When the Minister for Safeguarding herself walks out of your government, you know the wheels are off. Jess Phillips, one of the most recognisable Labour figures in Parliament, has resigned. She has been joined by three other junior ministers and four ministerial aides. Ninety-two Labour MPs have now publicly demanded that the Prime Minister set a date for his own departure. This is not turbulence. This is a government in collapse.
A Safeguarding Minister Who Couldn't Stomach Her Own Government
Phillips built her career on being the voice nobody could ignore. She rose on the back of campaigning for women, victims of domestic abuse, and survivors of grooming. Labour put her in charge of safeguarding because they wanted that brand on the door. Now she has slammed it shut on the way out.
Whatever the formal wording of her resignation letter, the message to Westminster is unmistakable. A senior Labour minister has looked at what this government is doing — or failing to do — and decided she cannot be part of it. You do not walk away from a Cabinet job at Easter unless you have lost faith.
Ninety-Two MPs Cannot All Be Wrong
The 92 Labour MPs now openly calling on Starmer to set out his departure are not Reform UK plants. They are his own people. They were elected on his manifesto. They sat behind him at PMQs for the past two years. And they have decided, en masse, that the country can no longer wait for him to be prised out of Downing Street.
This is what happens when a party governs without conviction. Labour spent the last general election telling the country it had changed. The voters took them at their word. Two local election cycles later, voters have looked at the cost of living, the boats still landing on Dover beach, and the NHS still groaning under the weight of broken promises — and they have given Labour their verdict.
The Real Failure: Grooming Gangs and Lost Trust
It is impossible to talk about Jess Phillips walking out of the Safeguarding brief without talking about grooming gangs. For more than a year, the government has dragged its feet on a full national statutory inquiry, hidden behind procedural language, and refused to confront the racial and cultural dimensions of one of the worst safeguarding failures in modern British history.
Reform UK has been clear from the start. The victims of these crimes — overwhelmingly working-class white girls in towns the establishment forgot — deserve the same justice anybody else would expect. The instinct to look away because the truth is politically inconvenient is exactly why public trust has collapsed.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would launch a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs with the power to compel witnesses and disclose its findings in full. We would back police and prosecutors who pursue these cases, not the bureaucrats who buried them. We would ensure safeguarding ministers were held to account by Parliament, not by spin doctors managing the news cycle.
And we would deliver a government that respects the people who voted for it. Labour has forgotten that. Jess Phillips, in her own way, has just confirmed it. The only question now is how long Keir Starmer can pretend the door is not closing behind him.