Fin Heath

What is with this recent woke nonsense where left wing parties use their backgrounds to justify bad policies or dodge criticism? Bridget Philipson for Labour, Hannah Spencer for the Greens and Rob Kenyon for Reform - all obsessed over their working class credentials. It’s woke.

It is entirely fair to call the SofS for Education a spiteful class warrior. The Left always claim moral superiority, applying a double standard to their own attacks. I’m not interested in their faux outrage or attempt to censor the language used against them - and I’m glad Kemi isn’t either.

@bphillipsonMP Anyone who gloats over the loss of jobs, loss of businesses, loss of bursaries and children having to move schools, really is despicable.

If Bridget Phillipson doesn’t like being called a spiteful class warrior she should stop behaving like one. She thinks she can ruin people’s lives and avoid criticism because she was born on a council estate. Plenty of people born on council estates turn out much better than her.

PMQs…. Because Bridget Phillipson grew up in poverty she’s allowed to do a shit job as education secretary. Ok…

"I grew up on a council estate" is not an excuse for failure - bang on. Enough of this woke nonsense whereby your socio economic background is used to justify bad delivery. Labour, Reform and the Greens keep obsessing about how working class they are - it’s identity politics.

"I grew up on a council estate" is not an excuse for failure. You are sacrificing the future of generations of kids on the altar of your class envy -reversing even Labour's academy reforms. 0% of teachers think you're doing a great job. I'm not here to give you a pat on the back. I speak for those people whose lives you're destroying and I'll NEVER stop speaking up for them.

Plenty of men in khaki in parliament for Armed Forces’ week. Is the Al Carns coup back on?

Prime Minister David Cameron announces his resignation.

This is the Education Secretary who taxed working parents paying for their disabled children to attend a special school. Purely because she was ideologically opposed to parents who want to spend money on their children’s education. That’s what we don’t like.

@BBCPolitics She's right; Bridget Phillipson intentionally wrecked the education of thousands of children and undermined the entire sector purely out of spite. She's a nasty piece of work. Ideologically cruelty. Vile

You're the secretary of state for education... All of it! Not just state schools. Stop being so blinkered.

Good. Kemi is right. You are spiteful @bphillipsonMP. Stop pleading poverty about your childhood. Stop using this justify your shameful record that dismantles nearly 30 years of consensus on schools - all to indulge your own grievances and victimhood.

@bphillipsonMP The arrogance of thinking you're entitled to more of people's money is the problem. All you've done is level down standards across the board. Let's have some aspiration in our education system and encourage people to be wealth creators, not welfare dependents.

Kemi lost her head at PMQs - and afterwards too. It's not the first time. She's compared me to a Gestapo officer. I wonder what it is about a working class woman driving record investment in state schools by ending private schools' tax breaks that the Tories hate so much.

Kemi isn't wrong. Phillipson is a class warrior with a spiteful agenda driven by the levelling down of schools for some so-called sense of 'fairness'

NEW - MPs say Bridget Phillipson and Liz Kendall confronted Kemi Badenoch about her language at PMQs today where she called Phillipson "spiteful" which Kendall said was outrageous. Badenoch reported to have said “I’m never going to stop talking about how spiteful you are”

🚨 UPDATE: Bridget Phillipson confronted Kemi Badenoch after PMQs about her language Badenoch responded: "I will never stop fighting you. You are destroying children’s lives"

🚨 WATCH: Kemi Badenoch calls Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson a "spiteful class warrior" full of "incompetence" Starmer: "She grew up in poverty. I know her story is an incredible story of social mobility and success. I am so proud she is sitting there" #PMQs

In 2016 I voted Remain. Straightforward self-interest: my life ran on the EU freedom of movement and freedom to work. The person pouring my coffee or fitting my bathroom didn't need to sound like me, and if anything I'd take Polish builders over white British ones fifty times over - better work, cheaper price, none of the fleecing. Despite which, if that referendum came round again in 2026, I'd vote Leave. Not because I've turned on continental Europe. The opposite. I want trade deals, military cooperation, AI and cybersecurity partnerships, counter-terrorism coordination - maximum cooperation with the European Union as an organisation and with European Union member states as countries. Britain is a small state in an age of intensified global competition; we need alliances, and a divided Europe squabbling internally is exactly what Russia and China want. None of this requires EU membership. What leaving the European Union is meant to deliver - what it COULD deliver - is the capacity to govern as a fully sovereign nation. That is where we've failed, catastrophically. Brexit wasn't the disaster. The Conservative governments since 2016 were the disaster. Too busy with internal scandals and parliamentary pantomime to do anything beyond the bare logistics of extraction. No plan to compensate for lost trade efficiency, no plan to actually USE the sovereignty we'd recovered. It’s simple. A decade in a space leaves an astronaut’s muscles atrophied; stepping out doesn't fix it, exercise does. Our sovereign decision-making atrophied inside the European Union, and after Brexit we never bothered rebuilding it. We just stood in the airlock complaining that walking was difficult. So I'd vote Leave now because the problem was never the destination. It was that we refused to walk once we arrived.