Berit Stell

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@LBRUT Thank you

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@LBRUT when are the recycling at Whitton Library carpark & Holly Road Car park Twickenham going to be emptied . All the containers are overflowing and people are dumping on the floor around them .

[Sensible Simon @simonwatt85]

People keep attacking the triple lock but nobody ever seems to mention gold plated civil service pensions. It’s those that will bankrupt the country.

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@Thomashornall My 94 year old mum agrees with you the prices are horrific . Plus it’s difficult to buy fruit/veg which is not packed.

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@John_Dabell ❤️

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@John_Dabell Thank goodness I had to check I have been so worried for you & family . Start enjoying your time away now . ❤️

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@John_Dabell I sincerely hope you had something in your cabin baggage John . @British_Airways someone please do something !!

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@KjemiSarah Helt enig !

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

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.

Follow us Lost in Yesterday

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@Thomashornall Total rip off

[Rachel Maclean @redditchrache]

This is the man who called me transphobic for pointing out that he was a bloke in a wig. He wasted police time reporting me for a non crime hate incident. The local Labour Party held a protest in town about me.

Absolutely ridiculous.

He is a bloke in a wig.

[Aviemore @Fyrishsunset]

@afneil Excellent and here’s a concise piece from Dame Jackie Baillie MSP who’s been getting in about their mince for years …

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@Thomashornall I’ll give you a bravery award for daring to say it as a non-Norwegian . No real competition amongst the supermarkets & the VAT madness . You’ll be having a go at still having Vinmonopolet soon !
I dare you 😂

[Sarah Vine @WestminsterWAG]

superb

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@francesbarber13 @TfL Totally I agree , we came on the bus from Guys Hospital to Waterloo . A sauna is cooler .
Bus drivers are heroes .

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@John_Dabell I know it well , my husband’s treatment had over time damaged the nervesystem the back of his hands so he can’t manage it himself . Try and ignore the looks and have the ‘ syringe drink ‘ . They don’t know how lucky they are @John_Dabell .
Thank you for highlighting it .

[Berit Stell @StellBerit]

@TrevorPTweets Thank you Trevor Phillips

[Trevor Phillips @TrevorPTweets]

My thoughts on the @EHRC guidance laid yesterday; this is not about non-existent "rights". It is about the safety of women - mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. We men need to hear their voices. Virginia Woolf : "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

My intro on @TimesRadio yesterday:

Where I live there are two different routes to and from the tube station. One, let’s call it Acacia Avenue, is quiet and residential. The other, London Road, is a busy major route with lots of traffic. At all times of the day, I automatically head for Acacia Road. It’s just much nicer.

The women in my family, on the other hand, will never willingly make that walk after dark. They live with an anxiety that most men find it hard to imagine, and frankly, rarely think about unprompted.

Last year 739,000 women were sexually assaulted in Britain. Virtually all such assaults - nine out of ten - are perpetrated by men. One in four women have been attacked at some time in their lives. Acacia Avenue is exactly the sort of place in which most women fear that they become vulnerable, and they are right.

As the author Virginia Woolf once wrote " Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes".

I think this is the right context in which to understand the furore over the guidance being laid today by the government, over the meaning of the words man and woman when it comes to providing services and facilities in workplaces.

Many men think this is about a rather arcane dispute about who gets to use what loo. For their mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, it isn’t.

In a previous life, as Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I had a hand in writing this country’s equality laws, in particular the 2010 Equality Act. It never occurred to any of us that there could be any confusion or dispute over the meaning of the words man and woman. But it has taken a decade of campaigning, a Supreme Court judgement and now hundreds of pages of guidance to settle the issue.

This is not about so called trans rights, which are completely unaffected by this guidance, since no-one has ever had the right to walk into a changing room reserved for teenage girls.

What it does mean is that women and girls are guaranteed the protection they deserve, and that their safety, which we spent half a decade drafting law to ensure, is protected.

But the whole business illuminates some serious issues in our politics.

First that many of our institutions, in spite of the fact that they always knew what the right thing to do was, decided to ignore the fears of their women customers and employees, under pressure from noisy pressure groups. Instead, the people who were supposed to be the grown ups behaved as though the law said what campaigners wanted it to say, rather than what it actually said. They settled for what they hoped would be a quiet life.

In a democracy, there’s little point in Parliament deciding anything if the law is then made an ass by activists intimidating bosses in companies, schools, universities and the media into doing something different.

Second, at the heart of the campaign to undermine the Equality Act is an idea that we specifically rejected in 2010, so called self-identification. That is to say, that it should be up to the individual to decide whether they have what’s called a protected characteristic - are you male or female, are you black or white. The problem is that self-ID would destroy the operation of any law against discrimination.

Look, it would almost certainly have been to my advantage as a young man to self-identify as a handsome, white public schoolboy. None of those things is true of me. And at various points I am pretty sure it’s been to my disadvantage. It is certainly statistically likely to have been to my disadvantage.

But according to the logic of those who say that self-ID should be the rule and that anyone should be able to decide for themselves whether they are male or female, black or white or Asian, were I to complain about racial discrimination, it would be difficult for anyone prove that I’d been discriminated against because of my race since anybody to whom I’d lost out could just tell the courts that they too were black.

I know that sounds like Alice in Wonderland but you can google the case where a chap, both of whose parents are white, insisted he should get money from the Arts Council because he so identified with the black struggle that he considered himself black, and everyone should accept his point of view. In the United States and Brazil exactly such outlandish claims have been made and people rewarded to the disadvantage of people actually born into minority families.

I have even been told about firms who, when reporting their gender pay gaps have put men who just happen to like wearing dresses at weekends - nothing wrong with that, let me be clear - into the female column and told their women employees that they really haven’t got anything to moan about because statistically they are paid equally, and they should get back in their box.

So today’s guidance isn’t just another tiresome chapter in culture wars. It is , I hope, a halt to the efforts to undermine one of the most important pieces of legislation on the statute book, by people who, for their own reasons, would prefer us to be living in the 1950s world of Mad Men.

[Nickie Brown @Nickie_Brown]

Let’s have a think about what’s happening in Makerfield.

This by election is costing taxpayers £226,208. And it’s happening because a Labour MP chose to step aside to make room for Andy Burnham’s leadership ambitions. He admitted that himself.

But here’s some more interesting figures.

If Burnham wins, he’ll have to resign as Greater Manchester Mayor too. That triggers another election costing taxpayers around £4.7 million.

So in total, nearly £5 million of public money could be spent not on improving services, fixing roads, supporting communities or helping struggling families, but on political career ambitions.

People are struggling with bills, crime, NHS waiting lists and communities being ignored. Yet Westminster politics still seems focused on who climbs the ladder next.

That’s what frustrates people. Not democracy. Political games made to look like democracy.

[Charlotte's Battle Against Glioblastoma (BAG) @alexeades1]

After losing a child, you are faced with arranging a funeral. Grief is at its rawest, gnawing away at every part of you. I sat in the waiting room, waiting for the funeral director to greet us. They talked about your loss and gave us a tour of the caskets. Things no parent should choose.

I sat there, clutching Charlotte’s last Chanel powder compact - unopened, of course. I also held onto Miles’s childhood teddy, Marmalade. Miles had given it to Charlotte in hospital. Miles said later that when he saw us come down the garden path without Charlotte, but with Marmalade, it broke him. I also sat in the funeral directors with a small plush hedgehog, a present from our school matron, Ruth, to Charlotte. She had given it to Charlotte on her first day of Year 7 because she knew how anxious she was. Lastly, I held her Minnie Mouse stocking - a Christmas present from her grandparents for her first Christmas. The photo was taken on 3.5.2013, Charlotte's last day in Year 11. 76 days later she was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

I had to choose an outfit, not a wedding dress. Rather, clothes for my daughter to be cremated in, along with shoes. I looked through the brochures containing all the caskets with tears pouring down my face, hardly able to turn the pages. I could have chosen pink or any colour I wanted, but Charlotte had always lived by the words “less is more.” I chose a simple wicker casket, and I knew she would have approved.

I drove a short distance down the road to the flower shop the funeral parlour had recommended. I wished I had been choosing a wedding bouquet with Charlotte instead. Again, I kept everything simple: three lilies laid on top, with small white posies placed around the handles of the casket.

Every minute of the day of the funeral, I wanted to run far away and pretend none of it was happening. But there is nowhere to run from grief, especially when it has wrapped itself around your entire life.

Charlotte died on 24.2.2016. Then, only weeks later, my aunt passed away on  24.3.2016. On Tuesday 29.3.2016, I lost my mother too. The world did not stop to let me breathe between losses; it simply kept taking.

Recently, I came across Charlotte’s birth and death certificates. To see those two documents placed side by side felt almost impossible to comprehend. One piece of paper marking the beginning of a life filled with hope, love, laughter, and memories; the other reducing an entire lifetime to a date, a time, and a signature. It is one of the most surreal feelings in the world holding proof that someone existed, and proof that they are gone, all within the space of two pieces of paper.

Grief changes the way you look at ordinary things. Paperwork becomes sacred. Handwriting becomes precious. A name printed in black ink suddenly carries the weight of an entire lifetime. And sometimes the smallest things, a certificate, a compact powder, a teddy, a little hedgehog, hold more love than words could ever explain.

Charlotte’s BAG has raised £385,000 directly funding research at Charlotte’s Lab, King’s College Hospital, London

The big difference with Charlotte's BAG is simple: we self-fund everything.
No merchandise
No salaries
No overheads
No advertising
We even cover the PayPal and PO Box fees personally so nothing is taken from the charity account.
If you want to donate to a brain tumour charity please think of us and pop a pound in Charlotte's Bag.
https://t.co/qGIjBOl3aq
Please RT Thank you