UK has got fat on the free labour of women, says Jess Phillips

The UK has got “fat” from the free labour of women, Jess Phillips has said.

The minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls said the country has relied on women providing charity for decades.

She said it was a “fundamentally sexist” practice that meant Government was less willing to provide the service itself.

She said she “hated” the title of her role and added that safeguarding against gender-based violence should be “business as usual in every single Government department”.

‘Mainstream concern’ 

The Birmingham Yardley MP suggested there was an issue in Whitehall where Government departments viewed violence against women and girls as solely a Home Office issue.

Ms Phillips said she had to push for the safety of women and girls to be a “mainstream concern”, which she said had not always made her “popular as a Government minister”.

Asked what pushback she had received from ministers or civil servants, she said: “People directly say things like, ‘That’s the Home Office’s job’.

“Why is it my job to do healthy relationship education in schools? Why is it my job to provide mental health support for whatever reason it is that you ended up in that [situation]?’.

“Do you know what it is? Free labour of women is where it comes from.

“It comes from a fundamentally sexist place in that women didn’t have these services, so a load of women across the country got together and made these services and offered them to other women for free, and they didn’t get paid for their labour.

“So they put down a mattress and made a refuge. They set up counselling services and got people who were trained to be therapists and got their voluntary hours and set it up for free.”

Services

Ms Phillips said people do not recognise how “heavily” the UK has relied on women providing support that previously did not exist which has suggested an impact on the willingness of Government to provide these services.

She added: “Nobody offered diabetes medicine for free. Pharmaceutical companies didn’t go, ‘Wow, this is really important. People will die without this. We’ll just give it away for free’.

“That is what the women in our country did in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and we got fat on that expectation that that service will be provided for free.

“And we also belittled it as an issue that wasn’t absolutely, fundamentally mainstream to the safety and security of our nation.

“Undoing that is really hard and it’s going to take a long time.”