Jennifer Howze

Writer. NOON Editorial Director | Bridport Shortlist | Deborah Rogers Foundation Longlist | @BritMums | Formerly @Netmums Ed Dir & @TheTimes Alpha Mummy

[Simon Holland @simoncholland]

No one is full of more false hope than a parent with a new summer chore chart.

[Katja Herbers @katjaherbers]

Hayao Miyazaki's reaction when a team of developers showed him a demonstration of using generative Al for animation:

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

BBC PAID A WOMAN HALF A MAN SALARY FOR THE SAME JOB AND THOUGHT NO ONE WOULD NOTICE

Carrie Gracie spoke fluent Mandarin. Ran the @BBC Beijing bureau. Thirty years of service. One of four international editors at Britain's most prestigious broadcaster.

Then the BBC was legally forced to publish salary data in 2017. Gracie looked at the list. Her male counterpart covering North America was on up to £249,000. She was below £150,000. Not even on the published list. Neither was Europe editor Katya Adler. The two women. Funny that.

She had explicitly made equal pay a condition of taking the China role. The BBC said yes. Then paid her nearly half anyway and apparently hoped she'd never check.

She checked.

She asked for equal pay. The BBC, with the confidence of an institution that had been getting away with this for decades, offered her a raise that still left her short.

She turned it down. Resigned from the post. Published an open letter to the licence fee payers explaining exactly what their public broadcaster was doing with their money.

The BBC's response was to put her through nearly a year of their own internal grievance process. Run by the same institution she was complaining about. Investigating itself. Shockingly, it went nowhere.

It took three separate meetings with the Director-General and the concrete threat of an employment tribunal before the BBC caved, issued a public apology, and paid her £361,000 in backdated wages.

She gave every single penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety).

A publicly funded broadcaster. Breaking equality law. Caught red-handed. Dragging a 30-year employee through a year of institutional theatre. Paying up only when a judge became a realistic possibility.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

*BRITISH WRITER PENS THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP*
Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump's limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don't say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it's a fact. He doesn't even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.
And scarily, he doesn't just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It's all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don't. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He's not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He's more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless or female – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy' is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and most are.
• You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it's impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that ‘woman’ is a concept men can embody at will.

[Quentin Letts @thequentinletts]

A taste of the Mandelson Files: a completely empty page with the message from Peter below 'happy to enlarge'.

[Jennifer Howze @jhowze]

Sydney, Charlie…of course!

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

We all give our cars “people” names, right?

[𝒢𝒾𝓁𝒷ℯ𝓇𝓉 @AbakpaJob]

You know you're getting old when the radio stations and bars play music you don't like, but the supermarket is throwing out banger after banger.

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

Ken Paxton is throwing everything he has at us.

He’s called me a radical leftist. He’s called me a fake Christian. He’s even called me a vegan!

I’m an 8th generation Texan — I've been eating BBQ since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The Wizard of Oz turns 87 this year, and back in 1998, critic Rick Polito wrote what might be the greatest one-line TV listing ever for TCM.

[LBC @LBC]

‘It’s a slap in the face.’

@TomSwarbrick1 speaks to caller Polly, a serving police officer, after three teenage boys, get no jail time for raping two girls.

[LBC @LBC]

'Of course they knew what they were doing.'

After three teenage boys avoided jail in a gang-rape case, @aliciakearns tells @ShelaghFogarty she believes the judge 'cares more about the future of the boys than the girls'.

[Jennifer Howze @jhowze]

From your mouth to God’s ears

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see.

His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert.

Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

[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.

[Maeve Halligan @MaeveHalligan]

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead."

I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

[Fatbaldbloke @Fatbaldbloke1]

When you forget your PE kit on cross country day and Mr Williams makes you do it in whatever is in the lost and found box.

[Lee Harris @LeeHarris]

'He is a menace to public safety. He is presiding over a party which is riddled with antisemites'

'He refuses to even acknowledge the issue of Muslim antisemitism'

Melanie Phillips tears Zack Polanski to SHREDS!
She is NOT holding back! 🔥

[Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker]

He’s terribly angry under pressure isn’t he?
#AngryDave

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The cost of living crisis is over.