Women Authors From England

"This is the double injustice of the criminal justice system for women. Male violence against women and children is not accorded equal priority to other forms of violence. And although sex-based differences in patterns of violence mean it is vanishingly rare that a woman will genuinely be a danger to society, female offenders are treated as though they are violent men."

"It was an effective, if painful, reminder of how racism manifests itself: not just in words such as "Paki" but in the self-appointed white gatekeepers who see it as their business to police celebrations of the contributions made, sometimes in the face of appalling racism, by people of colour. I've lost count of the number of times I've been called a racist simply for acknowledging the ethnicity of the medical professionals who gave their lives to keep us safe. So it’s worth reiterating why the skin colour of our fallen NHS heroes matters. It’s not just that outright racism and rising levels of Islamophobia affect the wellbeing of NHS workers willingly risking their lives to keep us all safe, it is that, as the General Medical Council has acknowledged, BAME medics face structural racism. And the government's anti-immigration rhetoric continues to legitimise discrimination at the frontline."

"Gender-non-conforming behaviour is something to be celebrated, rather than the basis for teaching children that they may have been born in the wrong body, as some schools now do. There are many reasons why children and young people may experience gender dysphoria: it may be a sign that a child will go on to have a fixed trans identity in adulthood, but can also be associated with discomfort about puberty, grappling with same-sex attraction and childhood trauma. There is a coincidence with autism. Yet the NHS has ignored this in embracing gender ideology's unevidenced affirmative model and has put growing numbers of young people on the path of irreversible medical treatment that can make them infertile and has potentially significant risks for their brain and physical development, without adequately exploring the reasons for their gender dysphoria."

"The lasting legacy of the financial crisis on Britain’s electoral landscape was not to shift our political centre of gravity to the left, but to shake the faith of voters in the capacity of mainstream politics to provide solutions. "You’re all the same" is a common refrain heard on the doorstep. It was this cynicism that created fertile territory for the SNP and Ukip: both Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage have successfully positioned themselves against a remote Westminster elite."

"[W]atching Barack Obama charm his way into our hearts here in Britain has reminded me of how brilliant he is at – well, just talking to people. Whether addressing a nation on TV, getting a grilling from journalists or rolling up his sleeves and taking a Q&A in a roomful of young people, he knows how to connect in a way no other present-day politician can. Over the past days, we’ve seen him articulate the positive case for Britain remaining in the EU better than any UK politician has done. He’s answered tricky questions in a way that comes across as authentic and honest, even daring to say: "I don’t know" to some of them. He’s challenged people who have said things he disagrees with in a way that somehow makes you like him more. When one young woman in the "town hall" yesterday morning apologised for being emotional, he said crying was fine and joked he feared she was going to come up on stage and do a dance with him."

"If we were to carry on rolling back state-funded care in Britain, it would inevitably be women who’d feel obliged to give up work to care for older relatives, storing up financial problems for their own old age. Some ageing people without family members willing to care for them would simply fall through the cracks. Even those whose families could do this might find themselves physically taken care of but with their emotional health suffering as relationships break down under the strain. Duty might kick in, but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought we could reverse-engineer the evolutionary urge to make huge sacrifices for our children. That’s not to say that it’s not lovely when some opt for a more multi-generational family life. But it should be an active choice. Structuring the state in a way that forces people to embrace a Mediterranean approach is wrong. We can’t answer the question of how big we want the state to be without asking how much our families should feel obliged to do for us – and how much we care about the potential price in terms of growing social and gender inequality."

"Which brings me to the vegan burger. Take a step back and it seems bonkers that our political leaders hold firm on outlawing weed but seem loth to invoke the nanny state where it’s most needed: in avoiding catastrophic climate change. We won't succeed in this unless we persuade people to fly less and eat less meat and dairy. That’s a gargantuan task, made harder by the demotivating knowledge that your own efforts are only likely to matter if others match them. Yet the most politicians do is half-heartedly conjure up a few green taxes in the hope they’ll nudge people in the sort of right direction. But they’re not effective enough, and also hit the poorest most. Time for the nanny state to get more radical. We should start by banning altogether things that have literally no function, such as bottled water in a country where it’s actually safer to drink tap water. And take a leaf out of wartime Britain – climate change is no less existential a threat – and ration activities such as flying and eating meat. If you’re not that bothered about a rare steak, you can sell your coupons to someone who can’t live without a good ribeye and feel smug as you tuck into your environmentally friendly, fake-meat alternatives."

"Doris Phipps and Lily-Annie Pollett, though they looked incredibly plain and depraved in oyster satin blouses, tight-seated, bell-bottomed trousers, red nails on dirty hands, greasy curls hanging on their shoulders, a cigarette for ever glued to their lips, were really very nice, kind girls."

"The organ pealed forth, though never except in fiction does it do this, rather blaring and bursting, or in more refined cases quavering. In every heart began to spring that exquisite hope, seldom if ever realised, that the bride will have had a fit, or eloped with someone else."

"One more long happy Sunday had joined the pale golden Sundays that are gone. Better — to us at any rate — than Sundays now. Though these latter-day Sundays may be real enough, to us they are but the illusion and the bygone days the reality. There is always in our minds the hope that we may find again those golden unhastening days and wake up and dream."

"But Hardie’s political trajectory also serves as an important warning to any contemporary radical leader in parliament, the one bit of the job many claim Corbyn cannot do. A strong believer in representative democracy, Hardie nonetheless loathed the deal-making and elitism of parliament itself and was widely acknowledged as a poor leader of the party in the Commons for the very short period he undertook the job from 1906 to 1907."

"There’s no doubt that a Corbyn win would pose an enormous challenge for the centre-right of the party, but the many MPs who oppose him can surely sit on their hands or plot, or both, for only so long. The task is even greater for the member for Islington North, borne in on a wave of popular feeling. If his leadership were to succeed, it would need to be exceptionally generous, imaginative and inclusive. It would have to forge fresh alliances, take surprising positions and make unexpected compromises. Hardie the seer, the agitator, inspires those of us who believe Labour needs to present a bolder alternative to the Conservatives. Hardie the diffident party leader reminds us that we still have a lot to learn about how to shape “divine discontent” into a credible and popular programme."

"Laura looked up at the shelf of her novels, with Adrian Coates's name on their backs. She had been lucky, she thought, to fail into the hands of so agreeable and helpful a publisher. ... So in time her first story went to Adrian, who recognising in it a touch of good badness almost amounting to genius, gave her a contract for two more."

"The trend in feminism over the past few years - spearheaded by Natasha Walter's New Feminism - has been to say that equal pay, equal opportunities and good childcare are all that matter; relationships, sexuality and appearance are no longer feminist issues. The result of this re-definition of feminism is that many more people can call themselves feminists - you'd have to be a pretty hoary old misogynist to believe that women don't deserve equal pay. And so, the eighties refrain of 'I'm not a feminist, but...' has been replaced with 'I'm a feminist if feminism means equal pay, but...' To be followed with something like '...not if it means I can't shave my legs.'"

"There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year [1997]. All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs. What I hadn’t realised was that this unmonstrous regiment of women came much closer to representing the end of something – feminism as a natural ally of radical politics – than to representing a key moment in the long march through the institutions. Nor had I imagined that so many of them would become part of that blancmange known as one-nation politics. There are many reasons why they have proved such a disappointment. Personal ambition is one. Most new MPs live in fear of marginalisation, of being banished to the Siberia of consistently applied principle, of having to face up to the fact that they will never be a bag-carrier for an Under-Secretary of State. Sisterly solidarity, too, plays a part. Top Labour women are ferociously loyal to each other, but their loyalty has so far furthered no cause greater than the right of cabinet ministers to send their children to selective schools or to have their minds changed over tobacco sponsorship of Formula One."

"[Review of Walter's book The New Feminism.] In its bid for sophisticated political adulthood, the new feminism also risks throwing out the most important legacy of women’s politics: the inquiry into personal life. Walter argues that these questions are now 'sorted', that women no longer need to justify themselves in terms of their private behaviour. And it may well be that what to wear and who to sleep with are, as Walter points out, rather passé as political issues, but that's not the end of the story. In my view, the matter of domestic democracy will become the site of renewed private/public struggles, partly because the question of who does what in the home is crucial to the question of who does what outside the home. Another factor to be considered is the growing number of women now employed by the professional classes to do their cleaning, childcare and ironing, often at wages well below any generally agreed national minimum. The old servant problem could come back to haunt the new middle class, itself caught in an ever-intensifying time crisis. Walter is optimistic about men in general – there is none of the male-baiting exhibited by the pop culture girls like Suzanne Moore or Julie Burchill – and particularly about their place in the home. Men, she believes, are ready and willing to take part in the 'unique poignancy' of domestic life. I would say that Walter was right to outlaw prescription in personal politics – there was something truly depressing about diktat feminism at its height – but description will surely remain the foundation of the most intelligent feminist writing."

"Honesty. I think all religions involve an element of self-delusion, and that’s no way to live your life. And freedom: the great thing about living in a secular society is that people have the ability to pursue their own religious or non-religious beliefs in their own ways, but not to compel others to follow them."

"It’s vital to speak up for humanism and rationalism in a world in which more and more people are falling into misinformation and prejudice. Obviously we can’t dismiss the positive role that religion plays in many people’s lives, but I am concerned that so often people are just picking up on lazy prejudices rather than trying to build consensus around ways forward. Humanism has a role to play in helping to ground debates in truth and pragmatism."

"I did not start out in state schools. Like so many children of Labour politicians in the 60s, my brothers and I began our education in the private sector. My parents, Tony and Caroline Benn, decided to move us all to state schools around 1963 on the grounds that it was hypocritical to back comprehensives for everyone else and then educate your own children privately. In some people's eyes, this made us four children a collective sacrifice, a living social experiment. We felt only lucky. Our nearest comprehensive was Holland Park, which cynics so enjoyed deriding as a showcase comprehensive and therefore a place of privilege. (If I had a pound for the number of times people have said to me, "Holland Park? Oh that wasn't a real comprehensive!" I could have paid for a year of private schooling, easy.) Holland Park was one of the first purpose-built comprehensives in the country but it was also, by the time I got there in the late 60s, a large rumbustious institution, which drew in a small, albeit highly publicised, section of the middle class who lived around the school. Some of these, like my mother, Caroline, became passionately committed to both the school itself - she was governor of Holland Park for 35 years - and the wider comprehensive cause. My brother Hilary remembers the strangeness of arriving at Holland Park for the first time after attending Westminster preparatory school, where he and my eldest brother Stephen had been usefully designated as Benn I and Benn II. He can still remember how huge the school buildings looked to him and the strange sound of so many boys - and girls - laughing and running and talking in the vast playgrounds."

"We can’t sit back and wait for someone else to do the work that is needed, we each have to get on and do what we can ourselves."

"We did win some battles at Women for Refugee Women – we helped to end the immigration detention of children, and we won a time limit on the detention of pregnant women, for instance. But overall it’s horrible to see how governments have used migrants and refugees as a scapegoat for wider failures in society. It’s very hard right now to build empathy around what women who cross borders are going through. But change is urgently needed – we really need to build a transparent asylum process in which women who seek safety here can get a fair hearing. Right now one of the key issues for refugee women – and for many other people – is also the lack of decent affordable housing, so that even if they do get their refugee status women and children are so often struggling with homelessness or insecure housing. So this links into wider issues around getting our society working for everyone. I truly wish we could see more leadership from the current Labour government on fairness in society, as well as empathy towards those who cross borders."

"I fear that we are being set a trap and falling into it, by playing this role in a farce that we didn’t script. As many have said, there is a spiralling craziness about this government’s approach, where the actual aim is not to achieve any of the stated objectives but to ratchet up the sense of crisis. We know, and they know, and they know that we know, that one key aim of the Rwanda policy is not to solve any potential challenges caused by arrivals on small boats but to create a distraction from the government’s real challenges. The more polarised and furious the debate gets, the more successful is the distraction. And yet many of us continue to play our role. But we cannot do otherwise. Because, while this performative cruelty may be in part a game to the politicians who put it into practice, for the people who are actually affected by the policy, it is far from a game. The narrative that the Rwanda policy is just a dead cat, thrown on to the table to distract from Partygate and the cost of living crisis, ignores the real harm that the policy is doing and the worse harm that it would do if people stopped opposing it. Let’s not forget that the deportations last week were halted only because people continued to dig in their heels. Dogged individuals at charities supported refugees threatened with deportation day and night and lawyers worked tirelessly on their legal challenges. They all knew that this is no time to give up, because what may look like a farce to some is in fact a tragedy in the making. Nobody who has heard or read any of the interviews with the refugees threatened by removal to Rwanda can be left in any doubt that the cruelty is real."

"I have been so struck by the number of women who have come up to me in the last few years saying that Living Dolls was the first feminist book they read and wanting to talk about it with me. It’s very good for a writer to hear that! But it’s also sad, because they always go on to say that they feel that little has changed. In fact, the rise of social media and online misogyny often makes life harder for young women, and there is worryingly a growing divide in attitudes between young women and young men. My new book, which I’m working on at the moment, explores the current backlash to women’s rights and how we need to rebuild feminism in the face of these growing threats."

"A quarter of a century on, the Grunwick dispute remains one of the most significant in modern industrial history. In a sense, the strike was typical of a pattern of similar disputes before and since: a factory with a few hundred workers, a slowly building sense of injustice and a long standoff between employer and worker. But even then, Grunwick seemed a different kind of battle. This was a historic meeting between a traditional trade unionism, still relatively sure of its power, and a growing band of black and Asian workers who were beginning to find an industrial and political voice. Arthur Scargill bought down his Yorkshire miners in a bus - there was even fighting talk of shutting the pits. Grunwick workers travelled to more than 2,000 workplaces over 40 weeks to enlist support. The strike seemed to draw in every progressive movement of the day. "Black and white unite and fight" demanded the banners in Chapter road. Socialist feminists did their picket duty and wrote sternly of the military tactics of their trade union brothers. Jayaben Desai, in her sari and white cardigan, handbag crooked over her arm, was a feminist heroine of the age. Yet perhaps the most lasting consequence of Grunwick and other mass disputes during the 1970s were some of the anti-union laws of the 1980s, particularly those outlawing mass pickets. Today, it is possible to see more clearly the fraud that lay at the heart of the argument advanced by what was then called the "new right", particularly over Grunwick. A few hundred Asian men and women asking for the right to join a union and negotiate from within it was hardly the best example of an overweening and arrogant union movement it claimed was running the country. By any reckoning, Grunwick was a just cause, whose supporters included moderates such as Shirley Williams. In 1977, an independent court of inquiry chaired by Lord Scarman criticised mass picketing but upheld the workers' claim to union recognition. But it was a lost cause: George Ward, the Grunwick owner, refused to give in. This, despite a last-ditch hunger strike by Mrs Desai and four colleagues on the steps of the TUC. The strike fizzled out in early 1978. No walkout since, bar the miners' strike of 1984-5, has quite achieved Grunwick's fame or progressive significance. In the early 1980s, I went to a small factory near Birmingham to cover a similar dispute, led by a group of Asian workers protesting about pay and conditions and the right to union recognition. This time, the streets were empty. As union power declined, so did media coverage - if there's no punch-up, so what?"

"I was sitting on the floor of my study, with pieces of paper stacked up around me. I felt listless and overwhelmed by the history that I did not want to see. I went to talk to Clara [Walter's daughter]. She was lying on her bed, multitasking in teenage style – listening to music, messaging her friends, studying her homework. "Those forms," I said, wanting her to see what I saw when I looked into the files, the threat as well as the opportunity. "I can’t find my grandmother’s last address. It’s confusing..." I held out one of the many pages I had about the past. "I guess it would be this address, where my great-grandparents were living at the start of the war. I know they were sent to Theresienstadt but not until later. Then to Treblinka. They arrived in Treblinka on 28 September 1942."" My daughter looked at me, and I at her, as the significance of the date penetrated our minds. The previous day’s date. Exactly 75 years after my great-grandparents’ death in Treblinka, we are seeking to regain our German nationality. I left the page I was carrying on her bed and went downstairs to make dinner. The forms got put aside again."

"This fierce, impatient feminism needs to be recognised. I call it the new feminism because it looks very different from the feminism of previous generations. For a start, it can no longer be confined to any kind of ghetto. It is everywhere. In the Seventies, feminism could be identified with a clearly defined women’s liberation movement. It has since fragmented and splintered; but splinters of it are lodged in the hearts and minds of almost every woman in Britain. We should not be diverted by the fact that few women call themselves feminists into believing that feminist beliefs appeal only to a minority of women. In survey after survey the vast majority of women, especially young women, say that they would like to see more equality between the sexes at home and at work. I would also argue that feminism today is not just a middle-class movement. It is often taken for granted that modern feminism appeals only to middle-class professional women. As I researched my book and set up interviews with women from all kinds of backgrounds and in all kinds of occupations, I was struck by the fact that real anger at inequality, real desire for change, and a real sense of women’s growing potential, were being articulated by all the women I spoke to. I heard those ideas just as strongly, if not more strongly, from women who worked as cleaners in south London or as members of community groups in Glasgow as from lawyers or journalists or MPs. My sense that feminism cannot be seen as appealing only to middle-class women is backed up by survey information. For instance, one recent MORI poll showed that women in social groups D and E are more likely than AB women to say that feminism has been good for women."

"If a week is a long time in politics, a century can seem surprisingly short. With uncanny timing, the centenary of the death of Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and arguably its most towering figure, falls at the end of this month, on the very weekend that Labour delegates will gather in Brighton for this year’s annual conference, the first under the party’s new leader."

"When it comes to the politics of agitation, Jeremy Corbyn is Hardie’s clear heir. Were Hardie alive in the 21st century he would surely have opposed the Iraq war, visited the Occupy encampments, supported those activists fighting against the "social cleansing" of London and denounced austerity. A charismatic public speaker who frequently addressed huge crowds, he would have recognised the enthusiasm and fervour of the mass audiences that Corbyn has attracted across the country, which so many thought dead in the age of Twitter and Facebook."

"[On the promise of prominent women in the New Labour government elected in 1997.] I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again."

"[In an article on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (1999).] Greer's fundamental conclusion is that the pursuit of equality is now doomed. Instead, women must pursue liberation. "Equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation," she says. Is this a valid distinction? I believe that the pursuit of liberation - the peculiar, individual, often contradictory journey to find freedom from the lies and conventions around us - is something that each individual woman can take on for herself. And yet I believe that it is only possible to pursue that liberation if you are not ground down by an economic and political system that systematically discriminates against you. Inequality in Britain is not a side issue. Inequality locks women out of power, and condemns women to poverty. Inequality prevents women from being fairly rewarded for their work, from being able to speak out and be heard, from being able to bring up their children in dignity, from bringing those who rape and beat them to justice. The struggle for equality is not the struggle to reshape women in the pattern of men, since men's lives too must be revolutionised if equality is to be grasped. Feminism must transform society so that women feel that they can have an equal stake in it, at work and at home. Then indeed we will see the rise of the liberated woman."

"Viner likes to deny it but there are antisemites on the daily's staff and she has not had the courage to face them down. For years now I have made a point of sending her a back channel email each time the Guardian has published another outrage. It will be a joy to know that I'm not a part of that anymore."

"Viner's pursuit of the Tortoise deal has been absurd and deranged [...] It represents a failure of duty of care to her staff, and crass mismanagement. To value the Observer brand at £1 is craven. And [[w:James Harding (journalist)|[James] Harding's]] Tortoise deal doesn't stack up."

"When she was appointed the first female [Guardian] Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women's issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence."

"[B]ack in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England. As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns. I took the story to the Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled "Islamophobic"."

"I once asked if a friend, a teacher from Huddersfield, could cook for him so that she could put it on her CV – "cooked for Alan Rickman" (it made sense at the time). He not only said yes, but acted as her sous-chef and rustled up a top politician and a Hollywood actor as fellow guests. When asked recently about his proudest Royal Court moment, his answer was not about him: he said it was when he took Rachel Corrie’s parents outside the front of the theatre to show them their late daughter’s name in neon lights."

"Say no to the mutilation of your flesh with knives, vacuum suction and poison, and that means you are irresponsible."

"The classic example of such a coloniser was Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, as described in Leila Ahmed's seminal Women and Gender in Islam. Cromer was convinced of the inferiority of Islamic religion and society, and had many critical things to say on the "mind of the Oriental". But his condemnation was most thunderous on the subject of how Islam treated women. It was Islam's degradation of women, its insistence on veiling and seclusion, which was the "fatal obstacle" to the Egyptian's "attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation," he said. The Egyptians should be "persuaded or forced" to become "civilised" by disposing of the veil. And what did this forward-thinking, feminist-sounding veil-burner do when he got home to Britain? He founded and presided over the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, which tried, by any means possible, to stop women getting the vote. Colonial patriarchs like Cromer believed that middle-class Victorian mores represented the pinnacle of civilisation, and set about implementing this model wherever they went - with women in their rightful, subservient place, of course. They wanted merely to replace eastern misogyny with western misogyny."

"I must respect myself; after all, I wash my hair with Fructis. Similar justifications lie behind the rise in cosmetic surgery (up 50% in the past five years in Britain): that it makes women feel better about themselves, complete, free from their flaws. While women flock to surgeons to have gruesome operations with often calamitous consequences, while cosy Boots the chemist offers injections of poison to paralyse expression muscles in the face, the surgery spin meisters sell it as a quasi-feminist act to take control of your body."

"The second low point, I remember very clearly, was on February 9. I was way behind schedule, so took a day's holiday from work with the aim of reading three novels - one each in the morning, afternoon and evening. The first book was Anne Tyler's fabulous The Amateur Marriage, which was about mistakes and regret and which I found deeply affecting. I cried in my local cafe. The second book was Julie Myerson's Something Might Happen, a superb but cruel book about terrible things. I sobbed the entire time I was reading it. This was in a different cafe. That evening, at home, I read Stella Duffy's devastating novel about terminal cancer and death, and how it is worse to die than be left behind, and, well, I could hardly walk. The trouble with really good novels is that they make you engage, make you experience the emotions of the characters as if they were your own. It was a terrible day, and yet these remained three favourites for me throughout the judging process."

"[[Germaine Greer|[Germaine] Greer]]'s new book is an exciting reminder of how discrimination against women stops them, physically, from being 'the whole woman'. 'Your cellulite is you,' she says. It might sound obvious; but what a thrill to talk about owning our bodies, about being who we are. This is where the equality-seekers get it wrong, and liberationists like Greer get it right. Because how we feel about our bodies has an impact on whether we get paid the same. Of course we'll never get equal status if we're spending all our time and energy worrying about our thighs. Of course we'll never get equal pay if we ask for it wearing a baby-doll slip. What has equality legislation done for women anyway? The Equal Pay Act came into force 29 years ago and yet a woman still earns 79p for every £1 a man earns doing the same job. Women may be entering the workforce in record numbers, but with little pay and no security. Saying we should concentrate only on equal pay doesn't even get you equal pay."

"The scandal of the medicalisation of birth is not new; from the 1960s, activists such as Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger have fought against the interventionist tide that sees birth as an illness, rather than part of a woman's "wellness cycle". But it is a scandal that has reached extraordinary proportions: in 30 years, the Caesarean rate in Britain has more than trebled; one baby in five is now delivered this way. (The US figure varies from 50% for healthy, middle-class women in their 30s and 40s in private hospitals, to between 1% and 15% for those in public hospitals.) Of course, Britain is different from America in that the market does not rule healthcare - US hospitals get a $1,000 bonus for every epidural requested. But the story is absolutely relevant here, with doctors under increasing pressure to avoid litigation, a severe shortage of midwives, the increasing popularity of elective Caesareans for women who are constantly told that vaginal childbirth is traumatic and terrible, and the threats of private interests entering the health service."

"Youth crime is an obsession for today's politicians, but in a small town in the 1980s there didn't seem to be much about. I came across drugs only when I met some wild boys from the exotic metropolis that is Thirsk. The violent crime I heard about, meanwhile, was largely distant and always terrifying: at primary school I was petrified of the Yorkshire Ripper until he was caught in 1981; later I was deeply troubled by the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh in 1986. The crimes the young people I knew were committing were the taping of the Top 20 from the radio (which was made especially glamorous because of the urban myth that someone from Leeds had gone to jail for it), underage drinking and smoking dope. No one I knew was arrested. However, my diary held a pleasing reminder that even a goody-two-shoes high-achiever like me got into trouble with the law. Our school, a Yorkshire state school, had made it to the London finals of a debating competition, previously the preserve of top public schools. The team was Simon, my political enemy (he was Tory, I was Labour; today he is a New Labour councillor), and me. We won, and to celebrate Simon and I and our supporters took over a flat in Fleet Street to which someone had the key, drank until the sun came up and were visited by the police at 5am, just as a fellow pupil was demonstrating how to wear an elephant-trunk thong he had bought earlier. Who could complain about the youth of today?"

"[On preparing the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie with Alan Rickman] But the quantity of the material left us with a series of questions. How much of Rachel’s life before she went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote other people? The trend in political theatre, from David Hare’s The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo, is journalistic: the use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record material rather than invention. But for us there could be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the kind of worries any parent might have if their child was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never came home, they have a devastating poignancy. ... And what about the voices of Rachel’s friends? I interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom have been deported from Israel since her death. We watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services: one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army, another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the subject, most notably Sandra Jordan’s powerful The Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in the end the power of Rachel’s writing meant that, apart from a few short passages quoting her parents and an eye witness report of her death, her words were strong enough to stand alone."

"Being open can bring you great scoops, too. My favourite example of this was during the 2009 London protests against the G20 meeting, when our reporter, Paul Lewis, was investigating what happened to a newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who had collapsed and died while walking through the protests. The pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. We were searching for eyewitnesses. We put callouts on Twitter and on the Guardian site, and within hours Paul was contacted by a Guardian reader in the US. This man was an investment fund manager who had been in London on business; he'd slipped out of his meetings to have a look at the protests, and film them on his smartphone. On reading our callout at his home in New York, he looked back at his footage, and discovered very clear images showing Ian Tomlinson being shoved to the ground by a policeman. As you can imagine, it was a big scoop. Although the police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in 2012, he was later dismissed for gross misconduct. The pathologist has been struck off. In August the police settled a civil action by the Tomlinson family by issuing a formal apology and agreeing to pay compensation. None of this would have happened if the Guardian hadn't been open to the web, with international reach."

"Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism. In an ideal Polly Toynbee world, private sector broadcasting would be banned, Rupert Murdoch would be nationalised, and the BBC would hire thousands more taxpayer-funded social affairs correspondents to psalm the benefits of social democracy."

"All I can say is that when I had come out of my faint, and read what Greg was saying, I saw, naturally, that he was absolutely right. In spite of all she gets wrong, there are things that Polly says that are serious and true, and that any Conservative government should be saying."

"In so far as New Labour has a fairy godmother, Polly is the girl. She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain."

"In Tuesday's Guardian, the doyenne of the liberal-Left establishment, Polly Toynbee, unburdened herself of the anger she feels when she is attacked for being middle class: "Right-wingers have long used class against any middle-class Leftist, a bullying that sidesteps the real political argument." It's no wonder she's so upset at being called middle class. It's quite wrong. Mary Louisa Toynbee (as she was born) is the [great] great granddaughter of the Earl of Carlisle. Her [great grand] uncle was the philanthropist Arnold Toynbee. She comes from a very grand family."

"It is not my practice to engage in local political activity on the grounds that I have quite enough of that sort of thing without doing it in the evenings or at weekends. My wife, Ms Polly Toynbee, who is a member of the SDP's National Steering Committee, intends to put up for the Lambeth Borough Council. That is her affair and I shall go canvassing on her behalf if weather permits. I expect, in the fulness of time, to become the Denis Thatcher of the SDP."

"By instinct, I like the French revolutionary tradition commanding absolute secularism in schools and state institutions. But French secularism tends to cause less social harmony, not more, used as an easy pretext for far-right anti-Muslim attacks. Humanists defend people's right to private beliefs and religious practices, as long as they impose on no one else."