Ground Rules

This Government can find any number of things to do that were not in its manifesto, and in at least one case directly contrary to it, but we can forget about the things that were. Whatever happened to, "We will act where the Conservatives have failed and finally bring the feudal leasehold system to an end"? At best, ground rents are going to be frozen, or capped at £250 per annum.

That would be less than the Conservatives had been in the process of doing before the General Election was called early. Against everyone who was making trouble now, Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove had been set to cap ground rents at £250, but only as the initial measure of the process of phasing them out to peppercorn. The Conservative manifesto promised to follow through with that. The MPs elected on that manifesto should table it as an amendment. By voting to save the ground rent racket, Labour would expose itself as truly the party of people who wanted money for nothing.

Burnham To The Ground

The defining domestic policy of New Labour was the privatisation of England's National Health Service. Only Andy Burnham has ever privatised an NHS hospital, but in September 2009 he modestly proposed that the NHS should be its own preferred provider.

Progress wrote to Burnham to protest that he was "restricting the use of the private sector in the NHS", and using its eponymous magazine to opine, not only that "With an election approaching, Labour has regrettably adopted anti-market rhetoric on health", but that, "The pro-market principles espoused by Andrew Lansley are the right ones." When were the expulsions and the proscription?

Burnham's position was called "profoundly worrying", and its endorsement by Unite was branded "insulting and ignorant", by the Deputy Chief Executive of the Association of Chief Executives. Don't laugh. All right, do. But that person was Peter Kyle.

There is also a strong Southern supremacism to the treatment of Burnham, but the main reason for the utterly ruthless determination to install Wes Streeting as Keir Starmer's successor is that those who set the line are only 99.9 per cent certain about Burnham on NHS privatisation, a 0.1 per cent deficiency that is enough to make them hate him to the marrow of their bones, whereas they have absolutely no doubt whatever about Streeting. Nor should they have.

Streeting would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. The nomination process now makes a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible, and with Burnham out of the way, then the looming fall of Starmer should crown the long-anointed Streeting, three years before a General Election.

With also sorts of long-planned and hideous things to do, Streeting would be getting on with them at great speed, since when it came to the Gorton and Denton by-election, in the absence of Burnham, all the talk from Labour itself is of to whom it was going to lose and by how much. Until yesterday, it was taken as read that Burnham would have won, would have challenged for the Leadership, and would have won that, too. In their own words, if uttered through their outriders, Starmer is still there, and Streeting will be there, only because Burnham was not.

A New Model?

Shabana Mahmood would have been happy if the National Police Service had been under the control of Suella Braverman. Since these changes would apparently take eight years, she would be happy with that in future. I have been around brown people like that my entire life.

Believing that digital ID, or mass live facial recognition, or whatever, would never be used against them or theirs personally, they are now to the right of Joe Rogan, who has denounced ICE for expecting American citizens to be able to produce their papers on demand. That would just as objectionable here, complete with the possibility of being shot dead.

This Burden Was A Gift

Marilyn Simon writes:

There is an episode from Northern Exposure, the Nineties TV show, that has forever lingered with me. In it, New York doctor Joel Fleischman goes hunting with his Alaskan friends, Chris and Holling, hoping to prove to the beautiful but hard-edged Maggie that his urbane view of hunting’s cruelty is the correct one. But instead of feeling distaste, Joel feels a rush of pleasure when he makes his first kill: a duck. When he and his friends go to retrieve it, he is horrified to discover that it’s still alive. “You’ve winged him. Finish him off,” says Holling casually. “What? How?” asks Joel. “Why, wring his neck,” replied Holling. “With my hands?!” Joel is in crisis. The next scene shows him rushing into his doctor’s office, with the wounded duck on a makeshift stretcher. “Sterilise the sheets!” Joel calls out to his assistant.

Dr Fleischman rather eccentrically operates on the fowl, trying to remove the buckshot. But the bird dies. And Joel is despondent. At the local bar, he is consoled by the waitress, Shelly. “When things get gnarly, Dr Fleischman,” she says, “it’s best to do the sad thing. Don’t be afraid to salt your oatmeal with your tears.” The fact is, Joel loved hunting: the primal experience of tracking his prey, of being outdoors, of sleeping under the stars. “And the killing,” he tells Shelly, “The killing was the best part. It was the dying I couldn’t take.”

I think of that line each time I hear about Canada’s MAiD policy which is vigorously putting an end to dying. There is a clear distinction between killing and dying, and between dying and death. In that episode of Northern Exposure, the bloodlust of killing is turned to compassion when Joel encounters the dying bird. Dying elicits his compassion in a way that death does not. Death causes grief, but bearing witness to dying moves him deeply. The Greeks had a few words for compassion. What Dr Fleischman seems to experience is splagchnizomai, which means literally to be moved in your bowels. This gut-wrenching compassion can spur one into unexpected action — such as operating on a wounded duck.

Perhaps this old episode has stayed with me because it is interwoven with my memory of my grandmother’s dying. It was slow. She had many strokes, but she had a strong heart. She lingered, and she suffered, and the family suffered, too, as we watched. I was 13, and then 14. My mother would insist that I visit her. It was frightening and depressing. Grandma would usually be unconscious. Her mouth would hang slack. She was skinny, and her breathing was always raspy. Occasionally she would be awake. But she couldn’t speak. I am not sure if my being there had any measurable effect on her at all. It may even have disquieted her.

But being there had an effect on me. There are not many places a teenage girl would less rather be than in a hospital by the bedside of a dying old lady. It smelled. I would hear other patients moaning. I felt awkward. Painfully so. Do I hold her hand? Talk casually? Remind her who I am? During these visits I acutely felt the desire to flee. If splagchnizomai is about being moved to action as a gut-response, I was being moved to avoid the suffering. But I could only sit there. It was a long wait to the end.

Those awkward, painful moments deepened me. I didn’t grow comfortable with suffering, but I grew comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was obliged to witness suffering, which is distinct from the pain of grief, and so her dying laid a demand upon me. It forced me to be connected to her, to suffer with her. It compelled me to learn about duty. I’ve realised, only in hindsight, that this burden was a gift. I learned, in part, how to suffer, and that suffering should not be done alone. There are more important things than ease.

A friend of mine who works as a chaplain at a Canadian hospital spends his life doing such sitting. He is witness to about one death a day. Most dying, he tells me, is like my grandmother’s: slow. Very often it is even gentle. Still, we don’t all die well, he’ll tell you. We die as we have lived. If you are bitter and resentful in life, you will be more so during your dying. If timid, more timid. If loving, more loving. Dying is frightening, and when we are afraid, we retreat into what is familiar.

When patients speak to the chaplain, they do not typically speak of the pain of dying but that of living. He hears about the sting of betrayal, the hurt of being wounded by someone you love. He hears of the pain of being misunderstood, overlooked, and left bereft. He hears about ordinary, heartbreaking loneliness. And he hears about the torment of guilt, of the wrongs we have inflicted on others. We feel the burn of shame, the ache of remorse. We often endure our own failings only through the dull consolation offered by self-delusion. “Life is pain,” as the classic line goes, “anyone who says differently is selling something.”

We need to be comforted for our living as much as for our dying. And we don’t want to endure the living or the dying alone. When it comes to that, all living is a movement towards the grave, and dying is a kind of intensified living. It only appears that some of us aren’t dying, as my chaplain friend says. Really, he says, we are one body, falling toward death together.

He is not the first to say this. John Donne wrote vividly of dying as a kind of urgent, heightened form of being alive. He was no stranger to death, burying five of his children, as well as his beloved wife Ann, only 33 years old. And in 1623, he grew dangerously sick himself, suffering for 23 days. As he lay near death, he would read the countenance of his physicians for signs of relief or worry (he finds mostly worry) as he submits to their increasingly desperate treatment, such as affixing spatchcocked pigeons to his feet to draw the humours away from his head. He grew in his love for his physicians as they cared for him.

The pigeon-slippers seem to have worked. Donne did not die of this illness; he lived another 10 years. Later, when he was truly dying, he wrote and preached his final sermon: “Death’s Duel.” It is his own funeral sermon, and its focus is on death. It is very different from the reflections he wrote on dying, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, which he rushed to print in 1624 as he felt that his dying reflections would be a gift to others. In Devotions, Donne writes of the compassion he grows to have for himself during his illness, which is not at all the same as self-pity. Compassion allows him to see himself as though from the outside, lucidly, and to love himself without self-deception. Dying also draws him closer to others. On the 17th day of his illness, Donne writes these astonishing words:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne understands that we are all of us falling toward our death. The bell is tolling for you and for me. To hasten death by bringing an end to dying involves me and you. I know that suffering increases, and that dignity, defined as choice and control, recedes during dying. We in Canada are involved in our shared, messy humanity. We seem to cohere around our support for the programme; somewhere around 84% of Canadians approve of it. But there is a depth of compassion that can only come from sitting with one whose living is the experience of dying. It is the dutiful, the uncomfortable, the painful, and even, at times, the undignified burden of sharing dis-ease. Dying deepens us in a way that grief does not.

Does it trouble me that almost all MAiD cases, 95.6% of them, are white and middle class, my own cohort? It does. We are either very progressive, believing that burdening loved ones is unethical and limits their agency, or we are keen to defer to experts, limiting our own. But no doctor, no health policy expert, no politician, has more moral authority over death than you or me. Dying has no expert class, no progressive elites. They are not more involved in mankind than you or me.

Other cultures do dying differently. When I would visit an Eritrean friend in palliative care, I was almost never the only one at her bedside. There was a constant vigil kept by other members of her community. This lasted months. Her suffering was great, but it was shared. Only on one occasion was I the only visitor by her bedside. She asked me to read her favourite psalm, a lament by David. She took comfort in David’s suffering: “There is no health in my body,” the Psalm says, “I groan in anguish of heart.” She felt joined with the ancient Hebrew poet, and her suffering was less because of it. She took comfort in humanity’s shared suffering. On that occasion, I left the hospital feeling nourished and cared for. It reminds me still of that Northern Exposure episode, at the end of which Dr Fleischman is literally nourished by the bird that died under his care. “Huh. Not bad,” he says while chewing it.

We are entangled creatures; we are involved with each other. To burden our loved ones by forcing them to act dutifully, against ease, sitting at the side of a dying loved one, is to precisely act with compassion and treat the dying with dignity. It is also to treat the living with a kind of dignity, one that has faith in our capacity to endure the suffering of others, to not flinch from painfully awkward tedium, to be able to endure the burden placed on us by sitting beside someone dying. It is a gift that the dying can bequeath to the living.

Security Compromised?

"At no point was prison security compromised" when 86 people just walked in? Whose Department could possibly say such a ridiculous thing? Do you really need to ask?

Yesterday, David Lammy was moaning to Nick Robinson that juries did not give reasons for their verdicts. Yes, they do. The reason for a guilty verdict is that the Prosecution had proved its case to the threshold for a criminal conviction, while the reason for a verdict of not guilty is that it had not. That threshold ought, by Statute, to be "beyond reasonable doubt", but no one expects Lammy to introduce that. Who would? That is not a rhetorical question.

Lammy is also the Deputy Prime Minister, which must be as far as he could possibly go. Presumably apart from the incumbent, but no one would bet on that, the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party must be expected to refuse to endorse any candidate at the next General Election who aspired to be Prime Minister, having declared today that that was an absolute bar. At Gorton and Denton, the circus is well and truly rolling into town. Rumour has it that Reform UK will be fielding Simon Danczuk, whom it last stood for Parliament in his own former constituency. He came sixth.

As for Labour, the rules are different for Southerners. Damien Egan was the directly elected Mayor of Lewisham, elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, yet in 2024 he resigned merely to contest the Kingswood by-election, where he had grown up but which was well over 100 miles away. Thankfully for him, he won it. But filling his mayoralty midterm cost the good burghers of Lewisham £635,000. The NEC was fine with that. Kingswood has been abolished, so Egan now sits for Bristol North East, which is essentially the successor seat. His husband is Yossi Felberbaum, a recruiter for the IDF's Unit 8200, an infamous collector of intelligence for blackmail and for secret evidence. Has this person been issued with a parliamentary pass?

Bringing us to the funniest whisper of all, that Labour's candidate at Gorton and Denton might be Tony Blair. No, of course not. But you have to admit that it is amusing. Blair is perfectly eligible. As well as being a member both of the Executive Board of Donald Trump's Board of Peace, and of its Gaza Executive Board, Blair remains a member of the Labour Party. Why do you? Or even if you do not, if you still identify as a Blairite, then you are endorsing both Trump's monsterplan for his Proprietary Colony of Gaza, and his deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln to begin the invasion of Iran in support of whichever of Reza Pahlavi, the MEK terrorists, or the present regime, had best guaranteed him personal control over the oil and gas. That was what he did in Venezuela, where the regime has not changed at all, and where Trump has been entirely open about his motivation. That is Blairism now. It pretty much always was.

Class Warfare At Its Ugliest

Dan Hitchens writes:

In 1975, the then UK prime minister, Harold Wilson, stated: ‘A policy of euthanasia would be wholly abhorrent and there is absolutely no possibility of this government – or I believe of any government – ever giving it support.’ It is mildly ironic that this prediction has been disproved by a prime minister who views Wilson as the very model of a Labour leader.

Keir Starmer and his allies love to study the Wilson administrations, and have occasionally cited his line that the Labour Party is ‘a moral crusade or it is nothing’. But the assisted-suicide bill, which Starmer has covertly helped along since its very beginning, would have been Wilson’s nightmare. And the language used by some current Labour MPs about it – a vague, relentless drift of soundbites about compassion and autonomy – would have alarmed him with its superficiality.

He would have been spot on, too. Currently being debated in the House of Lords, The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which began with such pure intentions, looks more and more like one of the ugliest episodes of class warfare in modern British history. People ‘might well’ apply for an assisted death ‘because there is only a limited amount of money to go around’, the bill’s sponsor in the House of Lords, Lord Falconer, recently told parliament. ‘Your financial position might be an element in what makes you reach a decision’, he explained. When peers suggested amendments to rule out poverty as a motivation, he batted them away: you should not be ‘barred’, he argued, merely because you are ‘influenced by your circumstances – for instance, because you are poor’. As long as you meet the broad medical conditions, poverty is as good a reason as any to seek assistance in ending your life.

Euthanasia and assisted-suicide laws have a way of dividing the population into worthy and unworthy lives. This tendency lurks, of course, in the dark history of the euthanasia movement. This explains the alarm of disabled people’s groups, who are resolutely against the legislation. And it has been manifest in the arguments of the most brutally honest supporters of assisted suicide.

In 2024, Matthew Parris cheerfully wrote in The Times that, ‘Our culture is changing its mind about the worth of old age’. He rejoiced that while, ‘Your time is up’, might ‘never be an order’, he conceded that ‘the objectors are right’, it ‘may one day be the kind of unspoken hint that everybody understands’. We can’t afford to do anything else, Parris believes. Similarly, the New Statesman’s Oli Dugmore enthused last year that assisted suicide would bring down ‘the pensions bill, the NHS bill and the care bill’, and would relieve us of the old folk who sit in care homes ‘unvisited by relatives who are preoccupied by the rhythm of their lives, or perhaps unable to summon the courage to witness the degeneration of the once totemic figures of their lives, their mum and dad. Let them die.’

Not many people, I believe, start out by thinking like this – or if they do, they realise they should keep it to themselves. But over time, even the prospect of an assisted-suicide law makes the unthinkable seem reasonable.

Lord Falconer himself is a notable example. In 2012, he led a commission on assisted dying, whose report made clear – repeatedly, and as a central principle – that nobody should be receiving lethal drugs for lack of decent healthcare. ‘Any decision to seek an assisted suicide’, the report said, must be ‘a genuinely voluntary and autonomous choice, not influenced by another person’s wishes, or by constrained social circumstances, such as lack of access to adequate end of life care and support’.

When another peer read that out in the Lords back in November, Falconer nodded along with the first half, then suddenly stopped. To all appearances, he has abandoned his previous ideal. Earlier this month, when peers suggested that assisted-suicide applicants should be guaranteed a meeting with a palliative-care team, he declared: ‘Of course, nobody wants the absence of palliative care to be the reason you apply for an assisted death, but we have to give everybody this choice on the basis of the way the world is for them.’ Likewise, if your reason is that you are poor, you get the green light.

What lies behind Falconer’s nonchalance? Perhaps it is unfair to cite his parliamentary register of interests, which lists a remunerated partnership at the law firm Gibson Dunn, two flats in London and a cottage in Nottinghamshire. But one feels this is a different world from that occupied by the domestic-abuse experts, eating-disorder specialists, disability campaigners, psychiatrists, palliative-care doctors, inheritance lawyers and care-sector whistleblowers who have so forcibly opposed the bill.

‘Your financial position might be an element in what makes you reach a decision.’ It’s hard not to read those words without thinking of the rising numbers of over-60s sleeping in cars and emergency shelters, the tens of thousands being chased for care-home debt, the elderly people seeking admission to hospital ‘entirely due to housing, isolation, lack of social support, self-neglect, safeguarding’.

The Britain of 2026 could certainly do with a moral crusade. But who could have guessed that Labour’s one would look like this?

Leading Britain’s Conversation?

ITV and LBC are funded only by their giant corporate advertisers, whose mind may therefore be discerned from their output. Unsurprisingly, they are Centrism Central, from Ed Balls interviewing his own wife, to Lewis Goodall, well, just to Lewis Goodall, frankly. And today, to defend the exclusion of Andy Burnham from the Labour candidacy at Gorton and Denton, LBC interviewed Ivor Caplin. Know the clique that is being wafted from dominance into hegemony.

The newly enobled Matthew Doyle somehow managed to retain his Labour Party membership despite having campaigned for Sean Morton as an Independent candidate, while Caplin was a Whip at the time of the Iraq War, as was Phil Woolas, and as was Dan Norris, who was close to Caplin and whose proxy vote is still cast by the Whips. All three were made Ministers soon after the vote on Iraq. The then Chief Whip was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. That Chief Whip remains an active Labour member of the House of Lords, even giving it as her institutional affiliation when she had the gall to endorse a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls.

For example, Liron Woodcock-Velleman was a Barnet councillor until last February, and he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act, yet he is scandalously out on bail while awaiting sentence for offences including sending naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl. He asked her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. His crimes were startlingly similar to those of his fellow London Labour councillor and right-wing stalwart, Sam Gould.

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Gould’s then employer, Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. The nomination process now makes a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible, and with Burnham out of the way, then the looming fall of Keir Starmer should crown the long-anointed Streeting. Streeting has a majority of only 528 over Leanne Mohamad, just as Phillips has a majority of only 693 over McIntyre, but huge damage could be done in three years of a Streeting Government, in which Phillips would certainly be a senior Cabinet Minister. In the meantime, to be the next Member of Parliament for Gorton and Denton, the Workers Party is fielding Councillor Shahbaz Sarwar of Longsight, a ward of the constituency.