't exist. And, you know, the idea that other families are achieving, like lockdown, classic, I was like, oh my God, the homeschooling.

In my head, all the other families were just nailing it their kids were being obedient people just like especially people with babies biggest liars in the world worse than politicians i don't know why we get a bad name like especially old people who had a baby a long time ago they're the worst why are you lying my mom was literally like you were eating a roast dinner at three weeks i was like they just absolutely weren't eating a roast dinner at three weeks and if we were you were frankly negligent and it's no wonder some of us have turned out wrong as you're writing something in your book as well what you're saying about like when we're little girls were sort of sold this idea of romance is the thing that's gonna save us and like the idea of the guy the you know cadbury's milk tray

man coming in with chocolates and you're like i don't want the the guy i'm scaling the idea of the guy, the Cadbury's milk tray man, coming in with chocolates and you're like, I don't want the guy scaling the walls of my house to lay chocolates for me while I'm sleeping. I just want someone to take the bins out. Yeah, just really. I like my aspirations are far, far greater in my opinion. I just want someone to remember which biscuits I like in the supermarket. Exactly. That is far more important to me.

I'm the same way though. To me, if Richard makes himself a cup of tea and doesn't make another one. Like, that is far more important to me. I'm just saying that I know, like, to me, if Richard makes himself a cup of tea and doesn't make another one for me, that is, like, do you still love me? Can I just say, if that were to happen in my house, not from my perspective, but from my husband's perspective, that's literally, like, selling your firstborn child. Yeah.

I mean, my husband would just... He would kill me i actually before like i know to you it's just a cup of tea but to me it's it's a sign that you see me that you know i've been up for a long time with the little one and you're just thinking you know she probably like a cup of tea my i mean honestly i mean the great this is tapping more than just me the greatest um the greatest guide I have ever had in this regard about the way that we compare people to each other and exactly what you just said is my husband

in the comparing and contrasting with how other people... He once just said to me, I think it was when Harry was really a tiny baby, when it's like the height of why isn't my baby sleeping through the night when everybody else's baby sleeps eight hours from the age of two weeks um he just said to me i don't understand i can't understand and can you explain to me why you compare yourself with them what's who benefits like what not even like who benefits like why are you bothering just sort of like he genuinely needed me to explain why does it matter what somebody else is doing

what what's the benefit to you to be thinking about it like he couldn't understand why i was doing it and i just was like he's he never, ever lost a night's sleep worrying about anything because he genuinely thinks worry won't change it. And he can act, like, he doesn't just think it. Like, I know that's the case. My mum always said, worry ruins today and doesn't change tomorrow. Like, I know those things, but he genuinely is like why are you worrying

yeah and can't and living with somebody like that yeah who is so straightforward yeah and so like if he's pissed if people think I'm up front Jesus Christ like people would invite us out for dinner and I'd be like well we can't get a babysitter and he'd just be like we don't want to come oh god this is terrible like uh anyway you know what though I've kind of had dreams where I'm like I would quite love to live like that just I think I thought that's what being in my 40s would be like actually just like I'm just not going to worry anymore I'm not going to think in those complicated ways when I'm going to just be much more straight up that's that was sort of my goal for well my husband definitely if anything we've infected each other he's made me more like that and I've made I've definitely sort of modeled social behaviors that he has picked up

in the 15 years that we have been together but like he will I remember when I was pregnant with Harry and we were babysitting a friend's child, which turned out to be a terrible disaster. She was sort of like trying to do me a solid, like, would you like to look after my baby and see what it's like? The baby cried the entire time and I thought, right, well, I've made a terrible decision. But me and my mate Alex were doing it together. And Tom obviously didn't know about Alex very well because we hadn't been together for a long time before I got pregnant.

And he came to pick me up to take me home from babysitting this child and Alex was there and I said to Alex get in the car and I'll say oh Tom can you give Alex a lift home and Tom was just like well that's actually really inconvenient no get out he would he would never do that now yeah but then I was just thinking wow but he's like it though yeah because also when it turns out when people do talk in a way I always remember just thinking, this is so embarrassing. Wow. I quite like it, though. Yeah, he is. Because also, when it turns out, when people do talk in a way that's quite unapologetic, nobody actually takes it badly, because they can see that it's just a real thing. They're not trying to, you know, he's not trying to be rude.

Yeah, like, when people go through things like, you know, I hate the name Kevin, and somebody will be like, well, that's my name. My husband will be like, I still don't like it. Like, it sucks to be you. Like, husband would be like, I still don't like it. Like, sucks to be you. Like, essentially would be his reaction. He's like,

oh, well, I've just immediately changed my name. Can he get, does he get the humour in it though? Does it make him laugh as well? But also,

he now, he definitely, the funniest thing he does is he will tell hilarious jokes and make out like he's being like he is. And he's not, he's,

he can, he can play a totally sort of straight man all the time. You know what, I get the impression he's going to make is and he's not he's he can he can play a totally sort of straight man all the time you know what i get the impression he's going to make a very good old man oh my god yeah he's gonna nail it oh he's totally gonna nail it he's totally he now being a dad he know he's now being a husband he's totally gonna nail it and he looks just like his own dad who is a total silver fox and so he's just gonna turn into like a debonair old man he's just gonna now being grumpy about things it's brilliant that's perfect i really really

love my husband i have to say i feel like it's like i feel slightly bad when people slag off their husbands because i don't really have anything to say yeah i do actually um happily i can i can agree with that and weirdly when people are very confessional about their own bad relationships i feel compelled to reveal something to bring so you know that slightly social awkwardness but usually the things that upset me it goes far as well actually sounds like it is quite upsetting but maybe the tea tea situation and not making me one of that kind of things i mean my husband would genuinely kick him out of the house if he if he did that that would be so often anymore he's

learned from my emotional response when my girlfriends sit around and slag off their husbands usually about child care or things like that um i always just think i end up just going oh yeah i do that like i'm the badder here in the situation just hear versions of yourself yeah terrible well maybe your husband just wanted it hadn't occurred to him to put the chicken in the oven while he was at home working. Whatever. So with having the babies and with your, you know, becoming a counsellor,

was that influenced by being a mum or was that just kind of the trajectory you felt like you were already on? It definitely, it was definitely influenced by being a mum because when I fell pregnant with Harry, you felt like you're already on it definitely the it was definitely influenced by being a mom um because when I fell pregnant with Harry I felt like I mattered for the first time in my life and actually not my life my parents made me feel like I mattered and I was always confident and clever at school and did well and things but there was definitely a period in my late teen years and my early 20s that's um like where I sort of lived out all of those sort of terrible

uh gender stereotypes of having to care for a bad boyfriend who treated me poorly knocking my confidence not really having any drive then when I was told that I would struggle to have children basically thinking well my body doesn't matter and all those sorts of terrible like putting terrible boundaries on myself and then when I was pregnant with Harry and when I had Harry I just thought you know what like you say yeah check out how special I am. This is really special. And I matter in the world now. And I understand why young girls end up having babies.

Well, they don't so much anymore, but they used to when I was a kid. Because it makes them matter in the world. Like, you matter to somebody. And being a mum gave me a massive confidence boost. And I know it can go one of two ways but I was just like you know I'm a 20 I'm a 23 I'm a 25 year old with two kids like do you know I can do anything yeah it was the like the reality for me and so they drove me to be much more ambitious I was very ambitious as a. They're not very ambitious and very wayward. And then they made me really, really, really ambitious for the future.

So everything I do actually is thanks to Harry. He likes to remind me of that. Danny likes to remind him that he's a bastard child and Danny isn't. There's a whole shtick that they do. I've read that you said that though, for working women in politics, it's actually harder to be you know you think it'd be hard to be a mother in politics but actually it's the

women that either through choice or through event have not become mothers that actually have a really tough time i think that that's definitely true and more and more you see it as people start to talk about their experiences much more politics has definitely become much more feminized in my time there by the sort of personal story and that is because women stood up and bore their souls about things um much more so than it ever happened before but yeah so the way that as as an abortion uh campaigner um the way that I would be treated compared to Stella, who, you know, we were often in lockstep, we did lots of stuff together, and Stella Creasy, the MP,

who now has a daughter, Hetty, who is adorable. She's like the tea room mascot. The way she was treated compared to the way that I was treated, the way she was treated compared to the way that I was treated, that she wanted abortions to be free, safe and legal because all she cared about was work and as a woman. And I never got that stuff said to me. And I was public about having had an abortion and still it was never aimed at me in the same way as the

vitriol that she faced it's this idea of a woman who didn't have a child and actually what turned out was that she'd really struggled for a long long long time to get pregnant and then stay pregnant and have traumatic miscarriages so all of that must have been and then people throwing stuff at her about dead babies when she's going through and now i knew she was going through that because she's my friend but the public didn't know that she has spoken about it publicly the public didn't know about it and just seeing that level of vitriol aimed at her because she was a woman without a child as if the women who choose not to have a child are in some way deficient and they're well they're just wrong you're wrong if you choose not to have a baby theresa may very much was treated as if she didn't care about the

future because she didn't have children and it it's just like, do you know what? If anything has ever made me want to blow up the entire future, it is dealing with my children. It makes me more likely to press the nuclear button than less likely. I'm going to do it. I remember my mum, my mum would, later in my life,

she became the chair of the Birmingham Mental Health Trust in sort of semi-retirement. She became the chair of this. And she, you know, so she had jurisdiction over people who were sectioned. She used to say to me,

I swear to God, I'm going to section you like a threat. Like, you know, our children bring out the very very worst of us we would never talk to other people the way we speak to our children and no i mean i'm it's like i i'm like i don't believe in democracy when it's in my house i'm like this is a totalitarian state you don't have an opinion and even if you do it doesn't matter you have no say in this household and so the the idea that people like Theresa May who chose not to have and that she didn't choose she she couldn't have children is what she has I believe said but that somehow that she's somehow deficient not just as a woman but just as a politician because she's chosen not to have

children yeah if she chose you know I've one of my very she's chosen not to have children yeah even if she chose you know i've one of my very best friends chose not to have children and she it literally was like i just don't want that lifestyle yeah like i don't want that safer yeah it's just like fair enough a few friends like that too and i suppose the the sort of uncomfortable subtext of that is that part of what it is to to be female is about the nurturing the maternal whereas actually it's possible to have all of that and not be a mother and it's also possible to be a mother and have none of it yeah exactly so but it's a sort of a weird box we sort of put people in sometimes of what they're supposed to represent and and actually

i think you spoke about in your book as well like this the pedestal of motherhood as well and all the oh that kind of emerged like oh my goodness saintal of motherhood as well and all the oh that kind of emerging like oh my goodness saintly person can have a child and all the things about your life that are then supposed to be shut away in a box and parts of you as well that like turn that down moderate that raise this one up you know the sort of wholesome nature of parenthoods it's like i mean i can only blame the virgin mary for that you know i mean i don't think she did it to herself i feel like she was really put on that pedestal and the idea that she bore uh a baby and that this was the sort of first miracle i mean i know nothing about theology that could be completely wrong

um but you know this this this sort of sanctity yeah of motherhood as opposed to the sanctity of fatherhood if only we thought that fatherhood was more sacred you know potentially we wouldn't end up in a social situation where for some it's very casual yes exactly i think you're right it would it would um put the emphasis there and also for you know men that do feel that those emotions or that role comes more challenging for them they can actually go and get support more readily rather than it being something where it's like oh okay that turns out I'm just not very good at that and sort of put in a box on things which is you know it's really damaging for for everybody affected by that um I want to go back to something you touched on

because you mentioned about having an abortion and I know I've got loads of girlfriends that have been through the same thing but most of them I've still done it where they've sort of sworn me to secrecy in fact some of my peers don't even know that they were going through the same experience at the same time and I've always thought it'd be so much better if people thought they were more able to talk about it but do you feel like it's becoming less of a taboo um I probably have an incredibly skewed uh view of this because almost all of my uh girlfriends like you say have um had abortions and they don't feel um they don't feel like they wouldn't talk about it in front of us but maybe that is um maybe they don't yeah they don't go around talking about it very much but i suppose it's still seen as something though that's got this sort of... You have to come out as having had it.

Yeah, exactly. It's just a women's health element. Also, I think that we have to be really, really careful, and I am as guilty of this as anybody, we have to be really careful that when we try and win the argument on abortion that we go for the very difficult stories. Because, you know, hard cases make people sit up, but they also make bad law. And so it's very easy to go for fatal, fetal abnormality.

It's very easy to go for children who've been raped, especially when you're talking about the Irish context, what we were fighting there in the Republic and in the North had got so emotive that you had to go i suppose for the emotive argument and i have definitely fallen for that but i just want people to know that the vast majority of people who have an abortion are in no way affected by it and that there has to be a voice for the you know the just made the decision went and had a procedure like any procedure and doesn't think about it uh as if it was something terrible that happened yeah because

the vast majority of people i know who have had abortions that is their experience and and actually the talk about people being raped or people who were whose lives were threatened by it doesn't represent those uh those women and i remember when i went uh to the clinic in birmingham i don't know what that weird noise is it's the shutter yeah it's just when i went to the clinic in bir Birmingham and I sat in the waiting room I remember feeling like oh gosh you know it's this terrible raised by a feminist um I remember thinking oh god you know I'm not going to be like the people who are in there and I was just like all of the people in there they were just like me I knew I knew one woman

I was like oh hi um and that it's the same for women's refuges i think that people think it's like bad girls yeah it's gonna be like prisoners sell black age and it's just like living in a house and like living in a block of flats with a lot of other people in a similar situation to you where you have a key worker who lives there as well it's just like it's we need to demystify those things that have become about the drama rather than the reality. That's actually a really good way of putting it, demystifying it. I remember reading in Catlin Moran's book, she speaks about having an abortion after she'd had her two girls.

She says she found out she was pregnant and went for a scan. She's like, oh, maybe this is going to be my little boy. There he is with his jazz hands. And then she's like, actually, no, this isn't right for my husband and I. This isn't what we're planning right now. And she said something like, you know, if I'm being given the power to create life, I should also have the power to say that's not happening now. And I actually thought that really was such a good way of putting it.

It's sort of very matter of fact um but also empowering many more people to talk about how they've had abortions as part of after they've had children because the idea in most people's heads is young knocked up girls yeah uh who are and in those circumstances people can understand that people go oh well you know she had a whole life ahead of her you know she'll get down to it in the future sort of thing um and or people in terrible sort of distress and situations and you know we're casual about it in a kind of birth control well i intervened on um a dup politician who said that that people were using it as birth control and i said do you think that i have only had sex three times so So, because I'm here to tell you,

I have done it more times than that. So please don't think that, you know, I was like, oh, let's not bother with any birth control tonight. I'll just have an abortion. I mean, how ridiculous. The fact that people still think that and say it in the House of Commons is quite phenomenal.

But that, you know, when i had an abortion it was in between my two children and so i i was in a loving relationship a loving and stable relationship and i had a baby i knew i could i was you know able to do that it just wasn't right yeah it just wasn't the right time and people say would you think that do you ever think that that would have been your little girl and i just think well it was just a it was just a collection of cells and b it isn't it just isn't yeah i don't need to think it's like when tom was having the snip and um i had been and asked if i could be, at the age of 27, if I could be sterilised. And this student was in the room with the student doctor and she gasped. She was like, and she said, but you're only 27.

And the doctor said, I think Miss Phillips knows how old she is. You don't need to inform her how old she is. And the, but people have, when then, so they basically said, you're too young, no, and it's a much more advanced procedure for you, get your husband to do it. So my husband, at the age of 30, and he didn't have to have any counselling or anything, he was able to make that decision completely without any, unlike me. That's interesting. Yeah, when he had the SNP, people said, well, what if you change your mind?

I said, I want you to realise is that I want him to have the snip because i will change my mind and when i change my mind and say let's have another baby i would like someone to shut a door in my face and say no you can't and every time that has happened when i thought oh it would be quite nice i go oh and it can't happen and i go, oh, I'm thinking about something else now, whether I'm going to make a chicken for tea. Like, it goes away in a fleeting second. I wanted that door to be shut. So, you know, this whole, it would have been that baby,

it would have been this baby. They just, none of it is real. Yeah. None of it is until it is. It's also incredibly personal, that kind of stuff, you know. If you already knew, like, no more babies, then you know no more babies. No more babies? I mean, Tom was very certain.

I mean, I think it was literally days after Danny was born. I'm getting down that bloody clinic. When I had my fifth, I had a sort of stand-in consultant for one of the sessions at the hospital, and she said to me, would you like to be sterilised at the same time you give birth? And I did think that was quite a stark question. I kind like oh um i'll ponder it thanks but i was just like wow that's quite a big question well can i just say i i have heard some terrible stories in my constituency about because there is um sections of my community uh certainly um you know the the

asian community and the irish community around here where you know the the Asian community and the Irish community around here where you know the culture of having lots of children is much more common I mean you're some sort of weird outline why have you got five children are you absolutely mad yes I'm constantly saying to women who come into my surgery when they're like I'm pregnant again I'm just literally like what is wrong with you how can you cope I just would not i mean two is too many in my opinion um but the um but the the horrible horrible stories about them without them being told or having interpreted for them being sterilized wow terrible like you know things knock the wind out of you don't they yeah that i mean it

not because it's not sort of a recent thing but this is certainly a legacy thing that i've heard about from people who live in my constituency um and that you know that like there is nothing that i've read or watched on handmaid's tale where i can't think of an example of where i've seen that in real life and so when you're sort of you know taking on board all the the stories that are happening around you does it is it constantly a source for you of a like an impetus to keep going to like make change to fight for their corner or this sort of thing yeah yeah I feel just so overwhelming you think sometimes it can be overwhelming more so when I worked in women's aid I remember there were a few occasions where usually things about children the same age as my children being abused um that I found

so like that like I was sick once at work I just vomited it and um that I just thought actually this might be too much but usually people say when you see so many bad things how do you keep hope alive and actually the reality is that when you see people who are in a terrible situation they drip in hope because they've bothered to come and see you and I've met people I've

met young women who have been in and out of the care system been raped by relatives been like you know just pimped out by drug dealers who get up every day I just can't even like the people who come in here for help are in a desperate situation but they give me hope about the resilience of the human spirit like they're bothering to get on a bus and come in here that's like they're amazing survivors people are capable of so much and when you see that people are capable of so much you think well then if we have all this power inside of us yeah there's got to be a way of using it for good and that's what keeps you going and so it's hard in the pandemic because you don't you know i'm not saying you know i really want to save people's sod stories but you're just not i'm

not you're not getting the same level of interaction and what about when the um the intensity is much more close to home and there are threats made about you or aggressive things said or threats how does how does how do you sort of deal with that i mean you you you learn like like women learn to take you know sexual harassment when they're wearing a school uniform like it's just part of life that's like you know i wish it wasn't I'm not saying that as like a good thing but it sort of becomes like well it's just part of the deal um and I'll just cope with it and then um sometimes you fight back and you fight back aggressively um and with wit and humor to try and make sure that people realize you're not hurt

sometimes you can talk about the hurt because i think it's important to deal with it but the thing that keeps me going in the hate and everything is that nobody i ever knew who ever changed anything did it without backlash nothing like good ever came because somebody went this is a good idea and everybody went around the table oh it sounds like a good idea like that literally has never happened once ever in the history of anything any progress ever has it been something that was agreed by consensus early on in its life um that's very true so and i i'm much more scared of a world where those people get to silence people i'm much like me shutting up and going away and not being a politician anymore in order to get the threats to go away doesn't make the threats go away yeah so you know there's no solution shouldn't really be just part and parcel of public i'm not suggesting

that it should at all it just is at the moment and we've got to legislate and do all sorts of things to make sure that it isn't um but the and sometimes it it's horrible and sometimes it will affect you what the thing that it bothers me the most is that i just feel so tired by it it's so tiring really time um and it's tiring feeling emotions about it and i feel tired on behalf of like all the women politicians and all the women's movement and people like my mum who went before like sorry man it delivered you like a women hating fascist online like it's like dudes man you thought it was going to be better and it actually got a bit worse um so i have to try and find a way to put a hopeful spin on it and then you know you've got you've got to face what did dolly parton say you could get the rainbow without the rain yeah good old dolly well in a more hopeful time we are set in your office where we're

behind you is a wall of thank you cards and i'm just hoping this is my favorite one And I'm just hoping... This is my favourite one. This is my favourite one. It says, I fucking love you. In, like, calligraphy. With, like, flowers. It's like flowers. It's, like, really, like, chintzy Laura Ashley.

But the inscription is, I fucking love you. Please tell me that's from the woman whose slabs in her garden were taken away by your husband. Oh, God. That would be excellent. I'm not sure she ever by your husband. Oh, God. That would be excellent. I'm not sure she ever said thank you first. Oh, what? Come on. You took away bathing slabs.

Oh, thank you so much for talking to me. No worries. My pleasure. Hey, I'm outside in the garden now. You might hear birds tweeting. Daddy, see mommy. You might see a Mickey. What's mommy doing? Am I sitting on a sledge?

We used the sledge when it was snowy and we haven't put it back in the attic. It's just sat in the garden. That's not very organized of us, Mickey. Anyway, I hope you liked my chat with Jess. I thought she was brilliant, actually, and I love it when I have a chat with someone and we have lots of giggles as well.

And I know I should play it cool, but I've got to be honest, I'm very happy when I manage to tie up the end of a conversation with a joke. It's just, I know, I should be like, don't even mention it, just let people think you're really good at that naturally but actually i get very like sort of internal high five moment um oh just found a

spoon in the garden it shouldn't be there um so who should i speak to you next week okie dokie next week will be cariad lloyd um who's had two kids. Her first one was about four, five years ago. And then she's also had another baby last year during lockdown. So we spoke about that. And she runs a brilliant podcast called Griefcast. Griefcast is speaking to people about loss. And I suppose, I mean, I've been aware of the podcast for a long time. I've listened to it a lot over the years.

But I actually think it took on special significance to me after I lost my stepdad last year so we speak about that and Cariad's also a comedy actress and writer so we speak about that too but mainly thanks so much to Jess Phillips for this week's chat

she was exactly as I had hoped she would be and we had a really, really good time together and I'm grateful to everyone that said yes to me for the podcast. I've got some lovely guests lined up for this series. And thank you mainly to you, of course, for being here again. And I should probably put the sledge back

in the attic. I guess you guys can't help me with that. Ah, Mama! Yes, Mickey? I want bacon and my Zee spoon. of the attic um i guess you guys can't help me with that yes mickey you want to take your shoes off okay we're gonna go better fit in the garden that's cool with me man all right guys see you in the oh see it's cold isn't it see you in a week See you in a week. And thanks very much. Lots of love. Look after yourselves. See you soon. Thank you.