A response to Jess Phillips...

It's clear now is not a great time to be a politician, particularly a Labour Politician, so I sympathize with Jess Phillip's current anxieties when attending to her role in public service, but surely she must recognize that now is also not a great time to be Labour member, despite her lack of sympathy for the many thousands of labour members who voted for Jeremy Corbyn to lead the party 10months ago?

Making good use of her public profile by writing a further explanation for the Huffington Post, as to why she decided to quit Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Ms Phillips begins in surprisingly confrontational fashion (for somebody complaining about her anxieties over confrontation), ridiculing the object of her ire, and dismissing the general discontent I assume has been directed at her over the past week or two, as coming from; "people who, I can only assume, think that the moon landing was a hoax and that Lord Lucan is currently sunning himself in a mankini sat with Anastasia and Rasputin on at a hedonism resort in Jamaica...."

When arguing or attempting to defend a position, misrepresenting all criticism is a common tactic employed by a party who knows they are on weak ground, in-fact the range of public resignations by Labour Mp's who've quit the shadow cabinet in the last week, demonstrate various attempts to avoid giving any substantial or honest explanation for their actions, from playing for sympathy, to the argument from authority, to the argument ad populum. I doubt the majority of criticisms or critical questions received by Ms Phillips represent a fringe paranoiac mentality as she asserts,but this is what she chooses to focus on when defending her position and perhaps justify her own sense of persecution, and paranoia.

Incase this portrayal of her 'detractors' as paranoiac loons is not enough of an explanation, Ms Phillip's adds rather patronizingly; "It is so easy to think about this whole episode in the Labour Party as binary, where one side is good, another bad." , but is this not a complete misrepresentation of an actual concrete division within the Labour Party? I.e that between radical socialist innovators and radical liberal conformists, or Blairites and assorted Leftists behind Corbyn? And does she not to some extent attempt to institute such a dualistic view as those who have exercised their freedom of speech to her?

I think people can deal with things in a good or bad way, generally the way the PLP have responded to the left turn of the wider party is bad, the way they have dealt with the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn less than a year ago is appalling, they've essentially broken a Labour leadership which for the first time in decades was seen as being "in touch with people" in this country.
She goes on to say about fighting for the NHS and securing funding for refuges; "you have no chance of achieving those things because the vehicle you are using to do it is faulty."

If this is so, it really begs the question as to whether Jeremy Corbyn has been able to drastically alter the operation of "the vehicle", while maintaining his public schedule over the past 10 months, or whether the vehicle she refers to is not the Labour party but the Parliamentary system itself, overseen by the type of liberal conformist, establishment MP's who currently make up the majority of the Labour back benches and participants in this rebellion.
The kind of people who lost Scotland to the SNP, oversaw the European project and Global banking industry in the decade prior to the last big crash, were wrong about European Union, and who failed in the period of New Labour to institute an attitude of civic pride that would have made defending the institutions currently under attack a lot easier.

If these "rebel's" from conformity insist upon establishing Jeremy Corbyn's unelectability as fact through repetition, at some point they are going to have to explain why it is so, perhaps Jess's "parliamentary democracy is broken" is the closest explanation as to his unelectability we've had yet. If only she had similar concerns about the ideologically charged media outlets that permeate and underpin public discourse, contributing to his unelectability, perhaps she wouldn't be seen as a mediocre, conformist irrelevance, and her resignation would be taken as more than what was expected of just another butthurt, self indulgent liberal.