Working Class Zeroes 17 - Bridget Phillipson

The fag-end of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is turning out to be a final, concentrated hit of all its worst qualities. In the course of the ‘orderly transition’ period, PMQs on Wednesday found him, as ever, squawking and gobbling like a half-stunned turkey. His biggest splutter came after Kemi Badenoch described Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson as a ‘spiteful class warrior’. Starmer gasped, and in appalled and plaintive tones - like Zippy after Bungle had refused to play with his twanger - clucked, ‘The Education Secretary grew up in poverty!’

So, indeed, did Ian Brady and Fred West. Apparently, this claim to childhood penury - which we shall examine more closely in Bridget’s case in due course - makes an adult unchallengeable. That little thing that Bertrand Russell called ‘The Fallacy Of The Superior Virtue Of The Oppressed’ - a fancy term for something most of us twigged when we were about eleven years old - seems never to have occurred to Starmer.

But then, Labour politicians still seem to assign growing up in the northeast and attending a state school to the same category as cerebral palsy or Spina Bifida. A cabinet minister raised by a single parent - tick - on a council estate - double tick! - essentially puts Bridget Phillipson on the same spectacular rung of achievement as Helen Keller.

But who exactly is this paragon, this modern-day Tiny Tim who has holy water running through her veins?

Bridget Maeve Philipson was born in Gateshead in December 1983 - appropriately enough, riding high in the pop charts at the time of her nascence was Paul Young with ‘Love Of The Common People’. She never knew or even met her father, who was apparently a teacher. Her mother Clare was a busy lady, starting up a domestic violence charity-cum-shelter - Wearside Women In Need - while pregnant with our Bridget. (It’s hard to be certain, but I’m getting a slight sensation of the old shabby genteels about all of this.)

Raised in the harsh and unforgiving world of the 1880s, young Bridget - riddled with rickets and dipped in diphtheria - was in and out of the local workhouse, crawling with lice, her tiny shrivelled frozen claws held out pathetically for pennies from passing mill owners. Oh no, sorry, this was actually the 1980s, so she received council housing, a free education, drama and violin lessons, and was an extra on Byker Grove.

She joined the Labour Party aged 15, which by the seventeenth entry on this list we should all know is a flashing red alarm signal of a massive wrong ‘un.

Further deprivations? She attended a very good former voluntary aided Catholic school, St Robert of Newminster. From there, battling against the odds, she went to Oxford, attending Hertford College, which is renowned for taking smart, hard working, selectively educated girls from the North. Here she studied Modern History, though presumably not the bits of modern history that involve socialists plunging their countries into despair and decline.

In an interview in the Guardian shortly after her appointment as Education Secretary, Bridget sobbed, ‘I grew up in a family that prized learning, was encouraged to read from an early age by my mam, sat doing times tables with my grandad, who was always giving me extra books and taking me to museums … I was also incredibly lucky to go to incredible state schools, they really pushed me to succeed, every step of the way, to apply to Oxford. The opportunities I enjoyed, I want all our children to have them.’ This is fascinating. Keep these details in mind - particularly her acknowledgement that encouragement and support from parents and family are hugely important for children - when we come to her ministerial career.

(This Guardian interview is quite remarkable, by the way, both for its complacent and incurious bum-kissing and for its purveying of downright lies about the previous government, which for all its many flaws, actually did a semi-reasonable job on state education.)

‘I grew up in poverty,’ says Bridget. ‘I know the impact it has. I know how it makes you feel.’ This is an interesting claim. Because - stand by for a bit of lived experience here - my own family background was not so very materially different from hers. There was never much money about, and we were recipients of what was then known as Family Allowance. I did drama and took violin lessons, and I went to university (much good it did me). And I can confidently state that, thankfully, I have no experience of growing up in poverty at all. In fact, that would be a grotesque claim.

What we’re talking about here seems to be the concept of ‘relative poverty’ and ‘inequality’. Actual, absolute poverty has declined in Britain and the rest of the world at historically unprecedented levels over the last hundred years or so, thanks to the miracle of modern capitalism. So, naturally, this is what chippy socialists like Phillipson dream of smashing to bits. The experience of actual poverty - abandoned, soul-crushing starvation and destitution - is so alien to Westerners that they now have to imagine it, and ascribe it to themselves for virtue points, while practising the violin. It is an obscene pose, a shiny wrapper on the sin of envy.

From Oxford, Bridget rose through the progressive ranks, becoming MP for Houghton and Sunderland South in 2010, and Education Secretary in the Labour government fourteen years later.

How did this waif of the storm celebrate her elevation?

Fortunately, Phillipson received a £14,000 gift/donation from Labour donor Lord Alli, which she used in part for a birthday party. She also accepted free Taylor Swift concert tickets, stating it was ‘a hard one to turn down’ as one of her children was keen to go. And parents want the best for their kids, don’t they? Who could say no to such a treat? And what kind of monster would stand in the way of a parent wanting the best for a child?

Funny you should ask.

As Education Secretary, Bridget has been central to Labour’s policy of ending the VAT exemption on private school fees. This is often described as ‘ending the tax break’ for such schools, though this is a highly pejorative way of looking at the exemption. This move was initiated - ostensibly - to fund state education improvements (e.g. more teachers, more money in the system).

How’s that going? Let’s check the government’s own official figures. There are now two and a half thousand fewer teachers in state schools than when Labour came to power. Large schools are closing at a historic rate - in fact, at four times the previous speed. The number of private school pupils entering the state sector is 191% higher than Bridget forecast, putting strain on the very places Bridget was trying to ‘help’. The costs of implementing the policy have exceeded the estimate by £242 million.

The policy hasn’t touched the very rich and the big public schools - but it has victimised and disrupted the borderline cases, the families who were just able to afford a better option for their children.

How did Bridget launch her flagship scheme? Following its implementation, she posted the following to X in October 2024 -

‘Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery. Our children need mental health support more than private schools need new pools. Our students need careers advice more than private schools need AstroTurf pitches.’

If that little missive isn’t dripping with envy and malice, what is? Note also the ancient stereotypes. In the light of what the policy has actually ‘achieved’, it takes on an even more unpleasant tone.

This is dog-in-the-manger, ‘if I can’t have it then neither can you’ vindictiveness. It might, just, be forgivable if the policy had been successful in its aims. But of course it wasn’t. It could not be, because it wasn’t actually motivated by anything more noble than the desire to spoil, to vandalise.

‘I stand by my record,’ Bridget posted this week, after Kemi’s ‘brutal’ parliamentary attack - ‘including putting us on course for a record reduction in child poverty … and if the Tories think that makes me a “spiteful class warrior”, it tells you everything you need to know about them.’

Like so many of her Labour colleagues, I don’t think Bridget understands what poverty and wealth actually are. I’m not even sure she comprehends what money actually is. She seems genuinely to believe that wealth is a hoard of gold coins belonging to Scrooge McDuck, and that like quicksand people can be ‘pushed into’ and ‘lifted out’ of it. This is a failure of education, who is overseeing further failures of education.

How to sum up Bridget, in the round? Here we have a poor, hard done by, working class, Northern, Oxbridge graduate running a G7 nation, and running it on the principles of an NUS bar in 1996. And it’s apparently the height of bad manners to point this out, however light-heartedly.

‘How dare you speak to me like that! I’ve never been so insulted in all my born days!’ There’s a reason why you often hear lines like that in comedy, but never in drama.

Labour - and Phillipson in particular - throwing up their hands in horror at Kemi’s ‘brutality’ like dainty Edwardian maiden aunts is highly humorous, yes, but it also reveals something.

The decorous and dignified David Lammy - who, lest we forget, described the likes of Steve Baker MP as worse than the Nazis - has suddenly come over all Lady Bracknell, tweeting, ‘Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Bridget Phillipson at PMQs today lays bare something deeper about the direction of their politics. I’m proud that this Labour government has the most state-schooled Cabinet in the post-war era - people who didn’t grow up with privilege, but earned their place through hard work. That’s the difference between us and them.’ The ludicrous Sir Chris Bryant MP had a similar mini-spasm of the conniptions about That Nasty Lady.

Hilariously, Labour really like to pretend it’s Upstairs Downstairs, and that they - despite running the country! - are Downstairs. I see Lammy as Hudson and Bryant as Mrs Bridges, but Bridget - with her blank expression and slow-table demeanour - has to be Ruby. ‘Peel them potatoes!’

But, actually, I think Kemi got the details wrong. Spite is too grand an emotion for Bridget. It is too developed and evolved, too complicated, too human. I don’t think she really has the capacity for such feelings. Attributing her with spite is rather like looking a freshwater trout in the eyes and saying that you think it is experiencing lasting regret.

Similarly, ‘class warrior’ isn’t quite right either. Like all modern progressives, Bridget is a status warrior. What such people really hate is not wealth or ‘privilege’ - whatever that means in the 2020s. In fact, they despise people who aspire to social mobility in the incorrect way. By accepting the largesse of state benefits, and giving her fealty to Labour, Bridget is the exemplar, the model citizen. Parents who scrimped and saved to squeeze just barely enough cash to give their kids the best they could, though? That is not ‘hard work’, apparently. Bridget, somehow, earned those freebie Taylor Swift tickets by the honest sweat of her brow. She grafted for that birthday bung from Lord Alli.

Boiled down to her bare essentials, Bridget Philipson is just one among many nasty, piddling people peddling nasty, piddling policies. Every small act Labour performs is helping to make life just that little bit shitter. But taken collectively, their wheezes add up into quite a heap. And, as anybody who grew up near a farm can tell you, just a little manure can cause quite a big stink.

Labour are now so convinced of their own unassailable moral rectitude that they’re even contemplating trying to control the flow of public information. They intend to force social media platforms to ‘prioritise’ state-sanctioned media outlets. They really seem to think that the public despises them because wicked people are lying. How could this not be the case, given that they are so wonderful?

In fact, they are radicalising the British population all by themselves. They are morons, enabled by morons, doing moronic things moronically. And Bridget Phillipson is the top of the class.

NEXT TIME on Working Class Zeroes - the unchanging man (really definitely this time, promise)