Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, gets an awful lot of criticism, some of it justified and some of it not. However what we do know is that she appears to be very thin skinned to such an extent that she wants mockery of people in her position banned.

She has also made claims, some say shonky claims, that she has been subjected to online ‘rape threats’, but to my knowledge, few if any of these claims have been validated. From my memory there was one stalking incident that was dealt with by police but it would be highly unusual for any public figure not to have at least one stalker, there are, it needs to be said, a lot of nutters out there.

Jess Phillips even complained that one YouTuber, Sargon of Akkad, put out a statement distancing himself from any alleged rape threats by saying ‘I wouldn’t rape you’, followed up afterwards by the statement that ‘there’s not enough beer in the world’ that would make him want to become intimate with Ms Phillips.

Jess Phillips is quite happy to dish out criticisms of others but baulks when criticism or mockery is directed at her. She is perceived by many of us to be a bit of an attention seeker but only when the attention is that which she approves of.

Ms Phillips is also, to use a colloquial term, ‘as thick as mince’, not a woman exactly highly blessed with a stellar intelligence. For example: Many of us who know a damned sight more about Islam than she does, laughed out loud when we saw her lecturing Muslims in her constituency who objected to enforced LGBT propaganda in a primary school, about how they were doing Islam wrong by protesting.

Now Ms Phillips has been shown again to be as thick as mince but this time over an obvious Photoshopped image.

Guido Fawkes is reporting that she retweeted without any thought or fact checking an image of US sportsmen wearing lace collars of a sort the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was known to wear. The image that she received from the Labour Women’s Network (who also should have known better) she then just retweeted it with the words ‘Shedding a happy tear at this. BOOM’.

This image is an obvious fake and should have been seen as such by both the Labour Women’s Network and Jess Phillips herself. Sadly they didn’t and embarrassed themselves greatly.

Ms Phillips should have engaged her brain before thoughtlessly retweeting something, an item that was clearly a parody. However, her actions do highlight something badly wrong with the way that we are governed. That is the dire quality of those whom govern us.

A more thoughtful person, someone blessed with a bit more savvy than seems to be possessed by Ms Phillips would have thought ‘this doesn’t look right’ and moved on. The problem as I see it is that he House of Commons is stuffed full to the brim with people who are just as thick as Jess Phillips.

Of course there are bright and thoughtful people in the House, but too many of them are not. They are just biddable lobby fodder, blindly following the orders of their Parliamentary Whips, who live in intellectual and viewpoint bubbles. Many of these less than satisfactory MP’s are elected on a combination of communal, sometimes fraudulent postal votes or by those who instinctively and without much thought, vote for the same parties election after election. Not for nothing is it said that in some Labour constituencies you could put a red rosette on a dog turd and it would get elected. The same also applies, but with a different coloured rosette of course, to those constituencies that instinctively vote Tory after each election.

We Britons are being really badly represented by many of the MP’s who currently occupy the Green Benches. Often their loyalty to party and to dogma means that they do not represent properly important viewpoint currents that circulate among the populace. With some of the worst of them, when we write to them to express a concern or a polite suggestion that a current government policy is bad, all we get back is party line bullshit with no indication that the concern of the constituent has been duly noted let alone acted upon.

We need a better calibre of MP. We need MP’s who are intellectually capable of independent thought and most importantly MP’s who will actually listen to their constituents. Until that happens we will continue to be ruled over by the likes of Jess Phillips and those like her, with all that this implies. One of the important jobs of the House of Commons is to hold the Executive to account in the name of the people who elected them. I’ve not seen them do much of that, especially lately, although some are now prepared to speak out. The only way this situation will change is if Britons look carefully at who is being put up for election and vote not for the colour of the party rosette but instead vote on the basis of the content of the character of those vying for our votes. That way we may be able to create a House of Commons that is thoughtful, open minded, intelligent and responsive to the desires of the people.