Boris Johnson should stop pretending to care about ordinary people – the cut to UC tells us all we need to know

The Tory cut of £20 per week to universal credit will affect 17,000 households in my constituency, including 11,000 children

Boris Johnson delivers his speech at the Tory Party conference (PA)

Boris Johnson has been enjoying the ticker-tape parade that is the all-worshipful Tory party conference this week.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham Yardley, a place with a Tory mayor, there was also a small ticker-tape parade. While I was queueing to pick up a food parcel for a destitute domestic violence victim this week at the local food bank, the lovely staff told me that the day before a woman had come to collect a parcel and was the 1,000th referral for food from this particular food bank that had come from my office. They gave her a box of chocolates to mark the auspicious occasion.

This all happened the day before the Tory cut of £20 per week to universal credit, which will affect 17,000 households in my constituency. Eleven thousand children live in those households. I am sure they are delighted to wake up to the Tory spin that only Boris Johnson has the courage to do what needs to be done to change our economy. Impoverishing them takes courage, apparently. Yes, I bet those 11,000 children are really pleased to be the little tin soldiers he is using while he loafs around pretending to be a courageous lion.

After all, it is that courage which, for the past 11 years of a Tory government and four years of a Tory mayor, has increased the gap in attainment between them and their wealthier, more southerly counterparts. All the while, Tories bellow in their little faces that they are being levelled up. They are, in fact, being levelled down.

I’ll tell you what courage looks like; I have seen it this week in bucketloads. It looks like a teenage rape victim I sat with. Abused for years as a child, she had the courage to report her abuser against some significant personal odds. That was four years ago; her trial was delayed once again recently. She is currently living in emergency temporary accommodation. The government obviously thinks it is appropriate for a teenage rape victim to live in a house alone with a group of other men, many with their own demons.

But don’t worry, I told her that I heard the justice secretary on the radio and he was saying that the Tories will do whatever it takes to make sure rape victims like her are cared for: apart from legislating against the kind of unsafe and unsuitable accommodation for victims that makes her scared to close her eyes, apart from ensuring that she has a right to an advocate through the system (she didn’t have one, after four years, until she came to me), apart from guaranteeing that her case and cases like hers are expedited, so that a quarter of her life isn’t spent in terror of this process. And all the while her alleged abuser walks freely in to other girls’ houses for the entire time.

This woman gets up each and every morning living in a frightening home with locks on the doors, no advocate to turn to, every day for four years counting down the hours until she has to sit and be pulled apart in a courtroom – that is what courage looks like. A government which has spent 11 years inching the rug out from underneath this young woman, digging holes for her to fall into where there used to be ladders for her to climb, is what failure looks like. Oh, and they have taken £20 off her this week, too.

I don’t normally get to spend the whole week in my constituency but the conference break to the Westminster timetable means that every day I can sit and talk to my lovely community. They tell it how it is, like the police officer who told me that, even with the extra police promised, it doesn’t account for those retiring and the natural churn, so they simply won’t get back to the number of officers they once had. They are very sorry that they have had to end local Speedwatch groups and other community interventions this week but they simply don’t have the bodies.

Boris Johnson is dressing up his inability to govern as if it was part of some courageous plan no one else would ever dare to undertake. It isn’t that; he just doesn’t care if his citizens are hurting. He can’t be bothered to hear about the realities of people’s lives, their business troubles and public service pleas; he’s too busy making funny videos riding a bike to care about this poor young woman in my constituency.

I get that he doesn’t care, I’ve come to expect nothing less. I just wish that he would stop shouting in her face that his government is on her side. It makes her feel as if she’s doing something wrong. Boris Johnson is not the courageous lion at all; he’s the fraudulent Wizard of Oz.

Jess Phillips is the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding and Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley.