Debra Williams

💜🤍💚

[FoodinJapan @FoodinJ]

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@FoodinJ

[The Royal Family @RoyalFamily]

Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.

[Laika @laikaloo]

@afneil Camilla Long wrote a very funny article on these two, it is a must read.
https://t.co/eC4VOKINuY

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Over 1,300 British farms have joined a new app in about twelve weeks. It is called Only Farmers, it was named deliberately after OnlyFans, and the parallel runs deeper than the joke intends.

Both are platforms where the producer sells direct access to themselves, because the people who used to pay them stopped paying enough to live on.

Lisa Hogan built it with her son Wolfe Bentinck, after five years of farmers coming into the Diddly Squat shop to thank her for the programme and then tell her their own version of it. Her words: this is for smaller farmers who do not have a marketing budget or Amazon.

Look at what is being sold.

Farm stays. Vineyard tours. Cheese-making. Beekeeping. Weddings. Lambing days. Clarkson's own summary this week was that you could walk an alpaca or milk a cow.

Every item on that list is something a farmer does anyway. Unpaid, at four in the morning, in February, as part of a job that a government review found loses money on nearly a third of British farms.

The novelty version pays. The work does not.

A family will hand over real money to stand in a shed for two hours and watch a ewe give birth. That same lamb, reared for months and sold through the proper chain, goes at a price the farmer is not allowed to set.

The second half of the app is grimmer still, because it also runs farmer-to-farmer equipment rental. Farms hiring kit to each other, because too few can justify owning their own.

None of which is a criticism of Hogan. She has built something useful, after listening at a till for five years. Book the alpaca. The money goes where it should.

But 1,300 signups in twelve weeks is not enthusiasm for an app. It is 1,300 farms reaching the same conclusion in the same season, which is that the dependable money is in the experience rather than the food.

We have arrived at a country where a farm earns more reliably from charging strangers to watch it farm.

Nobody thought that was worth remarking on.

[Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis]

STUDENT LOAN NEWS: The Treasury Committee of MPs has put out its report into student loans. Here's my view:-

I’ve long condemned the Chancellor’s planned freeze of the student loan repayment threshold next April as immoral and a breach of natural justice. So today is an important moment, as the cross-party Treasury Committee of MPs echoes this language in calling out a “moral obligation” for this to be reversed.

Changing terms for future students is a political choice, but that’s not what is planned next year. Freezing the threshold on existing Plan 2 loans effectively increases the amount those with those loans must repay each year. It is a retrospective, one-sided contractual change that would not be allowed in almost any other circumstance or sector. Worse, those hit often signed these contracts while just 18, with little or no explanation of what they were getting into.

This has to stop, and never be allowed again. That’s why one of the Committee’s most important proposals is that the Government should effectively be bound by the same Consumer Duty for student loans as a commercial lender, backed by proper fairness rules. Though it is only taking about student loan promotions, I think it should be for all student loan behaviour.

I have been pushing for this for over a decade. In 2016 we even got Wes Streeting, then a new MP, to propose FCA regulation of student loans and place restrictions on negative changes as a parliamentary amendment. It was rejected. Had that protection been in place, it could have stopped successive governments tinkering with the system, resulting in a horrific degradation of the original terms.

I hope this report, feeding into a new administration, means there is now a realistic chance of stopping the planned freeze and any future freezes.

Yet let’s be clear: that alone will not fix the Plan 2 student loan crisis - it’ll just stop it getting even worse. The report is titled "Student loans: broken and unfair?". There is no need for the question mark. The repayment threshold should be many thousands of pounds higher, interest should be reduced, maintenance thresholds need uprating, and the whole system, including the way it is communicated, needs a fundamental reset.

Here is the report: https://t.co/MPIOFE7mjy
Here is the MSE submission to the report: https://t.co/RIUPRO2svQ

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Tony Blair Institute for Global Change @InstituteGC]

https://t.co/27lbhXTsjk

[Debra Williams @dowoppadeb]

💯

[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.

[Titanic New York @TitanicNewYork]

114 years on, Belfast witnesses a full-scale drone Titanic depart into the night...a powerful tribute.

#titanic #rmstitanic

[JezzasLastStand @JezzasLastStand]

@stephenpollard @ShippersUnbound Full version of Shipman article here:

https://t.co/FzUV4QLli8

[Md Riyazuddin @riyazmd774]

15. Handwriting tool in Notes

- Open the Notes app
- Tap the Markup Switch button to show the tool palette
- Tap the Handwriting tool, which is to the left of the pen
- Start writing with your Apple Pencil

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

My position hasn't changed in the slightest. What you, and many other men, fail to grasp, possibly because you're so used to women coddling men's feelings you see it as the natural order of things, is that while a trans-identified man is absolutely and rightly free to dress and refer to himself however he likes in our society, that doesn't give him rights over women's beliefs and speech. I don't believe a man literally becomes a woman when he identifies as one, and as I have freedom of speech, I have the right to call him a man. The verifiable truth of sex forms the legal basis for women's rights and for safeguarding. Nothing reveals your inability to grasp this issue, or your fundamental sexism, more than the fact that you, a man, are assuming the right to dictate to women how they should speak about men.

[Steve James @sjamesjourno]

Something on my friend and partner, Hugh Morris.

https://t.co/rvaHXBBdcQ

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

British upland grazing has been continuous for 6,000+ years.

We have archaeological evidence of pastoral farming on the same hills that graze cattle and sheep today.

For six millennia, those hills have had large herbivores eating grass and depositing nutrients.

The ecosystem evolved with this. The soil biome depends on it. The plant diversity requires it.

"But cattle are destroying the environment!"

Which environment? The one that's been grazed for 6,000 years and is still producing food, or the one you imagine should exist based on watching David Attenborough?

Nature isn't static. These hills aren't "pristine wilderness." They're managed ecosystems that have supported human populations for 60 centuries.

Remove the cattle and you're not restoring anything. You're creating novel conditions the ecosystem hasn't experienced in recorded history.

But hey, at least you'll feel morally superior while importing soy from deforested Brazil.

[Harry Legge-Bourke @LeggeBourke]

.⁦@Glanusk⁩ it is with profound sorrow that we announce the death of Dame Shân Legge-Bourke DCVO who died last night peacefully surrounded by her family. A remarkable lady whose lifetime of service to her country , nation and countless organisations she supported.

[Debra Williams @dowoppadeb]

This is the right thing to do for the safety of all children.

[Wes Streeting @wesstreeting]

Children with gender incongruence deserve safe, compassionate and effective care. That healthcare must always be led by evidence. 🧵

[Mike Graham 🇬🇧 @Iromg]

Brilliant from @afneil on @RachelReevesMP

[Welsh Guards @Official_1WG]

#NewProfilePic

[Charlie Peters @CDP1882]

Six women on the panel for the grooming gang inquiry have sent GB News this statement of support for those who have quit.

They have criticised the harassment the women have faced and say that survivors must lead the inquiry’s focus, as they are “experts by experience.”

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

It has always been a hobby of mine to collect colour film footage from the second world war and all of the film I have used in this video is original colour and not colourised.

I've edited this little film for you using soundbites from WWII news broadcasts & speeches to represent the period of the Blitz, which began at 4pm on 7th September 1940 and continued every night until 11th May 1941. The music I chose is "The Lady Caliph" by Ennio Morricone.

(Due to the scarcity of colour footage, a couple of shots are merely representative: It may not show the correct type of bombs being dropped, and it might not show the correct type of planes dropping them. I know some military experts will undoubedly point that out to me, but the purpose of the film is to show London’s devastation, rather than the technical specifications of the military hardware used).