@tomchapple1@williamnhutton No it isn’t. It’s bang on the nose. The Treasury’s obsessive free mkt/short term approach to everything is the biggest brake on the economy that we have, and has been for ss long as I can remember.
@TheCricketPaper Don’t need an alcohol ban. Need to be clear to all players how England players are expected to act if they are to be eligible for any England team. And if they don’t act accordingly they won’t be eligible-whoever they are. And then leaders who demonstrate those principals.
@PolitlcsUK@e_casalicchio Or maybe he’s asking the Treasury to de their job properly. The world and our needs have changed but the treasury is still in the 19th century where laissez faire rules.
@BoothCricket@MailSport This whole issue is about leadership. Setting stds and expectations, demonstrating them personally and making it absolutely clear to others the consequences of not meeting them. Rob Key fails this test and unfortunately that’s also the issue with BS.
@PippaCrerar Well the Treasury would wouldn’t they. They still run the country (whatever the party in power) instead of the govt running them. Reeves and Starmer should have got to grips at the outset with this longstanding problem.
November 1971. Chiswick, West London.
Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor.
She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house.
Then the door opened.
A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking.
She didn't want tea.
She needed somewhere to hide.
Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police.
Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter.
When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one."
Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed.
Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority.
She didn't stop.
By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere.
In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief.
Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords.
She kept the doors open the entire time.
That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York.
The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world.
MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical."
She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million.
Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86.
She never stopped.
It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no.
Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go.
She made room.
Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world.
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@jessicaelgot Isn’t this getting a bit obsessive now ? Surely there are more important issues facing the country and govt? Mandelson should never have been near a govt posn - everybody knows that - so what are you now trying to show/uncover?
@foodtechteacher@TownleyHatTrick@_ElliottJackson Well you obviously didn’t go to Oxford or Southampton. Oh and I don’t think anyone who went to hillsborougb would deem that an acceptable level of perf.
@mcurrie95 It was interesting to hear his interview a few wks ago about how he’d concluded that he needed to become physically stronger to succeed in the Champ and how his increased gym work was paying off. And it certainly is - allowing him to deploy his skills more effectively.
@Ruskkeee@bav_aled Whatever the perfs in other games (and they don’t come any worse than Oxford) that group of player gave it their absolute all. Yes we should take more of the chances we create and we should stop giving cheap free kicks way but we couldn’t have asked much more of the team tonight