LNAT – Media

The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed

Gaby Hinsliff

Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.

But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.

This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.

Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?

Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.

Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.

Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.

All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.

But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.

The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed

Gaby Hinsliff

Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.

But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.

This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.

Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?

Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.

Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.

Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.

All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.

But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.

The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed

Gaby Hinsliff

Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.

But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.

This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.

Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?

Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.

Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.

Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.

All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.

But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.

The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed

Gaby Hinsliff

Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.

But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.

This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.

Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?

Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.

Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.

Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.

All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.

But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.

The more we see older women succeed, the more they will succeed

Gaby Hinsliff

Anne Robinson is, as she says herself, the oldest woman on television not judging cakes.

But age has hardly mellowed her. Like the canny pro she is, the 76-year-old former Queen of Mean toned it down a bit for her somewhat unlikely new gig hosting the gentle teatime TV quiz show Countdown, but the pre-launch interviews were as sharp and punchy as ever. After this long in the business, she knows her shtick. And love it or loathe it, there is something rather thrilling about her determination not to be put out to grass.

This month, the US business magazine Forbes released its inaugural “50 over 50” power list of women making professional breakthroughs in later life, from the powerhouse Netflix producer Shonda Rhimes to veteran diplomat Madeleine Albright. It sparked such interest that it’s now planning more, sensing a market for something celebrating older women’s energy and creativity, instead of yet another faintly exhausting list of power brokers under 30. It’s not hard to conjure up some British equivalents. Dame Sarah Gilbert, the 58-year-old scientist behind the AstraZeneca jab, is an obvious candidate but so is the vaccine taskforce chair Kate Bingham, 55, whose knack for picking winners reflects decades of investment experience.

Older women’s nous seems, for once, to be in demand in politics too. When the pollster Deborah Mattinson joins a beleaguered Keir Starmer’s office she’ll bring not just extensive research from the so-called “red wall” seats where Labour is being pulverised, but the institutional memory of someone who has known the party inside out since the 1980s, worked with Labour prime ministers, and is acutely aware that female voters over 50 (among whom Labour does badly) help swing elections. Given half a chance, she’ll help Starmer understand this often ignored group. In Downing Street, 53-year-old Simone Finn, who has been in Conservative politics since the noughties, wields increasing influence. But how does any of this help ordinary middle-aged working women, battling that toxic combination of ageism and sexism that has yet to find a catchy name, under the shadow of a pandemic?

Pre-Covid, women were driving employment among the over-50s to record highs; by 2019, older female employment rates were up 15% from the millennium. But Covid hit this group hard. A Resolution Foundation analysis found lockdown had dented older women’s employment rates harder than any other major crisis since the 1980s, with Black women in particular struggling. The end of the furlough scheme this month will be a perilous time for older workers who fear being pushed into premature retirement. Yet with a bit of help from government, these don’t have to be older women’s doom years.

Female employment bounced back unexpectedly strongly this spring; older women are disproportionately likely to work in health, social care and education, jobs largely sheltered from the pandemic (and Brexit) storms. Mothers’ working hours have fallen, after months of grappling with home schooling, but by January the average woman without children at home – disproportionately likely to be either under 30 or over 50 – was working more hours than pre-Covid.

Some may be trying to compensate for a partner not earning, a phenomenon also seen after the banking crash when women’s work kept many households afloat. A surge of older female breadwinners would be little cause for rejoicing, if it merely masked a crisis for older men. But it may also reflect something about the women now entering middle age, raised and educated with higher expectations than their mothers. Many Generation X women have fought to hold on to their jobs while bringing up children and they can’t afford to let go now.

All the supercharged role models in the world obviously won’t help without hard policy. That means a properly funded plan for social care, to stop women being forced out of work by caring for elderly parents; more flexible working towards the end of working life; specific programmes helping unemployed over-50s back into work; and better healthcare through the menopause, something the public health minister Nadine Dorries’s review on women’s health is examining.

But where the Robinsons and Albrights and Binghams come into their own is as a visible counterweight to the gendered ageism that so often sees older women written off prematurely. As the saying goes, you have to see it to be it, and too many women glancing around their industries see a puzzling vacuum where the powerful over-55s should be. Any glimpse of an older woman in her professional prime represents a flicker of hope.

The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense

To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.

Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.

The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.

An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.

The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense

To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.

Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.

The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.

An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.

The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense

To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.

Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.

The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.

An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.

The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense

To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.

Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.

The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.

An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.

The Guardian view on privatising Channel 4: it makes no economic sense

To sensible Conservatives, Channel 4 should seem a bargain. Owned by the state, it costs the taxpayer precisely nothing. It generates income from advertising – both from linear TV and streaming – that it ploughs back into Britain’s lively independent production sector, without the need for it to make a profit for shareholders. It was Margaret Thatcher’s government that brought it to fruition, after the seeds of the channel were sown by Lord Annan’s 1977 report into the future of broadcasting. It was designed to stimulate independent production beyond the BBC and ITV, reflecting the full diversity of Britain’s talent – and so it did. Some would say it has lost much of the iconoclastic spirit that animated it in the 1980s, when it commissioned artists from Peter Greenaway to John Akromfrah and put out pioneering shows such as Brookside. Kinder critics might say that the radicalism is still there, even if it is harder to detect amid the commercial programming that supports its more cutting-edge work. Certainly, Channel 4 remains the originator of brilliant television: it is the channel of the Paralympics, of Russell T Davies’s excellent drama It’s A Sin, of Nida Manzoor’s innovative comedy about young Muslim women, We Are Lady Parts, of the lockdown cultural triumph Grayson’s Art Club.

Now the government – having considered, and rejected, the proposition as recently as 2016 – is talking of privatising Channel 4. The ostensible reason is to help it achieve greater scale in a broadcasting world increasingly dominated by the giant US streaming services. But this argument is weak and wrong-headed. For a start it is unclear what, exactly, the government would be selling. Channel 4 is a publisher of broadcast material; it does not own its shows and is not some asset-rich operation whose sale would raise significant amounts for the public purse. Privatisation is certainly not the kind of “help” that those running Channel 4 desire, or say they need – especially after a pandemic year in which it defied doom-laden predictions. In the process of establishing a secondary headquarters in Leeds, the channel says it is likely to hit its target of spending half its budget outside London in 2021, two years ahead of schedule. The broadcaster is, then, achieving some of the government’s stated policy of spreading investment beyond London. But its regional hubs would almost certainly look indulgently expensive to a putative buyer. The government says it wants to protect what Channel 4 does. But the way to preserve the quiddities of a very particular British institution is certainly not to allow it to be subsumed into an international media company such as ViacomCBS or WarnerMedia, or even into, say, ITV.

The renewed impetus for privatisation seems to come from two tendencies among the Conservatives. One is an unshakeable commitment to the market as a good in itself, as personified by the media minister, John Whittingdale. The other is the peculiar zealotry directed against cultural organisations condemned as “woke”, a proclivity most obviously discernible in the culture secretary Oliver Dowden. Neither of these positions has much relationship with the supposed mainstream common sense of a Conservative party focused on British success stories and “levelling up”.

An intriguing contrast is presented by the government’s attitude to science and its announcement this week of a centralised body, the Science and Technology Council, charged with “setting bold visions, acting with speed and taking risks”. Reframe Channel 4 in broadly analogous terms and you could easily see it as a smart, low-cost form of venture capital fund, an incubator for the next generation of British production talent. What Channel 4 needs from the government is not a pointless, ideologically driven privatisation, but encouragement to become yet more innovative and radical in its experimentation with the form, craft and content of television.

Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics

Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?

I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.

Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.

Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.

And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.

Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”

Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics

Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?

I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.

Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.

Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.

And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.

Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”

Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics

Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?

I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.

Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.

Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.

And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.

Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”

Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics

Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?

I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.

Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.

Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.

And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.

Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”

Clint Eastwood’s Trump love and why we shouldn’t care too much about actors’ politics

Clint Eastwood’s pronouncement that we should ‘get over’ Trump’s racism left John Bleasdale doubting his hero, but how much should we listen to what actors say in interviews?

I’ve always loved Clint Eastwood. Always. From The Man with No Name to Dirty Harry, Where Eagles Dare to Gran Torino. I even loved the movies with the orangutan. And I didn’t just watch him: I studied him. I perfected the squint and I’d speak in a terse Clint whisper, until mum yelled at me to speak up. So I winced when I read – in an interview in Esquire in which he appeared with his son, Scott – Eastwood’s pronouncements on the “pussy generation”. He said we should all just “get over” Donald Trump’s racism.

Of course, it’s not like Eastwood was ever going to be mistaken for Jeremy Corbyn. In the Eighties, Dirty Harry went from being a noirish, semi-fascist anti-hero to an all-American icon, quoted by President Reagan; Firefox won the Cold War and Heartbreak Ridge replayed the invasion of Granada as a male-bonding romp. And then, in 2012, there’s that Republican National Convention speech, a stumbling improv piece with an empty chair.

Anyway, why should I care what the ex-mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea thinks about anything? Isn’t this exactly the kind of PC whimpering he was complaining about? And it’s not as if lefties like me don’t have our spokespeople in tinsel town. Rosario Dawson, Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn (who, before that Rolling Stone interview with El Chapo had last been spotted rowing a dinghy in Norwalk, Connecticut, helping flood victims) are all vocal in their progressive views. Meryl Streep even primal-screamed her joy at Hillary’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Hollywood is so liberal that right-wingers such as James Woods, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer meet in a semi-clandestine group called The Friends of Abe to discuss their views. Or at least they did until it broke up in April following an argument about Trump.

And Clint was never a full-on right-wing blowhard, a Fox News regular like Voight, or nuts like Woods. On the release of J Edgar, he appeared with Leonardo DiCaprio for a GQ cover story, agreeing on marriage equality – “I don’t care about who wants to get married to anybody else” – and describing his own evolution from Eisenhower Republican to libertarian. There’s also the director’s own work which feels sort of anti-Trump. From the lovingly crafted Charlie Parker biopic Bird in 1988, the careful rethinking on violence and its consequences in Unforgiven to his two Pacific theatre anti-war films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter a rare Japanese perspective on the conflict from a US director. As if to redress the maligned women of earlier films, Million Dollar Baby punched its feminist and ‘right to die’ messages through Grand Old Party orthodoxy. Even American Sniper was far more nuanced than it got credit for. So reading Clint’s views on Trump feels like we’re rewinding Gran Torino and watching the ornery hero unlearn his lessons and revert to his baseline racism.

Other heroes have disappointed in far grosser ways: think of Sean Connery’s views on slapping women (generally supports it) or Mel Gibson’s alcohol-lubricated anti-Semitism, but I can watch 007 and Mad Max relatively unperturbed – though What Women Want is dead to me now. In the end, the Esquire interview is a testosterone fest and hardly constitutes a full-throated endorsement.. Clint also talks movingly about his own father and it reminded me of something my dad once told me when he was disappointed in one of his sporting heroes, Liverpool midfielder Emlyn Hughes, sucking up to Maggie Thatcher: “I love football, but I can’t stick footballers.”

Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse

Hussein Kesvani

As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.

There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.

First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.

Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse

Hussein Kesvani

As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.

There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.

First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.

Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse

Hussein Kesvani

As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.

There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.

First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.

Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse

Hussein Kesvani

As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.

There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.

First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.

Abolishing online anonymity won’t tackle the underlying problems of racist abuse

Hussein Kesvani

As a person of colour who has spent much of their life online, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racist abuse. The posts, messages and emails stick with me long after they’ve been sent and the users have been blocked, reported and banned. It’s a reminder that being treated as “other” and degraded is part-and-parcel of existing on the internet as a non-white person. Moreover, while there was a time when posting on forums was something relatively few people did, the dominance of participatory timeline media in our personal and professional lives has changed all that. You don’t need to be in the darker, closed-off corners of the internet to experience a deluge of harassment and abuse.

There is an argument that by forcing people to reveal themselves publicly, or giving the platforms access to their identities, they will be “held accountable” for what they write and say on the internet. Though the intentions behind this are understandable, I believe that ID verification proposals are shortsighted. They will give more power to tech companies who already don’t do enough to enforce their existing community guidelines to protect vulnerable users, and, crucially, do little to address the underlying issues that render racial harassment and abuse so ubiquitous.

First, it’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Perhaps mandatory verification would limit the amount of openly racist abuse on the social platforms we all use, but it ignores the reasons why it is so prevalent and why it has so much purchase in these digital environments.

I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.

I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.

Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.

Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months. 

It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.

Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.

Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”

Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.

This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.

Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.

I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.

I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.

Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.

Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months. 

It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.

Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.

Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”

Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.

This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.

Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.

I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.

I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.

Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.

Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months. 

It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.

Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.

Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”

Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.

This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.

Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.

I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.

I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.

Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.

Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months. 

It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.

Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.

Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”

Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.

This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.

Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.

I have been working on a television script set in the OG, glamorous roaring 20s. All the futurists tell us that the end of lockdown is the beginning of the raunch relaunch, and we don’t need experts to tell us we wouldn’t say no to a masked ball as long as the mask wasn’t surgical.

I’ve been writing about all the American women who came to Britain to make their fortune and be taken seriously. Actor and wit Tallulah Bankhead – who famously said “My father warned me about men and booze but never said a word about women and cocaine” – couldn’t catch a break on Broadway but became the most famous woman in the UK. Virginian Nancy Astor was an elected MP a year before she even got the vote in the US. Singer and dancer Josephine Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and made Paris her home, was also a West End star.

Now, however, women in show business are leaving for America in droves – draining Britain of exceptional talent because we are gaslit by the UK industry. It’s an ancient tactic. The suffragettes were kept in red tape for decades: just fill out one more form, hold one more coffee morning. If they had been told the truth – “We are never planning to give you the vote and we’ve designed the system so you’ll never beat it” – they would have got much more radical much earlier.

Television development is the same. Women are given diversity schemes, special lunches and constantly told their next pilot will hit a television screen. I was recently kept rewriting the same script for 18 months. 

It is possible for a woman to create a television show in this country – if she already has a significant profile and it is an autobiographical half hour. Otherwise, all she can do is adapt a novel – ideally one about a woman being killed and mutilated. Please find exceptions to this rule and enjoy counting them on one hand. In Britain, women are not trusted to write from our imaginations or tell stories of historical women.

Scarily talented, relentlessly hardworking friends, including the actor and writer Sarah Solemani, standup and writer Bisha K Ali and comedian and writer London Hughes, have already gone to the US after being endlessly frustrated here. All of them became showrunners inside a few months or years. Sarah is shooting back in the UK now because she has covered herself in Stateside-glory, but a prophet is never accepted in her home town if that town is London.

Hughes and the comedian Gina Yashere just had a brilliantly frank conversation about their experiences as Black British women in the US, in which Yashere says: “Yes, the country is super-racist, but that glass ceiling is a lot higher than in England. So you’re a multi-millionaire when you hit it!”

Across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Netflix and Sky it is a matter of public record that only 23% of dramas were written by women in the past five years. Of these, 42% were adaptations, which means only 13% were original stories written by women. Men wrote 77% of dramas over the same period – and 55% of these were original stories. Only 26% of scripted comedy shows on TV in the same period were written by women.

This is meaningful because a society is a reflection of the stories it tells. Either men are significantly better at writing or something is deeply sexist in the commissioning departments of British broadcasters. Those are the only options I can see.

Sadly, it seems, I must cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction from my muse, Tallulah Bankhead, to get her glorious story on to our screens. Either that or, like the suffragettes, women will have to get radical. It’s the 20s … hear us roar.

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

On Saturday, a friend who spends most weekends trekking halfway across the country to check up on her increasingly frail parents spent an anxious morning scouring empty garages for petrol. She can’t have been alone.

The strains of a weekend’s stockpiling are starting to show: some teachers can’t fill up to get to school, nurses are reduced to cadging lifts to hospital, and care workers who rely on their cars to reach vulnerable people in isolated areas are struggling. And then there are the purely human dilemmas. Imagine being heavily pregnant, bag all packed for the labour ward, and the fuel light is flashing.

The longer this goes on – and emergency measures such as calling up army reservists can’t produce results overnight – the more gaps may emerge in things once taken for granted. Appointments will be cancelled, deliveries delayed, services suddenly unavailable. We have started to shift from being a “just in time” society, freewheeling through life blithely assuming things will always be there, to a “just in case” one, wondering nervously what we might run out of next. (It will probably be something most of us never even realised mattered, similar to the carbon dioxide shortage that rattled ministers this month.)

The legacy of Covid shutdowns, followed by a rush of bounce-back growth, is a global strain on raw materials and on every step of production and supply chains – which has been compounded in this country by a witless hard Brexit. There’s still plenty of fuel sitting in refineries, but the resulting shortage of tanker drivers to get it to British forecourts was all it took to spark a run on the pumps.

But on top of this, the very idea of a shortage of something sends humans into what’s known as scarcity mindset, a jumpy and selfish state where our own survival becomes uppermost and each stampede arguably only makes the next one more likely. People caught short by the Great Toilet Roll Drought of 2020 may well have resolved not to get caught again when queues started forming at the pump. Drivers who were restrained at first did the right thing, but will be kicking themselves if things still aren’t sorted by the end of this week.

Forecourts don’t ultimately run dry because of a few idiots manically filling jerry cans but because millions of people make the same individually logical, but collectively chaos-inducing, decision that it’s better to be safe than sorry: to fill up when there’s half a tank left, in anticipation of a long trip in a few days’ time, rather than when you’re on your last couple of litres; or buy loo rolls on a week when normally you wouldn’t bother.

Relatively small, unpanicky adjustments to individual lives can have a scarily big effect when we all suddenly make them simultaneously – in an economy calibrated (not unreasonably, before Brexit and Covid) for maximum efficiency rather than resilience to a series of rolling shocks, and in a political climate where trust in politicians’ reassurances is low.

The first step to breaking this feedback loop is clear, honest and trustworthy leadership – which means solving it would arguably be easier if Boris Johnson hadn’t spent the last couple of years offering the opposite. Failing that, the consensus from emergency planners and psychologists is that if you don’t want to trigger panic buying, then don’t use the word “panic” – which just makes people think there’s something to panic about. And don’t talk about shortages either, which immediately triggers the fear of scarcity. Ministers should instead say that there’s enough to go round if everyone takes only what they actually need.

Encouraging pro-social behaviour – putting senior NHS figures upfront to talk about nurses struggling to get into work, say – might help, as could concrete information about when things might be back to normal, and prioritising key workers.

Yet the fact remains that after a disorienting year and a half under the shadow of a pandemic, we now seem to be entering a new era of uncertainty and unpredictability. Over time, that can’t help but leave a mark.

Optimists on the left will hope the net result is to show up this government for what it is, even though bungling its way through the pandemic has barely dented Tory poll leads. But the gloomy among them will note that insecurity has historically bred intolerance and a determination to look after your own, which is why recessions typically push electorates to the right.

All we really know for sure is that the legacy of a jittery, anxious winter is unlikely to have melted by spring.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist