Long Reads - Bridget Phillipson

Bridget Phillipson MP: Australian Labor is showing what progressives can achieve in power

Just as Australia’s prime minister Anthony Albanese changed his party, Keir Starmer has changed the Labour Party here. The pioneering postwar Australian prime minister Ben Chifley said in 1949 that the labour movement’s great objective was not to put an extra sixpence in somebody’s pocket, nor to make someone prime…

Bridget Phillipson MP: A strong story – work and security

Labour cannot afford to seek solutions from the past for the challenges of today. Instead it needs to reclaim the language of security as it seeks to frame an offer to people about the future of their working lives. If you represent a seat like mine, you get used to…

Bridget Phillipson MP: Why our approach to the economy is one every Labour member should support

Earlier this month, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds shattered the glass ceiling in the world of economics by becoming the first woman to deliver the Mais lecture in its 43-year history. One of the most high-profile events of the year in the banking and finance community, she used her lecture to set out…

Bridget Phillipson MP: What does the Government really mean by ‘levelling up’?

Boris Johnson’s slogan needs substance, says the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Last week saw Conservative MPs in seats won from Labour in 2019 starting to break cover on the inadequacy of the government’s approach to regional inequality. Tory MPs are waking up to the reality that the prime…

Bridget Phillipson MP writes for Renewal

Getting the basics right This article was written in February 2020, and featured in Renewal in April 2020. The original article can be found here. Labour needs to win big in 2024. It’s time for the party to re-learn the art of professional leadership and communication, and to accept the…

Bridget Phillipson MP: Using the State for Change: Towards an Effective Labour Government

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the government is making a complete mess of Brexit, but behind that observation lie two others, which for now, go largely unremarked while Brexit consumes the attention of Westminster and Whitehall. The first is that the government is making a complete mess of…

Bridget Phillipson MP: Labour needs to learn from the winners, not repeat a losing formula

I suspect it will be months before we have anything more than a fairly broadbrush understanding of what happened in last week’s election, and while the results did not surprise me, the points I really want to make are about the immediate pitfalls to avoid rather than the longer term…

Bridget Phillipson MP: Labour loves nostalgia. But we succeed when our politics is about the future

We love nostalgia in the Labour Party. We pepper our politics with references to people in office seventy years ago. Sometimes we seem to drench our party political broadcasts in a sense of how things were better in the past, an implicit promise that our future will be a recapturing…

Bridget Phillipson MP: 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…

Bridget Phillipson MP: 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…