The Importance of Justice

Please sign this, which had it been in place, would have made it impossible to have charged me most recently; as it was, once charged, then it was impossible for me to have been acquitted despite the total lack of evidence. Once we had saved trial by jury, then we shall have many decades of lost liberties to reclaim.

I renew my longstanding invitation to each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council, to each and every member of Durham County Council, to each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, and each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, 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.

Now, as Isabella Machin writes:

If there is someone who understands the importance of justice, it would be Christopher Kinch KC - the former most senior judge at Woolwich Crown Court. Bound to the feared Belmarsh prison by a tunnel, Kinch sat through cases spanning from murders to acts of terrorism for 11 years, which included the renowned Hatton Garden burglary. Yet despite his decade-long seat on the judge's bench, he is losing faith in the system itself, having faced years of tribulations from backlogged trials, as he criticises Justice Secretary David Lammy's plans to axe jury trials.

The 72-year-old says the highly scrutinised plans will unnecessarily put the judges 'in the firing line' for potential abuse, while the plans won't actually save any money. The retired judge's voice has been echoed by members of the UK legal community as the Government, notably led by the former Director of Public Prosecutions, moves ahead with the plans under Lammy's steering. More than 3,200 lawyers, including barristers and retired judges, have called for the proposals to be dropped - which would replace juries with one single judge in cases where a sentencing may be up to three years. This comes as Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr publicly criticised the plans, calling for yet another U-turn by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

For Kinch, he fears judges will be put in danger if handed the onus of determining the guilty verdict, while he believes the chances of wrongful conviction grows as the choice drops from resting on the shoulders of 12 strangers to one judge. 'I just don't see that there are going to be huge savings that would justify the upheaval the proposals will cause,' Kinch tells the Daily Mail. 'And the potential loss of confidence when you have one judge making a decision instead of 12 members of the community - who are completely independent, chosen at random and come in what for me has always been the essence of democratic involvement in the criminal courts.'

Kinch believes the current system upholds democracy, as 'there is no other organ or institution in the country who trusts lay people in the same way'. He adds: 'We wouldn't have kept jury trials for as long as we have if it didn't work or people didn't trust it. I think many people will trust 12 strangers over one judge.' It is a decision, Kinch believes, is in complete contradiction to Lammy's 2017 report - named 'The Lammy Review' - that concluded racial prejudice was prevalent in the UK's criminal justice system.

In contradiction to recent events, the report heralded the importance of juries, calling them 'the guardians' of the 'principle that the law must be applied impartially' - and christened them the 'success story of our justice system'. This acclaim was justified in the report by 'successive studies' that highlight 'on average, jury verdicts are not affected by ethnicity', while it called for a 'change in the diversity of the magistracy and especially the judiciary'.

'One of the things that makes these plans, which will diminish the whole standing of the Crown Court, so surprising is that it is coming from Lammy. The judiciary is still predominantly people like me who are getting a bit pale,' Kinch says. 'It was only a few years ago that Lammy was saying the presence of people from ethnic minorities being in the jury was the only effective safeguard for fairness in the criminal justice system. This is because you couldn't necessarily trust the individual prejudices of a single judge.'

The proposals stem from a report by the retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Brian Leveson, commissioned in a bid to cut costs and halt current caseload projects reaching 100,000 by 2028. The measures, announced in December as part of the Courts and Tribunals Bill, would scrap jury trials and pass extra power to the magistrates as their maximum sentencing range gets a raise to 18 months, up from 12 months currently. The Bill was passed by 304 votes to 203 this month and has been criticised by Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, who argued juries 'put ordinary men and women of every walk of life at the heart of justice'. 

Meanwhile the retired judge raises concerns about the safety of his former colleagues - whose decision may receive significant backlash from family members or the convicts themselves. 'I can't speak for the judges who are still in harness but I think many of them probably won't particularly welcome this. They certainly won't welcome the scrutiny that will come afterwards,' Kinch says. 'Imagine if a judge is actually acquitting someone in a notorious case because the evidence isn't there as far as they are concerned. Someone is going to be saying this is where the judge lives or this is where the kids go to school.'

This comes as judges' fear for their own personal safety, both inside and outside the courts, significantly rises, according to a survey by UCL Judicial Institute. Judges' concerns around their personal safety while in court grew from 27 per cent in 2022 to 39 per cent in 2024, while it increased from 19 per cent to 26 per cent out of court for the more than 6,000 judges surveyed. This comes amid Greg Hazeltine, 43, being jailed for three years after throwing a radiator at Judge Patrick Perusko at Milton Keynes Family Court in 2023. He then proceeded to repeatedly punch Judge Perusko in the courtroom.

The threat of this violence, Kinch says, will potentially both deter people from entering the profession and also threaten 'jury management skills' as new recruits 'won't be learning on the job'. He continues: 'I've had conversations with people starting out their career who questioned whether they'd have applied if they'd known that they'd be sitting with a jury doing cases on their own. There is therefore also a danger those jury management skills wither as they won't be learning on the job.' This one-man-judge-show may also 'lose the security and strength' of a jury verdict, the retired judge says, which has 'served us well for so long' - and therefore raising the chances of a wrong guilty ruling.  

Kinch adds the opinions on a case, and therefore verdict, would 'quite likely' be different between different judges, adding: 'When I gave different judges the set of facts of a case at Woolwich, it was quite likely you'll get one judge on the left choosing one verdict and the one on the right taking a contrary view. It obviously increases the chance of an individual variation of a verdict if you just have the one judge.'

There are 1.3 million prosecutions in the UK every year, in which 10 per cent funnel through a Crown Court. Through the reforms, the current three out of 10 cases sat with a jury will drop to two out of 10. Crown Court backlogs are driven by years of budget reductions, court closures, maintenance backlogs and limits to the number of days courts are permitted to sit. However Kinch says existentially cutting juries out is a redundant solution, which is fuelled by the dropping of public funding by 22.4 per cent from 2009/2010 to 2022/2023 - despite the economy growing by 11.5 per cent over the same period. He questions the Government's justification for the slashing of juries, which includes time being wasted on the swearing in of jury members.

Kinch adds that cases may mount higher as judges will have to dedicate time to determining verdicts, rather than getting on to the next case as the jury deliberates. 'It doesn't take very long to swear in people for two weeks of jury service for trials lasting between two to four days. The jury manager's questioning on potential timetable clashes all happens in about 10 minutes,' Kinch explains. 'When the jury goes out to deliberate, the judge thanks the advocates and gets on to the next case on the production line. 'But if the judge has to go off to consider their decision, they are going to leave that courtroom empty. They will have to articulate their reasons clearly to the members of the public and press, which might take the rest of the day or overnight.'

The giving of a verdict is a responsibility, he says, he would never have wanted as an active judge. Notably, Woolwich Crown Court would not have been impacted by the jury cuts due to the severity of the cases covered. 'As a judge your job isn't to get a conviction or an acquittal but it is our job to get verdicts,' Kinch says. 'Quite early on as a judge I stopped trying to second guess juries. I struggle to think of a case where the jury reached a decision that I couldn't understand. I've always been relieved not to give the last verdict.' 

Despite the adrenaline of the courtroom, Kinch says he is quite happy to be retired to 'dog-walker-in-chief' after hanging up his wig in 2024. Instead he is content on working on his 'cooking repertoire', as he swaps his previous responsibility of determining the future of convicts to now determining the future of his culinary endeavours. 

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: 'With victims facing unacceptably long waits for justice after years of delays in our courts, we make no apology for pressing ahead with our plans to reform the system based on Sir Brian Leveson's independent review. These vital reforms have never been a cost-saving exercise, they are about creating a sustainable system that will speed up justice for victims and bring the creaking court system into the 21st century – backed by record investment.'

How Liberalism Became A Joke

Although he gives Keir Starmer too much credit, Aaron Bastani writes:

There’s a compelling argument that Ed Davey is the most successful Liberal Democrat leader of all time. While it’s true that Nick Clegg became Deputy Prime Minister in 2010 — the first time his party held power in Westminster — that came after electoral disappointment. Less than a week earlier, the Liberal Democrats had lost five seats, despite gaining almost a million votes. Under Davey’s stewardship, though, the party stormed to more than 70 MPs in 2024, its best ever performance. The last time its Liberal forebear had done that well was back in 1923, when Herbert Asquith was calling the shots.

Davey, one might conclude, had joined illustrious company, becoming an heir to the venerable tradition of Lloyd George and the young Churchill. Yet few would associate the weighty hand of history with today’s MP for Kingston and Surbiton. Remember, Davey’s most noteworthy moment at the last election wasn’t a striking policy proposal or a clippable statement of principle, but his repeated tumbles off a paddle board. Over the weekend, at his party’s spring conference in York, the Lib Dem leader continued his unique brand of guerilla marketing. Taking to the stage to “Daddy Cool”, the former Secretary of State was later seen “dad dancing” to Chappell Roan. Forget Keynes and Beveridge; even the hinterland and gravitas of Charlie Kennedy now feels as distant as the Edwardians.

More to the point, and given the meteoric rise of both Reform and the Greens, one might ask: why does Davey persist with the slapstick persona? A decade ago the Lib Dems, past masters of the by-election upset, would have fancied their chances in Gorton and Denton. Last month, by contrast, they lost their deposit. It feels, in short, like almost everything in British politics has changed over the past year and a half — except for the Liberal Democrats.

Advocates for Davey’s brand of leadership might reply that whatever one’s views on his style, the results speak for themselves. Beyond his party’s success at the last election, Nowcast and YouGov predict further gains at the next one, the latter putting them on 85 seats.

But is that really so impressive given that the Lib Dems have long been Westminster’s third party, and that the big two are in freefall? While it’s true that Davey made hay in 2024, cruising home in Tory strongholds like Chichester, Witney, and Guildford, he has not managed to make comparable inroads into Labour territory. Instead, it seems that everyone but the Lib Dems is ready to feed on the carcass of Keir Starmer’s majority, from the Greens and SNP to Reform and Plaid Cymru. Rather than dancing to Gen Alpha bangers, Davey should be asking why Farage and Polanski are making the political weather instead of him.

One explanation is that such ambition is institutionally off-limits. The Lib Dems have learned the hard way — principally from the doomed SDP-Liberal alliance of the 1980s and Clegg’s disappointment in 2010 — that conservative gradualism is better than radical failure. In 2024, Davey delivered on the former, and then some, with a relentless focus on Tory seats in the south of England, especially those that contain a Gail’s bakery. But given the sudden rise of Zack Polanski, who has taken the Greens to more than 200,000 members and a by-election win for the first time in their history, that now feels like a limited strategy.

Perhaps Davey habitually affects a jocular manner because liberalism itself has become an unserious worldview — so much so that any Lib Dem leader would struggle embody gravitas. Liberalism is bereft of thick ties across society; nor does it offer a deeper sense of meaning to its devotees, something one certainly can’t say for Reform or the Greens. Today’s liberals, in short, believe in little beyond the dying status quo. Their post-Cold War triumph was so utterly overwhelming that, almost two decades after the Global Financial Crisis, they lack the tools to change course.

Adrian Wooldridge, author of Centrists of the World Unite!, provides an insightful explanation of how liberalism conquered all while losing its mojo. As he wrote for UnHerd, liberals “reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation”, yet are “now incapable of running the world which they have made.” It should therefore be little surprise that, over the last decade, the Liberal Democrats have been perennially negative: stop Brexit, stop Corbyn, stop Boris — and now stop Farage. They can’t stand for anything because this is the world they wanted. And it sucks.

That applies to both pillars of what Wooldridge persuasively labels “double liberalism”. Why double? Because it combines the excesses of economic neoliberalism, increasingly pervasive since the early Eighties, with the dismantling of any conception of a shared moral universe, a change that goes back to the 1960s. It is the combination of these two liberalisms that political and media elites have in mind when they talk about the “centre” — an increasingly meaningless concept, not least because it is neither the middle ground of public sentiment nor popular. “The strength of the post-liberal argument,” Wooldridge notes, “is that it recognises this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.” What is presented by elites as a politics of moderation often animates resentment and even hatred. The leadership class of the Long Nineties, Tony Blair more than anyone, appears incapable of grasping that.

Yet, left to itself, post-liberalism also gives rise to wantonly self-destructive pathologies. If Davey is incapable of taking himself seriously, then Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage can, on a range of issues, appear outright deranged. How else do you explain the allure of the MAGA-sphere for so much of the British Right? We can ascribe some of the blame to the demise of an ideologically curious liberalism. As a result of this intellectual seppuku, politics on the extremes have become ever more puerile. I say this as a socialist: a historically literate politics of the actual centre only serves to refine my own views.

Consider the economy. For all the fanfare around Elon Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE unit, the Brookings Institute recently suggested that America’s fiscal situation is actually deteriorating. In other words, Trump, for all of his radical, disruptive rhetoric, has retained the default platform of the Republican Party since Reagan: deficit-funded tax cuts and rising public debt. As long as the petrodollar exists, that strategy might remain viable for Washington. But it certainly isn’t for the Europeans and Brits, because we don’t benefit from having the world’s reserve currency. That Reform is still barking about a British DOGE — even now — should terrify us all. The enthusiasm underscores the extent to which we are the backwater franchise for a political operation already discredited across the Atlantic. And because liberals at home are ideologically bankrupt too — or, worse still, don’t actually care about ideas — imitation of the Americans still passes for radical, cutting-edge thinking.

It’s a similar story with foreign policy. The radical Right is becoming progressively unmoored from reality over Iran and the wider region, partly because the centre has no credible blueprint of its own. At the end of February, Farage was as eager as anyone to become embroiled in yet another overseas conflict, a position he quickly disavowed. The same was true of Badenoch, who initially demanded strikes in the Middle East. Matt Goodwin, who finished second as the Reform candidate in Gorton and Denton, said he was willing to pay more to fill up his car if that was the cost of depriving Iran of a nuclear weapon. Such opportunism has been exposed only because, on this one occasion, centrists — specifically Keir Starmer — took a position founded on reason rather than complacent liberal interventionism. As a result, and unusually for his time in government, Starmer finds himself aligned with public opinion.

Perhaps a decisive position on the war in Gaza would have achieved something similar — especially had that position been taken earlier on. Yet the Iran response remains instructive. On the one occasion that Labour has broken with the liberal default of recent decades, Labour has Farage on the back foot. It’s strange indeed to see both Richard Tice and Tony Blair knocking a Labour prime minister. This may also be part of a wider pattern, or at least the start of it. Before dancing the Macarena last weekend, Davey argued that the entirety of Britain’s nuclear deterrent should be built at home. It’s important to remember that our Trident missiles are actually from a “shared pool” housed across the Atlantic. Green shoots of pragmatism? Maybe.

Don’t expect a transformation, though. It’s often suggested that contemporary Left-wing politicians aren’t as talented as Tony Benn, and that their Right-wing counterparts are less erudite than Enoch Powell. But why wouldn’t they be, when the ideological school that reigned supreme in recent decades has been so disinterested in ideas? Peter Mandelson is perhaps the most grubby example here, but there’s also Justin Trudeau, who led a country afflicted by a drug epidemic while insisting on the gender-neutral term “peoplekind”, and Kamala Harris — whose presidential bid was a series of meandering speeches and clips of her dancing on social media.

Looking back on his rivals, it is obvious why Trump prevailed not once but twice. While trying to lean into the attention economy, rather than defend politics as a serious vocation, centrists were a handmaid to the very populism they claim to abhor. Trump’s endless, shambling monologues — despite being occasionally funny — were only captivating because what the alternative was a world of clipped soundbites devoid of personality or political substance. Ironically, this also fuelled the rise of Barack Obama, whose singular ability to speak capsized the Clinton campaign ahead of 2008. But Obama was the outlier, and Clinton the default for double liberalism. Even then, there was little of substance to what the senator for Illinois actually said.

All of this helps explain the allure of Mark Carney. The Canadian PM’s recent Davos speech was both brave and intellectually coherent. Notably, Carney acknowledged some of liberalism’s failings over recent decades. But his words were conspicuous precisely because liberalism so rarely produces politicians of substance. For Wooldridge, there is little to read into this shortage of great statesmen. But there’s an argument that it’s structural, emerging from the inherent contradictions of the tradition. Carl Schmitt, a critic of liberalism, claimed it seeks to “dissolve the political into ethics and economics”. Should it really surprise us, then, that given the culmination of the liberal project meant the abolition of politics, competent exponents of the craft would gradually vanish too?

So what might a reanimated liberal politics for the mid-21st century actually look like? First, instinctive complacency would be replaced by an acknowledgement of what has gone wrong. In Europe, particularly, we may be in the foothills of our own Century of Humiliation.

On the level of politics, the priorities should be clear: sovereignty is a tool for solving problems — and national identities matter. People want a state that protects them and that stands as a source of authority; if it fails to be either they view it as a useless, wasteful encumbrance. The national community is real. That doesn’t mean forsaking your fellow man in other parts of the world, but it does mean accepting the nation-state as the primary locus of political action.

The policies of a new liberalism should be an extension of such thinking. The wealthy should do their duty to others and their country by accepting the need for a new economic settlement. Wealth is, essentially, collectively produced — and a liberalism that is indifferent to exploitation deserves to die. A renewed liberal politics, retaining its old aim of allowing individuals to be the authors of their own lives, must also ensure that access to the basics is guaranteed: cheap housing, transport, cheap energy. Nobody is reading the collected works of Jane Austen, or learning Mandarin, when they are living in their overdraft.

A great advantage of democracy, of course, is that systems can self-correct. Yet even here there are warning signs. Some centrist commentators have claimed that the Westminster system should become less, rather than more, democratic. Unconvinced by the merits of party primaries, which keep politicians on their toes, they argue for a political class that is even more insulated from the public. It’s ironic that advocates of a worldview built on reason, public deliberation and Enlightenment values often argue for the kind of decadence you might associate with the Hapsburgs or the late Ottoman Empire.

Fortunately, however, such voices are becoming quieter. Given the benefits that serious-minded liberalism has brought to all of us — from defending the rule of law to upholding freedom of expression — its reinvigoration, in a form fit for the present day, would be a welcome one. Just don’t expect Ed Davey to lead the charge.

Before The Plough

At first glance, abortion would seem to have become much more partisan in Parliament than it used to be, especially in the House of Lords. But if the majority of Conservative Peers who did not attend had turned up and voted against the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, then it would have been defeated. Only 10 of the current 23 Lords Spiritual could find nothing more pressing to do, either. At least none of those voted in favour. Yes, the women in question are in desperate circumstances. There is already a partial defence of diminished responsibility, reducing murder to voluntary manslaughter. But voluntary manslaughter still carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, just not the mandatory one that came with a conviction for murder. Quite right, too, as Neil O’Brien writes:

In the Fallow Field

I went down on my hands and knees

Looking for trees, 

Twin leaves that, sprung from seeds,

Were now too big

For stems much thinner than a twig.

These soon with chamomile and clover

And other fallow weeds

Would be turned over; 

And I was thinking how

It was a pity someone should not know

That a great forest fell before the plough. 

 - Andrew Young 

* * * * *

I nearly died before I lived. I was born (in the early hours of the morning) with the umbilical cord caught round my neck, and the midwife went into a massive panic. It got untangled in the end, but I was pretty close to never knowing what Larkin called “the million-petalled flower of being here”. No wedding day ceilidh. No first kiss. No seventh birthday fireworks. Never smelling newly cut grass, or fresh bread, or roasting coffee. We are all lucky to have caught the bus to ever existing.

For some it’s a close-run thing. Our son (6) is the fruit of our eighth and was-always-going-to-be final round of IVF. When we did the pregnancy test, it was negative. We were heartbroken. But looking at it a little later (which you should never do) it showed a faint line. A tiny ribbon of hope in the wind. We tested again the next day. A faint, just visible line. He caught the bus. He sometimes drives us crazy, but this morning he was attacking me in the kitchen with a soft dinosaur, and he was happy because the tooth fairy brought him a pound, and I am so glad he is with us. 

Say you were to ask me this very strange question: when did you try hardest not to drop something? I could answer easily. After our daughter was born - after incredible endurance from my wife - our little daughter was cleaned up by the doctors, then given to me to carry back across the room, to snuffle on her mother’s breast. My first responsibility as a father. I have never been so careful not to drop something. She was only really a couple of handfuls then, but already wholly perfect.

* * * * *

Last night the House of Lords voted for an amendment which will decriminalise self-induced abortions all the way up the point of birth. So you will be able to kill a baby the day before it is about to be born, and face no legal consequences. This is monstrous. There is no magic that happens as you pass down the birth canal. There is no flash of light as your soul descends. There is no moral difference whatsoever between a baby the day before birth, and a baby a day after. The thought that someone could poison or smash up the body of a baby and face no legal consequences is appalling. That’s an overused word these days so let me try again. The thought should make you sick.

Advocates for this appalling change play silly word games, but if the law banning late abortions is no longer enforced, it effectively won’t exist. And everyone knows what is coming next. This amendment will result in horrific amateur home abortions. Some will be forced on women by men. But either way it will be horrific. And then the same people who advocated for this will then say we should “tidy up” the mess they made and allow the same things to happen in clinical settings too.

This is not even being done as a stand-alone new law, but as an amendment tacked on to the Crime and Policing Bill which the government originally said is intended to “protect the public and our town centres from antisocial behaviour, retail crime and shop theft”. There have been no impact assessments, no public consultation, and almost no public debate. Polling shows people are overwhelmingly against abortion up to the day of birth. There were just 45 minutes of backbench debate on it in the Commons. But the law will be changed anyway.

The people pushing this - like Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Tonia Antoniazzi, are perfectly clear about where they stand. All conversations end in thought-terminating slogans, like: “my body my choice”. But this is nonsense. Yes, it is your body, but it also someone else’s body too. What about their rights? Antoniazzi is at least perfectly clear. Times Radio host, Stig Abell asked her: “Any woman could end a pregnancy at any time, 35 weeks, 36 weeks, 37 weeks, without committing an offence. And you are comfortable with that?” Tonia replied: “Yes I am.”

Now, up to a point these things are debatable. When do you become a person? At the moment of conception? Or when you begin to think and feel, mid-way through pregnancy? Until last night the law had settled, uneasily, on the latter. But no one was pretending that full term babies were not people with rights. Until now.

One irony is that the government originally said that the Crime and Policing Bill would also “tackle the epidemic of… violence against women and girls that stains our society”. Violence against girls? Now you can kill a baby girl and face no consequence. Perhaps your husband doesn’t want a girl. Unlucky her to have been dealt the wrong chromosome. The reason you kill the baby doesn’t matter, there will be no penalty. Would this happen? It already is doing. The NHS says that there is clear evidence that sex-selective abortions are happening already in some communities.

None of this is abstract. In 2012 Sarah Catt was jailed for killing a baby at 39 weeks. The court said she took a “cold, calculated” decision for her own convenience and self-interest. She took pills at 39 weeks and gave birth, and never revealed where the body was. The court said she had a history of deceit and concealment. The judge said she did it because she thought the man with whom she was having an affair was the father. From now on, that will be absolutely fine. There will be no prosecution for doing this.

* * * * * *

Most bad things happen not because people are like: “yay, let’s do something terrible”, but because we do what human beings are best at - we look the other way. From the holocaust to the mass inhumane treatment of animals, people look the other way. I am no exception. I wonder how much of the meat I have eaten in my life was raised in conditions of grotesque cruelty? I have never marched to stop the war, although several of our recent wars have brought nothing but utter disaster. And I have generally tried to stay out of the abortion debate. I would rather not think about it. But this is now ridiculous. Murdering people is bad, and there is no debate that these babies who can now be killed are people, just like you and me. Am I not a man and a brother? I am not a religious person, but I do think killing babies is bad. Never mind the fact that they can think and feel. They can live. These days three in ten babies born at 22 weeks will survive. By 26 weeks it is 80 percent - and rising.

* * * * *

While they were at it last night, the Lords also voted to keep abortion pills-by-post, and rejected plans to return to requiring a medical assessment to prevent coercion. We already know that this is being abused by bad men. In December 2024, Stuart Worby was jailed after spiking a woman’s drink and ending the life of her unborn child at 15 weeks gestation using abortion pills obtained through the pills-by-post scheme.

We also know pills-by-post is causing real problems. A FOI request in 2022 to six ambulance services found a 64% increase in ambulance call-outs from women concerned after taking abortion pills. A study found that 10,000 women, or 1 in 17, of those who took abortion pills at home prescribed by the NHS, required hospital treatment in 2020.

* * * * *

In January new data showed that the number of abortions in England and Wales had risen to a record high in 2023 - a 10% increase on the previous year. That brought the total to just under 300,000 a year across the UK - equivalent to the population of a city the size of Leicester every year.

Number of abortions, residents of England and Wales, 1969 to 2023

Someone said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and as rare as possible”, but it is no longer rare. We are close to one abortion for every two births. I have written before about offering more support to people who want to have children. But it isn’t the number of people that conceive that has gone down. Compared to 1968 we have a quarter fewer births, but actually more conceptions. Abortion makes up the difference.

Births and abortions in England and Wales

Number

 

of Live Births

Number

 

of abortions

Chart: Neil O'BrienSource: ONS, Abortion statistics for England and Wales: 2023 and Births in England and Wales 2024Get the dataEmbed Download imageCreated with Datawrapper

When I look at the charts above, I think of the lines from Andrew Young that I quoted at the top.

It was a pity someone should not know

That a great forest fell before the plough.

300,000 people a year never get to be born. More than ten million lives have been ended this way since 1967. They could have lived, but will never get to see the sun rise, never taste ice-cream and never feel a hug. Left alone they would have mainly grown and lived. But they had no voice, and we took that all away from them.

The clinching argument in the 1960s for the legalisation of abortion was to avoid “back street” and home abortions. But now the advocates of further liberalisation are backing DIY abortions in order to push on with their agenda: pills by post with no checks, and no prosecution for late abortions as long as you do it yourself and no clinician is involved. This will lead to disasters and then the advocates of it will come back for more.

I voted against these changes and will vote to repeal them if I get a chance. I don’t have many original thoughts to add to this long-running and emotive debate. But one thing I think is missing is this. There are loads of people who would like to adopt a baby. Particularly among those who cannot have children - which is a growing group as we all delay having kids. The number of people who would adopt a baby is larger than those who would adopt or foster grown children. The people who take on bigger children are heroes and deserve medals. But there are many people who don’t feel able to do this, but are longing for children and would adopt a baby. Meanwhile there are women who are pregnant and don’t feel they can bring up a child.

There must be a way to solve one problem with the other? To offer people the support they need to have a baby and a home for him or her to live in and be loved in? Shouldn’t people be given that choice and offered the help to make it? People say that every child should be a wanted child, but there are many people who want and don’t have. My former colleague Michael Gove recalls how his adoptive mother told him: “You didn't grow under my heart, you grew in it”. I know quite a few people who had the same love from an adoptive parent. I think we have massively lost our way here. There are lots of things that are complicated, but killing babies is wrong. There are lots of people who were on the road to life, but will never get to live. But they have no voice and we - including me - don’t like to think about it. So we look the other way. That’s got to change.

Stronger The Longer You Look

Yesterday, the Covid-19 Inquiry has found that people with acute or chronic heart conditions“avoided or delayed attending healthcare setting during the pandemic” so as “to avoid putting pressure on the NHS”. Now imagine if there were assisted suicide “to avoid putting pressure on the NHS”.

Today, Lord Falconer rejected the notion of a minimum age, any minimum age, for a child interpreter whose parent was discussing assisted suicide with a doctor.

And from the country where it has gone furthest, so that there are even small signs of a turning of the tide, Ramona Coelho reminds us of what is still at stake:

A man diagnosed with metastatic cancer initially expressed interest in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Though the treating team determined he lacked capacity and was being sedated for pain management, a MAiD practitioner “vigorously rouse[d]” him to ask if he wanted MAiD. Withholding sedation, the practitioner accepted mouthing “yes,” nodding and blinking in response to questions as capable consent. The MAiD practitioner then facilitated a virtual second assessment, conducted in the same way, and MAiD was administered immediately after.

This active displacement of clinical care, as documented in government reports, is illustrative of a broader trend – MAiD is shifting the focus of medicine from the treatment of suffering to the elimination of the suffering patient. This shift does not reflect the intentions of every clinician, but it reflects structural pressures that are increasingly shaping practice. Canada is approaching 100,000 MAiD deaths since legalization 10 years ago. That number marks a quiet but profound transformation in how medicine understands suffering, autonomy and its own purpose. What was introduced as an exceptional measure is now a normalized part of clinical care.

Assisted dying is often framed as compassion for the suffering and preservation of a patient’s autonomy. But what happens when assisted dying becomes embedded in clinical decision-making and clinicians shift from focusing on healing to evaluating whether suffering justifies death? If practitioners are rushing to MAiD, even when other physicians have determined a lack of capacity to consent, does that sound like preserving autonomy?

In Canada, MAiD is legally exempt from homicide and assisted suicide laws under the Criminal Code. Health Canada maintains MAiD should not count as a cause of death, yet it is now Canada’s fourth leading cause of death. Many MAiD requests cite fear of being a burden, loneliness, or social isolation as drivers of suffering. These are not medical diseases but signals of social vulnerability. / MAiD should not count as a cause of death, yet it is now Canada’s fourth leading cause of death. / As a family physician caring for marginalized patients and as a member of Ontario’s MAiD Death Review Committee, I see how structural pressures appear in practice. Government reviews document similar patterns.

In one reported case, a man with cerebral palsy living in long-term care voluntarily stopped eating and drinking, leading to renal failure and dehydration. He was deemed eligible for MAiD under what is called Track 1 because his death was considered “reasonably foreseeable.” No psychiatric expertise was consulted despite evidence of psychosocial distress.

To provide MAiD, clinicians must assess whether the condition is grievous and irremediable, whether death is reasonably foreseeable for Track 1, and whether capacity and voluntariness are present. These are legal judgments layered onto clinical practice, leading to wide variation in clinician interpretation.

Interpretations of “reasonably foreseeable death” vary. Canadian law does not require terminal illness to meet that criterion. Some clinicians consider death foreseeable with a five-year prognosis. Others accept decisions to stop eating, drinking or taking medications as evidence of decline, making death foreseeable.

Social conditions also shape MAiD requests. Patients may seek assisted death after losing caregivers, entering long-term care or when they cannot access palliative or community supports. These situations should trigger aggressive efforts to improve care rather than being reframed as intolerable suffering requiring MAiD.

When people lack supports to live, assisted dying can become a structurally constrained choice rather than a voluntary one. A choice made in the absence of realistic alternatives is different from one made in the presence of robust supports.

Health Canada encourages proactive MAiD discussions and referrals for MAiD by objecting physicians. This creates clinical pathways that subtly direct patients toward assisted death rather than toward expanded care.

Over time, this changes professional identity. Medicine traditionally demands persistence with patients through uncertainty, slow recovery and complex suffering. MAiD introduces a different model, asking clinicians to decide when suffering should no longer be treated and when life may be ended instead. The deeper danger is cultural and professional. With MAiD’s integration into our system, medicine may shift from asking, “How do we treat suffering?” to “When is suffering severe enough to justify death?”

If Canada continues expanding assisted dying, it must answer hard questions. Are we expanding access to death faster than access to care? Are we ending lives prematurely when people could have flourished with adequate suicide prevention and support?

A health system that offers assisted death without ensuring access to housing, mental health care, disability supports, palliative care and community supports risks changing medicine in ways we may not recognize until it is too late.

Doing right by the law, and doing right by our patients: The ‘means available to relieve suffering’ safeguards in MAiD Canadians deserve access to robust and timely responses to their MAiD inquiries. Most important among these are conversations and supports intended to relieve suffering, that may ease or address the person’s desire to die.

And Kevin McKenna also strikes an important note:

The Scottish Parliament voted firmly last night to reject Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying bill. It’s the third time legislation such as this has been defeated in the devolved era. Mr McArthur now says he’ll continue the struggle.

On the day a politician tried to impose a culture of death on Scotland, we were reminded once more of the state’s contempt for the living. A year after the country’s first drug consumption facility was opened, we learned that deaths from addiction in Scotland have risen by 8%.

When Scotland was first revealed to be the drug death capital of Europe, the outrage and sense of national shame dominated the national conversation for months. Now, we have become so numb to their effect that we simply shrug, look down and shuffle away. The annual increases in premature deaths of our most vulnerable people is one of the Scottish Government’s most catastrophic failures.

Last year, they were offered the chance to remedy this by passing the Right to Recovery Bill. Instead, the SNP and the Bearsden Bolsheviks in the Scottish Greens chose to reward the addiction quangos and the sprawling executive class that feeds on them.

Many of those who had voted in favour of Mr McArthur’s bill were responsible for killing the Right to Recovery bill. There’s grim symmetry in this. The addiction death numbers laid bare how the professional hand-wringers at Holyrood really view Scotland’s marginalised people. By choosing to allow them to keep themselves topped up with Class A narcotics the Scottish Government tells them that their lives, quite literally, are worthless. This was underscored a few months later when many of them chose to reject Ash Regan’s Prostitution Bill.

The people whom these laws would have protected are those most at risk of feeling worthless. They have no advocates. There’s no one to tell them that they’re valued and worthy of love in a country which denies them basic support and protection. As such, they’d have been among those most at risk of Liam McArthur’s icy tap on the shoulder.

Within minutes of his suicide bill being rejected by Holyrood, a nauseating narrative began predictably to emerge. You’d better get used to it. This was Holyrood at its finest, we’ll be told. The contributions from the floor were sensitive and thoughtful. It was so, so emotional. Look at the nice, kind politicians: people in their families get sick and die too. Bless them.

Let’s be honest here: there was little that was uplifting about this at all. It was a sickening display of narcissistic exceptionalism. A cohort of affluent, middle-class actors seeking group hugs and sympathy by weaponising the deaths of their loved ones to make a bad law that would principally target those with none of their choices and privileges.

And besides: how heartfelt can it be when you can’t speak about it without recourse to notes that have been diced and spliced by the party advisory? Do they think the pain of seeing their family members’ dying occurs at a level above and beyond that endured by millions of families without the resources and funds to choose a neat and tidy, pre-packed death?

In other countries where Assisted Dying has swollen to become a state-sponsored instrument of eugenics, the feeling of being a burden on your family and society has featured heavily in those seeking death. Those living in multi-deprivation, or who feel dehumanised by a violent partner (usually male) are especially vulnerable to these feelings.

Those living with the reality of mental and physical impairment also face jeopardy. When cost considerations are factored into our valuation of human life, the vulnerable and infirm, especially those with no-one to speak for them, begin to feel that their existence is subject to the approval of the state.

The Glasgow Disability Alliance, like all the other groups representing disabled people, opposed this bill. They said it would “mark a huge change in society and create an existential threat to disabled people”.

If you’re inclined to join the adulation and emotionalism about how our MSPs conducted themselves last night, consider this: 57 of them chose to disregard the lived experience and fears of Scotland’s disabled community and voted instead for a primitive bill that would have made these people feel less human.

If you encounter any of these 57 during the Scottish election, feel free to quiz them on this. Most of them will talk about social justice and health inequality and homelessness and child poverty during their hustings events. Ask them how they reconcile this with their eagerness to back legislation which would, inevitably, come for those living the reality of such conditions.

The arrogance of LibDem MSP Liam McArthur became a factor in the failure of his bill. In his overweening confidence he and his supporters rejected qualifications that might have made it palatable, such as provisions for conscientious objection of healthcare professionals or specialist training in identifying coercion. Hospices and care homes would not be permitted to opt out from offering suicide.

This betrayed the fundamental inhumanity at the root of Mr McArthur’s bill. Some Christian churches operate several of these facilities, representing a significant cost saving to the state. He and his supporters would rather see these shut down than countenance any resistance to the state’s diktat.

Those hoping that Scotland can now concentrate on improving palliative care for those approaching the end of their lives are kidding themselves. This country’s ruling elite have consistently refused to help the living who are suffering the ravages of addiction and women driven into prostitution by poverty and male cruelty.

Do you really think that the Scottish Greens and the SNP will spend money on helping those at the end of their lives? Behave yourselves. Assisted Dying was always an attractive, cost-effective alternative than having to spend money on people they loathed when they were in good health.

I pity Liam McArthur. What a bleak existence he must lead. Imagine studying hard to gain your honours degree at one of the world’s finest universities and then labouring for years to persuade the public that you’ll serve their needs better than your opponents. And when you become a decision-maker in your country’s legislative chamber, you dedicate five years of your life to this desolate and barren undertaking.

Mr McArthur has pledged to continue his campaign. I would entreat him instead to use his talents and privileges improving the lives of the living, especially those lacking influence, money and basic human dignity.

But writing from Canada, Jonathon Van Maren is much more upbeat:

On Tuesday, the Scottish Parliament voted to reject a bill to legalize assisted suicide in a 69-57 vote, with one abstention. The failure of the suicide bill comes after a massive push by euthanasia campaigners to shepherd the legislation across the finish line; just days ago, sponsoring MSP Liam McArthur insisted that the bill was “bullet-proof” after 175 amendments were accepted during the final week of deliberations.

This is the second major loss for suicide campaigners in less than six months, with another significant defeat likely looming. On November 23, Slovenia’s assisted suicide law was overturned by national referendum after a stunning campaign reversed public opinion in less than two months—53% of those who participated voted against assisted suicide. Meanwhile, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill is tied up in the House of Lords, with over 1,200 amendments tabled and time running out.

Assisted suicide—always referred to by soothingly Orwellian phrases such as “medical assistance in dying”—is broadly popular according to polling in most Western countries. Suicide groups and their political allies quote these data relentlessly. But over the past decade, an indisputable case study has loomed large over the debate: Canada.

In 2016, Canada legalized assisted suicide for adults with “enduring and intolerable suffering” and a “reasonably foreseeable death.” But safeguard after safeguard was torn down by the House of Commons and the courts; in 2021, assisted suicide was legalized for those struggling with mental illness (a law to stop this practice is being debated in Parliament). Canada is on track for 100,000 euthanasia deaths by this summer and has become an international cautionary tale.

Scottish MSPs who voted against the bill cited Canada’s grim expansions —which have been condemned by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—as one of their key fears. Canada was cited by the Church of Scotland in its opposition to the bill. Inclusion Scotland, one of the disability rights organizations opposing the bill, noted that “in Canada … we note with concern that there has been divestment in palliative care facilities in favour of medical assistance to die.”

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh noted in a statement (quoted in an open letter signed by a range of Scottish luminaries and published in The Herald) that the Canadian example exposes the likelihood of future expansion:

The College is very concerned to note the speed with which Canada has moved from legislation similar to the proposed Assisted Dying Bill to legislation which allows euthanasia by lethal injection for individuals irrespective of capacity and irrespective of terminal illness.

Scottish MSPs heard horror stories directly from Canadians. Last spring, Alicia Duncan of British Columbia traveled to Scotland to tell her mother’s story. In 2020, Donna Duncan suffered a concussion after a car accident; her mental health suffered, and her daughters found out she was scheduled for assisted suicide in October 2021, just two days before she was scheduled to be killed. They managed to commit her to a psychiatric ward, but after forty-eight hours, Donna was assessed again and killed four hours later.

Because Donna had been starving herself, she was determined to have a “reasonably foreseeable death” and thus be in the same category as someone who was terminally ill. “The Scottish bill echoed many of these same standards, and in some areas appeared even weaker,” Duncan told me. “Safeguards that appear clear on paper can become dangerously subjective in practice, particularly for vulnerable people.”

MSPs were horrified by her story. “It was a very emotional meeting,” she told me. “They were shocked, and very grateful for my testimony. One MSP and I spoke of her concerns about coercion, which I had also emphasized. Another had tears in her eyes as I spoke. It’s one thing to look at a bill, but it is another to hear the real-life implications and the trauma it can cause others.” Alicia Duncan was diagnosed with PTSD after her mother’s death.

Suicide campaigners in Scotland faced pushback from across civil society. Organizations raising concerns about the bill or opposing outright included the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland, the Royal College of GPs Scotland, the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatrics Society, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, Alzheimer Scotland, and the Glasgow Disability Alliance, among others.

The failure of Scotland’s suicide bill is significant. Scotland is very secular and notoriously progressive. But with incontrovertible case studies illustrating where suicide regimes inevitably lead—Canada being the most prominent among them—resistance to assisted suicide bills has stiffened as politicians are forced to confront the consequences of their votes. Suicide campaigners who countenance safeguards because they see new laws as merely a first step to a more permissive euthanasia regime are seeing their soothing lies confronted with cold hard truths and mounting corpse counts.

Thank God that MSPs in Scotland and voters in Slovenia saw that clearly. Now, it is time for the House of Lords to terminate Kim Leadbeater’s deadly bill. A defeat for the suicide campaigners is a victory for the vulnerable.

And writing from England, Robert Clarke is delighted:

On Tuesday evening, the Scottish parliament voted 69 to 57 to reject the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill. There was respect in Holyrood for the enormity of the question – and firm resolve when it came to answering it. The message sent by MSPs is one that every MP in Westminster needs to hear.

Scotland’s rejection of assisted dying is particularly significant considering the political makeup of its parliament. More than 70 per cent of seats in Holyrood are held by centre-left or left-wing parties, which tend to be more supportive of assisted suicide. Yet the bill was defeated across party lines, by MSPs who examined the evidence and concluded that no amendment had made it ‘safe’. It was a vote for our common humanity, for hope over despair.

What killed the bill was scrutiny. When it passed the committee stage last year, the margin was 70 to 56 in favour. Over the months that followed, as MSPs confronted the detail, support faded. By the final debate, the leaders of all three of Scotland’s largest parties opposed it. The pattern is clear: the closer you look at assisted-suicide laws, the harder they are to support.

Jeremy Balfour, an independent MSP who was born with no left arm and a right arm that ends at the elbow, gave one of the standout speeches of the evening:

‘Imagine being told by many people, including a number of politicians, that you are a burden on society, and the benefits that you rely on to survive could be better spent elsewhere. I want you to imagine that you’ve heard on numerous occasions the words, “I’d rather die than live like you”. How do you think you would feel watching this debate? I think you would rightly feel terrified.’

Balfour’s fear is not hypothetical. Supporters of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted-dying bill, which is currently being debated in the UK parliament, like to cite Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act as a model for Britain. This has now been in place for over 25 years. In its early years, around a third of assisted-suicide patients cited being a burden as a concern. By 2019, that figure had risen to nearly 60 per cent. In 2022, one third of Canadians who ended their lives under the country’s Medical Assistance in Dying law cited ‘being a burden’ as among their reasons. This is hardly evidence of autonomous choice. Vulnerability is driving these decisions.

The Scottish result reflects a trajectory we are seeing internationally. In Slovenia last November, voters who had backed assisted suicide in a 2024 referendum rejected the actual legislation once they saw what it contained. In Westminster, the Leadbeater bill passed the Commons, but it is now stalling in the Lords under growing opposition. The longest-serving MPs have tended to be the most consistently opposed to assisted dying. The more legislators learn, the clearer their opposition becomes to these laws.

The public polling that proponents of assisted dying lean on so heavily deserves the same scrutiny. Dignity in Dying has made much of polling that suggests a majority of Brits support assisted dying. But a different picture emerges when you dig into the data. More in Common found that, while only 13 per cent oppose assisted suicide in principle, 58 per cent are concerned that elderly people may seek it out because they feel like a burden, or because they are pressured into it. This reflects sympathy for an abstract idea that erodes when real consequences are exposed.

The Leadbeater bill now seems certain to run out of parliamentary time – there remain more than 850 amendments to be debated in only five allocated sitting days. Its supporters will no doubt blame the clock for its failure. But bills that command real confidence get moved through – indeed, it is telling that the Labour government has refused to allocate it anymore time. The Leadbeater bill is stalling because parliament is doing exactly what Holyrood did: examining the detail and finding it unsafe.

Scrutiny is what will kill assisted dying: the case against these laws only gets stronger the longer you look.

Conduce To The Happiness

The Scott Trust spent five million pounds on nine per cent of Tortoise Media so that that start-up could buy The Observer. All 140 Observer staff have now been offered voluntary redundancy. With an endowment of £1.3 billion, the Scott Trust should buy it back.

That said, there are now 20 grandees of the liberal media who make, if not a living, then no doubt fat fees by watching GB News, for the first time in their lives, purely in order to complain about it and about the fact that its regular readers did not do so. Whoever was paying them to do that should put in a bid for The Observer. As, in that case, should Sir Paul Marshall and Legatum. Let the games begin.

Mass Religious Observances

For example, this, in Hyde Park.

Or this, elsewhere.

Herewith, the Voice of the Jewish News:

Trafalgar Square is a place for all. Jewish News has been delighted to co-host the community’s annual Chanukah in the Square event many times in the past, as we light the Menorah and sing Maoz Tzur. It plays host to events celebrating other religions as well, from Christian Pentecost prayer events, to Vaisakhi and Diwali celebrations; and this week, to an Iftar celebration during the Muslim month of Ramadan. The uproar in response to that latter has been considerable – and notably ugly in tone.

For one thing, this week’s Trafalgar Square Iftar event had invited those of many different faiths – different Christian denominations, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and others – to attend. At a certain point, those Muslims present who wished to pray, did so. There were no exhortations for those of the many other faiths present to join in – if that was an “act of domination and therefore division”, as some have suggested, it was a remarkably odd one.

The question here is not really one of whether such prayer is in fact an attempt to “dominate” – or the more obvious explanation, that during Ramadan one breaks one’s fast by eating very briefly just before and then more properly after the evening Maghrib prayer (yes, like our own Maariv prayer). Rather it is about whether one has the right to publicly express their religious identity in this country. In this specific instance, an event to mark a key event in the Islamic calendar had been openly and legally booked for Trafalgar Square. Muslims present had every right to pray as a part of that.

At the beginning of Ramadan, another event made headlines – a police officer defending the right to freedom of speech of a Christian preacher in Whitechapel. The officer said, in response to those who claimed that it was “a Muslim area”, that “In this country we have freedom of speech… “I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him. He’s not in your home.” It appears that some of those who so loudly championed that police officer last month have forgotten what she said – or think that there should indeed be a double standard.

There are times when Jews in this country wish to openly and publicly display our faith, whether that is through dozens of public Menorah lightings around the country, Purim parades through neighbourhoods with large numbers of Jews, road closures for a Hachnasat Sefer Torah, visiting streams or lakes on Rosh Hashana for Tashlich or large throngs of Charedim protesting education bills outside Westminster while reading Psalms and then davening Minchah. We are fortunate to live in a liberal, democratic society where such things are open to us – for many centuries such things would have been unthinkable.

We would be wise to defend that right for others, because what guarantee do we have that if it were taken from them, we would not be next? We would urge those members of the Jewish community who are inclined to support condemnation of such public prayer to consider where such things can lead – and it is not particularly difficult to see. Attempts in Western countries to circumscribe the Islamic way of life almost always end up doing the same to Jews. Whether via attempts to ban religious slaughter, religious courts or circumcision – initiatives where a significant percentage of advocates wish to make life more difficult for Muslims will also affect Jews.

Are there Islamists in this country who wish to assert their way of life over others? Of course. But it is hard to think of a more counterproductive way of combating such a thought process than by telling the many moderate Muslims that they – and they alone – should be unable to celebrate their faith in a public venue which they have booked for an event. In fact, there are few things more likely to help Islamists in their portrayal of British society as irretrievably hostile towards Muslims.

There are those in our community who will respond to this by telling us that the situation with Muslims is ‘different’. To that we would encourage them to look across the Atlantic. A number of the most influential right wing voices in the United States were railing against Muslims a few years ago. Now they have switched their sights to target Jews.

If you think that could not happen here, you are kidding yourselves. Uphold religious rights for all – you’ll never know when you’ll be glad that you did.

Those Jewish and Islamic courts are taken up overwhelmingly with keeping people’s religious marital status as far as possible in line with their civil marital status, frankly very much like the Catholic ones that also operate in this country. No court sitting in Britain is ordering that anyone be stoned, and whisper it not, but that would already be illegal. As for the most influential right-wing voices in the United States, their mounting calls to ban Eucharistic and Marian Processions are already implicitly being echoed in Britain by Nigel Farage, with others no doubt to follow. Well, let us give them something to complain about. Let there be the Eucharistic and Marian Processions that this country lacked. Including in Trafalgar Square.

On Being Rejected

Someone who was decidedly reluctant to communicate electronically while at the coalface surprises me by keeping it up in Emeritus life (and, perhaps not unrelatedly, publishing far more), specifically to say that I needed to take a look at this, by Alex Byrne:

Philosophers like savage book reviews. The typical milquetoast review offers some criticism leavened with a teaspoon of praise. For example, while the author has “inadvertently demonstrated that his theory of self-knowledge collapses under sustained scrutiny,” the book is nonetheless a “valuable contribution.” Boring.

Quassim Cassam’s review of Michael Devitt and Kim Sterelny’s Language and Reality has a more forthright assessment: “This is not a book which students should be advised to consult. It is a book which they should be advised not to consult.” Applied to G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker’s Frege: Logical Excavations, Michael Dummett would have agreed: “This pair of authors might have given us an illuminating comparative study of Frege and Wittgenstein; it is regrettable that they have preferred to attempt a hatchet job on a philosopher they lack the good will to understand.” And who can forget Nina Strohminger’s review of Colin McGinn’s The Meaning of Disgust? It begins: “In disgust research, there is shit, and then there is bullshit. McGinn’s (2011) theory belongs to the latter category.” These three examples are all from academic journals; offered a freer rein in a newspaper, philosophers take the gloves off. According to Galen Strawson, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression “shows something that has been becoming increasingly obvious to a number of people for quite a long time: that although Derrida is a nice man, he is just not very bright.”

Submit a philosophy paper to a journal and it will likely be rejected; it might even be “desk rejected,” with the hapless author receiving no feedback that could help improve the paper’s chances at another journal. What about an invited book review? I had never heard of a rejection, still less one with no feedback—until recently. To keep vulgar suspense to a minimum, the would-be book reviewer was me.

You may be wondering why the story of a book review rejection deserves telling. I beg your patience for a few paragraphs. First, I need to say something about Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Entirely online, its sole mission is publishing reviews of philosophy books. NDPR churns them out: 145 reviews last year, only 79 in 2024 but a whopping 418 in 2014. All reviews are open access; like PhilPapers and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is one of those wonderful philosophical resources enabled by the internet.

Philosophy journals that publish reviews have a book review editor, but NDPR’s volume requires more people. There is an editorial board currently comprising 70 professional philosophers, from Ásta at Duke to Jessica Wilson at Toronto. The editor is Christopher Shields, a leading Aristotle scholar, assisted by the managing editor, Kirsten Anderson, a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Baylor University. As NDPR explains:

Reviews are commissioned and vetted by a distinguished international Editorial Board. We do not accept unsolicited reviews, but welcome proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers … In the event that a proposal is received, we will vet it in the normal way with our Editorial Board before determining whether to issue an invitation to write a review. [emphasis in original]

NDPR allows—as of course it should—reviews that trash books. “From my perspective as a philosopher,” John Martin Fischer complains, “it is jarring that a book on free will would not discuss free will.” The book in question is Robert Sapolsky’s 528-page Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which Fischer spends more than 6,000 words dismantling. Brian Leiter’s verdict on Thomas Stern’s Nietzsche’s Ethics is even more dismissive: “In the end, what is most puzzling about this little volume is not that it is often wrong, relentlessly superficial, and philosophically flat-footed, although it is all of those things.” Louise Antony’s review of Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell’s A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How it Made us Human gets straight to the point: “I am afraid I found a great deal to criticize in this book, and not much to admire.” Despite, like Fischer, taking more than 6,000 words, Antony laments that “space limitations prevent me from discussing every problem I find in this book.” She finds the third part particularly risible: “I am very sorry to say this section is appallingly superficial.” (Fischer, Leiter, and Antony are all on the NDPR editorial board.)

An example from this year is Timothy Williamson’s review of Amie Thomasson’s Rethinking Metaphysics:

As the book goes on, it encourages the reader to expect much-needed support for its deflationary treatment of metaphysics from functionally oriented linguistics. When it finally arrives, in Chapter 7, in the form of Michael Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it proves a dampish squib.

The book, Williamson concludes, “left me with a strong sense of a degenerating research programme.” The authors of A Better Ape were so irked by Antony’s review that they composed a lengthy reply (her review “rests on misrepresentations of our ideas and mistakes about the science”). Thomasson instead took to Facebook to produce this apophasis:

NDPR could not have chosen a less charitable reviewer for Rethinking Metaphysics than Tim Williamson … If I were to write in the style of my interlocutor, I might say that it is a ‘dampish squib’ of a review written by someone with a ‘degenerating research program.’ But I won’t. Because I believe in being respectful and kind. Insults come out when arguments run out.

Her allies chimed in. Ásta (as mentioned, on the NDPR editorial board) exclaimed, “What an uncharitable way to engage with the serious work of another philosopher!” The board member Brian Leiter, no friend of metaphysics, commented: “My first thought on reading this was to email Amie to offer congratulations, since obviously TW is unnerved. His research program is under attack, and is soon to pass into history.”

Among the many Facebook comments, however, only one said that letting the review through was a mistake: “This is horrible and I don’t think they even should have published it.” Probably the vast majority of philosophers, including those on Thomasson’s side of the argument, would agree with two commenters who wrote: “He was asked to review a book and gave his opinion without sugar-coating it. The piece isn’t vituperative,” and: “I think it is good to have very bracing reviews written and published.”

Back to my story: last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said in the review, the book is nothing short of ambitious. Here’s part of Cosker-Rowland’s summary at the end:

This book has proposed a new account of gender identity in terms of our subjective sense of the gender that it is fitting or not unfitting to treat us as and has proposed a new integrity-based account of trans rights … [O]ur gender identities generate trans rights to freedom of (legal) gender, gender-affirming healthcare, and sporting participation and accommodation grounded in our basic liberal rights to live and act with integrity … [O]ur gender identities establish that we morally ought to be treated as and thought of as the gender that matches our gender identity … [This book] has shown that our gender identity also seems to matter for the gender that we metaphysically are. It has shown that we should understand being trans in terms of gender identity.

Undeniably interesting, which is more than one can say for many philosophy books; and as a trans woman, Cosker-Rowland brings relevant experience. But to borrow Louise Antony’s words, “I am afraid I found a great deal to criticize in this book, and not much to admire.”

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

Here’s another example I didn’t mention in the review. When rashly suggesting that some youth suicides in the UK were the result of restricting access to puberty blockers for gender dysphoria, Cosker-Rowland cites two tweets from the activist lawyer Jolyon Maugham in support (p. 210, fn. 16). These allegations were investigated by a suicide expert, Professor Louis Appleby, and found to be baseless; Cosker-Rowland says that one of Maugham’s tweets provides a “thorough response” to Appleby. There are three problems with her discussion. First, Cosker-Rowland falsely asserts that the National Health Service “ceased providing puberty blockers” (p. 210) after 2020 (instead, there was a pause of six months, with an in-practice ban only after the publication of the Cass Review in 2024). Second, she describes Appleby as “the UK Government’s gender critical adviser” (p. 210, fn. 16; emphasis added), clearly implying bias on Appleby’s part. There is no evidence that Appleby is “gender critical” and Cosker-Rowland appears to have made this up. Third, Maugham’s tweets have been (unsurprisingly) deleted. Thus, in an Oxford University Press book, the citations supporting an extremely serious claim are two deleted tweets. (See also the thorough reporting by the journalist Ben Ryan.)

I was worried that the “board member covering the relevant area” would demand extensive revisions or cuts, and I even speculated (not seriously) about an outright rejection on the grounds that my review perpetrates epistemic violence against the LGBTQ+ community or something equally fantastical. But I kept reassuring myself that too many years in the gender trenches had left me unreasonably paranoid, and that the review would make it through vetting with no more than minor tweaking.

Weeks dragged by, and towards the end of February, Kirsten Anderson emailed again, this time with bad news: NDPR had decided not to “move forward” with publication, based on “consultation with the board.” “Even paranoiacs have real enemies,” as Henry Kissinger is said to have once remarked.

No reason was given, but Anderson did say that I should contact the editor, Christopher Shields, for “further clarification” or if I had any “specific questions,” which I promptly did. I said that I would be very grateful for answers to the following two questions:

1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.

2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?

The first question was worth asking, I thought, although I suspected I would not receive an answer. After all, the board members assigned to vet reviews can often be identified, or at least drastically narrowed down, based on the subject matter. If the book is about Nietzsche, probably Brian Leiter; if about consciousness, probably David Chalmers, and so on. And with book reviews in regular journals, the only relevant person is the book review editor, whose identity is known to everyone.

The second question was the one I really wanted answered. We philosophers—and academics in general—are all in this together, stumbling towards the truth as best we can, and that requires honest feedback. That is why referee reports are sent to authors even when their papers are rejected and why graduate students are not merely told that their arguments don’t work. Occasionally authors and students see that a referee’s or a supervisor’s objections are devastating and abandon their projects entirely. Of course, in the case of desk rejection, or those unsolicited emails philosophers receive giving a proof of idealism from logic alone, one cannot fairly expect a written explanation, because that would often be too onerous for the journal or the philosopher. In my case, however, the reasons were (presumably) already set out in an email from the board member, and could easily be transmitted, preserving anonymity if necessary.

In his reply, Shields kindly gave me plenty of detail about the process. The review first went to him for screening, “mainly to establish that there are no obvious problems,” which there weren’t. He then sent it to a board member for “substantive vetting.” That board member declined to vet it, for whatever reason. Shields then “sent it to a second board member, who reviewed it and recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” Whoever that board member was, he or she was quite adamant, issuing a “clear and unswerving recommendation” against publication.

That was all appreciated, but what Shields did not do was answer either of my questions. A non-answer to the first one I at least expected, but what justification could there be for keeping the reasons behind the “clear and unswerving recommendation” top secret? No one would accept a disrespectful policy of not sending referees’ reports to authors of rejected papers, and my situation was no different. If anything, there were stronger reasons for disclosure, given the earlier implication that “revision requests” were the worst-case scenario.

Before Shields replied, I already assumed that two board members were involved, since it was most improbable that the member who had approved the invitation was the one who rejected the review. Now I knew that the number might be three: the approver, the (possibly distinct) first member asked to vet, and the member with the “unswerving recommendation.” The topic of gender identity is squarely in the analytic feminist philosophy wheelhouse, and the NDPR board has three members with specialties in that sub-discipline: Sally Haslanger and two I have already mentioned, Louise Antony and Ásta. A couple of other board members could not be excluded, but plausibly at least one of that trio would know something.

Cold emailing a board member I’d never met would have been ticklish, but fortunately I had known all three for years: Sally is my long-time colleague, Louise is an old friend with whom I share many professional interests, and I was on Ásta’s thesis committee when she was a PhD student at MIT. It quickly turned out that Sally and Louise knew nothing about my review; Ásta was sympathetic—“I’m sorry that happened. Unfortunately, I have no information on that.”—and referred me back to the editor.

The identity of the “clear and unswerving” board member remains unknown. More importantly from my point of view, at the time of writing I have not been told anything about the reasons for rejection; neither have I been told anything about the reasons for secrecy.

Given the board member’s view was evidently that that my review was unpublishable in any form, it was slightly jarring when Shields ended his email, “I do hope you will find another outlet for your work.” Perhaps that was just clunky boilerplate. I was now faced with the problem that shopping book reviews around to journals is an uncommon practice with little guarantee of success. NDPR was apparently willing to effectively suppress the news that OUP is publishing books with an activist-level disregard for the facts.

The gender-critical gods have smiled on me before in similar situations: Polity stepped in to publish Trouble with Gender, and the invited-then-rescinded pronouns handbook chapter ended up in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. They did so again, casting their spell on the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs, where the review will appear in the summer issue (you can read it here).

Could the “clear and unswerving recommendation” for rejection be unconnected with the pall of censoriousness that has descended over the philosophy of sex and gender? Monkeys might fly. In any case, protecting Cosker-Rowland from criticism (even if misguided) is patronizing—she can look after herself. If my review contains embarrassing blunders, they will soon become known. And controversy helps sales: “Now I must read the book,” one Facebook commenter said in the Thomasson-Williamson thread.

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Alex Byrne is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Transparency and Self-Knowledge and, more problematically, Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions.