Podcast appearances and mentions of Stella Creasy

Who is behind the red paint attacks both in and outside the capital? Journalist David James Smith reports on the latest, as Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, urges the Met Police to treat the repeated vandalism with the seriousness it deserves.And in part two, journalist Lucy Pavia shares how you can bring the cottagecore garden trend to your own urban outdoor space. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour MP Stella Creasy, Conservative MP and former net zero minister Graham Stuart, Theo Bertram of the Social Market Foundation think tank (who also used to work for TikTok and Gordon Brown) and LBC's political editori Natasha Clark.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour MP Stella Creasy, Conservative MP and shadow farming minister Robbie Moore, TUC general secretary Paul Nowak and social activist and commentator Nimco Ali.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour MP Stella Creasy, former Conservative MP and minister Steve Baker, broadcaster Jemma Forte and founder of ConservativeHome Tim Montgomerie.

Continuing our series of focussed analysis of the general election, Naomi Smith chats to the deputy leader of the Greens, Zack Polanski, about every aspect of the result. What was different in this campaign that resulted in a quadrupling of Green seats? Will the LibDems' success in primarily Tory-facing constituencies leave space for the Greens to challenge the gov't from the left? How does a hostile media shape the narrative? What next for the Green Party? PLUS: The case for Proportional Representation. ALSO: The environmental case for veganism. AND A SCOOP: Why is Stella Creasy's Walthamstow constituency in Zack's sights? Subscribe to the podcast, like us, rate us, and share the joyous news on social media. Ideas, feedback, comments, guest or topic suggestions? Find us on twitter @quietriotpod, email us at quietriotpod@gmail.com, or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. Quiet Riot is produced by Kenny Campbell, in cahoots with Sandstone Global. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 57: Stella Creasy on “being the change”, staying professional amidst personal turmoil and her love of WalthamstowStella Creasy is the Labour and Co-Operative MP for Walthamstow, first elected in 2010.She has held a variety of positions within the Labour party, first as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the shadow Education Secretary Andy Burnham, and then in 2011 as a shadow Home Office Minister for crime prevention, in Ed Miliband's first reshuffle. She ran for the deputy leadership of the party in 2015, coming second. She is currently Chair of Labour Movement for Europe and has campaigned for a continued relationship with the EU and against Brexit induced parliamentary deregulation.She is an avid campaigner and contributor to debates. Most notably, in July 2019 she put forward the amendment which proposed that if the Northern Ireland Assembly was not restored by October that Westminster would legalise abortion in the country. Other campaigns include sexual harassment, childcare provision, andMotheRED – a campaign to financially support mums to be selected and elected as Labour Party candidates in the next General Election. She has also campaigned against ‘legal loan sharks', introducing a Ten-Minute-Rule Bill to cap the cost of credit to avoid extortionate rates and force the Government to tighten restrictions.#hygystpod #StellaCreasy #Walthamstow #MP #Parliament #Election24 #Labour #SirKeirStarmer #Equality #UKPoliticsHave You Got Your Sh*t Together? with Caitlin O'Ryan, is a podcast that celebrates not having your sh*t together! In each episode, Caitlin interviews guests who seemingly “have their sh*t together” - be that in life/love/work/hobbies. Throughout the conversation, the questions unveil whether they actually do, or whether the whole concept is a lie! With a mix of guests from various backgrounds, the podcast is sure to be relatable, honest, and an antidote to Instagram culture. Producer - Ant Hickman (www.ahickman.uk)Artwork - Tim Saunders (www.instagram.com/timsaunders.design)Photography - Patch Bell (www.patchstudio.uk)Music - Cassia - 'Slow' (www.wearecassia.com)Web: www.hygystpod.comInsta: www.instgram.com/hygystpodEmail: hygystpod@gmail.comRSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/644a8e8eadac0f0010542d86 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our latest Election update: If Labour are set for a massive majority, why are they still so cautious on policy? Labour's Stella Creasy tells Andrew Harrison why the party refuses to over-promise – why Starmer won't talk about rejoining the EU – where she stands on the controversial two-child benefit cap – plus Gaza, Sunak, Farage and how to get people believing in politics again. Don't miss our Election Night Live Show, streaming on Zoom for Patreon backers. • “I don't want us to promise a moon on the stick. I want people to feel confident.” • “The far right don't offer you solutions. They offer you someone to blame.” • “Every big project this Government has promoted hasn't happened.” • “We ripped up so much by leaving the EU… We cannot underestimate how damaged our reputation has been.” We're on YouTube!: https://www.youtube.com/@ohgodwhatnow www.patreon.com/ohgodwhatnow Presented by Andrew Harrison. Producer: Chris Jones. Audio production by: Tom Taylor. Video production by: Alex Rees. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. OH GOD, WHAT NOW? is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Labour have launched their manifesto with just two things on the cover - a picture of Keir Starmer and the word “change” - but how much change are they actually offering when it comes to the big issues of the day such as Brexit, Ukraine, the housing crisis, climate change and the economy?  Labour appears to be on course to win power with a safety first strategy that promises relatively little, leaving us relatively little to hold them to account for.  And now the Conservatives are warning of the dangers of a Labour “supermajority”. Joining Krishnan Guru-Murthy to discuss this on The Political Fourcast are Labour's Stella Creasy, the Green Party's Sian Berry and Channel 4 News' senior political correspondent Paul McNamarra. Produced by Silvia Maresca, Calum Fraser, Rob Thomson, Nick Jackson.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, Conservative Sir Alan Duncan, Gina Miller from the True and Fair Party and POLITICO Europe's Anne McElvoy.

How much will new Reform UK leader Nigel Farage shake up the election?Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, Conservative Sir Alan Duncan, Gina Miller from the True and Fair Party and POLITICO Europe's Anne McElvoy.

The Guilty Feminist 395. AbortionPresented by Deborah Frances-White with Alison Spittle and special guests Stella Creasy, Lisa Hallgarten, Dr Felicia Yeung and music from BvdhiRecorded 25 March 2024 at Kings Place. Released 13 May.The Guilty Feminist theme composed by Mark Hodge. More about Deborah Frances-Whitehttps://deborahfrances-white.comhttps://twitter.com/DeborahFWhttps://www.virago.co.uk/the-guilty-feminist-bookMore about Alison Spittlehttps://www.instagram.com/alisonspittlehttp://alisonspittle.comMore about our guestshttps://twitter.com/stellacreasyhttps://members.parliament.uk/member/4088/contacthttps://www.fsrh.org/authors/lisa-hallgartenhttps://www.instagram.com/drfelyeunghttps://reprojusticeinitiative.orgFor more information about this and other episodes…visit https://www.guiltyfeminist.comtweet us https://www.twitter.com/guiltfempodlike our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/guiltyfeministcheck out our Instagram https://www.instagram.com/theguiltyfeministor join our mailing list http://www.eepurl.com/bRfSPTOur new podcasts are out nowMedia Storm https://podfollow.com/media-stormAbsolute Power https://podfollow.com/john-bercows-absolute-powerCome to a live recording:Australia and New Zealand tour: https://guiltyfeminist.com/aus-nz-tour2024/Kings Place, 12 June: https://shop.kingsplace.co.uk/30327/30330Global Pillage, 17 June: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/?s=pillageKings Place, 15 July: https://shop.kingsplace.co.uk/30328/30331Thank you to our amazing Patreon supporters.To support the podcast yourself, go to https://www.patreon.com/guiltyfeminist You can also get an ad-free version of the podcast via Apple Podcasts or Acast+ https://plus.acast.com/s/guiltyfeminist. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, Conservative Rachel Maclean, Lib Dem Lord Razall and Luke Tryl from the More in Common think tank, which aims to tackle social divisions.

Can the UK have any influence over what Netanyahu does next?Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, Conservative Rachel Maclean, Lib Dem Lord Razall and Luke Tryl from the More in Common think tank, which aims to tackle social divisions.

Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, former No10 Comms Director Guto Harri, DUP MP Jim Shannon and Observer columnist Martha Gill.

Shadow Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds takes your small business calls & should we talk about rejoining the EU?Joining Iain Dale on Cross Question this evening are Labour's Stella Creasy, former No10 Comms Director Guto Harri, DUP MP Jim Shannon and Observer columnist Martha Gill.

Nadine Dorries has finally gone (we think), but her behaviour will stick in our minds forever. She's not the only Tory MP to have let us all down over the last 13 years. So why are the parliamentary standards of this government so abysmal? Plus, a closer relationship with Europe could be key to the UK's future. So how does Labour go about that, especially when it persists with its messaging that it will ‘make Brexit work'? That's Oh God, What Now? with special guest, Labour MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy. “This government has made it easier for people to be sacked… but not in Parliament.” – Stella Creasy. “All the rules changes, in terms of MP's behaviour, are changed reactively.” – Marie Le Conte. “You can't make Brexit work. The only thing you can do is to repair the problems it has created.” – Stella Creasy. We're on YouTube!: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVOIkIWUDtu7VrVcFs0OI0A  www.patreon.com/ohgodwhatnow Presented by Alex Andreou with Matt Green, Marie Le Conte and guest, Labour MP for Walthamstow Stella Creasy. Producers: Alex Rees & Chris Jones. Assistant Producer: Adam Wright. Social Media Producer: Jess Harpin. Audio production by: Alex Rees. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. OH GOD, WHAT NOW? is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the second part of a two-part interview. Recorded in 2018, economist and author Mariana Mazzucato discusses her book, The Value of Everything, with UK Labour MP Stella Creasy. It's a wide-ranging discussion looking at how real wealth is created in our economy and how we can measure the true worth of both infrastructure and services. Mariana Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. We'd love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you'd like to get ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency .  Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this two-part episode recorded in 2018, economist and author Mariana Mazzucato discusses her book, The Value of Everything, with UK Labour MP Stella Creasy. It's a wide-ranging discussion looking at how real wealth is created in our economy and how we can measure the true worth of both infrastructure and services. Mariana Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. We'd love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you'd like to get ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency .  Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Concerned about social justice from an early age, Stella Creasy rallied friends to protest about animal cruelty in her teens. Before making her way to Westminster via Walthamstow Council, London (where she's lived since 1998), Stella was employed as a youth and a charity worker. 'Politics seemed like a productive place to make change happen,' the 46-year-old tells me, 'In my head I'm still that 15 year-old burnished with injustice at the world and excitement about what can be achieved.' Highlighting the importance of 'bloody hard work', being in the room, and not giving up even when you feel unheard, her energy and determination is impressive. After 13 years in opposition, Brexit, the Covid pandemic and a fair amount of political mayhem, she is still incredibly focused and driven.In this special episode, Stella joins me to talk about the realities of getting things done as a woman in politics and imagines a future where things might be different. (Please make this happen, Stella!) She shares details of the issues she's currently tackling, both in her London constituency and Westminster, including: maternity discrimination and affordable childcare, regulating the Buy Now Pay Later industry, the safeguarding of child refugees and making misogyny part of the hate crime framework. She quite obviously loves living in Walthamstow, and is incredibly proud of her local community. Talking to Stella Creasy made me realise that I need to get involved. She is passionate about equality and human rights, and her enthusiasm for fairness and change is contagious. As it says in her social media bio ' Sitting on the sidelines is for Statler and Waldorf.'We hope you enjoy this special episode. Such an inspiring conversation with an incredible woman.PODCAST CREDITSProducer and audio engineer: Linda Ara-TebaldiHost: Alyson WalshGuest:  MP Stella CreasyMusic: David SchweitzerArtwork: Ayumi TakahashiCoordinator: Helen Johnson 

We're digging this incredible conversation out from the archives. Stella opens up about the reality of being a mother in Parliament and what needs to change across the board. In this punchy chat, she cracks open the issues surrounding motherhood and work. And, well, how to make it work.

The Possibility Club podcast: Practical Bravery     DEFENDING MOTHERHOOD!       New mums are worried about leaving children with other people; about juggling new responsibilities, childcare and bringing the whole self to work. They are worried about the cost of childcare and about flexibility for emergencies, illness or anything that else that means child and mum need to be together. And if your work is linked to your self-esteem and your purpose, to your motivation and identity - then time away from it and not thinking about can crash that confidence - especially given how much a business and its processes can change in a year. And then the guilt - why should any of this get in the way, when having children is a privilege and a choice?   Whether you're looking through the lens of productivity or performance, culture or compliance - the HR strategy of any business, whether there are 20 of you or 2,000, should be to be an organisation in which people can be their best.     There can be great positive impact in seeing maternity support as an opportunity to rally round, upskill, demonstrate collective empathy and recognising that there will be some new perspectives and priorities that could actually be helpful. You have an opportunity to genuinely transform an employee's life for the better in ways that almost certainly foster loyalty, close connection and creative thinking.     It is hard for small businesses, but so is everything. Lean in and collaborate with affected staff rather than hide behind policies. How can businesses help with childcare - which is the number one barrier and concern? It could be through tax relief and salary sacrifice, or just by being flexible on work start and end times.   In this episode Richard Freeman meets Motherhood defender, entrepreneur, charity leader, agent provocateur, organiser of The March of The Mummies and author of  The Motherhood Penalty: How to stop motherhood being the kiss of death for your career - Joeli Brearly   ------   Pregnant Then Screwed https://pregnantthenscrewed.com/   “We exist to end the motherhood penalty — essentially we mean the gender pay gap.”   “We all talk about the gender pay gap and often we don't even mention motherhood but we know that the pay differential between men and women who don't have children is absolutely tiny, and it's as soon as you get into those childbearing years that the pay gap widens. By the time your first child is twelve years old, a woman's hourly pay rate is 33% behind a man's. We want to close that gap.”   Twitter: @pregnant_then_screwed Twitter: @joeli_brearley   Joeli Brearley — The Motherhood Penalty (Simon & Schuster Ltd) (via Hive) https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Joeli-Brearley/The-Motherhood-Penalty--How-to-stop-motherhood-being-the-/25912501   Joeli on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelibrearley/?originalSubdomain=uk “None of this is about blaming men. If we fixed these structures and systems so they worked a bit better, we would have more equality.”   Joeli writes for Harper's Bazaar — ‘the motherhood penalty is crippling women' https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/culture/culture-news/a43118474/joeli-brearley-motherhood-penalty-childcare/   Maternity Leave by Country 2023 https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/maternity-leave-by-country   Parental Leave via Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave   “Through the creation of capitalism, you needed somebody to create the next labour force. You needed somebody who was procreating, reproducing the labour force, looking after that labour force and doing the other bits of work that are required to sustain capitalism, the unpaid labour.” "Change is slow because the whole structure is patriarchal. Really, we need to burn the whole thing down, everything needs to be burnt down and start again.”     Judith Kerr — The Tiger Who Came To Tea (via Hive)   https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Judith-Kerr/The-Tiger-Who-Came-to-Tea/21988     Stella Creasy reprimanded for taking child into Parliament (via The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/23/stella-creasey-baffled-after-reprimand-for-bringing-infant-into-commons     Stella Creasy on The Possibility Club (via LibSyn) https://thepossibiltyclub.libsyn.com/after-corona-stella-creasy-on-community-power     “Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy because we just do it, and don't question it.”   BBC admits it got it wrong with its ‘Can Women Really Have It All” headline, around Jacinda Ardern's resignation (via The Journal) https://www.thejournal.ie/bbc-admits-error-jacinda-ardern-headline-5974462-Jan2023/     “We know that last year we helped women secure £1.3million in terms of settlements after experiencing discrimination or in a tribunal case.”   “The campaigns we run are not little tweaks, they're not easy things to fix: this is about radically changing the way we live and work.”   "I get my kicks from the services we run. I get messages all the time saying without you I would have fallen apart. I do get kicks out of the campaigning as well but campaign is losing, you know, campaigning is bashing your head against a brick wall.”   Early Years Alliance https://www.eyalliance.org.uk/   “The money that the government gives to the childcare sector, they underfund those places by about £3 per child, per hour, and don't give those nurseries opportunities to make up that shortfall, so those costs have to be passed down the chain. That's why you have childcare professionals on minimum wage. We've had 20,000 nurseries close since 2015.”   “Of course we talk about it from the perspective of the mothers, and some providers don't like that. They think that we should be talking about it in a very different way. And we think, come on guys, we're in this together!”     “The fact of the matter is, this argument will be won off the back of parents, it won't be won off the back of providers. Because we're a bigger group! We're making that noise, we're making that point repeatedly.”   Mary Agyapong ‘felt pressured to work' (via BBC News) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-56498978 -----------     This episode was recorded in January 2023 Interviewer: Richard Freeman for always possible Editor: CJ Thorpe-Tracey for Lo Fi Arts   For more visit alwayspossible.co.uk

Childcare in the UK is among the most expensive among the countries of the OECD. The lack of affordable and accessible childcare is costing the nation £27bn a year – equivalent to 1 per cent of GDP – according to report by Centre for Progressive Policy. In this bonus episode of the New Statesman podcast, brought to you by the Spotlight team, Alona Ferber, editor of the Spotlight policy section and supplement, speaks to Stella Creasy. The Labour MP for Walthamstow has long been outspoken on the need to reform Britain's dysfunctional childcare system, which the party promises to “completely reimagine” if it wins the next election. They discuss why childcare is becoming an increasingly political issue and the hostility Creasy has experienced campaigning around issues related to work and motherhood. She discusses her recent victory on whether childcare should be considered part of economic infrastructure, the crisis in the sector and which voices are sorely missing from the debate.This interview will be appearing in the next edition of the Spotlight supplement.Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman appPodcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's episode, Toby and Nick discuss who emerges as the most loathsome character in the Lockdown Files, Matt Hancock, Simon Case or the duo of Slackie and Lee? They also discuss why so many senior journalists and broadcasters appear to be more outraged by the fact that Isabel Oakeshott gave Hancock's WhatsApp messages to the Telegraph, apparently breaking a non-disclosure agreement, than they are by the scandalous revelations the messages contain. Next, they consider whether Sue Gray joining Keir Starmer's staff is a man-bites-dog story or a dog-bites-man story. Toby thinks it's the latter – after all, didn't we already know that most senior civil servants are Labour supporters? They go on to discuss Michael Knowles's comments about wanting to ‘eradicate' trans ideology at CPAC and whether that was deliberately misinterpreted by woke journalists as wanting to ‘eradicate' trans people, or whether those journalists believe – alongside trans rights activists – that any challenge to trans ideology is tantamount to erasing trans people? They also talk about Stella Creasy's amendment to the Public Order Bill which would create ‘buffer zones' around abortion clinics in England and Wales and the recent arrest of the Christian campaigner Isabel Vaughn-Spruce for silently praying outside an abortion clinic and puzzle over why she's been arrested again when the last time it happened the charges against her were dropped. In the last item before the break, they discuss Chris Rock's swipe at Meghan Markle in his latest Netflix comedy special and agree that Rock, while good, isn't as funny as Dave Chapelle. They also wonder whether comedians are now the only people left who can get away with attacking sacred cows and try to devise a test whereby Toby writes a defence of Prince Andrew in the Spectator and Nick includes one in a stand-up routine and they wait to see if Toby gets cancelled but Nick doesn't. This week's sponsor is Thor Holt and you can find him here: https://www.thorholt.com/, https://thorholt.substack.com/ or https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorholt/ or on his telegram channel at @thor_holt. Will Jones then joins Nick to talk about the big stories in the Daily Sceptic in the past seven days: a new study saying mRNA vaccines contain DNA that may turn human cells into spike protein factories; the risk that Net Zero policies will cause global starvation, according to two top climate scientists; whether the number of births in England fell in 2022 compared to 2021 and, if so, whether that's linked to the Covid vaccines; the rise in hormone prescriptions since 2020; and new scientific evidence suggesting temperatures have been stable in Greenland for 60 years, save for a sudden jump of one degree in 1994. In Peak Woke, Nick offers up drag queen baby raves, while Toby volunteers the removal of any Christian content from songs the Girl Guides since around the campfire. Finally, we are blessed with another visit from Dr Jordan Peterson, who answers listeners' problems, including a query about whether if you dressed as a women to go to a party you could get away with blackface, claiming you'd come as a ‘woman of colour'. To advertise on one of the fastest growing podcasts in the world – or if you have a question for Dr Peterson – drop Toby a line on thedailysceptic@gmail.com Please go to https://dailysceptic.org/ and make a donation so we can continue to bring you all this high quality content. Subscribe to Nick's substack: https://nickdixon.substack.com/ Listen to Nick's podcast – The Current Thing – by going here https://currentthingpod.podbean.com Produced by Jason Clift Music by Tinderella

Stella Creasy, who feels like a Labour grandee these days, talks to Ros Taylor about Brexit, Tory negligence and removing barriers to get more mothers into politics. Creasy discusses the work she's done from opposition, and talks tentatively about a future where Labour might be in Government… “Women have always wanted to be involved in politics, but it's about the environment we create for them.” “We've really struggled as a country because of austerity… imagine how much stronger we could have been.” “I know how much is at stake. I think the British people want to hear the case for the alternative.”  “Isolating Britain from the world makes us smaller, not taller.” www.patreon.com/bunkercast  Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Producer and audio editor: Alex Rees. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Lead Producer: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. Instagram | Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EPISODE 56: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN A-Block (1:45) SPECIAL COMMENT: The old sports phrase is "No Pain, No Gain." The political corollary is: "No Pain, No Gain - But No Brain, No Pain." This is proved by Herschel Walker's latest lie about the abortion he paid for (3:00) To say nothing of similar amazingly stupid deceit from Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Donald Trump, Kanye West, and Elon Musk (5:53) And yet the World Championship may be held by the new U.K. government. Only on Day 41 and already a lame duck, Prime Minister Liz Truss doesn't show up to face the House of Commons and when someone jokes she's hiding under a desk, Truss's stand-in answers seriously "I can assure the house she is not under a desk." It's the longest sustained laughter I've ever heard a group of politicians express at another's expense, and it proves another theory that has been festering in me for decades (9:30) Namely: There are no adults. B-Block (13:21) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Jeezy, in Los Angeles (14:15) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: In the Senate debates, Utah's Mike Lee is caught seditioning and Ohio's J.D. Vance is caught lying, denying he ever claimed Alex Jones was a more credible source of information than Maddow (17:13) IN SPORTS: Baseball's jinxed post-season continues: they wait two-and-a-half hours to rain out the Yankees and Guardians when it never really rained. Plus the format is a disaster: the National League World Series team will have either the 10th or 11th worst record in the sport. And more taxpayers get scammed for a new stadium, this time in Nashville. I'll repeat the simple explanation proving all the 'benefits' of new sports facilities are non-existent folderol. (22:20) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Liz Truss's Health Secretary vies with Trump's balls and Oz drinking his own urine (yeah, they "made" you) for the honors. C-Block (26:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It was 48 years ago this month that I was at Boston University, aged 15, destined for an internship with the Boston Celtics, and to my shock I was offered a full merit scholarship - a free ride. And then a stringy-haired disc jockey at the college radio station said the set-up was all wrong and I would be making a mistake if I went there. Impossibly, that gaunt, snarky kid of 20 was named Howard Stern.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stella Creasy is one of the most dynamic back-benchers in Parliament. She campaigns nationally on issues such as abortion rights, making Westminster a child friendly workplace, and how to deepen democracy. Locally, Stella put her constituency, Walthamstow, on the map with clever campaigns and even smarter social media.We were delighted to welcome her to It's Bloody Complicated. We talked all things Labour Party and Tory Party, and what's next for the future of democracy, E17, and indie rock.It's Bloody Complicated is recorded every second and fourth Tuesday of the month. Become a Compass member to join our live recordings and put your questions to our guests: https://action.compassonline.org.uk/podcastSupport the show (https://www.compassonline.org.uk/podcast/)Support the show

Anita Anand in conversation with MP Stella Creasy and folklorist Dr Juliette Wood. It's back to Disney to get into the origins of Elsa from Frozen. We hear which elements Disney borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen, and how Disney is changing how it does princesses.Produced by Audio Always Producer: Ailsa Rochester Editor: Jo Meeks Sound: Rob Green

In today's episode UnHerd columnist Kathleen Stock explains how criminalising catcalling won't stop men hitting their wives, in an essay for UnHerd titled Stella Creasy's bourgeois feminism.

Before we get started… Writing elsewhereI have recently written about modern Russian literature for CapX, as well Victorian YIMBYs and Katherine Mansfield and 1922, for The Critic.Tours of LondonSign up here to get updates when we add new tour dates. There will be three tours a month, covering the Great Fire, Barbican, Samuel Johnson and more!Helen Lewis is a splendid infovore, which is how she has come to be one of the most interesting journalists of her generation. You will see in this conversation some of her range. We chatted before we recorded and she was full of references that reflect her broad reading. She reminded me of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to write a book you must turn over half a library. I recommend her book Difficult Women to you all, perhaps especially if you are not generally interested in “feminist” books. Helen is also working on a new book called The Selfish Genius. There's an acuity to Helen, often characterised by self-editing. She has the precision — and the keenness to be precise — of the well-informed. She was also, for someone who claims to be a difficult woman, remarkably amiable. That seeming paradox was one of the things we discussed, as well as biography, late bloomers, menopause, Barbara Castle, failure, Habsburgs and so on... I had not realised she was such a royal biography enthusiast, always a good sign. Helen's newsletter, by the way, has excellent links every week. It's a very good, and free, way to have someone intelligent and interesting curate the internet for you. Her latest Atlantic feature is about defunct European royals who are not occupying their throne. Let's hope one of Helen's screenplays gets produced…(I do not know, by the way, if Tyler Cowen would endorse the reference I made to him. I was riffing on something he said.)[This transcript is too long for email so either click the title above to read online or click at the bottom to go to the full email…]Henry: Is Difficult Women a collective biography, a book of connected essays, feminist history or something else?Helen Lewis: Start nice and simple. It was designed as the biography of a movement. It was designed as a history of feminism. But I knew from the start I had this huge problem, which is that anyone who writes about feminism, the first thing that everybody does is absolutely sharpens their pencils and axes about the fact that you inevitably missed stuff out. And so I thought what I need to do is really own the fact that this can only ever be a partial history. And its working subtitle was An Imperfect History of Feminism, and so the thematic idea then came about because of that.And the idea of doing it through fights, I think, is quite useful because that means that there was a collision of ideas and that something changed. You know, there were lots and lots of subjects that I thought were really interesting, but there wasn't a change, a specific "We used to be like this, and now we're like this," that I could tie it to. So I don't think it is a collective biography because I think there's no connection between the women except for the fact that they were all feminists, and to that extent, they were all change makers. And I've read some really great collective biographies, but I think they work best when they give you a sense of a milieu, which this doesn't really. There's not a lot that links Jayaben Desai in 1970s North London and Emmeline Pankhurst in 1900s Manchester. They're very disparate people.Henry: Some people make a distinction between a group biography, which is they all knew each other or they were in the same place or whatever, and a collective biography, which is where, as you say, they have no connection other than feminism or science or whatever it is. Were you trying to write a collective biography in that sense? Or was it just useful to use, as a sort of launching off point, a woman for each of the fights you wanted to describe?Helen Lewis: I think the latter because I felt, again, with the subject being so huge, that what you needed to do was bring it down to a human scale. And I always feel it's easier to follow one person through a period of history. And weirdly, by becoming ever more specific, I think you'll have a better chance of making universal points, right? And one of the things that when I'm reading non-fiction, I want to feel the granularity of somebody's research which, weirdly, I think then helps you understand the bigger picture better. And so if you take it down all the way to one person, or sometimes it's more... So Constance Lytton and Annie Kenney, that's sort of two people. I think probably Constance is bigger in that mix. It helps you to understand what it's like to be a person moving through time, which is what I wanted to kind of bring it back. Particularly, I think, with feminism where one of the problems, I think, is when you get progress made, it seems like common sense.And it's one of the things I find I love about Hilary Mantel's, the first two of that Thomas Cromwell trilogy, is there is a real sense that you don't know what's going to happen. Like the moment, the hinge moment, of Anne Boleyn's star appears to be falling. It's very hard not to read it now and think, "Well, obviously that was destined to happen. You'd obviously jumped ship to Jane Seymour." But she manages to recreate that sense of living through history without knowing the ending yet, right? And so maybe you should stick with Anne Boleyn. Maybe this has all just been a temporary blip. Maybe she'll have a son next year. And that's sort of what I wanted to recreate with feminism, is to put you back in the sensation of what it is to be like making those arguments about women having a vote at a time when that's seen as a kind of crackpot thing to be arguing for because obviously women are like this, obviously women are delicate, and they need to be protected. And when all of those arguments... Again, to go back to what it's like to just to live in a time where people's mindsets were completely different to... Which is to me, is the point of writing history, is to say... And the same thing about travel writing, is to say, "Here are people whose very basis, maybe even the way that they think, is completely different to all of your assumptions." All your assumptions that are so wired so deeply into you, you don't even know they're assumptions. You just think that's what consciousness is or what it is to be alive. And that's, I think, why I try to focus it on that human level.Henry: How do you do your research?Helen Lewis: Badly, with lots of procrastination in between it, I think is the only honest answer to that. I went and cast my net out for primary sources quite wide. And there was some... The number of fights kept expanding. I think it started off with eight fights, and then just more and more fights kept getting added. But I went to, for example, the LSC Women's Library has got a suffragette collection. And I just read lots and lots of suffragette letters on microfiche. And that was a really good way into it because you've got a sense of who was a personality and who had left enough records behind. And I write about this in the book, about the fact that it's much easier to write a biography of a writer because they'll fundamentally, probably, give you lots of clues as to what they were thinking and doing in any particular time. But I also find things that I found really moving, like the last letter from Constance Lytton before she has a stroke, which has been effected by being force fed and having starved herself. And then you can see the jump, and then she learns to write again with her other hand, and her handwriting's changed.And stuff like that, I just don't think you would get if you didn't allow yourself to be... Just sort of wade through some stuff. Someone volunteered to be my research assistant, I mean I would have paid them, I did pay them, to do reports of books, which apparently some authors do, right? They will get someone to go and read a load of books for them, and then come back. And I thought, "Well, this is interesting. Maybe I'll try this. I've got a lot of ground to cover here." And she wrote a report on a book about… I think it was about environmental feminism. And it was really interesting, but I just hadn't had the experience of living through reading a book. And all of the stuff you do when you're reading a book you don't even think about, where you kind of go, "Oh, that's interesting. Oh, and actually, that reminds me of this thing that's happened in this other book that's... Well, I wonder if there's more of that as I go along." I don't think if you're going try and write a book, there is any shortcut.I thought this would be a very... I'm sure you could write a very shallow... One of those books I think of where they're a bit Wikipedia. You know what I mean. You know sometimes when you find those very 50 inspirational women books, those were the books I was writing against. And it's like, you've basically written 50 potted biographies of people. And you've not tried to find anything that is off the beaten track or against the conventional way of reading these lives. It's just some facts.Henry: So biographically, you were perhaps more inspired by what you didn't want to write than what you did.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's very true. I think writing about feminism was an interesting first book to pick because there's so much of it, it's like half the human race. It's really not a new subject. And to do the whole of British feminism really was a mad undertaking. But I knew that I didn't want to write, "You go girl, here's some amazing ladies in history." And I wanted to actually lean into the fact that they could be weird or nasty or mad. And my editor said to me at one point, and I said, "I'm really worried about writing some of this stuff." She said, "I think you can be more extreme in a book," which I thought was really interesting.Which I think is also very true in that I also feel like this about doing podcasts is that I very rarely get in trouble for things I've said on podcasts because it's quite hard to lazily clip a bit of them out and put them on Twitter and toss the chum into the water. Right? And I think that's the same thing about if you write something on page 390 of a book, yeah, occasionally, someone might take a screen-grab of it, but people hopefully will have read pages 1-389 and know where you're coming from, by that point.Henry: Maybe trolls don't read.Helen Lewis: Well, I think a lot of the stuff that annoys me is a shallow engagement with complexity, and an attempt to go through books and harvest them for their talking points, which is just not how... It's just such a sad, weathered way of approaching the experience of reading, isn't it? Do I agree with this author or not? I like reading people I disagree with. And so for example, the fact that I call the suffragettes terrorists, and I write about that, I think people are reluctant to engage with the fact that people you agree with did terrible things in the pursuit of a goal that you agree with. And I think it's very true about other sectors. I always think about the fact that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for terrorism. And that gets pushed down in the mix, doesn't it? When it all turns out that actually, he was a great man. And that incredibly long imprisonment in Robben Island is its own totemic piece of the history of modern South Africa, that you don't wanna sit with the awkward bits of the story too.Henry: You've had a lot of difficult experiences on Twitter? Would you have written this book if you hadn't lived through that?Helen Lewis: I think that's a hard question to answer. I tried not to make it a “Here is the cutting of all my enemies.” And actually, my friend, Rob read this book in draft and he insisted that everyone I knew that I was going to argue with had to be of sufficient stature to be worth arguing with. He's like, You cannot argue with, I think I put it in my drawing piece, a piece like Princess Sparklehorse 420. Right? That's quite hard when you're writing about modern feminism, because actually if you think about what I think of as the very social justice end of it, right? The end of it, that is very pro sex work, very pro self-identification of gender, very pro prison abolition, police abolition, it's actually quite hard to find the people who were the theorists of that. It's more of a vibe that you will find in social media spaces on Tumblr, and Twitter and other places like that. So trying to find who is the person who has actually codified all that and put that down to then say, "Well, let's look at it from all sides", can be really difficult. So I did find myself slightly arguing with people on Twitter.Henry: I'm wondering more, like one way I read your book, it's very thought-provoking on feminism, but it's also very thought-provoking just on what is a difficult person. And there's a real thing now about if you're low in agreeableness, that might mean you're a genius, like Steve Jobs, or it might mean you're a Twitter troll. And we have a very basic binary way of thinking about being difficult. And it's actually very nuanced, and you have to be very clever about how to be difficult. And in a way, I wondered if one of the things you were thinking about was, well, everyone's doing difficult in a really poor way. And what we need, especially on the left, is smart difficult, and here is a book about that, and please improve. [chuckle]Helen Lewis: Yeah, there was a lot of that and it's part of the sort of bro-ey end of philosophy is about maybe women have been less brilliant through history because they're less willing to be disagreeable, they have a higher need to be liked, which I think is kind of interesting. I don't entirely buy it. But I think there's an interesting thing there about whether or not you have to be willing to be iconoclastic. The thing that I find interesting about that is, again, there's another way in which you can refer to it, which is the idea that if you're a heretic, you're automatically right.Henry: Yes.Helen Lewis: And there's a lot of...Henry: Or brave.Helen Lewis: Or brave, right? And I think it's... You can see it in some of the work that I'm doing at the moment about the intellectual dark web being a really interesting example. Some of them stayed true to the kind of idea that you were a skeptic. And some of them disbelieved the mainstream to the extent that they ended up falling down the rabbit holes of thinking Ivermectin was a really great treatment for COVID, or that the vaccines were going to microchip you or whatever it might be. And so I'm always interested in how personality affects politics, I guess. And yeah, how you can be self-contained and insist on being right and not cow-tow to other people without being an a*****e is a perpetually interesting question. It's coming up in my second book a lot, which is about genius. Which is sort-of the similar thing is, how do you insist when everybody tells you that you're wrong, that you're right. And the thing that we don't talk about enough in that context, I think Newton is a very good example is that, obviously, he made these incredible breakthroughs with gravity and mathematics, and then spends literally decades doing biblical chronology and everyone tells him that he's wrong, and he is wrong. And we don't really talk about that side of it very much.All the people who spent all their time studying phlogiston and mesmerism, or that's more complicated because I think that does lead to interesting insights. A lot of people who the world told was wrong, were wrong. And we're over-indexing, always writing about the ones who were the one Galileo saying the Earth still moves, and they turned out to be correct.Henry: Yes. There are good books about biographies of failures, but they're less popular.Helen Lewis: Which is tough because most of us are going to be failures.Henry: Yes. Well, you're not gonna buy a book to reinforce that.Helen Lewis: No, but maybe there could be some deep spiritual learning from it, which is that a life spent in pursuit of a goal that turns out to be illusory is still a noble one.Henry: That's a fundamentally religious opinion that I think a secular society is not very good at handling.Helen Lewis: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I've been doing lots of work for Radio 4 about the link between politics and religion, and whether or not religion has to some extent replaced politics as Western societies become more secular. And I think there is some truth in that. And one of the big problems is, yes, it doesn't have that sort of spirit of self-abnegation or the idea of kind of forgiveness in it, or the idea of just desserts happening over the horizon of death. Like everything's got be settled now in politics here, which I think is a bad fit for religious impulses and ideas.Henry: What is the role of humour in being difficult?Helen Lewis: I think it's really important because it does sweeten the pill of trying to make people be on your side. And so I had a long discussion with myself about how much I should put those jokes in the footnotes of the book, and how much I should kind of be funny, generally. Because I think the problem is, if you're funny, people don't think you're serious. And I think it's a big problem, particularly for women writers, that actually I think sometimes, and this happens in journalism too, that women writers often play up their seriousness, a sort of uber-serious persona, because they want to be taken seriously. If you see what I mean, it's very hard to be a foreign policy expert and also have a kind of lively, cheeky side, right? We think that certain things demand a kind of humourlessness to them.But the other thing that I think humour is very important, is it creates complicity with the audience. If you laugh at someone's joke, you've aligned yourself with them, right? Which is why we now have such a taboo and a prohibition on racist jokes, sexist jokes, whatever they might be, because it's everyone in the audience against that minority. But that can, again, if you use your powers for good, be quite powerful. I think it is quite powerful to see... There's one of the suffragettes where someone throws a cabbage at her, and she says something like, “I must return this to the man in the audience who's lost his head.” And given that all the attacks on the suffragettes were that they were these sort of mad, radical, weird, un-feminine, inhuman people, then that was a very good way of instantly saying that you weren't taking it too seriously.One of the big problems with activism is obviously that people, normal people who don't spend every moment of their life thinking about politics, find it a bit repellent because it is so monomaniacal and all-consuming. And therefore, being able to puncture your pomposity in that way, I think is quite useful.Henry: So if there are people who want to learn from Helen Lewis, “How can I be difficult at work and not be cast aside,” you would say, “Tell more low-grade jokes, get people to like you, and then land them with some difficult remark.”Helen Lewis: Use your powers for good after that. It's tricky, isn't it? I think the real answer to how to be difficult at work is decide what level of compromise you're willing to entertain to get into positions of power. Which is the same question any activist should ask themselves, “How much do I need to engage with the current flawed system in order to change it?” And people can be more or less open with themselves, I guess, about that. I think the recent Obama memoir is quite open about, for example on the financial relief in 2008, about how much he should have tried to be more radical and change stuff, and how much he... Did he actually let himself think he was being this great consensualist working with the Republican Party and therefore not get stuff done?And then the other end, I think you have the criticism I made of the Corbyn project, which was that it was better to have kind of clean hands than get things done. There's a great essay by Matt Bruenig called Purity Politics, which says... No, what is it called? Purity Leftism. And it said, “the purity leftist's approach is not so much that they're worried about that oppression is happening but that they should have no part of it.” And I think that's part of the question of being difficult, too, is actually how much do you have to work with and compromise yourself by working with people with whom you're opposed? And it's a big question in feminism. There are people who will now say, “Well, how could feminists possibly work with the Conservative Party?” Entirely forgetting that Emmeline Pankhurst ran as a Conservative candidate.Henry: She was very conservative.Helen Lewis: Right. And there were members of the suffragettes who went on to join the British Union of Fascists. That actually... Some of the core tenets of feminism have been won by people who didn't at all see themselves on the left.Henry: If I was the devil's advocate, I'd say that well-behaved women, for want of a better phrase, do make a lot of history. Not just suffragists but factory workers, political wives, political mistresses. What's the balance between needing difficult women and needing not exactly compliant women but people who are going to change it by, as you say, completely engaging with the system and almost just getting on with it?Helen Lewis: There's a scale, isn't there? Because if you make yourself too unbelievably difficult, then no one wants to work with you and it's... I think the suffragettes is a really good example of that actually. The intervention of the First World War makes that story impossible to play out without it.But had they continued on that course of becoming ever more militant, ever more bombings, and pouring acid on greens, and snipping telephone wires... The criticism that was made of them was, “Are they actually turning people off this cause?” And you get people saying that, that actually the suffragettes set back the cause of women's suffrage, which I'm not entirely sure I buy. I think I certainly don't buy it in the terms of the situation in 1905. Fawcett writes about the fact that there were loads of all these articles decrying the suffragettes, whereas previously they'd just been... The cause of suffrage, which had been going on for 70-80 years, quite in earnest, in legal form, had just been completely ignored. So there was definitely a moment where what it really needed was attention. But then, can you make the same argument in 1914 about whether or not the suffragettes were still doing an equal amount of good? I think then it's much more tenuous.And there was a really good article saying that, essentially your point, well-behaved women do make history, saying that a lot of boring legal heavy-lifting... And it's one of the things I find very interesting about where modern feminism in Britain is. A lot of the work that's most interesting is being done through things like judicial reviews, which is a lot of very boring pulling together large amounts of court bundles, and people saying, “Is this obiter?” This word which I once understood, and now don't anymore. But it's not people chaining themselves to railings or throwing themselves under horses. It's people getting up in the morning and putting another day shift in at quite boring admin. And I do think that maybe that's something that I underplayed in the book because it's not so narratively captivating. Brenda Hale made that point to me that she would have been a suffragist because she just believed in playing things by the book. You won it by the book.And I do think now I find I don't agree with throwing paint and pies and milkshakes and stuff like that at people whose political persuasions I disagree with, right? I fundamentally don't believe in punching Nazis, which was a great debate... Do you remember the great Twitter debate of a couple of years ago about whether it's okay to punch a Nazi? I think if you live in America or the UK, and there are democratic ways and a free press in which to make your political case, you don't need to resort to a riot. And that's not the case all over the world, obviously. But I do think that I am... I think difficulty takes many, many forms.Henry: A question about Margaret Thatcher.Helen Lewis: Yes.Henry: Was she good for women, even though she wasn't good for feminism? So millions of women joined the labour force in the 1980s, more than before or since. It was the first time that women got their own personal allowance for income tax, rather than being taxed as an extension of their husband's income.Helen Lewis: I'm trying to remember. Was that a Tory policy?Henry: That was 1988 budget, and it came into effect in 1990. And she also publicly supported. She said, “You should be nice to mothers who go out to work. They're just earning money for their families.” So even though she definitely did not, consciously I think, help the cause of feminism, you would probably rather be a woman in the '80s than the '70s...Helen Lewis: Oh yeah, definitely.Henry: But because of her. That's my challenge to you.Helen Lewis: No, it's a good challenge. And I think it's one that has a lot of merit. I'm not sure whether or not she would be grateful to you for positioning her as Margaret Thatcher, feminist hero. And it's really into having... I wrote a screenplay last year about the women in politics in the years before Margaret Thatcher, and it's very... And I cover this a bit in the book. That women have always struggled in Labour, a collective movement, where it's like if you let one woman through, you've got to let them all. Like, “I'm the vanguard” versus the Thatcher route, which was like, “I'm just me, a person. Judge me on who I am,” and not making such a kind of radical collective claim. So that's the bit that holds me back from endorsing her as a kind of good thing for women, is I think she was Elizabeth I in the sense where she was like, “I'm good like a man,” rather than saying, “Women are good, and I'm a woman,” which I think are two different propositions. But it's definitely true that... I think that growing up in a society that had a female prime minister was a huge deal. America still hasn't had a female president. It's just not... If you're a girl growing up there, it's just... That's something that you've never seen. And the other half of it is, I think it was incredibly powerful to see Denis Thatcher. The true feminist hero that is Denis Thatcher. But genuinely, that's somebody who was older than her, who was willing to take a back seat. And he found a role for men that was not being the alpha. It was kind of the, “I don't have anything left to prove. And I like playing golf. Haven't I got a great life while the little woman runs around with her red boxes. All a bit much.” I think that was almost a more radical thing for people to see.And it's interesting to me that he was somebody who had fought in the Second World War because I think the '70s and the feminist revolution, I think in some ways depends on there being a generation of men who didn't have anything to prove, in terms of masculinity. And it's really interesting to me that... So Barbara Castle's husband Ted was also, I think, a little bit older than her. But he was also very much in that Denis Thatcher mould of, “Woman! Right, you're exhausting.” And Maureen Colquhoun, who I also write about in the book, her husband Keith was, by all accounts, a very decent guy who was totally accepting of her ambitions. And then he conducted himself with incredible dignity after she left him for a woman. And I think that's a story that I'm interested in hearing a bit more about, is of the men who weren't threatened. So I do think that's a big challenge that the Thatchers did present to orthodox values. But let's not underplay them as conservatives.Henry: Oh no, hugely conservative.Helen Lewis: And also the fact that, to some extent, Margaret Thatcher was reacting to an economic tide that was very useful to her. More women in the workforce meant more productivity, meant higher GDP. And I think it was at that point a train that was just not... Why would you throw yourself in front of it to try and reverse it and get women back into the home?Henry: Her advisors wanted a tax break for marriage.Helen Lewis: Oh, that's a classic Conservative policy.Henry: Because they said, “We're in office, and this is what we're here for.” And she said, “I can't do it to the mill girls in Bolton. I can't give a tax break to wives in Surrey playing bridge.” And in a way, I think she was very quietly, and as you say for political reasons not entirely openly, quite on the side of the working woman for moral reasons that we would usually call feminist. But which because it's her and because of everything else she believes, it doesn't really make sense to call them feminist, but it's difficult to think of another Prime Minister who has had so much rhetoric saying “Yes, women should go to work, that's a good thing. Don't yell at them about it.” And who has implemented economic policies that's giving them tax breaks and trying to level the playing field a bit. So it's a sort of conundrum for me that she didn't want to be called a feminist, but she did a lot of things that quotes, if you were that sort of person would say “undermined” the traditional family or whatever.Helen Lewis: Yeah. And she found a way to be a powerful woman and an archetype of what that was, which I think again, is based enormously on Barbara Castle, I think Barbara Castle is the template for her.Henry: Oh yeah. Down to the hair. Yeah.Helen Lewis: With the big hair and the fluttering the eyelashes, and that kind of, what I think of as kind of “Iron Fem” right? Which is where you're very, very feminine, but it's in a steely ball-crushing kind of way. Although interestingly, Barbara Castle cried a lot. She would have frequently burst into tears about stuff, which again was, I think kept the men around her slightly off balance, they didn't know how to... Which I think any good politician uses what they've got. But the thing that struck me when I read more about Thatcher last year, was about the fact that if she hadn't been the first female Prime Minister, I think we would write a lot more about her lower-middle middle class background and what a challenge that was. And the fact that that really, in some ways, I think the Tory Party really loved having a female leader once they got over the initial shock because it was kind of like, “Well, aren't we modern. And now Labor can't have a go at us about all this kind of stuff, 'cause look at our woman leader.” What I think was more of a profound challenge for a long time, was the kind of arriviste sort of idea that she was, as you say, a representative of working people, upwardly mobile, or from right to buy being an example of one of these policies. I think that was a big challenge to the kind of men in smoky rooms.Henry: I don't think they ever got over it. Carrington called her “a f*****g stupid petit-bourgeois woman.”Helen Lewis: Petit-bourgeois is exactly the right, I think the right term of abuse. And there was a... And I think that's why... I mean, I think it came out as misogyny but actually it was also driven by class as well, the fact that she was no better than she ought to be, right?But that's about... I think that's how you see, and honestly I think Ted Heath experiences as a great... Leading to the incredible sulk, one of my favorite phrases, [chuckle] that he just never kind of got over that he had been beaten by a woman. I think that was an extra kind of poisoned pill for him, of the ingratitude of the party, that they would replace him with a woman.Henry: And a woman of his own class.Helen Lewis: Right. And exactly, it's not like she... So she wasn't sort of Lady Aster wafting in a cloud of diamonds and violet scent. It was, “Hang on a minute, you're saying this person is better than me.”Henry: Now, before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, almost nobody thought that she was going anywhere, right up to say a week before the leadership election. People would have meetings about who the candidates were and they wouldn't even discuss her. Who are the people in politics today that no one's really sort of gathered actually have got this big potential?Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's really interesting isn't it, that essentially she goes into that leadership context and they sort of think, “Well, someone's gonna shake it up a bit, someone's gonna represent the right to the party.” And then they go round... And it was Airey Neave who was running her campaign, going around sort of saying, “Well, you know, vote for her, it'll give Ted a shock.” And then the first ballot result comes in and they go, “Oh God, it's given us a shock as well.” And then I think at that point, Willy Whitelaw piles in, doesn't he? But it's too late and the train's already moving. And the other one who's... It's Hugh Fraser is the other... And he runs very much from the sort patrician candidate background. I love that, that leadership election, it symbolizes what I like about politics, which is just that sometimes there is a moment, that is a hinge when a force that's been bubbling away suddenly pops up. And not to get too much into the great man or in this case, a great woman theory history, but someone makes a big decision that is either going to be the right call or the wrong call.And for Margaret Thatcher is almost insanely ambitious, and she could have ended up looking incredibly stupid, and because the life didn't take that fork in the road, we'll never look back on that. But there are many people who have made that gamble, and again, go back to failures point, have crashed. You have to have that kind of instinct in politics. Who's good now? I was just thinking this morning that Bridget Phillipson of Labor, who is now currently shadow education, I think has been underrated for a long time. Finally less so, given that she's made it to the Shadow Cabinet, who knows if she can make an impression there, but she is smart. So I'll give you an example, she was asked the inevitable question that all labor politicians are now asked, like, “What is a woman?” And she said, “The correct... “ This is Richard Madeley asked her this. She said, “What to my mind is the correct legal ounce that would also makes sense to normal human beings who don't follow politics all the time, which is, ‘It's an adult human female or anybody with a gender recognition certificate. And there are difficulties in how you might sometimes put that into practice, but those are the two categories of people.'”And it was like this moment, I was like, Why? Why has it taken you so long to work out an answer to this question that is both correct and explicable. And I think that is an underrated gift in politicians, is actually deciding what issues you're going to fudge around and which issues you actually have to come out and say what you think even if people disagree with it. It was one of Thatcher's great strengths, was that she made decisions and she stuck to them. I mean, obviously then you get to the poll tax and it becomes a problem. But I think there's... One of the problems I felt with the Ed Miliband era of Labor was that he didn't want to annoy anybody and ended up annoying everybody. Wes Streeting, I think is also... No, I won't say underrated, I will say he's now rated and clearly has got his eye on the leadership next.Bridget Phillipson has a much more marginal seat than you'd like to see from somebody who's going to be a leader. Wes is an interesting character. Grew up on free school meals, has been through cancer in the last couple of years, is gay, has a genuinely kind of... But is also on scene as being on the right to the party. So he's got lots of different identity factors and political factors that will make people very hard to know where to put him, I think, or how to brand him, I guess. But those are two of the ones who you make me think that there's some interesting stuff happening. On the Tory side, there are some people who are quietly competent. So Michael Gove, I think, whatever you think about his persona or anything like that, is the person they put in when they want stuff actually to happen. I think Nadhim Zahawi did very well as Vaccines Minister without anyone really noticing, which is probably not what you want when you're a minister, but it's probably what you want from the public.Henry: Why are so many women late bloomers? Well, obviously, the constraints of having a family or whatever.Helen Lewis: I think the answer is children, I think is the answer to that one.Henry: But there must be other reasons.Helen Lewis: I think... I mean, who knows? I may be straying into territory which is pseudo-science here, but I do also think that menopause is quite important. When you lose all your caring for others, nicely, softly, softly hormones and your hormone profile becomes much more male, I think that makes it easier to not care what people think about you, to some extent. As does the fact that you can no longer be beautiful and play that card. And I don't know, I think also... Again, this is... I don't know if this is supported by the evidence, I think there's more of... I think more of the men fall away. I don't know, I think if you're a guy who's found it very hard to form personal relationships, then maybe your 50s and 60s can be quite lonely, whereas I think that's often the time in which women kind of find a sort of a second wind. Does that make sense? This is all... I mean, none of this is... There's no evidential basis for this, this is just based on my sort of anecdotal reading of people that I'm thinking of.Henry: Camille Paglia once wrote, she put it in very strict terms, she said something like, when the menopause happens, the wife becomes this sort of tyrant and starts flourishing.Helen Lewis: Yeah. No, I'm very much looking forward to that, yeah. Oh yeah.Henry: And the husband becomes this kind of wet rag and his testosterone level drops and the whole power balance just flips. And you're sort of, you're saying that, but not in quite that... Not as quite an aggressive way as she's phrased it.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and it's not a universal truth.Henry: No, no, not at all.Helen Lewis: I just think for the people for whom that happens, that is quite an arresting thing that often gives them the liberation. I also do think there's a kind of mindset change. I don't have kids, but I know from women that I know whose kids have gone off to university, that if you have been the primary caregiver, there is suddenly a great, big hole in your life, and what do you fill it with? And actually, do you have to find a new focus and direction and purpose, because you don't want to be sort of turning up at their halls of residence going, “Hello, just thought I check in, see if you're alright.” And whereas for men, who've maintained a sort of career focus throughout, whilst also adding on a family, that's not such a kind of big realignment of their day and their life and what they feel the focus of their life is.Henry: I spoke to Tyler Cowen about this and he wondered if there's something about women become more acceptable in their looks. So you think about Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher as... I think you were sort of implying this, when a woman reaches middle age, the public or the people around them are less likely to judge them on whether they're good-looking, and so some of that sexism slightly falls away, because when you are a woman in your 20s or 30s, you're very susceptible to being looked at or rated or whatever, whereas Margaret Thatcher had a sort of, I don't know, a motherly quality that no one would... There was a kind of cult of finding her attractive and Alan Clark said disgusting things about her.Helen Lewis: Yeah, and also we've had a queen for 70 years, right? So we do have that sort of idea of what female power looks like, which is icy and so it's non-emotional, but yeah.Henry: But I've seen that in the office, that women in their 20s have a difficult time if they're good looking because there are a certain type of men...Helen Lewis: Well, people assume you're stupid as well.Henry: Well, and also it's just what men go to. They talk about you being that, whereas once a woman gets slightly past that, men don't automatically sort of go, “Oh, how would you rate her out of 10” or whatever? And that creates a space to see them as the person.Helen Lewis: And see them as actual human. I think that's a really interesting thesis. I also think that there's a... I think being a young woman is a particular kind of problem. So I think there's definitely a form of ageism against women, where it's silly old bat, right? Which I do think you get silly old duffer as well, but there is some extra level as well about women, it's like, “Why are you still talking? No one wants to hear from you? Your... “ This is a phrase they use in the internet now, “You're dusty, you and your dusty opinions.” But I think you get the contrary version of that as a young woman, whereas I think we find... The phrase Young Turk implies man, doesn't it?It's like, thrusting young guy, on his way up, super ambitious, he's the new generation, whereas I don't think you necessarily have that whole sort of coalition of positive stereotypes about young women. It's untested, learner, still needs to learn the ropes, that kind of... I'm eternally grateful to my boss in my 20s, Jason Cowley of the New Statesman, for making me deputy editor of the Statesman when I was 28, which I think was a pretty radical thing to do. When I don't think it would have necessarily felt so radical to make a 28-year-old guy.Although I say that, but then Ian Hislop became editor of Private Eye when he was 26, and there was like a revolution among the old guard. And he had to metaphorically execute a few of them outside the woodshed. So I do think that... I also think people begin to... There's... Now, this is really straying to some dangerous, choppy feminist waters. Competition between women can be very fierce, obviously. I write about this in the book in the terms of Smurfette Syndrome. The idea that there's only one place for a woman, and by God, I've got to have it. But I do think that there can be some jealousy that maybe recedes. And I think it's probably true for men and women. As you get older, people don't see you as a threat because they think, “Well, by the time I'm 40, maybe I'll have all the stuff you have.” But if you've got that stuff at 28, I think there's a real feeling from other people in the generation that those, the stars are peeling away, and there's a real resentment of them. So one of the things I do is I provide kind of counselling services to young journalists who've just suddenly had like a really big promotion or career lift or whatever it is. And I feel indebted to go and say to them, “By the way, this is amazing, but people will hate you because of it.”Henry: It's very striking to me that we've had a period of very young politicians being leaders, but they're men. And the women who've either competed with them or become leaders afterwards are in their 50s. And I do think there's something about what's an acceptable public woman.Helen Lewis: And the idea of authority, I think that's the thing. I think as you get older as a woman, it's easier to seem authoritative.Henry: Someone like Stella Creasy, I think, has had a much more difficult time just because she happens to be under a certain age.Helen Lewis: Yeah, I think that's interesting. And I think the fact that she's now got very young children at a relatively older age. I know that's... Sorry. Apologies to Stella, if you're listening. But it is comparatively old to have children after 40, still. That that will be interesting of how that complicates her next decade in politics.And I do think those super top jobs… There was a really brilliant piece of research which I put in the book about the sort of so-called demanding jobs, the kind of lawyers, the top lawyers, and I think journalists and politicians. Greedy jobs, they're called. And the fact is that they have become more demanding in terms of hours as women have entered the workforce. And now the thing has become fetishized as can you do the 14-hour days? And it becomes a soft way of excluding women with young kids.The problem, I think, will come with all of this when both men and women end up needing to look after elderly parents, as we're having more and more of that extension, those decades at the end of life when you're alive but maybe you're not as mobile as you were. Maybe you need more help from your family. And I think there is a lot of anger among certain types of women that they just feel like they're finally free from their caring responsibilities, and then they get landed with another one. But I know, I've been to some feminist conferences recently where... There's a famous saying which women are the only minority that get more radical with age, which I think is probably true. You can meet some groups of 50-something women, and they are fuming, really fuming. And they've now got the time and the sort of social capital with which to exercise that fuming-dom, as it were.Henry: Is Roy Jenkins overrated?Helen Lewis: [laughter] That's the most random question. He's not my favourite politician, mainly because I'm Team Castle for life, right? And I think she was treated very badly by the men in that Wilson cabinet, the first, the '66 to '70 one, of whom he was one, right? I think that, yeah. I think... Do you know what? I haven't got very strong opinions on him compared with my strong opinions on James Callaghan, who I am anti. And I know there are some Callaghan-stans out there. But I think the utterly cynical way in which he sucked up to the unions in order to get the leadership at the cost, ultimately, of then Margaret Thatcher in '79, out-strikes me as one of the most sort of cynical pieces of politicking.Henry: You are sailing very close to being a Thatcherite.Helen Lewis: I'm not a Thatcherite. I'm not.Henry: No, I know.Helen Lewis: But I can see... I think you... And I think Rachel Reeves has basically written about this, who's now Labour's Shadow Chancellor, that if Barbara Castle had succeeded with In Place of Strife on what were, now, to us, very mild measures, right? A conciliation pause where you have negotiations, strike ballots, no wildcat strikes. If she'd managed to push through some of those, then some of the excesses of the '70s would not have happened. Or at least, Labour would have been able to show that it had a grip of them. But you have a situation where the teachers were asking for something like 25% pay rise in the run up to the '79 election. And the Labour government just looked completely out of control. And so yeah, that's my Callaghan beef. What's your Roy Jenkins beef, then?Henry: I don't have beef. I can't remember why I wrote that question. I read about him in your book. I suppose I think that he did implement some good progressive measures, but that he was essentially a sort of patrician wannabe. And that his whole career in politics is much more middling and establishment, and his radicalism was... I don't know. Perhaps overrated, when we look back.Helen Lewis: Well, I will go away and read some more. I read quite a lot of the... The mad thing about the cabinet, particularly in that Wilson government, is that they were all obviously sitting there writing copious amounts of... To the extent that Barbara Castle would actually write literal notes in cabinet, save it for diary later on. But Tony Benn was writing notes. Crossman was writing notes. Jenkins essentially wrote lots of... A very full memoir. Harold Wilson wrote one of the most boring memoirs that the world has ever seen. The trade union leaders wrote memoirs. Jack Jones wrote a memoir. It was an astonishingly literate and writerly sort of set of people. And yet the cabinet was, in some respects, kind of utterly dysfunctional, but with Wilson still running a sort of... You know, sort of like who was kind of currently had been nice to me. And he went... And of course in his second term, he became incredibly paranoid.It was not a model of good government really. And again, Callaghan is one of the greatest political resurrections ever, right, when he completely screws up the Treasury and then uses Northern Ireland's Home Secretary in order to kind of make himself back into a respectful mainstream figure. But before we go and fight Roy Jenkins-stans, we should both go and find out what our beef is with him.Henry: I'm gonna say her name, well, Colquhoun?Helen Lewis: Colquhoun.Henry: Colquhoun. She said, “Labor would rather fight Powell than solve poverty.” Is that still true?Helen Lewis: What read it out there is a phrase that I think Maureen Colquhoun said after not “the rivers of blood” speech, but another Enoch Powell speech in the '70s, which got her in enormous trouble. Would you like to endorse this sentiment that got her called a racist? And it was used as a pretext for drumming her out of the Labor party. So what happened to Maureen after that is that she... Her local party tried to de-select her, it then went to an appeal at the NEC. She eventually ended up holding on to her candidacy and then she lost in '79 to a guy called Tony Marlow, who's one of the most... Talk about Thatcher, I mean... He was bristly, to the extent that his nickname was Tony von Marlow. But yeah, he has some terrible quote about Harriet Harman as well, which is something like, “These bra burners have got a chip on their shoulder,” or something. It was something terrible mixed metaphor involving how you couldn't wear a bra if you also had a chip on your shoulder. Anyway, I digress.Henry: I'm not trying to endorse her quote, but if you replace Powell with Boris.Helen Lewis: I think it's a really interesting quote about... It comes back to purity leftism, what we were talking about before, is actually, “Do you want the win or do you want the fight?” And there is, I think, more of a tendency on the left than the right, to want to be on the right side of history, to want to be pure, to want to be fighting, and that sort of sense that... The perpetual struggle is the bit that you want to be in, that's the bit that's exciting, rather than the win. I think one of the really interesting sounds to me is gay marriage. I was just reading this Jonathan Rauch piece this morning about the fact that... His argument being, that there was a coalition of kind of right-wingers and centrists and liberals in America who fought with the radical left, who wanted gay rights to be predicated on the idea of sort of smashing the nuclear family and everything like that, to say, “Let's make gay rights really boring, and let's talk a lot about how much we want to get married. And maybe we wanna adopt. Let's recruit all the people who happen to have been born gay, but are also Tories or Republicans.”And I think a similar thing happened to him here, where you have David Cameron saying, “I support gay marriage not in spite of being a conservative, but because I'm conservative.” And you frame it as essentially a very norm-y, boring thing. And I think that has been really interesting to watch in the sense of... I think that's why gender is now come much more to the fore because it's a sense that, “Well, if even Tories are okay with people being gay, it's not... Like what's left? How is that interesting anymore?” And so, I think the criticism that she was trying to make there is very true in the sense that sometimes Labor wants to look right more than it wants to win a halfway victory.Henry: What are some of the best or most underrated biographies of women?Helen Lewis: That's a really interesting question. I read a lot of royal biographies, so I very much like Leonie Frieda's biography of Catherine de' Medici, for example. There is also... You're gonna think this is terrible, Princess Michael of Kent wrote a joint biography of Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II, which is called The Serpent and the Moon, which is a really... I think it's... Actually, it's not a bad biography, but I think it's quite interesting to write a biography of the wife and the mistress together.Henry: Yeah, I think that's a great idea.Helen Lewis: Because the story of them is obviously so intertwined and their power relationship obviously changes, right? Because Catherine is the dowdy wife who bears the 10 children, Diane is the kind of unbelievably gorgeous, older woman. But then of course, the king dies and it's like, “Oh, nice chateau you've got there. Shame, one of us is the dowager queen and one of us is now just some woman,” and makes her hand back her Chenonceau to her. So I enjoyed that very much. I'm trying to think what the best political women biographies are. Do you have a favourite Elizabeth I biography? I think there must be a really great one out there but I can't... I don't know which one actually is best.Henry: Well, I like the one by Elizabeth Jenkins, but it's now quite out of date and I don't know how true it is anymore. But it's, just as a piece of writing and a piece of advocacy for Elizabeth, it's an excellent book. And it sold, it was sort of a big best seller in 1956, which I find a very compelling argument for reading a book, but I appreciate that a lot of other people might not.Helen Lewis: No, that's not to everyone's taste. That's interesting. I like Antonia Fraser as a biographer. I don't know if you'‘e got a strong feelings, pro or anti. Her Mary Queen of Scots book is very good. Her Mari Antoinette book is very good. And I actually, I interviewed her once about how she felt about the Sofia Coppola film, which is basically like a two-and a half hour music video. She was totally relaxed, she was like, “It's a film, I wrote a book.”She didn't say it like that, she didn't go, “Film innit,” sucking on a roll-up, she said it in a very lofty, Antonia Fraser kind of way. But I think that's a good thing if you're an author, to kind of go, “What works in a biography is not what works in a film,” so...But yeah, I grew up reading those Jean Plaidy historical novels, so I guess I read a lot of biographies of Queens. I'm trying to think whether or not I read any biographies of modern women. I haven't read... I have on my shelf the, Red Comet, the Sylvia Plath biography. And I also, which is on my to-read pile, as is the biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas by Janet Malcom, which I one day, will treat myself to. Henry: What are the best or most underrated biographies by women?Helen Lewis: By women? Well, again, then we go back to...Henry: I mean, you've named some of them, maybe.Helen Lewis: The interesting thing is, I remember when I did Great Lives, they said... The Radio 4 program about history. That they said, the one thing that they have tried to encourage more of, is men nominating women. Because they found there was no problem with getting women to nominate men and men to nominate men, but they found there weren't that many men who picked women, which I think is interesting. I really wanted, when Difficult Women came out, I wanted a man to review it.Henry: Did that not happen?Helen Lewis: No, it didn't happen. And I think everybody would've... I think, from the point of view of your male reviewers, why would you review a book on feminism when you're gonna get loads of people going, “Ew, what are you doing?mansplaining feminism?” But it's an intellectual project, right? It's not a... It should be open to criticism by absolutely anyone, not on... You don't have to pass an identity test. It's an ideology and a school of history. And so I would... What's the best biography of woman written by a man, is kind of a question I'm interested in.Henry: Yes. That's very difficult to think of.Helen Lewis: And how many of them are there? Because it just strikes me that when I'm naming all my women, biographies of women, that they're all by women.Henry: Yes. It's difficult to think... It'‘ easy to think of biographies of men written by women.Helen Lewis: Right. Hermoine Lee's out there repping for Tom Stoppard biography recently. But yeah, people can send in answers on a postcard for that one.Henry: Should there be less credentialism in journalism?Helen Lewis: Yes. I started as a sub-editor on the Daily Mail. And I worked alongside lots of older guys who had come up through local papers at the time when the trade unions were so strong that you had to do two years on local paper before you got to Fleet Street. And therefore, I worked with quite a lot of people who had left school at either 16 or 18 and were better at subbing than people who'd... than recent university graduates. And so, the way that journalism has become first of all, a graduate profession and now a postgraduate profession, I don't think it's got any real relationship to the quality of journalism. There are a sort of set of skills that you need to learn, but a lot of them are more about things like critical thinking than they are about literature, if you see what I mean?That's the thing. That is what I find very interesting about journalism, is the interesting marriage of... You have to have the personal relationships, you have to be able to find people and make them want to be interviewed by you and get the best out of them. Then you have to be able to write it up in prose that other humans can understand. But then there is also a level of rigour underneath it that you have to have, in terms of your note-keeping and record-keeping and knowledge of the law and all that kind of stuff. But none of that maps onto any kind of degree course that you might be able to take. And so, I think that's... And the other huge problem, I think in journalism is that, everyone in the world wants to do it, or at least that's how it seems when you're advertising for an entry level position in journalism.When I was at the New Statesman, we used to recruit for editorial assistants and I once had 250 applications for a single post, which was paid a fine amount, you could live on it just about in London, but was not... It was a plum job in intellectual terms, but not in economic terms. And I think that's a real problem because I could have filled every position that we had, with only people who'd got Firsts from Oxford or whatever it might be. But it wouldn't have been the best selection of journalists.Henry: No. Quite the opposite.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yes. I enjoy your anti-Oxford prejudice. [chuckle] But you know what I mean is that I... But the fact that you had to have at least a degree to even get through the door, is sort of wrong in some profound way. And actually, some of the places have been... I think Sky did a non-graduate traineeship for people who were school leavers. And I think that there are profound problems in lots of those creative arts, publishing is the same, academia is the same, where you could fill every job which is low paid, and in London, with middle-class people whose parents are willing to fund them through. And the credentialism just is a further problem in that it just knocks out bright people from perfectly normal economic backgrounds.Henry: Do you think as well, that in a way, the main criteria for a good journalist, whether they're a sub-editor, or writing leaders or whatever, is common sense? And that a good English degree is really no guarantee that you have common sense.[laughter]Helen Lewis: Yeah. I couldn't put my hand in my heart and say that everybody I know with an English degree demonstrates common sense. I think that is actually not a bad... The famous thing is about you need a rat-like cunning, don't you? Which I think is also pretty true. But yeah, you do need to come back to that kind of idea about heresy and you do need to have a sort of sniffometer, not to be... I think you need to be fundamentally cynical, but not to a point where it poisons you.The right amount of cynicism is probably the thing you need in journalism. Because my husband's a journalist and quite often, there'll be a story where we just go, “I don't believe that. I just don't believe that.”And it really troubles me that that's become harder and harder to say. So I wrote a piece a while ago, about TikTok and people who claim to have Tourette's on there and actually quite a lot of them might have something else, might have functional neurological disorder. But there are whole genres of that all across journalism, where people will talk very personally and very painfully about their personal experiences. And the other half of that is that, we are not... It's mean, to question that. But they're often making political claims on the basis of those experiences. And you therefore can't put them in a realm beyond scrutiny. And so it's interesting to me, having been a teenager in the '90s when journalism was incredibly cruel. I'm talking about the height of bad tabloid, going through people's bins, hate campaigns against people. And a lot of this “be kind” rhetoric is a response to that and a necessary correction, but I do think there are now, lots of situations in which journalists need to be a bit less kind. That's a terrible quote. [laughter] But do you know what I mean?Henry: I do know exactly what you mean.Helen Lewis: When you have to say, “I know you think you've got this illness, but you haven't.” That's tough.Henry: People need to be more difficult.Helen Lewis: That's always my marketing strategy, yes.Henry: I want to ask if you think that you are yourself a late bloomer? In the tone of voice that you write in, you very often... You write like an Atlantic journalist and there are these moments, I think, of real wit. I don't mean jokey. I mean, clever. And so, a line like, “Your vagina is not a democracy,” is very funny but it's also very...Helen Lewis: It's true.Henry: Sort of Alexander Pope-ish.[laughter]Helen Lewis: That's the best possible reference. Yes, I hope to write very mean epigrams about people, one day.Henry: Please do. But you can also be very jokey like when you said, I think in a footnote, that you don't watch porn because the sofas are so bad.Helen Lewis: True.Henry: Now, there is something in those moments of wit that I think suggest that you could, if you wanted to, go and do something other than what you've already done. Maybe like Charles Moore, you'd become a biographer, or maybe you'd become a novelist, or maybe you'll run a think tank, or maybe you'll set up a newspaper and only employ 16-year-old school leavers, or... I don't know. Is that how you think about yourself or am I...Helen Lewis: You are trying to tell me I need to just grow up.[laughter]Henry: Not at all.Helen Lewis: Stop clowning around like a sea lion for applause after throwing fish.Henry: My theory on Helen Lewis is, you've got all the accolades that someone could want from a journalistic career.Helen Lewis: Not true. I've only ever won one award for journalism and you'll love this, it was Mainstream Video Games Writer of the Year.Henry: Oh my god.Helen Lewis: That's it. From the Games Awards in 2013, which I only remember this because every so often my publisher will put award-winning journalist as a merit that I have. Not really gov, not if I'm honest. You're right though. I have one of the plum jobs in journalism which is I work three days a week at the Atlantic, and then I make radio documentaries on the side and write books, and that is a position which is enormously enviable. But I have also... So I've moved away from column writing, in the last couple of years — I used to write a regular op-ed column — because I found it a deeply unsatisfying form. And I think, when you do jokes, you begin to realize that you can actually just say stupid, easy clap lines and with sufficient confidence, and people will respond to them, and after a while, you begin to hate yourself for doing that.[laughter]Well, that's one of the reasons I again... Like getting off Twitter. You know what I mean? You see some of those accounts that just exists to do lazy little dunks about the people that are appointed, that are sort of designated hate subjects. So if someone gets designated as a hate subject, then you can say nasty things about them and then everybody will applaud you. And I fundamentally revolt from that and I don't like it.I think that as a journalist, you should always try and be at right angles to whatever the prevailing opinion is. And actually as I've got older, I value the sort of... The people I think of as contrarians who I think really believe it rather than the people who are doing it for effect. Someone like a Peter Hitchens. He's got a whole ideology that's very much not mine and a set of interesting opinions and he believes them, and he truly argues them, and although they... Whether or not they're popular or unpopular is of no interest to hi

TW: This episode discusses baby loss. This week's guest is none other than the Labour legend who is standing up for all mums every day, voting for women's rights in parliament and doing it in style with her baby in a sling. Stella Creasy MP joins me to talk about the highs and lows of being a politician and a mother, and to talk about the lesser-known shoe fetish requests she receives from strangers online. Yes, you read that correctly.

MP Stella Creasy joins us this week to chat about getting more mums into parliament, the fight for maternity leave and flexible working, misogyny becoming a crime, bringing her child into parliament and how we can get involved with making a change.If you want to get in touch with a question or guest suggestion, send us an email to askmumsthewordpod@gmail.com--- A Create Production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

BE WARNED: It's LuAnna, and this podcast contains honest, upfront opinions, rants, bants and general explicit content. But you know you love it!On LuAnna this week: Anna and Lu have been out on the town and now have hangovers, Anna loves Ulrika Jonsson and Lu hates social media, #savethefemalebedbugs, and Luanna is making people faint. Please don't sue us. Plus, Stella Creasy taking her baby into the Commons, the legal age to be married rises from 16 to 18, a pokey weirdo and a parenting rant. Remember, if you want to get in touch you can:Email us at luannathepodcast@gmail.com OR drop us a WhatsApp on 07745 266947

Iain Dale and Jacqui Smith respond to a complaint about the shortness of last week's episode to record one of record length, with just the right mix of political commentary, analysis and humour. So they say. They discuss the deaths in the English Channel and the spat between Britain and France, the new Covid variant, Boris Johnson's CBI speech, No 10 v No 11, I'm a Celebrity, Sir David Amess's funeral, Geoff Hoon, Stella Creasy and her baby in the Commons, Nick Fletcher MP's male role models and much more besides. Smut quota: Middling

Sarah Vine and co-presenter author Imogen Edwards Jones tackle the important issues of the week, starting with Rod Stewart's dancing with a dishcloth on his head. Sarah and Imogen talk to Louise Oliver, President of the British Association of Women Entrepreneurs, on whether Stella Creasy was right to bring a baby to the House of Commons. Kate Mansey of the Mail on Sunday discusses all-women shortlists in fiction - and how a friend is struggling to get published simply because he's male. Plus, Hannah Betts on why big, bouncy blow-dry hairdos are back! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

La parlamentaria británica Stella Creasy dijo que tiene que ser posible que la política y la crianza de los hijos se concilien después de que le informaran que no podía sentarse en la Cámara de los Comunes con su pequeño hijo.

Yesterday Sikh Women's Aid launched a report into domestic abuse and child sexual abuse within the Sikh community. Conducted via anonymous surveys sent out over the summer, the survey of nearly 700 respondents showed that 70% had experienced domestic violence and 35% had experienced child sexual abuse or exploitation. To tell us more about this report and what can be done to help the issue, we're joined by the co-founder of Sikh Women's Aid and co-author of the report, Sahdaish Pall. Writer and historian Sheila Rowbotham helped start the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain. She organised and spoke at its first conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, she went on to encourage night cleaners to unionize and she wrote many ground breaking boojavascript:void(0)ks, including Women, Resistance and Revolution, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World and Hidden from History. This all happened in the 1970s and Sheila writes about it in her second and latest memoir, 'Daring to Hope: My life in the 1970s'. She joins Emma to discuss the many momentous feminist events of that decade. We used to have YOLO, then FOMO, now we have HOGO. Post lockdown, the fear of missing out no longer plagues us. We have become too comfortable sitting on our sofas watching TV. The effort of putting good clothes on and leaving the house is too much. This hassle of going out (HOGO) has been blamed by the hospitality industry for an increase in the number of no-shows at restaurants and paid-for live events. We talk to psychotherapist and author of Happy Relationships: At Home, Work and Play, Lucy Beresford and actor Sadie Clark whose play, Algorithms, is on at Soho Theatre in December. Motherhood and elite sport has felt like a taboo topic for many athletes in the past. Now official pregnancy guidance for Olympic and Paralympic athletes and sport governing bodies has been introduced for the first time by UK Sport. To discuss why this has been introduced now and how it will impact elite sportswomen, Emma is joined by five-time Olympic archer Naomi Folkard who contributed to UK Sport's consultation for the guidance and The Telegraph's Women's Sport reporter Molly McElwee. The judgment on the SEISS discrimination verdict appeal is expected today at 10.30am. It follows a claim by the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed of indirect discrimination due to the way the Self Employed Income Support Scheme was calculated. Introduced in spring 2020 to give financial help to self-employed workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the group argued SEISS was unlawful because it disproportionately affected women who had not worked because of their pregnancy and childbirth. Presenter: Emma Barnett Producer: Kirsty Starkey Interviewed Guest: Sahdaish Pall Interviewed Guest: Sheila Rowbotham Interviewed Guest: Stella Creasy Interviewed Guest: Lucy Beresford Interviewed Guest: Sadie Clark Interviewed Guest: Naomi Folkard Interviewed Guest: Molly McElwee Interviewed Guest: Jolie Brearley Photographer: Sally Fraser

Stella Creasy, Labour and Co-op MP for Walthamstow, says the risks from dropping masks and social distancing is not equal for everyone. And she tells Bloomberg's Caroline Hepker and Roger Hearing that Parliament is sending a terrible message by not giving pregnant MPs maternity cover and the same rights as other workers. Jonathan Goodhand, professor of conflict and development studies at SOAS, discusses the withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan. What does the West have for 20 years of nation-building? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

The Labour and Cooperative MP Stella Creasy is threatening legal action over her forthcoming maternity leave cover. Backbench MPs are currently allowed to take informal maternity leave, but not all their duties are covered during their absence. For instance they can employ office staff to help with constituency issues Ms Creasy says she's currently only being offered two thirds of her salary to employ a suitable replacement but she says that won't cover important tasks like meeting Ministers, media work or doing school visits. Also a replacement is unable to speak in the House of Commons or attend parliamentary committees. Ms Creasy has said: "I think every woman should be able to have paid maternity cover, proper cover - it's not just about being paid, it's that somebody else will be doing that job.” She may just be 13 years old but Libby Scott has just released her third novel ‘Ways to Be Me' in collaboration with the author Rebecca Westcott. Along with the hugely successful Can You See Me? and Do you Know Me?, the three novels feature the story of Tally who is autistic. The books have been widely praised for their realistic portrayal of autism. Although not autobiographical Tally's story is partly based on Libby's own experiences of being autistic herself. This latest one - a prequel to Can You See Me? - goes back in time to the period just before she gets a diagnosis age 10. Libby and her mum Kym join Chloe. A humanitarian ceasefire has just been called but since November last year the fighting between the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and government forces in Ethiopia has left thousands of people dead. More than two million have been displaced and 350,000 pushed towards famine. There are reports of women who were kidnapped by soldiers and held as sexual slaves. Chloe discusses the situation with BBC Africa Correspondent in Nairobi - Vivienne Nunis and Rita Kahsay, co-ordinator of the Tigray Youth Network based in the UK. Fertility clinics in the UK are removing an unsafe number of eggs from women hoping to have IVF, according to a new study. Looking at data from UK fertility clinics between 2015 and 2018, researchers found that some were retrieving far too many eggs from women, reporting cases of up to 50 eggs being removed in a single procedure. The ideal 'safe yield' is around 12 eggs. Chloe Tilley discusses the implications with Joyce Harper, Professor of Reproductive Science at the Institute of Women's health at UCL, and the author of Your Fertile Years. As we know travellers are obliged to quarantine in a hotel at their own cost after returning from countries on the UK's red list, where Covid infection rates are high. They spend 10 nights in their room and are allowed out for daily exercise only when accompanied by a guard. Private security companies have been hired by the government to ensure hotel guests observe quarantine rules. Kathy Godolphin had a disturbing experience saying she experienced sexual harassment at a hotel after returning from working on a conservation and anti-poaching project in Zimbabwe. She joins Chloe Tilley to discuss the aftermath of that ten days. Presented by Chloe Tilley Producer: Louise Corley Editor: Beverley Purcell

The presenter, journalist and “Queen of Mean”, Anne Robinson, is best known for her acerbic style of presenting on 'The Weakest Link'. In the 1960s she was the first young female trainee on the Daily Mail, worked at the Sunday Times and the Daily Mirror, and went on to host programmes from Points of View to Watchdog. Today Anne takes up the Countdown reins as the first female host of Channel 4's longest running series. She will join numbers whizz, Rachel Riley and wordsmith, Susie Dent, to make a formidable female trio. She joins Chloe Tilley. Last week the government voted down proposals to make it illegal to film or photograph someone breastfeeding without their consent. MP's like Stella Creasy, who has experienced this herself when teenage boys took photos of her as she breast fed her baby while on a train, and the MP Jeff Smith, wanted to make an amendment to the Voyeurism Act of 2019 - more commonly known as the Up-skirting Act - which focused on making it illegal to take photos and films of the lower part of the body or ‘up a skirt'. This recent proposal is for a simple amendment to be made to the 2019 Act to include the upper body and so protect breastfeeding mums. In April this year Julia Cooper found a man taking photos of her as she breast fed her baby in the park. When Gwen Strauss' aunt Hélène was in her 80's she nonchalantly mentioned at lunch that she had led a band of women in an escape from a Nazi death march, in the dying days of the war in Europe in 1945. The women were all members of the French Resistance, although two were Dutch and one Spanish. Gwen embarked on a search for these women, scouring France and Germany to track down their records, their families and their memories. Gwen – an award-winning children's book author - has now painstakingly reconstructed what happened in her new book 'The Nine'. The reality TV dating show Love Island is back on our screens. The show is undeniably popular and creates many water cooler moments, but what can it actually tell us about modern love and dating? We speak to journalist, podcaster, and author of new book 'Millennial Love', Olivia Petter and Nichi Hodgson, author of 'The Curious History of Dating', about how important the series might be in helping millennials and Gen Z find true love after lockdown. Presenter: Chloe Tilley Producer: Kirsty Starkey Interviewed Guest: Anne Robinson Interviewed Guest: Julia Cooper Interviewed Guest: Gwen Strauss Interviewed Guest: Olivia Petter Interviewed Guest: Nichi Hodgson

In this episode, Ellie is joined by fellow breastfeeding mother Julia Cooper, who is campaigning with MPs Jeff Smith and Stella Creasy to change the law to make illegal the taking images of breastfeeding without consent.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Cheer Up Luv Podcast. Today I am speaking to a very exciting guest, it's the Labour MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy! Stella has now been an MP for Walthamstow for 10 years, and has worked on notable campaigns to tackle online harassment, domestic abuse and islamophobia. Stella also made history as the first MP to get maternity cover. In the episode we discuss the campaign to treat misogyny as a hate crime, the gender gaps in our system surrounding childcare and maternity leave, and how we can make the streets safer for women, girls and marginalised genders. You can find Stella here @stellacreasy and here: https://members.parliament.uk/member/4088/contact Resources: https://fawcettsociety.eaction.org.uk/make%20misogyny%20a%20hate%20crime https://www.change.org/p/make-public-sexual-harassment-a-criminal-offence-in-the-uk If you would like to send in your story, please feel free to DM @cheerupluv or submit via the website: http://www.cheerupluv.com Music composed by Alex Gruz This episode is sponsored by TOTM and Lara Intimates. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eliza-hatch/support

On International Women's Day, we ask what Covid-19 lockdowns have done to gender equality at work - and at home. Mum Leslie Chiaramonte was forced to quit her nursing job amid the demands of juggling childcare and work. British politician Stella Creasy fears the pandemic will lead to a "tsunami" of unemployed mothers. But Holly Birkett, co-director of the Equal Parenting Project at the University of Birmingham, says it has helped to remove the stigma attached to flexible working. Producer: Szu Ping Chan (Photo: Stock photo of a mother multi-tasking with her young son; Credit: Getty Images)

Knowing what is or isn't going to give you a hangover is essential lockdown intel, so Mick gets busy herding delightful comedy cats and hosts of the Spit or Swallow podcast, Lou Conran and Sally-Anne Hayward, to find out more. Jen has a natter with Michelle Elman, life coach and author of new book The Joy of Being Selfish, about boundaries, why we need them and how to set them. In Jenny off the Blocks, Jen's talking sailing, specifically the Vendee Globe, completed by Pip Hare last week. Just how good a combo is domestic violence, absent eyelids and a glorious hat montage? Find out as this week’s Rated or Dated revisits Sleeping With The Enemy. Plus, in the Bush Telegraph, there's fun with percentages, a(nother) celebration of Stella Creasy, and a centuries-old debate about where women should be is still happening. Sigh. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/standardissuespodcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

To kick off the new year, we're going to zoom in on politics - most specifically on power and action, and where it comes from when it seems like big, era-defining decisions are needing to be made everyday. Our special guest is Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow in north east London since 2010. Early on in her parliamentary career, Stella gained recognition for her successful campaigning on payday loan companies, leading to better regulation of exploitative interest rates - even winning accolades from the conservative press and the then Conservative chancellor George Osborne. As a politician, Stella Creasy is known for direct and detailed interrogation of social injustices, with attention given to the abortion rights of women in Northern Ireland, and the consideration of misogyny as a hate crime. She has sat on the Labour front-benches as shadow ministers for business and crime prevention. Following the birth of her daughter just over a year ago, Stella has worked to improve maternity rights for female MPs, including employing the first ever locum MP to cover some of her constituency work when needing to care for her daughter. Prior to being elected to Westminster, Stella worked for thinktanks and political movements, as a parliamentary researcher and Head of Public Affairs for The Scouts. We spoke to Stella towards the end of November 2020 about power, community, social mobility and what the hell it is like being a British MP through a decade of austerity, Brexit and a global pandemic. --- Useful links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Creasy https://twitter.com/stellacreasy https://working4walthamstow.co.uk/ --- For more information on how you can get involved with The Possibility Club – an inclusive community of professionals working out what's next, have a look here > www.thepossibilityclub.org You can also receive Finding Chances, a free weekly letter from Richard Freeman, looking behind-the-scenes at business, culture, community and education by signing-up at https://findingchances.substack.com/ We'd also love to know what you think about the interviews. Please review and share your responses to this podcast on your favourite podcast platform. This is an always possible podcast. The interviewer was Richard Freeman for always possible and the producer was Chris Thorpe-Tracey for Lo Fi Arts.

It's a man's world - but our first guest is trying her best to change that. Stella Creasy made history as the first MP to get maternity cover. She tells Claire Newell why parliament hasn't always made parenting easy and why she believes the lockdown is disproportionately affecting women. Plus, she reveals how she's been discouraged from taking on big roles because after having a baby.How have you found returning to work after having a child? Tell us your story: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/work/have-found-returning-work-having-child-want-hear/ |For 30 days' free access to The Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/audio |Get in touch: podcasts@telegraph.co.uk |See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week I talk to Laura Challinor from Stella Creasy's campaign to Make Misogyny a Hate Crime and Melania Geymonat who is campaigning against hate crimes since she and another woman whom she was on a date with were attacked on a bus and the photo went sparked a conversation across the globe. TW assault and homophobia.

We've some big hitters from the world of feminism for you in this week's podcast. You are welcome. First up, Mickey chats to Woman's Hour's Jenni Murray about fat shaming, changing attitudes and her new book Fat Cow, Fat Chance. Hannah talks to Labour MP and woman of action Stella Creasy about why she's working to make misogyny a hate crime. In DDD, we're less than rapturous about the Rapture as we watch Left Behind. Plus there's bona fide good news and a correct usage of the word hero in the Bush Telegraph. Tuck in! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we are joined by Emily Batchelor and Amy Dwyer, both newly appointed Women's Officers for the Young Fabians, to discuss female leadership through Covid and beyond. We spoke about how female leaders around the world have had some of the most effective and competent responses to the current pandemic and explore the reasons behind it. We spoke about the importance of gender parity within Parliament and what measures organisations such as 50:50 Parliament are doing to achieve this. We also discussed the need for more female leaders and visual representations of powerful women towards dismantling the obstacles women face when running for office.Speakers:Emily Batchelor - YF Women's Officer https://twitter.com/EmilyJBatchAmy Dwyer - YF North West Womens Officer and Ambassador for 50:50 Parliament https://twitter.com/AmyDwyer23Carolina Saludes - YF Vice Chair https://twitter.com/CarolinaSaludesLouie Marlow - YF Content Producer https://twitter.com/louiemarlowResources: Amy Dwyer's Blog piece female leadership during Covid: bit.ly/2DKcY2l Emily Batcherlo's Blog piece on Female liberation: https://bit.ly/393s92a Tessa Jowell profile and obituary: https://bit.ly/3h9AuVaThe 50:50 campaign for equal representation in parliament: https://bit.ly/2OAk8Zb International Index on gender equality: https://bit.ly/3fBaaCYUN figures on representation in public bodies: https://bit.ly/2CG4qsU 5:38's piece on sexism in the 2016 US Presidential Election: https://53eig.ht/3jbO8sz This event was recorded on Thursday 16th July.To all our female listeners: we want you in our podcast, so if you're passionate about a topic just get in touch with us at podcast@youngfabians.org.uk. We want to hear from you.Enjoy!Follow us on social media to find out more:https://www.facebook.com/PodcastYFhttps://twitter.com/PodcastYfThe intro music is by ‘One in a Googolplex' and used under Creative Commons. Find out more about them here:https://oneinagoogolplex.bandcamp.com/

  “... every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984 Cancel culture.  Gone with the Wind… - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ5ICXMC4xY   https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/university-rename-student-halls-named-18387566  Ben and Jerrys https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-ben-jerry-s-lecturing-us-about-white-supremacy-?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020200605%20%20GC+CID_aa85b1b5fefb5cb7f5ce3bbf4d4d583e JK Rowling – https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-nhs-has-quietly-changed-its-trans-guidance-to-reflect-reality?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020200605%20%20GC+CID_aa85b1b5fefb5cb7f5ce3bbf4d4d583e  Covid – India and Brazil becoming the centres.  China and India –  Top Ten Albums – Slow Train Coming… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC10VWDTzmU   Tim Keller –   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZFCB9sduxQ   The Irish Blessing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TascsWZPj8U&feature=youtu.be https://youtu.be/TascsWZPj8U   

Keeping up fitness when you're isolated at home. Jenni talks to fitness instructor Rosemary Mallace of Over Fifty Fitness and Professor Janet Lord, an expert in muscle health and immunity from the University of Birmingham, about why keeping moving is particularly important as you get older and what you can do to exercise at home. Earlier this week the Government published advice that women could be prescribed both abortion pills for a medical abortion, which they would be able to take at home, without attending a hospital or clinic. It has since said that this was published in error. With women trying to observe instructions to stay at home – some self-isolating – trying to reduce the spread of Coronavirus the British Pregnancy Advisory Service says that 500 women a day must make unnecessary journeys, with services and clinic closures forcing them to travel greater distances. So, how can those women who need an abortion access one safely and legally? Jenni speaks to Professor Lesley Regan, Past President RCOG and Co-Chair National Women’s Health Task Force and to Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow. Hampstead Theatre in London is currently streaming on Instagram, ‘I and You’ a play they produced in 2018 starring Maisie Williams in her first stage role. It looks at the struggle a teenager finding herself restricted to her home. The playwright, Lauren Gunderson, currently the most produced living playwright in the US, tells us about her play and what it says about the struggles of youth confined across the globe. Keeper by Jessica Moor is a novel set in a women’s refuge. Katie, an employee there, has died. As the women in the refuge insist Katie didn’t take her own life the police are forced to investigate. Jenni talks to debut novelist Jessica Moor and to Natasha Saunders who has experience of domestic abuse and of life in a refuge. What can fiction do to shed light on domestic abuse? Presented by Jenni Murray Produced by Jane Thurlow Interviewed guest: Stella Creasy Interviewed guest: Lesley Regan Interviewed guest: Lauren Gunderson Interviewed guest: Jessica Moor Interviewed guest: Natasha Saunders Interviewed guest: Rosemary Mallace Interviewed guest: Janet Lord

Recorded midway through the UK general election campaign and two weeks before the birth of her first child, Labour MP Stella Creasy found time to talk to Julia Gillard about her life in politics, fighting to win abortion rights for women in Northern Ireland – at the cost of personal abuse that put her life in danger, and how parliament needs to change to become truly gender-equal. Earnings from the podcast will go back into funding for the Global Institute for Women's Leadership, furthering the work they do to create a world in which being a woman is no barrier to being a leader. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It's rare we open a gigcast with the question "WTF?" but as our guests last month were MP Stella Creasy and US comedian Taylor Glenn it seemed rather fitting. We also talked about what we'd change if we were in charge of the world, "liberal bros", disastrous driving tests and foam shrimps. Because foam shrimps. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

An anti-abortion billboard campaign targeted at pregnant MP Stella Creasy is being pulled down amid claims the posters were a form of harassment. Clear Chanel, which owned the billboards, apologised and said it was taking immediate action to remove them. Ms Creasy tabled a recent amendment to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, which was passed by a majority in the Commons in July. Emma Barnett talked to Ms Creasy about her experience, and asked Aisling Goodison from anti-abortion campaign group CBR why they ran the campaign.

Sharenting is when you put too much information about your children on social media. It could be baby pictures or details of what they're doing or what they've achieved. You might think your post is sweet or funny, but when your children grow up, they might not agree especially when it comes to finding a job. Jane talks to Claire Bessant, a solicitor and Associate Professor at Northumbria Law School and Leah Plunkett, who's an Associate Professor of Legal Skills at the University of New Hampshire in the US and author of ‘Sharenthood’. Anti-abortion posters were put up in the Labour MP, Stella Creasy’s, constituency in London this weekend. They've now been taken down. Stella Creasy is eight months pregnant, has publicly spoken about the miscarriages she’s had and she’s a prominent campaigner for abortion rights in Northern Ireland. We speak to Stella who feels she's a target for a group called Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK, which is behind the posters. We also talk to their spokesperson, Ruth Rawlins. More books than ever before are now published about women and science. Last week Caroline Criado Perez won the 2019 Royal Society Book Prize for her book ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’. It lists the ways in which the world is designed for men, rather than women. We bring Caroline together with neuroscientist, Professor Gina Rippon, whose book ‘The Gendered Brain’ refutes the claim that men and women’s brains are fundamentally different.

Thanks to Westminster -or should that be Westmonster-- Northern Ireland is to have abortion-on-demand legalised from 22nd October, unless Stormont is restored. Led by the unholy trinity of Labour MPs Conor McGinn, Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy, the 'swamp' has voted for this evil. Thank God, anti-abortion protests have taken place, most notably on 6th September when 20,000 people attended a silent witness at Parliament Buildings, while a similar number marched through Belfast the following afternoon.

Thanks to Westminster -or should that be Westmonster-- Northern Ireland is to have same-sex marriage imposed on it from 22nd October, unless Stormont is restored. Led by the unholy trinity of Labour MPs Conor McGinn, Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy, the 'swamp' has voted for these two evils. Thank God, anti-abortion protests have taken place, most notably last weekend when 20,000 attended a silent witness at Parliament Buildings on the Friday, while a similar number marched through Belfast on the Saturday afternoon. What alarms me however is that there has been little or no opposition to fake marriage...

On this week's Polling Politics, Joe Twyman and Marie Le Conte are joined by Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow. They're discussing our new Prime Minster, Boris Johnson, as well as the new Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, the hot weather and a suprisingly lengthy amount of chat about Colchester... Presented by Joe Twyman and Marie Le Conte. With Stella Creasy. Produced and edited by Nick Hilton. Theme music by Joe Button. This is a Podot podcast. For more details go to podotpods.com (http://podotpods.com/) and for sales and advertising email nick@podotpods.com

In this week's extra show, Progress interim director Stephanie Lloyd sits down with Stella Creasy to talk about her fight to extend abortion access to the women of Northern Ireland, going public about her miscarriage and Donald Trump's racist comments about 'The Squad'.Be a progressive:*Donate to the Abortion Support Network*Support JLM – become an affiliate member*Become an LGBT+ Labour solidarity member See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

we talk Stella Creasy and the move to remain. At least the g1 is on https://twitter.com/WDTATW_Podcast

"I wouldn't have a manifesto, I'd have a set of five ambitions because you can't do everything."Stella Creasy's plan for power is certainly more radical than most who have been offered the hypothetical keys to Number 10 by ITV News.The Labour MP spoke...

Heather Stewart is joined by Anushka Asthana, Ryan Shorthouse and Anand Menon to discuss the latest in the Tory leadership contest, maternity rights for MPs and Labour's Brexit position. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/politicspod

Labour's Stella Creasy talks about the abuse she receives, her views on feminism and equality and explains why her parents are troublesome constituents. But can she get through the conversation with Sophy and Matt without mentioning the B word?

The Labour MP on her mum's career advice, campaigning against payday lending and trying to avoid the Pythonesque giant foot of Brexit.

Are citizens' assemblies the way to break the Brexit deadlock? Alison McGovern speaks to Stella Creasy about the new solution being touted to find a way forward by involving people from outside of politics in the decision-making process.And with big news for Progressive Britain, Alison and Stephanie Lloyd quiz Conor Pope on some of the best moments on the podcast over the past 18 months.Further reading:*Lisa Nandy and Stella Creasy: MPs alone won't solve the Brexit deadlock. We need a citizens' assembly*Alison McGovern” Sometimes we MPs need to shut up and listen – that's why we need citizens assemblies on Brexit See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Television presenter Laura Whitmore, MP Stella Creasy, songwriter Chelcee Grimes and comic Nish Kumar play their favourite songs including tracks from Cat Power, Alanis Morissette, The Undertones, Beyoncé, Westlife and Nina Simone. Colin Murray has the questions on great songwriters, tattooed lyrics, Irish bands and big ends.

Alison McGovern and Stella Creasy go head-to-head in the Progressive Britain quiz of 2018 – including Ukip leaders, reality television and who will replace Theresa May in 2019.Further watching:*Jonathan Dimbleby Show debate on Europe, 1996 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A change in Brexit policy will be voted on at conference, but how did it get there – and what are its effects? Is Labour now committed to single market membership? Does the party support a People's Vote? And is a 'deal or no deal' referendum really on the table?Conor Pope, Alison McGovern, Richard Angell and Stephanie Lloyd work out what matters.Further reading:*'We all must be better' – Alison McGovern's speech to the Progress rally *'We are all idealists' – Wes Streeting's speech to the Progress rally *'They did break the poor' – Stephanie Lloyd's takedown of Militant revisionism*‘Stand proud as Labour' – Stella Creasy's speech to the Progress rally Further listening:*The single market: could we stay? Progressive Britain episode one See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's episode of the Intelligence Squared podcast, Mariana Mazzucato, UCL economics professor and author of The Value of Everything, sat down with the UK Labour MP Stella Creasy in a wide-ranging discussion of how real wealth is created in our economy. Mariana Mazzucato is Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

After major shifts in the 1940s and 1980s, is it time again for a major overhaul of how our economy functions? That's the argument in the new major report from the IPPR's Commission on Economic Justice, Prosperity and Justice. Catherine Colebrook talks to Conor Pope, Richard Angell and Alison McGovern about the report's findings, and what it might mean for the economy of the future.Further reading:*Down with the cult of GDP. For us economists, it's yesterday's yardstick – Catherine Colebrook*We can and must rebalance the economy. Here's how – Tom Kibasi*How should we tax property? There may be another solutions to wealth inequality? – Michael EdenboroughFurther listening:*Wealth inequality: shaking those assets – Progressive Britain with Liz Kendall*A new economy? – Progressive Britain with Stella Creasy and Tom Kibasi*The Beveridge anniversary: still relevant? – Progressive Britain with Nicholas Timmins See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Chequers "dead in the water"? Anti-semitism weaponised by Theresa May and Stella Creasy is a solid backbencher.

Special guest STELLA CREASY – Walthamstow MP, out-and-out Remainer and biggest* Wedding Present fan in the Commons – joins us in the week that the Government decided that its own contingency advice for No Deal was too alarming for the simple British public to see.(* OK, only). In a wide-ranging chat with Stella we ask… How can we get Labour to make a stand against Brexit before it’s too late? Now that Vote Leave’s deceitful Facebook ads have been exposed, can Britain regulate its way out of the political nightmare of Dark Ads and social media vitriol? Is there a realistic route to a People’s Vote? And what’s going on with Walthamstow’s favourite son, Brian Harvey of East 17?PLUS we welcome brand new regular NINA SCHICK – in-demand political journalist, Brexit specialist and German citizen – to the Remainiacs panel with her penetrating perspective from Berlin and beyond. Will Naomi steal the new kid’s dinner money? There’s only one way to find out…This week’s REMAINIACS is presented by Andrew Harrison with Naomi Smith and Nina Shick. Audio production: Jack Claramunt. Remainiacs is a Podmasters production.Help us to #OwnTheRemoan and get smart Remainiacs merchandise too. Support us at the crowdfunding platform Patreon. REMAINIACS.comTheme music ‘Demon Is A Monster’ used by kind permission of Cornershop. Buy it here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Isabel Hardman presents the highlights of Sunday's political interviews. This week's highlights come from Sajid Javid, Arlene Foster, Stella Creasy and Andrew Lloyd Webber. This podcast was produced by Matthew Taylor.

With pressure growing on Theresa May to change the law on abortion in Northern Ireland following the referendum in the Republic, Sophy talks to DUP leader Arlene Foster and Labour MP Stella Creasy about their views. #Ridge

The Guilty Feminist Presented by Deborah Frances-White and Jen Brister Episode 92: Politics with special guests Stella Creasy and Sisters Uncut Recorded 19 February 2018 at The Royal Albert Hall in London. Released 2 April.  Music by Mark Hodge and produced by Nick Sheldon. https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/series/women-and-the-hall/ More about Deborah Frances-White http://deborahfrances-white.com https://twitter.com/DeborahFW Global Pillage More about Jen Brister http://www.jenbrister.co.uk https://twitter.com/JenBrister More about Stella Creasy https://twitter.com/stellacreasy http://www.workingforwalthamstow.org.uk More about Sisters Uncut http://www.sistersuncut.org https://twitter.com/SistersUncut For more information about this and other episodes… visit guiltyfeminist.com tweet us twitter.com/guiltfempod like our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/guiltyfeminist/ check out our Instagram instagram.com/theguiltyfeminist/ or join our mailing list eepurl.com/bRfSPT  The Negotiations special episode of the podcast is now available to purchase. http://guiltyfeminist.com/product/include-yourself-podcast/ Come to a live recording! 12 April at the National Portrait Gallery. Tickets on sale now. 16 April at Kings Place. Tickets on sale now. 22 April at the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton. Tickets on sale now. 7 May at Kings Place. Tickets on sale now. 24 May at The London Palladium. Tickets on sale now. 26 May at The Oxford Playhouse. Tickets on sale now. 28 May at Kings Place. Tickets on sale now. 15 July at Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Tickets on sale now. Leave us a review and rate us on Apple Podcasts!

We are excited to be kicking off Season 2 with a bang with Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow. She sat down with Lliana Bird, Emma Gannon and producer Shola Aleje to talk about men’s role in feminism with ties in nicely with International Women's Day this week. We also discuss the teens online and offline fight for gun control and attitudes towards the elderly. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Conor Pope and Richard Angell chat about Stella Creasy's PFI campaign, just what Boris Johnson means by a ‘liberal' Brexit, and reply to listeners' comments.Further reading:*Keir Bradwell on Boris Johnson's speech *Kate Dearden on how trade unions should respond to changing working conditions *Join the Labour Campaign for the Single Market See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There is a consensus that the old economic model does not work, but not an agreement about what should replace it. Stella Creasy MP talks to Conor Pope and Stephanie Lloyd about PFI, while the IPPR's Tom Kibasi and and Labour in the City's Allen Simpson discuss what economic justice and consensus might look like in this new era.Further reading:*Stella Creasy on how PFI is bankrupting Britain *Tom Kibasi on a eulogy for Britain's economic model *Jack May on public-private partnerships post-Carillon *Join Stella Creasy's PFI campaign See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Who are the progressives of the year? Alison McGovern, Richard Angell, Stephanie Lloyd and Conor Pope discuss the progressives who got things done in 2017 – but can you beat them in the surprise end of year quiz?Further reading:*Charlotte Norton on Stella Creasy and abortion rights in Northern Ireland *Ealing Council bans anti-choice demos outside abortion clinics*The women of LabourToo write on the need to cultivate the courage to listen *How Liverpool is integrating health and social care *Robert Philpot on how Doug Jones could be the turning point for the Republicans *Felicity Slater on whether Macron can deliver the change France desires *Forget the lizards, Marlon Solomon says David Icke is dangerous *The Jewish Labour Movement's Ella Rose writes on breaking through the bagel belt *Seema Malhotra on the promise of Britain See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On the failed amendment to The Queen's Speech, and the amendments from Stella Creasy and Chuka Umunna. With Katy Balls and James Forsyth. Presented by Lara Prendergast.

Isabel Hardman summarises the best of Sunday's political interviews. Feat: David Davis, Debbie Abrahams, Gerard Coyne, Stella Creasy and Lord Patten.

Sophy talks to Cabinet minister Priti Patel and Shadow Attorney-General Shami Chakrabarti and gives her analysis as the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire continues.She also discusses the latest Brexit developments with Ken Clarke, and abortion in Northern Ireland with Labour MP Stella Creasy. #Ridge

In the latest 'Sophy Ridge on Sunday' podcast, Sophy quizzes housing minister Gavin Barwell about the Government's plans to make renting more affordable. She also talks to Harriet Harman, the longest-serving female MP in the House of Commons, and discusses Brexit with leave campaigner Iain Duncan Smith MP and remainer Stella Creasy MP. #Ridge

On this week’s episode – The battle for Mosul is now in its seventh day and the Iraqi army says around 50 villages have been liberated from ISIS militants. But has a plan been made for what happens after the fight for the city is over? I put this to Rory Stewart, Minister of State at the Department for International Development. After years of negotiations, talks of Canada’s trade-deal with the EU broke down on Friday. Due to be signed next week and with all 28 member states in support of the agreement talks fell through as Belgium’s Wallonia region rejected the deal. The Canadian trade minister and president of the European Parliament say they hope it can still be signed. To discuss the implications of this impasse we hear from the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, the head of Europe and trade policy at the Institute of Directors, Allie Renison and Dr Gerard Lyons, the co chair of economists for Brexit. The so-called jungle camp in Calais is due to close this week and the UK government is hurrying to fulfil its promise to take in unaccompanied minors. We hear from Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow, who is leading the fight to bring the children of Calais to Britain. Once again, the race to discover who will be the next leader of UKIP is underway, we speak to the leadership hopeful Raheem Kassam who is being backed by the party donor, Arron Banks. And finally, as ever, we have a team of top political pundits to discuss this week's news - political columnist Steve Richards, the political editor of the Sun David Wooding and Sky’s own senior political correspondent Beth Rigby. All on this week's Murnaghan podcast!

Stella Creasy is one of the few MPs to change government policy from the opposition back benches. She is also, according to The Daily Mirror, the UK's third most Twitter-addicted politician. Stella shares her insights into getting people fired up about politics. She also talks about why she sometimes feels like 'Walthamstow's mum' and explains why her parliamentary peers at 'Hogwarts gone wrong' need to put networks before institutions. Plus we compare the rhetoric of policy wonk Ed Miliband and pint-wielding 'everyman' Nigel Farage.

With voters now being offered a clear choice between right and left, have we entered a new political age? At a Guardian Live/National Theatre event in London, economist and presenter Evan Davis chairs a lively discussion on the future of the political landscape

For the ninth show Matt is joined by Labour MP Stella Creasy. For details of The Political Party 2014 shows at St James Theatre, London visit www.mattforde.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

DigitalOutbox Episode 177 DigitalOutbox Episode 177 - Moto X and Twitter Trolls Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 0:59 - Moto X 7:10 - Google announces tool to track lost Android phones 8:09 - O2 and Vodaphone Launch 4G on August 29th 12:16 - BT and Vodafone among telecoms companies passing details to GCHQ 15:06 - No internet access in 17% of UK homes, ONS data shows 17:06 - Teenager Hannah Smith killed herself because of online bullying 21:09 - Stella Creasy receives Twitter photo of masked, knife-wielding man 23:35 - Twitters Abuse Commitment 25:51 - Tweeting arrests of 'illegal immigrants' is a new low for the Home Office 26:48 - Twitter bigot ordered to pay gay rights campaigner £40,000 for calling her a paedophile 29:01 - Obama Administration Vetoes Ban On Certain iPhones And iPads 31:08 - 'Safety issues' prompt Apple charger trade-in programme 33:24 - Amazon launches digital downloads for software and video games in the UK 34:27 - Feedly Pro Announced 37:07 - Google Chrome security flaw offers unrestricted password access 39:18 - Google Play Music All Access Goes Live In 9 European Countries Picks Ian Pivvot - Pivvot is a thrilling game of strategic avoidance that will consistently test and challenge your ability to make quick, impulsive decisions. As the game progresses, you will have to rely on your instincts and problem-solving skills to navigate down the winding path for survival. With its intensity, minimalistic design, and puzzling logic, Pivvot is sure to keep you guessing at every turn. - iOS and coming soon to Android