UK minister suggests she got faster medical care because she voted for Gaza ceasefire
Jess Phillips says she sought medical attention at Birmingham hospital for trouble breathing, was seen by Palestinian doctor who apparently prioritized her due to her political views
The UK’s minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, Jess Phillips, has suggested she received quicker medical care through the National Health Service (NHS) because she voted for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Speaking at an event titled “An Evening With Jess Phillips” earlier this month, Phillips told attendees of an episode she had where she had difficulty breathing, according to multiple reports.
“Me lips had gone blue, and I couldn’t breathe,” she recounted to the audience, saying that she subsequently sought help at a Birmingham hospital.
Describing the scene at the hospital, Phillips was quoted as saying she had “genuinely seen better facilities, health facilities, in war zones [and] in developing countries around the world.”
She eventually reached the front of the queue, Phillips continued, “undoubtedly” because of who she was and because the doctor who saw her was Palestinian.
Phillips explained that the doctor helped her get through because she resigned from the Labour frontbench in November, while Labour was still the opposition, to vote for a resolution calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“I got through because of who I am. Also the doctor who saw me was Palestinian, as it turns out. Almost all the doctors in Birmingham seemed to be,” she said, according to the Daily Mail.
The doctor “was sort of like, ‘I like you, you voted for a ceasefire,'” Phillips recounted, adding that she appeared to have received faster care for that reason.
After the UK election in July, Phillips decried the abuse she and her activists had suffered at the hands of some pro-Palestinian protesters in what she dubbed “the worst election I have ever stood in.”
In her victory speech after she narrowly held her Birmingham Yardley seat, which was accompanied by heckles of “shame on you” and “free Palestine,” Phillips described an instance when a man screamed at a woman who was distributing leaflets for her and cases when her campaign team had their tires slashed.
She also said she believed that candidates standing on the pro-Gaza platform were “deplorable” and that they “have done absolutely nothing to help a single person in Gaza” other than bullying and picking on “mainly women.”
Her story about the NHS was criticized by many who said that as a public servant, she should not have accepted preferential treatment, and some who questioned how someone who was known to be pro-Israel or recognizably Jewish would have been treated in comparison.
Phillips has refused or not responded to multiple British publications’ requests for comment on the story.
In a letter published in the Lancet medical journal in November, two doctors, David Katz and Fiona Sim, on behalf of the Jewish Medical Association wrote that many Jewish healthcare professionals had been the victims of “unacceptable and explicit antisemitism” since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7 with the terrorist organization’s attack on Israel that resulted in some 1,200 people being murdered, and 251 hostages taken.
They wrote that the abuse included doctors who openly expressed support for Hamas’s attack, including one who mocked people fleeing from the Supernova music festival where hundreds of people were murdered by terrorists.
“Although these attacks might have come from a small number of people, it is nonetheless a serious problem,” they wrote. “Patients, and their families, need to feel safe in the knowledge that those entrusted with their care never express racist — including antisemitic — views.”
