Give Us Dignified and Equitable Lives

This letter appears in The Times:

Although there is talk of the robustness of checks and balances in the assisted dying bill to prevent Disabled people being coerced, as a leading organisation for Disabled people in Britain we know from bitter experience that words and laws do not always add up to protecting Disabled people.

This was evident during the pandemic, where we were often denied life-saving care, and where 60 per cent of all deaths from Covid were those of Disabled people, who comprise 24 per cent of the population. We have huge empathy for Disabled people who live with pain and wish to make an informed choice to have control over the end of their lives.

However, given the severe inequalities for Disabled people within society, especially relating to the quality of health and independent living support, we can no longer maintain a neutral stance, and believe that upholding quality of life should be the focus of the government.

Giving us dignified and equitable lives should come before putting in place ways of assisting us to die.

Kamran Mallick

Chief Executive, Disability Rights UK

The Shortcomings of This Method

Hannah White and Jill Rutter are more right than wrong:

Private members’ bills (PMBs) – like the one Kim Leadbeater is now proposing to legalise assisted dying for a limited category of the terminally ill – have been used for potentially controversial social legislation before. They allow governments to test parliamentary appetite for a change in the law, with the option to help the bill through if it emerges that enough MPs back the principle. This route was used for some of the big social reforms of the 1960s – including abortion and decriminalisation of homosexuality.

More recently, however, governments have opted to introduce government legislation on similar issues, for example, civil partnerships and same sex marriage, while still allowing MPs to vote with their conscience. Kim Leadbeater’s decision to use the rare opportunity of being first in the private members’ bill ballot to bring forward this legislation was understandable, but the government could presumably have dissuaded her from doing so with a commitment to bring forward government legislation later in the parliament. This would have enabled the groundwork to be laid for a more satisfactory debate. Instead the government has found itself responding to unhappy MPs, facing difficult headlines, and dealing with a bill which has lacked proper preparation.

New MPs cannot complain that the bill is coming too early – but legislation needs proper preparation 

Some new MPs have complained about being asked to participate in a free vote on a contentious matter of conscience so early in their parliamentary careers. An objection based on the readiness of MPs to fulfil their parliamentary function is – in itself – not a good one. The first months of becoming an MP are a near-vertically steep learning curve for many, but being willing to use one’s personal judgement to decide matters of national importance – without the comforting guidance of the party whips – is a core competence for the role.

The readiness of the legislation is a different matter – because the process of legislating via a private members' bill is quite truncated. It is not that the bill is badly drafted – it was reportedly prepared by an extremely experienced parliamentary drafter. Nor is it because parliamentary scrutiny is limited compared to a government bill – the time available for Commons scrutiny of most government legislation is limited by ‘programming’ and MPs cannot timetable the scrutiny of private members’ legislation in the way the government can (though Nikki da Costa – former legislative affairs director at No.10 – has pointed out that the membership of scrutiny committees is left to the member promoting the bill). But a key problem with using this route to legislate is the lack of pre-legislative stages – and it may be that which ultimately means MPs decide they have no option but to stop the bill proceeding even if they are sympathetic to the principle.

Legislation on an issue like assisted dying would have benefited enormously from a more thorough preparation phase. Governments have used this approach in the past. A notable example was in the 1980s when governments were faced with the need to legislate for changes in the potential for assisted conception. The response of the Thatcher government was to ask a leading philosopher – Dame Mary Warnock – to chair a review of the wide range of ethical issues raised by those advances. The result has been that the UK has a widely accepted regime around human fertilisation and embryology, overseen by an arm’s length body and the issue has been largely removed from politics.

Compare that with the backlash that the Blair government faced when it tried to push wider availability of genetically modified food on an unprepared nation. One of the lessons that the government learned from that fiasco was the importance of public engagement around potentially sensitive changes – and that in turn led to the establishment of the Sciencewise public engagement programme. Twenty years later the UK government has now taken steps to allow genetic engineering, but not yet modification. One reason why the UK was able to gain acceptance to the use of donor mitochondrial DNA to reduce the risk of hereditary diseases was that the ground was well prepared by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – and the UK became one of the first countries to legislate to allow this – via a government bill.

The government could have laid the groundwork for an informed decision on assisted dying

The government has set up a wide range of policy reviews – but not on assisted dying. But a well-led review, involving many of the people on both sides of the argument, and with a mandate to engage the public, could have addressed the whole range of issues that MPs are now trying to navigate. It could have explored the international experience. It could have looked at the practicalities about how this would be organised and what the implications would be for the NHS. It could have seen if there was anyway of satisfactorily addressing the concerns of people about coercion and the worries of disabled people – and drawn up the best safeguards possible. It could have explored eligibility criteria. Any bill drafted to reflect the recommendations could also be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny.

It is not just assisted dying which would benefit from a more considered approach to legislating on tricky social issues. The fraught and polarised issue of gender recognition and sex-based rights could have been the subject of much more careful advance consideration of how to make life easier for trans people while providing proper and guaranteed protection for women – whether in safe spaces or on the sports field – and avoiding the degeneration of the issue into (as seen with the now overturned Scottish legislation) a poisonous stand-off. Ireland has managed to navigate its way into the 21st century by much greater use of citizens assemblies before making legislation. The UK seems to have forgotten – or never learned – how to do this.

MPs unhappy with the use of a Private Members Bill for assisted dying should press for reform of backbench legislation

Those who have objected to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill being brought forward as a private members' bill need to channel those objections into impetus to reform parliament’s procedures for considering backbench legislation. These procedures have many deficiencies, and the idea that backbench MPs have a reasonable prospect of getting their own legislation onto the statute books without government support is essentially a fiction perpetuated by MPs and parliamentary staff alike.

Although the parliamentary scrutiny received by a private members’ bill is not different to that received by a government bill – except in terms of the lack of programming – there are numerous other problems. There are three different routes to introduce a bill – an unnecessary degree of complexity; opportunities to bring forward legislation are allocated either by luck (a ballot) or patronage (the whips) rather than cross-party support or preparedness; proceedings take place on a Friday when many MPs prefer to be working in their constituencies; and even widely supported PMBs can be readily ‘talked out’ – filibustered by opponents. Many of the bills that reach the statute books are government ‘handouts’ – effectively an extension of the government’s legislative programme rather than a genuine opportunity for the legislative ideas of backbenchers to be considered.

The Procedure Committee brought forward proposals for reform of private members’ bill procedure in 2013, but no government has since seen fit to allow the House to consider them. Prompted by the attention drawn to PMBs by the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, the Procedure Committee should review and update these proposals and the government should make time for them to be debated.

It may be that Keir Starmer thought the PMB route to allowing the Commons a vote on assisted dying offered him the best of both worlds – making good his promise to Dame Esther Rantzen that he would allow a vote on assisted dying without provoking an internal row and tying up his government in a prolonged debate. But at the moment it looks like a case that hasty legislation may end up meaning no legislation, even if there is quite widespread support for the principle. And his actions have drawn attention to the shortcomings of this method of making law.

Asked To Commit On Partial Information

Sam Coates writes:

It's a mess, they know it, some regret it and it's Sir Keir Starmer's fault.

That's the view of some at the top of government watching, dismayed, as the red-on-red conflict drags on over the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, aggravating a sore which crosses party lines, dominates the airwaves for the foreseeable and creates problems which bear some of the characteristics of the Brexit days.

Whatever way you look at it, there's a feeling there's been a miscalculation over their handling of the assisted dying issue, and some at the top of government are quite open about this to me.

As some now acknowledge, the politics were always going to be fraught but they failed to spot this early enough, with the consequence the issue is now taking up more bandwidth than was assumed.

It has become a distraction from the main priorities of the Labour government - improving people's living standards and securing the borders.

As a result, there will be few tears shed in influential parts of Downing Street, including by chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, if a week on Friday the assisted dying bill fails its first Commons test and ends its journey there.

If MPs do not kill it then, the issue will hang over the government for at least the whole first half of next year, and quite possibly to the point of implementation in early 2026.

The sheer amount of parliamentary time it will take up has unnerved the whips' office. The public don't distinguish between government and parliamentary priorities.

The Labour leader's 'mistake'

The mistake was made in March. Sir Keir promised broadcaster and campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen to "make time" "…early in the next parliament".

At that point they thought they were being smart - not to commit a possible future Labour government on the issue one way or another ahead of an election and leave it to MPs' consciences - and inside Labour HQ this must have sounded like a pain-free promise ahead of polling day by a party not wanting to annoy any section of the electorate.

But they appear not to have gamed the consequences.

Social liberals v Blue Labour social conservatives

This issue pits social liberals against Blue Labour social conservatives, with each side digging in and Sir Keir (previously on record in favour) now set to vote in the opposite side of the chamber to his deputy Angela Rayner.

Wes Streeting will be set against his own fellow health ministers, and symbolically - a Labour prime minister against a Tory leader of the opposition.

That there are two sides to this isn't a surprise, even if the volume of complaining is now unnerving them.

Ministers can't sidestep debate

A bigger issue for the government is they underestimated how ministers are being dragged into the centre of the debate, even though they are meant to be remaining neutral.

Ministers are finding they cannot simply sidestep this debate, as happened in previous votes of conscience such as gay marriage and abortion.

This is because of the active and complex involvement of the government legal and health systems if the legislation passes and assisted dying is permitted in law.

This may be a private members' bill, but it will be for the government to determine which doctors perform the assessments, and who carries out the end-of-life service for those that qualify.

Take one question that has been left hanging: whether a newly formed part of the NHS provides the end of life drugs, or whether it is something that can be done by the private sector.

According to allies of Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP fronting the legislation, it is up to the secretary of state for health to decide whether this is done publicly or privately.

I'm told there's a presumption this is done in the public sector, yet other countries have private services like Dignitas carrying out the procedure for a fee, and in an era of constrained resources, could this be an option?

This part of the debate seems largely to have been passed over - yet there are huge cost benefits should the government allow the private, not public sector, to carry out the service.

Overall I'm told there will be no impact assessment - which sets out the costs of assisted dying legislation - until and unless the legislation passes second reading.

At that point it will be done by government, not parliament. This means MPs will be engaging in one of their most totemic votes of this parliament without access to all the facts - and being asked to commit on partial information. This has left some unhappy, unsurprisingly.

This was an easy promise - but it's proving much harder to deliver than expected.

Surrogacy Concern

Sienna Rodgers and Sophie Church write:

In 1985, young mum Kim Cotton gave birth to a baby girl on behalf of a Swedish couple who could not conceive themselves. Using her own egg, she had inseminated herself with the commissioning father’s sperm. She was paid £6,500 for the arrangement, brokered through a US agency. In so doing, Cotton became the UK’s first commercial surrogate.

Cotton faced fierce backlash from social services and the public when it emerged money had changed hands for Baby Cotton. Within six months, the Surrogacy Arrangements Act was passed to ban commercial surrogacy in the UK.

Today, surrogacy is legal in the United Kingdom, but only in certain situations. Open advertising for surrogate mothers is not allowed, for example. And, crucially, when the baby is born the surrogate mother is their legal parent – a switch to the intended parents can only be made after birth, via a ‘parental order’.

Under proposals from the Law Commission, however, all of that could change. So, are we heading towards a more commercial, US-style model of surrogacy? And will the government risk a clash with anti-surrogacy campaigners?

Cotton has expressed regret at never meeting the parents of Baby Cotton, and has spoken of her heartbreak after handing her over. Nonetheless, she went on to give birth to two more babies as a ‘gestational’ surrogate – meaning a donor’s eggs were used – and found these to be much more positive experiences. (The first time, Cotton used her own egg, making her a ‘full’ or ‘traditional’ surrogate.)

In 1988 Cotton established Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy (Cots) to help facilitate births through surrogacy. Since its founding, she has helped facilitate surrogacy arrangements involving 1,131 babies.

Nearly 40 years after her first experience of being a surrogate, Cotton is more certain than ever that surrogacy is the purest form of female altruism. “At the end of the day, it’s women helping other women. That’s what it’s supposed to be: a sisterhood,” she says.

Gestational surrogates are three times more likely to experience severe complications during pregnancy, according to research published this year by Queen’s University, in Ontario. Cotton freely admits that Cots – where 99 per cent of surrogacy cases are gestational – is currently seeing miscarriages “left, right and centre”, with two in the past week alone at the time of her interview with The House.

“We do prepare them,” she says of the surrogates who make their arrangements with the help of Cots. “I do prepare them because surrogates have never – in most cases – had a miscarriage. It’s an absolute shock to them because they’re not used to a loss like that. Of course, it’s a double whammy; they feel terrible for themselves, and then they have the guilt of, ‘What have I done wrong? I’ve let my couple down. I’m so sorry. I feel terrible.’”

Does it ever shake her faith in surrogacy? “Oh no, never,” Cotton replies. “I’ve been dealing with surrogacy for almost 40 years now, and I’m passionate about it.”

Asked about the complications that can arise in surrogacy arrangements where the baby is severely disabled, Cotton says: “That’s all part of our agreement session.” This is a talk that takes place before conception. “We don’t really have conflict in it, because they agree it early on. It’s a deal breaker. If we’ve matched a couple, then they find out the surrogate will not terminate a child under any circumstances, they part company.”

There has only been “one slight disagreement” between intended parents and the surrogate, she says, because the intending mother “went into panic mode” when she discovered there could be a complication in the baby’s development. “Unfortunately, that was twins, and one died straight after birth, so one twin was healthy, and the other one didn’t make it.”

In an effort to bring clarity to such potentially ambiguous and delicate situations, the Law Commission took an in-depth look at surrogacy before publishing a final full report and draft legislation in March 2023. Its starting point was acknowledging that surrogacy is “permitted” and “supported by government”, says law commissioner Professor Nicholas Hopkins, so it did not consider whether to ban it altogether.

The report has only received an interim response from the government so far, as the last administration did not make parliamentary time for the proposals to be taken forward. Whether Keir Starmer’s government will be more interested in doing so remains to be seen.

The House understands that the minister responsible, Baroness Merron, plans to meet with the Law Commission in the next few weeks. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are considering the Law Commission’s report and will publish our response in due course.”

If the Law Commission proposals get the go-ahead, domestic surrogacy laws will be changed significantly, creating a new “pathway” for surrogacy in the UK. Key reforms include the following.

• Intended parents would be the legal parents of the baby from birth. (Currently they must apply for a parental order at least six weeks after the birth, and within six months.)
• Surrogacy agreements would be overseen and supported by regulated surrogacy organisations (RSOs). These would be regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). 
• Only paying the surrogate mother’s expenses – medical and wellbeing costs, those to recoup lost earnings, pregnancy support, and travel – would be permitted. (Currently expenses are not legally defined and do not have to be itemised.) 
• The ban on lawyers charging for negotiating and advising on surrogacy agreements would be lifted. 
• ‘Matching’ services would be permitted.
• Open advertising by RSOs for intended parents and surrogate mothers would be legal, as would advertising by lawyers and counsellors offering surrogacy-related services.
• The minimum surrogate age would be 21.

There would still be no legally binding surrogacy agreements in the UK – unlike in the US. There, cases are regularly reported in which problems arise when commissioning parents use contracts to micro-manage the surrogate mother’s life during pregnancy and to mandate abortion in certain circumstances. 

So, what do surrogacy organisations make of the Law Commission recommendations?

Cotton is concerned that the new rules would further commercialise surrogacy in the UK, particularly in allowing “piranhas” already acting in the space – lawyers, clinics, counsellors – to make money. She suggests it is unfair that the surrogate, who “does the lion’s share of the work and takes all the risks”, must “justify what she’s paid”.

The Law Commission reforms around regulating surrogacy organisations are partly why her agency, Cots, is due to close in 2025. “I don’t have the money,” she says of the new criteria Cots would be forced to meet. Instead, she plans to set up a surrogacy advice line.

Cotton believes the “biggest problem” in surrogacy rules is the current ban on advertising. She admits advertising on Facebook “all the time”, though only on private pages. “Demand is double because now same-sex couples are able to get a parental order. We allowed that to happen. So overnight the demand doubled, but the supply stayed the same – in fact, it’s worse than ever.”

Sarah Jones, chief executive of SurrogacyUK – which, unlike Cots, requires the surrogate to play a role in the baby’s life as they grow up – is enthusiastic about the recommendations.

“The Law Commission did listen to the surrogate voices, and there’s absolutely nothing in the legal reforms that even hints at going towards a commercial model at all,” she says.

“Surrogacy has been going on for decades and decades unregulated, and we’re really lucky that nothing majorly wrong has happened. We touch wood all the time that nothing really, really terrible has happened,” Jones adds.

“There’s nothing tabloid paper-worthy at all in the majority of surrogacy cases. That’s by luck, rather than anything else. Being regulated by someone like the HFEA that can put these mandatory safeguards in place has got to be a good thing.”

Anti-surrogacy organisations, on the other hand, are alarmed by the Law Commission proposals.

Helen Gibson of Surrogacy Concern is concerned that, while expenses would need to be itemised, the new rules would not put a cap on them.

“In 2018 there were five examples of expenses lodged in parental order applications with the family court that reached over £60,000 per pregnancy. We don’t believe anything the surrogacy agencies say about how kind this is; how beautiful and miraculous. It is not altruistic. We think women are being incentivised to do this.”

She is also worried about vetting. Pro-surrogacy campaigners say the Law Commission proposals would strengthen the safeguards, as under the new pathway health and gametes screening, counselling, a pre-conception welfare of the child assessment and a criminal record check would be required. For those who use surrogacy outside of the new pathway, intended parents will still need to apply for a parental order.

Gibson disagrees with that pro-surrogacy view, countering: “The vetting proposed by the Law Commission would not have been much enhanced on what it is now.” She points out that the new pathway would remove the involvement of Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) officers and the Family Court, both of which are engaged in the parental order process. Instead, the gatekeepers of the new pathway would be regulated surrogacy organisations, which she claims would have little interest in keeping people off the pathway.

Surrogacy Concern cites data showing that 95 single men have been granted parental orders for babies since UK law changed to allow this in 2019, and the numbers show that increasingly men over 50 and 60 are pursuing surrogacy.

There is no upper age limit for a parental order, which will almost always be granted if there is a genetic link between the child and intended parent. To compare the situation with adoption, while there is no upper age limit there either, agencies look for adopters with the physical and mental energy to care for children until they are adults.

Gibson’s worries extend beyond this. “I am extremely worried that we have created a situation with surrogacy where we are making it easier for predatory men to gain access to children,” she says. Examples of convicted sex offenders becoming fathers via surrogacy form the basis of her concern.

In 2014, a 21-year-old Thai surrogate mother claimed an Australian couple had rejected one of the twins she had for them because the boy was born with Down’s syndrome, in a case that led to Thailand banning commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Amid the outcry, it emerged that the commissioning father, David Farnell in his mid-50s, was a convicted sex offender. The Australian courts ruled that the twin sister should be able to live with him nonetheless, though he was not allowed to be alone with the child.

A case closer to home took place in 2021 but received no media coverage, being highlighted instead by Lexi Ellingsworth of Stop Surrogacy Now UK. Via a surrogacy arrangement in Colombia, a couple had twins, one of whom sadly died. The baby who survived was brought back to the UK – but was made a ward of the court when it transpired that the 56-year-old non-genetic father who applied for a parental order had convictions for child sex offences. Ultimately, following a psychological and parenting assessment, the Family Division of the High Court ended the wardship.

Another area of concern for Gibson is that allowing open advertising by non-profit agencies for the first time would drive up the “supply” – to use Cotton’s term – of surrogate mothers.

“We are very worried that we would see an explosion of the numbers of women coming forward who will get sucked up into this, who might not have spent a long time giving it a lot of thought, who might not be building up relationships with the commissioning parents, and who might be doing this thinking, ‘It’s a beautiful, miraculous thing to do, and I can get a significant amount of money while I do it’,” Gibson says.

Along with Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Surrogacy Concern has collected testimonies from British surrogate mothers who have experienced regret.

In one of many stories, an altruistic gestational surrogate named Rachel, who gave birth to twins for some friends, says she was “well-meaning and ill-informed”. She was unaware of the hormone supplements necessary until after she had agreed to the pregnancy, by which time she felt she could not deny her friends a baby. After suffering second-degree tears and having one of the twins admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit, she was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

UK fertility lawyers NGA Law and surrogacy agency Brilliant Beginnings are quoted by the Law Commission as saying the ban on advertising reflects “the desire to prevent surrogacy from occurring, which is inconsistent with modern attitudes on surrogacy”.

Anti-surrogacy campaigners are sometimes accused of promoting outdated attitudes, and specifically of being homophobic. These critics point to how Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who is anti-LGBT, recently criminalised citizens engaging in surrogacy abroad.

Gibson believes there is a 50-50 split between domestic surrogacy and international surrogacy where the baby is then brought home to the UK. The Law Commission hopes its reforms can encourage domestic surrogacy by making it more appealing, but it also proposes to make it easier for parents using surrogacy abroad to start the UK paperwork before the birth.

“Commercial surrogacy practices are banned in this country. People are circumventing our ban to go abroad and buy babies in large number. That is a child protection and a safeguarding failure, which we have raised with government,” says Gibson.

“We are an outlier in allowing any form of surrogacy at all. In allowing people to go abroad and pursue commercial surrogacy, we’re basically giving a green light to wealthy people buying babies off mothers, often in developing countries or low-income women in US states.”

Despite the similarity of Meloni’s position on international surrogacy and her own, the Surrogacy Concern founder is adamant that homophobia does not explain her opposition to surrogacy.

“I’ve been a campaigner on the left all my life. We have no problem with non-traditional families, and we support gay parenting. What we are against, for everyone, regardless of sex or sexuality, is surrogacy,” she says.

Pointing out that the “vast majority of people who pursue surrogacy are heterosexual couples”, Gibson adds: “It’s important to understand that there is no unified view on this amongst any community, and we’re supported by a lot of gay men and a lot of infertile women.”

Some see parallels between the surrogacy debate and the clash over trans rights.

Asked why the last government did not pursue the surrogacy rule changes, Jones of SurrogacyUK replies: “I think it is unfortunately that we’ve been caught up in this anti-trans rhetoric. We are in that sort of culture war. Maybe people are worried to put their heads above the parapet and speak up for surrogacy.” She “absolutely” believes that some anti-surrogacy campaigners are homophobic.

On a purely practical level, Surrogacy Concern says the HFEA has little appetite for becoming the surrogacy regulator as the Law Commission has recommended. Would the fertility regulator agree with that observation?

“I don’t think we’d ever be on the barricades asking for surrogacy to be something that we would regulate. However, in the economic climate, with our eyes wide open, we know that if there is going to be a regulator, it’s going to come to us,” says HFEA director of strategy and corporate affairs Clare Ettinghausen.

“I suppose we’re – what’s the word? – ‘willing participants’, but we wouldn’t have necessarily gone to campaign to be the surrogacy regulator.”

The HFEA’s expertise lies in regulating and inspecting medical facilities, not in overseeing non-profit organisations.

“If you think about the Charity Commission and what they do, it’s much more similar to that,” Ettinghausen says. “There was this idea that, ‘Well, you’ve regulated clinics, you’ve got an established code of practice – you just lift and shift that on surrogacy.’ But I don’t think it’s as easy as that.”

If the government were to implement the recommendations, Ettinghausen says the HFEA would need extra resources to set up a new pillar of regulation – from expanding the workforce to include policy and legal development professionals, to building inspector training resources and developing a code of practice.

“We don’t have that expertise at all, and it’s something we would definitely either have to train existing staff or find new people to be able to do,” she says. “I do worry about just saying, ‘It’s a read across – you’ve been inspecting fertility clinics and embryo research centres, therefore you can inspect a not-for-profit organisation.’ That’s a completely different type of entity.”

Hopkins of the Law Commission tells The House: “It’s a role that we understand through our engagement they are happy in principle to undertake, and certainly very well-placed to undertake.” He adds that the regulator “was always going to be the HFEA”.

The law commissioner says “we don’t have any indication yet” as to what view the new Labour government might take. But as surrogacy becomes more common, there is significant demand for reform of UK law.

The question remains, are these the right reforms? There appear to be practical concerns around the Commission’s recommendation for a regulator. As for the ethical considerations, it may be that neither the pro-surrogacy nor the anti-surrogacy side gets their way, with ministers deciding the area is simply too controversial to go near. 

If Wes Streeting does back the reforms, it is easy to see how a clash with some feminists – similar to the one Labour found itself struggling with on gender – would ensue.

The Progressive Case Against Immigration

Primarily out of a desire to re-Christianise this country and to shore up the anti-war movement, and also because, as with our defence of the farmers, good food is fundamental to quality of life, some of us have moved a bit since the days when we would have agreed with everything that Lee Fang said here if it had been translated to a British context, as most of it could be. But it is still important:

The battlelines on immigration have hardened predictably. Left-leaning voters proudly display “refugees welcome” yard signs, while Donald Trump supporters cheer his pledge to implement “largest deportation operation in the history of our country”. Amid such partisan attitudes, it has become heretical to suggest that the Democrats need to be tougher on immigration.

But they must. In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion. Only by accepting this, and making the case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking, can the Left reconnect with its blue-collar roots.

And perhaps it isn’t such a heretical thought. Across the world, Left-leaning political parties have fared best when they have adopted restrictive policies on migration. The reigning Social Democratic Party of Denmark has won successive elections over the last decade with no fear from the populist Right, in large part because of its refusal to take in new asylum seekers and in its efforts to reduce any net migration.

For centre-left Danes, this position isn’t so much an aberration, but an extension of the fight against neoliberalism. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” Mette Frederiksen, the SDP leader and Danish Prime Minister wrote in her autobiography.

The same can be said of the United States. It is no coincidence that the era of lowest immigration to this country, between the Thirties and Sixties, coincided with the greatest expansion of labour unions, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Reduced migration meant less infighting and greater focus on the broad public interest among the working and middle class. It was these decades that gave us the federal minimum wage as well as Medicare and Social Security, our most durable and most generous entitlement programmes.

Contemporary trends also strongly correlate. Democrats this century have won the White House only in years of decreasing migration. In 2008 and 2012, the years Barack Obama won two successive bids, immigration was down sharply. Four years ago, the Covid pandemic led to the closure of the US-Mexico border and the suspension of most visa programmes, measures that led to the fastest decline in migration on record. Of course, these weren’t the only factors, but the absence of a migration crisis sucked the wind out of the sails of Trump’s reelection that year.

More recently, the Democrat Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, who represent two of the three districts that the Democrats held onto in Trump country, bucked their party by voting for hardline immigration enforcement and never missed an opportunity to remind voters that they disagreed with their party leaders on this issue. That’s not to say they abandoned the Left. Golden is a torchbearer of labour unions and Perez has been outspoken on breaking up corporate monopolies. But they show how the Democrats can once again become a big tent party, bringing back independent voters.

Many progressives disagree, pointing to the racist quota systems behind 20th-century limitations on migration. And it’s true that the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which slashed migration by more than 80%, had bigoted justifications in line with the more intolerant views of the day. But racist beliefs of the past should not be weaponised to dishonestly argue against race-neutral immigration laws of the present. Migration levels can be cut across the board and a merit-based system need not have any ethnic component. Border security should not take race or ethnicity into account.

It is this dangerous conflation of laissez-faire migration policy and anti-racist activism that has wreaked havoc among the Left. In the reaction to the first Trump Administration, many liberals unthinkingly embraced unlimited migration as a progressive value. Such views only widened the distance between the Left and the working class.

The Left seems to have all but forgotten who is pushing, behind the scenes, for fewer immigration barriers. The fast food giants, industrial agribusiness interests, slaughterhouses, and other business groups lobby to import new workers on a strictly economic basis. Corporate executives leaned on the Biden Administration to increase the flow of migration over the last four years to reduce what they euphemistically called “wage inflation” — business-speak for higher wages won by tight labour markets. Silicon Valley, meanwhile, has championed its own immigration lobbying bonanza in a bid to bring lower wage computer programmers to American shores.

“The Left seems to have all but forgotten who is pushing, behind the scenes, for fewer immigration barriers.” Most mainstream Democrats, including Joe Biden, once sang a different tune and recognised the connection between business and mass migration. Back in 2006, Biden previously campaigned on building a new border fence and enacting new laws to “punish American employers who knowingly violate the law when they hire illegals”.

But the shift away from their traditionally tough stance has coincided with the changing demographics of the party base, especially its core of urban, educated professionals — who tend to benefit economically from mass migration. If you’re an educated white-collar worker, it’s unlikely you will face direct economic competition with a migrant hailing from Venezuela or Afghanistan. In most cases, you benefit from the lower wages of immigrant Uber drivers, maids, and kitchen staff in the form of cheaper goods and services. And there’s a small chance that you will be competing with migrants for limited spots at a homeless shelter or in line at the food bank.

This shift was only accelerated by Trump’s arrival. In 2017, Left-leaning politicians reflexively began opposing anything Trump supported, even if these ideas were in line with traditional Democratic policy priorities. For instance, they began dismantling routine immigration enforcement mechanisms, such as the 287(g) local law enforcement program, put into place by previous Democratic presidents, tying the hands of the Biden administration.

In those years, activists and politicians alike embraced slogans like “Abolish ICE” and competed to show deference to illegal aliens. It was in the midst of this dynamic that Kamala Harris took her most unpopular stances, such as her pledge to provide undocumented aliens in detention centres with taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries.

More to the point, the highly educated activist Left created cultural parameters that made open discussion of these issues impossible. Recall the treatment of Bernie Sanders who went viral for retorting: “Open borders? That’s a Koch brothers idea.” Invoking the arch-Republican billionaires, Sanders was expressing concern that mass migration lowers wages to the benefit of corporate interests. But many liberal media outlets decried Sanders as a racist bigot, an “ugly” xenophobic dinosaur of the highest order. An idea that once formed the bedrock of the labour movement has been transformed into an example of Leftist heresy.

But take it from the Cato Institute, the gem of the Koch foundation-backed libertarian research centres. Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president of the institute, previously commented on the benefits of mass immigration from the perspective of the pro-business elite.

“A diverse population,” Nowrasteh observed wryly on a thread debating mass migration, “reduces social solidarity, which is good for economic growth because people don’t want wealth-destroying policies to help out people who look different.”

In other words, waves of immigrants are favoured by this Koch-backed pundit not only for macro-economic reasons. He sees the cultural and political disruption it fuels as an essential benefit. The less societal cohesion, the less likely welfare state policies will advance.

I view the issue from the opposite direction from the Koch foundation world. The need for new social programmes is already fast approaching. Americans are living longer than ever, exacerbating the financial outlook of retirees and care facilities. And the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and other automation technology may soon replace tens of millions of workers. But if society is so consumed with backlash over immigration, how will the Left ever propose a workable solution to any of these challenges?

Borders pose an existential challenge for Democrats, one that forces them to reckon with the drift on class. Will American remain perpetually in conflict over new arrivals, constantly divided and competing with lower wage workers and pondering questions of shifting cultural identity, or will we end this cycle and fix the problems that plague our most struggling citizens. The future of progressive policy depends on solving it.

The Only Adequate Safeguard

Diane Abbott and Edward Leigh write:

Free votes on conscience matters are comparatively rare in the UK parliament. But they are almost always about issues of once-in-a-generation social change. Laws such as this need the utmost care because of the risk of unintended consequences. This is especially the case with the current assisted dying bill.

Writing from opposite benches as the father and mother of the house, our concerns are twofold, relating both to the process regarding the bill and its likely practice once implemented. Regarding the process, we have seen our fair share of bills over the years: some good, some bad. Whatever the merits of a bill, laws are always better if there is proper scrutiny and plenty of expert advice has been sought. This is particularly the case with private members’ bills, which often do not enjoy the independent scrutiny that government lawyers can offer.

When MPs last voted on this issue less than a decade ago, in 2015, Rob Marris published his private member’s bill a full seven weeks before MPs voted on the proposal at second reading, providing time for scrutiny and debate. In contrast, Kim Leadbeater’s bill was published just 18 days ahead of second reading.

The inadequacy of this timescale is heightened by the unprecedented number of new MPs. Parliament will have sat for just 12 weeks by the time MPs vote on what is, quite literally, a matter of life and death; many MPs are still relatively unfamiliar with normal parliamentary procedure, let alone for private members’ bills, of which this will be the first in this parliament. There is more than a suspicion that the pressure groups behind this proposed change have sought to take advantage of an inexperienced new parliament. Either way, the flawed process has been lamentable and wholly unacceptable for a matter of such importance.

It is not only parliamentary scrutiny that is being limited. There are significant legal and practical issues relating to assisted suicide. Last week, the former president of the high court family division, Sir James Munby, published detailed analysis of the bill’s judicial safeguards and concluded they fall “lamentably short”. He said: “Only those who believe implicitly in judicial omniscience and infallibility … can possibly have any confidence in the efficacy of what is proposed.” Equally importantly, more than 3,000 medical professionals have expressed concerns about the effect on their profession, were assisted dying to be made legal.

But our worry about this bill is not just about the rushed process. We are also concerned about how the new legislation would be implemented in practice, particularly as regards to vulnerable groups. The organisations campaigning for a change in the law have successfully used high-profile celebrities to promote the cause. We do not doubt their sincerity, and sympathise greatly with anyone experiencing the fear and pain that can sadly accompany terminal illness, but MPs must make laws based on their effect on every member of society, not just those whose profile gives them a prominent voice.

Evidence from elsewhere suggests those most at risk when assisted suicide is legalised are vulnerable minorities. Such people, unlike privileged elites who are used to exercising autonomy over every part of their lives and who can afford good-quality social and palliative care, are most likely to resign themselves to an assisted death against their will because they are unable to access the support they require.

Imagine the pensioner whose children cannot afford houses of their own watching her limited savings, earmarked for those children, disappearing on social care and so feeling a “duty to die”. And, sadly, it is not impossible to imagine a malevolent family member tacitly pressuring a disabled terminally ill relative to consider an assisted death, either because of the time-consuming and emotional burden their care has become, or even to be able to access the assets they will inherit more quickly. Or consider the elderly widow who has been hospitalised and worries she is taking up a valuable bed in an NHS under significant strain and would be better off dead.

Incidents such as these would be relatively rare, but the very act of legalising assisted suicide makes them possible. It is because, as demonstrated elsewhere, it is simply not possible to avoid such scenarios if assisted suicide were to be made legal that the only adequate safeguard is to keep the current law unchanged. Meanwhile, we should be investing instead in improving our health and social care system generally. And if there is one thing this debate has shone a light on, it is the urgent need to increase investment in palliative care.

The Safeguards Are Effectively Useless

Tom Chacko writes:

Kim Leadbeater has described her Bill on assisted dying as including the strongest safeguards possible. The Bill has multiple tests and stages that someone needs to pass to be “approved”. It is full of hurdles. But those hurdles are not safeguards.

The abuses of assisted suicide laws are now well known from other countries, and we have been promised they will not happen here. But the tests in the Bill do not target most of those abuses at all. For this Bill, the only real question is whether it is reasonable to think you might die within the next six months. If you are, there is then no bad reason to want to die, as long as it’s your genuine reason and not the result of pressure or coercion.

So, to take the sort of things that happen in other countries and are usually seen as tragedies, you might ask to die because you have no savings and do not think you can live off benefits if you are sick and can’t work. You might have been told you can only return home if a stairlift can be fitted, but the waiting list for this is 9 months. You might feel bad that the NHS is spending money keeping you in hospital. Or you might be afraid that the money you hoped to leave to your children is going to disappear into care home fees.

Under this Bill, these are good reasons to die. You can give the doctors and the Judge these reasons and they will have to approve it. The doctors can suggest it to you, as long as they aren’t putting pressure on you to say yes.

The doctors and courts are supposed to identify coercion or pressure. We don’t know what this means: coercion, in the law of undue influence, is hard to establish: “the will is overborne without the victim’s consent”, i.e. you are threatened into doing something you actively do not want to do. There isn’t an established meaning for “pressure”. Telling your mother that your life would be much easier if she left you the house rather than sold it to pay care fees would be manipulative, but it might fall short of “pressure”.

Pressure and coercion aren’t obvious. The person asking for assisted suicide won’t tell the doctors, as (due to the pressure) they will have chosen to die, and doctors aren’t investigators. Medical records don’t reveal the family life or finances of the patient.

To identify this, you would investigate the patient’s home life and finances (and those of anyone who might inherit). This would be intrusive and slow, and it would require powers to demand information and question friends and relatives. Without this, coercion and pressure will simply be invisible to the decision makers.

This is made worse by the fact that the Bill would allow someone to apply for assisted suicide effectively secretly. The doctor may advise the patient to “consider” discussing it with others but that is it. In other countries tragic cases have emerged where close family members say they had no idea their relative was seeking euthanasia until they were told to collect the body. This Bill almost guarantees such cases will arise in the UK — and expecting coercion or pressure to come to light without publicity is extraordinarily naïve.

The High Court’s involvement is trumpeted as a safeguard. However, courts are dependent on the material they see. The Bill requires the judge to question at least one doctor (they do not need to question the patient!), but while the judge can speak to others, there is nothing in the procedure that will warn a judge that they should have any doubts about coercion or how settled the intention to die is. The court will be as dependent as the doctors on the material provided by the applicant: and they may have very little time to deal with the question. Oregon is usually held up as an example of a well-controlled assisted suicide regime, but if the UK has Oregon’s rate, we would be looking at 8000 applications a year, two each week per High Court Judge if spread across them all — if restricted to the Family Division, maybe a dozen a week.

With 15 years experience as a barrister, representing clients in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, I know that courts tends to rely on somebody arguing each side of a dispute. We rarely ask a judge, alone, to work out whether there are flaws in the background when someone is asking for something. Where they do this, e.g. when imposing a freezing order, the absent party may come to court later and object. Here, if the court gets it wrong, the person who might have objected will be dead.

Why are the safeguards so weak? The guiding principle in this Bill is that it should be easy and quick to obtain an assisted death. The drafters do not want people without capacity to be killed, nor do they want coercion or pressure to take place, but they are not worried enough about it to include safeguards that would be expensive, unattractive, or that might slow the process down for the target demographic of the well informed, financially secure, determined applicant: people who don’t want to be ordered to involve their family, or to get a psychiatric assessment they don’t think they need, or to wait during a long cooling off period.

This is designed by and for the determined and independent: people who do not easily imagine worrying that their children will stop visiting if they know they’ll inherit nothing, or being told they need an electric wheelchair but that they are low priority and might be considered next year. The vulnerability of the sick and elderly is ignored in this Bill. Therefore a system has been designed that looks like it has safeguards but where the safeguards are effectively useless.

Sign The Form, Kill Yourself, Protect The NHS?

Sarah McCulloch writes:

Many opponents of assisted dying focus, quite understandably, on the danger of slippery slopes. I’m here to talk about the danger posed by Kim Leadbetter’s Bill if we never change a single word.

We don’t have to ask how NHS staff will manage assisted suicide, because we know. Those of us who work in the Health Service, at least. MPs deserve – indeed, have a duty – to know too.

So, first, the story I tell every time this subject comes up. In 2014, I was a student occupational therapist on a palliative oncology ward. Every one of my patients were dead within three months of my placement ending; they would all have been eligible for assisted suicide under this bill.

When you are that ill, one thing on the checklist is getting asked if you want to be resuscitated when you have cardiac arrest.

Having to resuscitate someone is a difficult and unpleasant task and you will very often wish you had died if you survive (the crash teams will often break multiple bones and the amount of time you spent without oxygen can cause all kinds of disability and additional complications to your existing condition).

We have therefore Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) forms people can sign to say they would like to be left to die in peace. It’s a conversation we have with every patient and it is a life-and-death conversation that you should be sensitive, informative, and neutral about.

Sound familiar? If you want to know how the NHS will treat assisted dying, look no further than how it actually handles DNRs.

As a student, I watched a new patient asked whether he wanted a DNR order. He declined, as he was Catholic. At the MDT later on that week, the staff nurse, who had never met him, asked why he didn’t have a DNR order in his file, and said she would go speak to him.

She thought it was a paperwork error. Why wouldn’t you have a DNR order in his position? There must have been some kind of mistake.

On that same placement, I saw a DNR order in the notes of a patient who had advanced dementia. The reason given was “advanced dementia”; the doctor had just put dashes in the ‘communication with patient’ and ‘communication with relatives’ boxes, and then signed it.

You’re supposed to confirm you have spoken to both. He had not – but only the ward staff ever knew he’d put on the black cap.

When you create processes like this, for which the safeguard is that decision has to be recorded or a KPI goes down a percentage point, and that decision is one that many of the people who actually have to make it are too busy dying to contemplate, clinical staff will step in to make sure the paperwork gets done.

I observed to a colleague the inevitable nudge of asking every patient if they’d like to die by DNR. She justified it by saying that it was emotionally hard on the crash teams to try to resuscitate people with such a low chance of survival.

My life is not a numbers game. Nobody’s is – to them. But bureaucracy weighs the odds, every time.

None of the NHS staff involved in these stories is an angel of death. They aren’t getting money or a thrill from these decisions. They care about their patients and believe on compassionate grounds that their quality of life would be improved if it were just shortened.

But the fact is if you are dependent on clinical staff who think dying be the best thing for you, a thousand micro-decisions will be made to create an environment where if you want to live, you (or your loved ones) implicitly have to justify why you should – not once, but often over and over again, if you are ever given the choice at all. And people are notoriously bad at disputing authority. — If this Bill becomes law, that staff nurse – who assumed a missing DNR order was a paperwork error, not a patient decision – will start asking anyone, everyone, who expresses despair or frustration and their situation if they would like assisted dying.

You’re dying anyway, right? Wouldn’t you like it to be ‘comfortable’, and on your own terms? If you say yes, she’ll bring in the doctor after rounds to witness your first declaration.

Then, after a couple of weeks of observations, tests, and morphine, she’ll arrange for the junior doctor on the ward downstairs to come in and sign off everyone’s second assisted suicide declaration – because you won’t be the only person doing this, in palliative care, and it’s more efficient – and witness them again.

Those declarations will then be handed over to the same trust contract solicitor who handles the court of protection applications. Here’s how that’ll go.

You’ll be told this is “getting authorisation for the drugs because they’re controlled”. The judge will talk to the solicitor and sign them all off, because the paperwork is in order, there are only 18 High Court judges in the Family Division to handle thousands of applications, and it’s surely perfectly reasonable for someone with a terminal illness to want to die without suffering.

(Leadbetter professes to believe that a 75-year-old with oesophageal cancer, who has never used the internet and can barely breathe, will be made available via video link to be examined by the busy judge. She won’t.)

You won’t have to pay for any of this; it’ll be covered by the End of Life register’s continuing healthcare budget. If any of your relatives want to challenge the court application, on the other hand, they’ll have to find and pay their own lawyers.

In the meantime, your care plan will be halted; there’s no point starting negotiations with the local authority if your discharge destination is unknown and you’re going to be dead in a month. (You won’t be, because there’ll be a delay at every stage whilst they try and get hold of the next professional; but you could be, and your social worker is probably off sick anyway.)

Your medication won’t be titrated, and the possibility that you might live longer than six months – because up to a third of people given six months to live beat that prognosis – won’t be planned for. You’ll be given treatment available to hand, but anything more complex, that has to be booked elsewhere and transport arranged, will be held off pending “the outcome of your application”.

You’ll have a DNR order by default – because you want to die – so if you have a heart attack before you can change your mind, that’s unfortunate. The discharge coordinator will start asking whether your death date has been set so they can report it to the daily bed management meeting.

You will stay in hospital and the rehab team will deprioritise you for mobilisation. You’ll likely want to die at home but without a care package in place, you either won’t be safe to discharge (ironically) or they’ll have to arrange your death date around the availability of the hospice bed that someone else has also been waiting to die in.

(At this point, you will make a frustrated joke that the NHS has queues to die, because you’ll be in one.)

Nothing in Leadbetter’s Bill protects against the NHS downgrading your care whilst the ‘safeguards’ on state-assisted suicide run their course. The likelihood that you will just die due to withholding of care before the final affirmative act will rise – and all of these deaths will be recorded as natural. — Meanwhile, the nurses will start asking you about your will arrangements and negotiate with your relatives about when they’re available to come say goodbye (outside of protected time, obviously).

This will all happen impersonally and seemingly inevitably, but all the staff will be super kind and helpful about keeping you updated on the abstract processes rolling along out there somewhere, and you will be grateful to them for everything they do.

After you’ve told all your loved ones that you’ve requested to kill yourself, it’s going to feel like a Rubicon has been crossed; you’ll lie back and passively accept the situation, as people you befriended on the ward or at the day hospital start to disappear as their own death dates approach.

You’ve given informed consent to start the process but you will have no control over how or when it is completed. Lack of staff and resources, you know how it is.

Until the day comes when the nice staff nurse comes in with the doctor, who hands you a syringe driver and a button to push.

They will tell you that you can still change your mind, if you want to. If not, then the doctor is obliged to remain in the area until you are dead – so if you’re approaching shift’s end and struggling to do the deed, they might offer to help you push that button.

You may have misgivings. But you’ll have spent a solid month, or longer, experiencing decreasing quality of life, the withholding of treatment, and having your imminent death normalised by the cheerful staff who are almost all your human contact. No plans have been made for your ongoing care.

You’re going to die anyway. You don’t want to be a burden. Someone needs your bed. More than you. — We don’t have to ask how NHS staff will manage assisted suicide, because we know. We let them do it with DNR orders, and court applications to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from brain-damaged toddlers against the wishes of their parents. We did it with the Liverpool Care Pathway, until the systematic killing of the elderly became a little too obvious and it was cancelled in 2013 after Liverpool Community Health killed the relative of an MP.

LCH has now been shut down. In 2012, it emerged that the commissioners had a KPI for how many people were denied food and water, and paid hospitals to meet it.

You think the NHS isn’t going to do that with assisted suicide? You think we won’t package it up as end-of-life care and patient choice while counting the money saved by your convenient demise? Sign the form, kill yourself, protect the NHS.

Over time, as clinical staff qualify into the new regime, the moral objectionability of asking the terminally ill if they would like to kill themselves will weaken. Eventually, we’ll make it part of the standard protocol for end-of-life care, just like DNR orders.

Patients will have the right to consider their options. They’ll also have the right to patient confidentiality; if they withhold consent to inform their relatives then, in a minority of cases, the first thing you will know about your loved one’s choice is when you’re told they’re dead.

There will be at least one horrifying story of an eighteen-year-old with a learning disability diagnosed with a painful remitting and relapsing condition that becomes terminal who will choose assisted suicide without informing their parents. The parents will sue – and they will lose, because all the procedures will have been followed correctly within the law.

Meanwhile staff who have a moral or clinical objection to assisted suicide will simply not work in palliative care, in the same way professionals who object to abortion do not work in reproductive health. Eventually, the entire field will be staffed by people who are happy to kill you. This will change the vibe considerably.

Assisted suicide is not an individual matter between you and the GP with whom you’ve socialised at the village fête for thirty years. Something like 200,000 people a year will be technically eligible for it.

In the hands of a centralised, state-funded public healthcare system, this is an assembly line of people to be terminated.

Policy choices will be made. Targets will be set. Incentives will be offered. Once the staff who object have moved to other departments, only the opposition of people demonised as religious fanatics will put any obstacles in the way at all.

NHS staff sign away people’s lives all the time, because we are human and we bring our values to work. Quite a lot of them think you should die, and soon. Don’t make it easier.

Strictly Off The Record: Day 31

If you are Douglas McKean, then Oliver Kamm is convinced that you and I are one and the same. I hate to have to tell you that I have never heard of you. He first contacted me about this at lunchtime on 4 July, so General Election day was obviously slow on The Times, and he has promised to involve the Police, from whom I have heard nothing. Anyone with news of any developments, do please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Strictly off the record, of course.

Also please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com with any news on the case of Fr Timothy Gardner OP, which was supposed to have been heard at Newcastle Crown Court in July, but of which I can find no trace. While this is not the only arrow in my quiver, unless Fr Gardner was convicted, then the latest accusations against me have absolutely no credibility, and nor does the propensity evidence that alone secured my conviction in 2020, to breach of the suspended sentence for which I wrongly pleaded guilty in 2021, leading to my imprisonment. Fr Gardner's non-conviction is not the only thing that could vindicate me. But it would do so. Any information would therefore be most gratefully received. Again, strictly off the record, of course.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Justice Delayed: Day 137

Even assuming, and it was far from clear, that the Crown had presented any evidence whatever on the morning of Wednesday 19 June, then no later than the afternoon of Thursday 20 June, I would have been found not guilty unanimously in the time that it took to walk to the jury room and send a note to the judge. On Monday 6 November, the only Prosecution witness did not turn up, having been suspended from the Police. Since then, he has been "asked to resign" because of his conduct of my case. On Friday 14 June, my barrister formally complained.

Lo and behold, on the morning of Sunday 16 June, enough Police Officers turned up at my door to take down an al-Qaeda cell, and behaved roughly as if that were what they were doing. Everyone is laughing, and not at me. Late that night, a nonsense additional charge, quite different from the stated grounds of the arrest, was added, with no expectation that it could possibly stick, but in order to postpone what would have been that week's open-and-shut acquittal. Be at Durham Crown Court on Wednesday 26 February 2025, almost exactly two years, although we dispute the timeline, after the original complaint was allegedly made. When I shall be found not guilty. But the process is the punishment.

Rather than embarrass itself any further, the Crown did not even ask for me to be remanded. Nor did it dispute that the Police had found nothing on my laptop or on my phone, even though the latest allegation therefore cannot be true. And nor did it dispute that its only witness had been sacked from the Police because of my case, or that this latest action against me was a revenge attack for my barrister's complaint, both of which are now on Monday 17 June's record of Newton Aycliffe Magistrates' Court, as is the cleanliness of my devices, of which the Police are nevertheless keeping possession, requiring me to replace them at considerable expense.

I wish that my solicitor had used such terms as "Mafia hit" and "punishment beating". I am using them now. This is a punishment beating for the sacked policeman. And it is a Mafia hit by some Fredo Corleone, because the latest complaint was supposedly made before I had withdrawn from the General Election, a withdrawal that has rendered it pointless in its own terms. Other than the unpaid position to which I was elected unopposed well over a year ago, and which has therefore been kept vacant ever since, I have no intention of contesting another election to public office.

Welcome to the Starmer State, which institutional Britain has treated as the status quo since Keir Starmer became Labour Leader. I am not the only dissident that it persecutes, and things are already getting an awful lot worse now that Starmer is Prime Minister.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Safeguarding Challenge: Day 496

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, currently Nazir Afzal, Amanda Ellingworth, Wesley Cuell, Bishop Paul Mason, Sarah Kilmartin, Jenny Holmes, Sir David Behan, and Sr Una Coogan IBVM.

That purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, currently Gail McGregor, Paul Weatherstone, Fr Christopher Hancock MHM, Canon William Agley, Catherine Dyer, Canon Martin Stempczyk, Canon Peter Leighton VG, Maureen Dale, and Tony Lawless.

And that purely factual statement is acknowledged as such, unless and until it had been expressly repudiated to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, by each and all of the members of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, currently Meriel Anderson, Ian Colling, Andrew Grant, Kirsty McIntyre, Lisa Short, Yvonne Brown, and Petra Scarr.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and the allegation at the base of any outstanding charge has been made in order to incite my suicide. I should emphasise that there is absolutely no risk that I might ever give anyone the satisfaction of my suicide.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The CPS Challenge: Day 496

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service as part of its organised persecution of the opponents and critics of Keir Starmer, which is its principal national priority.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from seeking the position of General Secretary of Unite the Union on a programme including disaffiliation from the Labour Party, a proposal that would be hugely popular two years into a Starmer Government.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a thinktank to strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from establishing a weekly magazine of news and comment, a monthly cultural review, a quarterly academic journal, and perhaps eventually also a fortnightly satirical magazine.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to prevent me from taking journalistic, political or other paid work for fear of losing my entitlement to Legal Aid.

I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service out of the same racism that has caused it to refuse to prosecute the Police Officers in the case of Stephen Lawrence.

And I am morally and factually innocent of every criminal offence with which I have ever been charged, and any outstanding charge is being pursued by the Crown Prosecution Service in order to incite my politically motivated murder, a murder that the CPS has already decided would never lead to any prosecution.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Board, currently Monica Burch, Stephen Parkinson, Simon Jeffreys, Dr Subo Shanmuganathan, and Kathryn Stone.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the CPS senior leadership, currently Tristan Bradshaw, Dawn Brodrick, Mike Browne, Steve Buckingham, Matthew Cain, Gregor McGill, Grace Ononiwu, and Baljhit Ubey.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Audit and Risk Assurance Committee, currently Simon Jeffreys, Stephen Parkinson, Michael Dunn, Deborah Harris, and Dr Subo Shanmuganathan.

Each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the members of the CPS Nominations, Leadership and Remuneration Committee, currently Kathryn Stone, Stephen Parkinson, and Monica Burch.

And each of those eight statements stands as a matter of record unless and until it had been expressly denied to davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by each and all of the 279 members of staff of the CPS North East Area, by definition including, but not restricted to, Chief Crown Prosecutor Gail Gilchrist, and the Area Business Manager, Ian Brown.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Clergy Challenge: Day 1200

I invite each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if he thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me.

Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

The Representatives Challenge: Day 1200

As already stated on the day after my release: "The instant that Labour lost control of Durham County Council, then I was granted an unsolicited tag for more than 10 weeks of future good behaviour. I invite each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, each and every member of Durham County Council, and each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know." The current total is zero.

And I invite each and every Member of Parliament whose constituency fell wholly or partly in County Durham to contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com if they thought that I was factually or morally guilty of any criminal charge that had ever been brought against me. Not legally guilty; Bill Cosby is legally innocent. Factually and morally guilty. No name would be published except at the request of its bearer, but if anyone ever did get in touch, then the readers of this site would be the first to know. The current total is zero.

This post will appear daily until further notice.

Business, Occupation

Well, I am all stocked up for the winter. I do not know where the farmers and gamekeepers were, but that was the best day's poaching in 25 years. Then again, how long shall I be here to enjoy the fruits of it? This does not feel the way people of a certain age describe the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in fact we are closer to the edge than that was. American long-range missiles have already been fired inside Russia.

We do not know that they did, but why would the Russians not have cut undersea telecommunications cables between NATO countries? Finland and Sweden wanted NATO, and this is it. Yet a negotiated settlement is now majority opinion in Ukraine; follow that link, from May 2022, for the only form that that settlement was ever going to take. Unless everyone in the world had been killed first, of course.

My enemies in local politics call me "The Cockroach" because I would survive a nuclear war, but if the nukes had not killed everyone else, then the pensioners, at least, will freeze or starve to death, since the Government has today admitted that its withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment had put an extra 100,000 of them into poverty.

One struggle, brothers and sisters. If you stood with the farmers in India, then stand with the farmers in Britain. If you regret the defeat of the miners, then stand fast against the defeat of the farmers on the same principles. Resist Peter Mandelson's lobbying for the retention of leasehold, and resist his little fanboys' ruse to drive families off the land in favour of the same interests. Remember what Kemi Badenoch did to the farmers when she was Trade Secretary, remember that Nigel Farage consistently voted against help for small farmers when he was a Member of the European Parliament, and remember that Jeremy Clarkson openly bought his farm to avoid inheritance tax on the money that he had largely been paid by the BBC. Do not let them deceive you into giving ammunition to the rest of the Establishment.

And insist on, not least by being, better voices against a Government in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had falsely claimed that her "business occupation" was an economist when signing a legal document to become a director of a charity. Even against the background of a World War, the only way that Rachel Reeves could possibly still be in office is that there is absolutely no one else.