Articles - Bridget Phillipson

Bridget Phillipson MP: Voters must have the final say on Brexit

Labour’s position on a confirmatory referendum seems to shift daily, but even if every Labour MP backed one, we’d still need either government support, or Tory MPs breaking the whip. And there are still Labour MPs holding sincere reservations about the prospect, including colleagues I respect tremendously like Gloria De…

Bridget Phillipson MP: Thursday’s results mean there’s only one way forward: ask the people

Local elections are inevitably – and rightly – about local issues but there’s no getting away from the reality that Brexit played a big part in the shocking results that began rolling in on Thursday night. Those votes make clear that a general election would not deliver a decisive victory to either…

Labour’s 2017 manifesto was far from perfect – we can’t be bound by it forever

Last week saw a number of my colleagues decide they could no longer remain Labour MPs. I won’t be leaving Labour, but I have no hesitation in saying that some of the reasons given by those who left shame all of us who stay. I still believe that the Labour…

My constituency voted to leave – but I’m still backing another referendum

There’s a lot that the Labour chair Ian Lavery says about the UK with which I agree from the bottom of my heart. That’s hardly surprising – we’re both Labour MPs from north-east England, both grew up in the communities we represent, and both serve as MPs for places which have suffered not…

If we want to win the next referendum, we’ll need a better campaign than the last one

For those, like me, who believe that the time has come for a referendum on either leaving the EU on the terms of Theresa May’s deal, or staying in the EU after all, we have a difficult question to answer: what goes on the side of our bus? The 2016…

Theresa May wants my support for Brexit deal. Here’s how she can get it

There seems to be no majority in this Parliament, either for this deal or for any other outcome. It is clear that as we agonise over Brexit, our country is slowly falling apart. As the roll out of Universal Credit continues apace, every week I see more and more truly…

The fortress mentality on universal credit needs to stop

Universal Credit in its current form is an unmitigated catastrophe, long in the making and now vast in its scale, the Ben Hur of public policy failure. Today’s report by the Public Accounts Committee, which found a culture of denial at the DWP and a department adrift from the real-world…

‘Holiday hunger’ and ‘period poverty’ campaigns risk forgetting what poverty really means

Fridays, as for most MPs, are surgery days. And with every surgery comes more avoidable misery inflicted by the Conservatives. Each week I meet people who are, through no fault of their own, not among the Prime Minister’s “just about managing” but instead among the “not really managing at all”,…

Machine politics is underrated – and essential to winning power and changing policy

Shifting the Debate on Brexit

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