Labour frontbencher Jess Phillips has been accused of “racist and bullying behaviour” after getting into a row on social media with high-profile headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh.
Birbalsingh, former chairwoman of the Social Mobility Commission who was once dubbed “Britain’s strictest headteacher”, accused the Birmingham Yardley MP of seeking to “whip up a social media mob” against her on Twitter.
It came after the Birbalsingh, head of high-achieving Michaela Community School in Brent, said she inadvertently tweeted a picture of Tina Turner alongside her abusive former husband Ike Turner amid tributes to the late star.
In a four-page, open letter to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Birbalsingh wrote: “She inspired a vicious mob attack against me on Twitter on the evening of May 24 2023, and called into question my school’s safeguarding policies in a deliberative attempt to challenge my competence as a Headteacher.”
“My view is that Ms Phillips’ extreme and unprompted hostility towards me is motivated by my race. By this I do not mean that she hates all people of colour.
“Her behaviour is a clear example of ‘unconscious bias’. I mean that she hates me, despite not knowing me, because she subscribes to the idea that Black and Asian individuals in public life owe a duty to voice opinions that match with a left-wing view of the world, or they are worthy of her contempt.”
‘You ain’t no Aslan’
Birbalsingh also accused Philips in the letter of saying that Conservative politicians from an Asian background were somehow “not Asian” after been sent a tweet from over five years ago in which the Labour MP used a Chronicles of Narnia metaphor to question the motives of some up-and-coming politicians.
She later tweeted on Sunday that she was mistaken about that point in her original letter to Starmer. She said: “Jess Phillips didn’t say ‘You ain’t no Asian’, and instead said ‘You ain’t no Aslan’.
“It was a poor quality screenshot someone took that I was reading.”
She then insisted that her other points about being subjected to a pile-on still stood.
School lunches controversy
In 2016, it was revealed that the free school “superhead” forced children to sit in detention if their parents cannot afford to pay for school lunches.
Birbalsingh issued parents with a letter threatening to punish pupils with “lunch isolation” if their lunch payments were not made on time.
Parents were told their children would be given a sandwich and a piece of fruit in place of their hot meal and separated from their friends at lunch time until the debts were paid off.
She also said people from poor backgrounds should not aim for Oxbridge – and should take “smaller steps” instead in her first speech as the Chairman of the Social Mobility Commission.
“We want to move away from the notion that social mobility should just be about the ‘long’ upward mobility from the bottom to the top – the person who is born into a family in social housing and becomes a banker or CEO,” Birbalsingh said.
“We want to promote a broader view of social mobility, for a wider range of people, who want to improve their lives, sometimes in smaller steps.”
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