Joined Forces

Inside Time reports:

Parliamentarians, trade union leaders and rank-and-file police officers have joined forces to call on the Government to order a Royal Commission on Prisons and the Justice System.

A joint letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for the move was signed by the officers of the Parliamentary Justice Union All Party Parliamentary Group: Liz Saville Roberts MP (Plaid Cymru), Lord Balfe (Conservative), Richard Burgon MP (Labour) and Lord Woodley (Labour).

They were supporting an approach from Steve Gillan, General Secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association; Jo Grady, General Secretary of the University and College Union; Fran Heathcote, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union; Ian Lawrence, General Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers; Nicola Ranger, General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing; and Mel Warnes, acting National Secretary of the Police Federation of England and Wales.

In a joint statement, the unions said: “Rehabilitation is simply impossible in violent, squalid and overcrowded jails. Sticking-plaster solutions such as early release schemes are doomed to fail unless probation is made fit for purpose, while plans to restrict jury trials are a dangerous and wrong-headed response to case backlogs caused mainly by cuts and mass court closures under the last Government.”

The union chiefs said that despite early warnings by the Labour government that it had inherited a “ticking time-bomb” in prisons and that failure to act would mean “the prospect of a total breakdown of law and order”, the response by ministers since had been piecemeal, timid and contradictory. The unions said that narrow reviews into sentencing, courts and prisons had barely scratched the surface of what is needed. They also criticised privatisation within the justice system and last year’s cuts to prison education provision.

The Parliamentarians, in their supporting letter, added: “The current prison overcrowding crisis is just the tip of the iceberg, and it is important to recognise that it is interconnected with other problems – from squalid and violent prison conditions, with ineffective education and rehabilitation programmes, to excessive probation workloads, severe courts backlogs and intolerable pressures facing staff throughout the criminal justice system.

“As the statement (from the Unions) makes clear, the scale and interconnected nature of the problems demand holistic, end-to-end reform, rather than the current piecemeal approach of narrow reviews. We ask you to give serious consideration to this proposal and to engage directly with the unions, whose members experience the consequences of these pressures every day. We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and relevant ministerial colleagues to discuss the case for a Royal Commission.”

Added to these calls, Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, also called for a Royal Commission whilst speaking at his organisation’s annual general meeting, which was attended by Policing Minister Sarah Jones. Mr Smart said this had been promised by the then-Conservative government in 2019 but not delivered, and would be the first such examination of the criminal justice system in more than 60 years.

Further Fuel

Jess Barnard is an elected member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, and she writes:

Last night, Andy Burnham announced that the UK will provide ‘defensive air to air refuelling’ support to Saudi Arabia’s military, plunging Britain into another disastrous conflict in the Middle East. Amid a worsening humanitarian situation in Yemen, the latest Saudi attacks risk more civilian deaths and an acute refugee crisis, with thousands already displaced.

Burnham’s arrival in office seemed to suggest the possibility of a break from Starmer’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and collusion with the war on Iran — two shameful stains on Labour’s legacy. But with this new announcement, history seems to be repeating itself.

The conflict with the Houthis began in 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US and UK, intervened in Yemen’s civil war. Their goals were to dislodge the Houthis and to prop up the government headed by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who would keep the country in favour with Saudi Arabia. The campaign killed nearly 9,000 civilians, with many more dying from the effects of the war, from collapsed services to starvation to epidemics.

Britain supplied spare parts, ammunition and maintenance to the aggressors along with unconditional political support. The then foreign secretary Philip Hammond declared that the UK would assist the Saudi military ‘in every practical way short of engaging in combat’, which included sending military advisers.

London thus gave the Saudi coalition a free hand to commit a litany of war crimes. As early as 2016, a UN panel found that it had engaged in ‘widespread and systematic’ attacks on civilian targets. In 2018, a Saudi airstrike hit a school bus, killing 29 children. Cluster bombing targeted medical facilities and ancient heritage sites. Yet the onslaught ultimately failed. The Saudis were forced to sign a truce in 2022, but by that time it was too late: Yemen had already been shattered.

The fragile peace was broken after the recent bombing of Sana’a airport by Saudi Arabia. The subsequent Houthi offensive has seen them gain control of Yemen’s western coast and, with it, the chokepoint of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, an area crucial to Saudi Arabian oil transportation.

The UK responded by providing refueling support for US operations against Yemen last year. While Starmer tried to justify these actions as ‘defensive’, the Pentagon itself reported that they had ‘more likely than not’ resulted in the killing of 281 civilians. Human Rights Watch warned that Britain’s involvement in the operation ‘may make them complicit in war crimes’. On 29 April 2025, Starmer took British involvement up a notch, becoming the tenth British Prime Minister to directly bomb Yemen, as RAF Typhoons carried out a joint UK-US strike south of Sana’a.

This was yet another futile operation. Less than a week later, Trump was forced to sign a peace agreement with the Houthis. But the humanitarian impact of this forever war could not be clearer. Around 47 percent of the Yemeni population are currently experiencing crisis levels of acute food insecurity while nearly half of children under five are acutely malnourished, according to the UN. The World Health Organisation observes that the country is already facing ‘multiple concurrent health risks’, including cholera, measles, dengue, diphtheria and trauma. More than 112,00 people have already been internally displaced, with UN agencies warning that they lack the resources needed to support those forced from their homes.

Now, Burnham has agreed that Britain will help to refuel the Saudis’ killer jets — visiting yet more destruction and misery on the poorest country in the region. Outlandishly, he tried to frame this decision as an attempt to alleviate the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, as if deepening civilian suffering in Yemen would somehow offer respite to communities in Britain. If anything, more bombing will only exacerbate the inflationary pressures triggered by Trump’s war on Iran, which are pushing up prices for working-class people worldwide.

When the war on Yemen started in 2015, Labour opposed Britain’s involvement and committed to both suspending arm sales to Saudi Arabia and presenting a resolution at the UN to end the conflict. History now looks kindly on this position.

Burnham should follow this example and break from years of failed international policy. His government could rebuild the international aid programmes that Starmer brutally cut, and provide safe passage to refugees fleeing the war, rather than pouring further fuel into the region.

While Malise Ruthven writes:

In February 1940, my godmother, Freya Stark, arrived in Sana’a carrying a forbidden cinematograph projector. Her mission was to loosen Fascist Italy’s influence over Imam Yahya, the formidable ruler of Yemen’s Zaidi imamate. Fortunately for Stark and the British, scratchy Ministry of Information footage of Royal Navy ships in Portsmouth made what she called a tremendous impression, with Yahya and his court unable to resist this display of naval might. The Italian legation was furious, and talked of importing a projector of its own. But it was too late. Within a fortnight, Stark believed, Italian influence in Sana’a had been broken.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refuelling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refuelling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defence industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defence export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air- defence systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defences. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”. 

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defence. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilise a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognised camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refuelling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations centre, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

Starmerism: An Autopsy

Neal Lawson can do it when he wants to:

The king is dead, long live the king. In the end, Labour switched effortlessly from Keir Starmer to Andy Burnham, little more than two years after the former’s landslide election victory. Burnham’s ascendancy always looked inevitable to me, despite those who mocked him and blocked him. He had the semblance of a plan – based on ‘Manchesterism’ – the personality and therefore the popularity to replace Starmer. But it wouldn’t have happened if Starmer was any good as a political leader. He had to be terrible to be replaced so quickly, not least because Labour is essentially a loyalist party and all the power in the party is vested in the leader and their office. For this to have happened so soon after such a big electoral victory tells us much about the quality of both that ‘victory’ and Starmer’s leadership skills.

But the speed and efficiency of the transfer of power will mean little in the absence of any deep analysis of exactly what Starmer got wrong and why and the nature of the 2024 election result. Yes, he was unpopular in the polls and a poor communicator, but it was the midterm – he had time and was sitting on that huge majority. To go so spectacularly wrong so quickly demands a deeper post-mortem, so that mistakes can be learnt from instead of being naively repeated.

And here is irony number one. Starmer famously claimed that he had never failed. Someone who thinks they have never failed can never really learn. As he ponders his future and his resignation honours list – which he swore blind he would never write, just as he u-turned on so many other issues and people – let’s get our eyes down and scrub up for the Starmer autopsy.

But wait. First some personal throat clearing, given the personal is always political. I’ve got more fingers on one hand than times I’ve met Keir Starmer. A few times in very small groups before he became leader, and we exchanged a couple of emails after, in which I advised him to go big on ideas and movements. What he needed, I said, was the countervailing forces of ideas, organisation and culture to provide the capacity to act in office against the forces that would resist him. He did not take any of my advice.

He was obviously uninterested in big ideas and even bigger movements. It felt to me he had a ruthless, calculating shark-like disdain for anything that wasn’t going to be of immediate personal interest and assistance to him. I was just someone worth being courted in the run up to the Labour leadership contest in 2020, not least because I gave him cover on Labour’s left flank. I didn’t back him. Later, his henchman tried to have me expelled from the Labour Party for supporting the kind of cross-party pluralism that Compass, the organisation I’m the director of, has been backing for a decade and a half. They failed. I remained a party member, but one certain in the knowledge that it would in fact be Starmer that would fail.

From these early suspicions of deep flaws to the dawning horror of how he behaved, first running the party and then the country, my concerns grew. Uninterrupted, his premiership would make a Farage premiership more, not less, likely.

But people I knew and really rated – people who knew the Starmer of old and talked of a kind, thoughtful and sincere person – found it hard to reconcile their memories with the man who now led Labour and the country. Undoubtedly, the differences between their views and the view that I had formed of him say something about the man and his ability to change or conceal his true intent. But it also says something about our political institutions and culture and what how they change and even deform people. I’ve seen this in every Labour leader going back to the 1980s. How much Starmer’s leadership failure was down to nature or nurture, we are unlikely to ever know. Lives, especially leading political ones, are always complicated, and Starmer like all of us has conflicting and paradoxical passions and potentials. But the mix in him became politically toxic.

Now that more personal stuff is out of the way, what was Starmerism, in which context did it arise, why did it go wrong, and even if he never wants to learn from anything ‘because he has never failed’, what can we learn from it?

Irony number two. Starmer said there will be no such thing as ‘Starmerism’. He was even wrong on this. Just because a leader has a loathing of ‘isms’, doesn’t mean they can escape defining one. Every leadership, however conscious or unconscious, has a culture, a style, a method. Indeed, the very rejection of an ‘ism’ is itself an ‘ism’. So, to understand Starmer’s ‘ism’ we must go back to the moment it was catalysed in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was crowned leader of the party.

Because Starmerism was essentially anti-Corbynism, even if he didn’t quite know it. Because the other player key in this origin story is Morgan McSweeney, the designated hyper-factional fixer for the Labour Party right. By hyper-factional it is meant a desire not just for a tendency or faction to become dominant within a party, but to eradicate all other factions such that the future of the party becomes impossible to contest.

McSweeney was tasked with a sly, cynical Trojan horse operation to ‘rescue’ Labour from the clutches of the Corbynites. Critical to understanding this mission means getting into the minds of the Labour right, whose attitude is that the Labour Party is their party, and theirs alone. It’s not just that they think their path is the best route to a successful Labour government, but that any other voices and views are illegitimate. The right’s broad view is that Labour only wins when it persuades the City, the media and a few swing voters in a few swing seats that it is safe to back the party. It is a worldview that is broadly anti-intellectual and suspicious of both deeper democracy and wider party’s and movements and the commitment to pluralism they demand. Theirs is a paternalistic and ameliorative social democracy which might have worked in the absence of the global financial crash, growing disparities between citizens and the mounting threat of climate change. But there was no longer an absence of any of this.

From the Labour right’s perspective, everyone else is a ‘Trot’ who can be stomached if they stay in their place in the outer margins of the party, but preferably they would F-off and leave Labour to them, the ‘grown-ups’. This mental and organisational grip on the party was manically and mechanically maintained up until the moment in 2010 when Ed Miliband beat his brother David. This was not meant to happen. But, worse – much worse – was to come. Because of the vast economic, environmental and cultural changes sweeping the globe (not least the mass take-up of social media which meant old forms of politics, like the technocratic paternalism practised by the Labour right) left-wing ideas, policies, parties and leaders had started to challenge their old and tired social democratic orthodoxies. So instead of reverting to type after the loss of the 2015 election and swinging back to the right, the Labour membership voted to keep heading left and Corbyn stormed to victory. To Labour’s right, the threat was existential and deeply personal. Their birthright to run the party, to be the party, had to them been suddenly and violently snatched away. They would do anything, anything, to get it back. And not just get it back but ensure that the left, in its widest sense, could never ever again take from them what was rightfully theirs.

Here are the words of McSweeney’s co-architect of the undercover takeover of Labour Peter Mandelson when he said of Corbyn in 2017: “I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure.” He even gave examples of his efforts, “maybe an e-mail, a phone call, or a meeting I convene.” And I was the one they tried to expel, while Mandelson was given the US Ambassadorship. I repeat, they would do anything, anything to regain and maintain their grip on the party – take a dip into Paul Holden’s book The Fraud to understand more.

Meanwhile, and at least initially separate to the Orwellian named Labour Together project – whose real goal was to tear Labour apart – Starmer had bundled himself into the safe Labour seat of Holborn and St. Pancras for the 2015 general election defeat.

It’s hard to believe that Starmer gave up his successful career in law and the civil service to become an MP without a strong desire to become leader and potentially Prime Minister. Every move he made should be seen in the light of the pursuit of that goal: initially supporting Jeremy Corbyn, being in the shadow cabinet, manoeuvres around Brexit to build his profile rather than find a workable national solution, the company he was seen to keep (on the left) and didn’t keep (Tony Blair), the things he said and didn’t say were all part of an endeavour to become leader. To be fair, he is not the first or last to act in this way. But he is remarkable in being the least intellectually and culturally prepared of any Labour leader in its history.

This personal ambition, almost by accident but great serendipity, met McSweeney’s factional desire to destroy the left. McSweeney was looking for a glove puppet, or seemingly in his own words from the Get In book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund – someone who thought they were driving the automated DLR train.

McSweeney happened upon Starmer relatively late in the day. At first, through Labour Together he cultivated a team of possible future leaders such as Steve Reed, Wes Streeting, Lisa Nandy, Bridget Phillipson, and Shabana Mahmood. None were to wear the crown. Not least because McSweeney rather brilliantly, if you like this kind of deceit, saw an organisational route through the crisis for the Labour right, but it had to be based on a massive lie. His deep polling of the Labour Party membership convinced him that only a candidate pretending to be a Corbynite could win. But a candidate so malleable, that they were prepared to say anything to win, and then immediately do the exact opposite once in a position of power. Someone who could pose as a Corbynite, call Corbyn a friend, to say his task was merely to professionalise the operation so that Corbynism without Corbyn could win an election, but then turn on the very people whose support they had just sought. That person was of course Keir Starmer.

But at this stage, the Labour Together project was only about gaining control of Labour, not changing the country. After the general election loss in 2019, the broad view was that it would take two elections to get Labour back in. But stage one of wresting back control of the party could only, by definition, be achieved by someone that McSweeney and his right-wing vanguard could never fully trust, because unlike them they had to have been tainted by proximity to Corbyn to win the leadership vote in a largely Corbyn friendly selectorate. This candidate would improve Labour’s position at the next election and then be ousted in favour of a true believer, who could win the subsequent election on sound Labour right-wing grounds. But of first order importance, it would let them regain control of their party.

And then the Tories imploded, first Johnson, then Truss and finally Sunak. Labour didn’t win in 2024; it was handed a slam dunk victory by default by a corrupt and inept Tory administration who the electorate desperately wanted to see the back of. Anyone else would do. And so McSweeney was saddled with Starmer, a Prime Minister he neither trusted nor rated. And Starmer had reached the political summit with little idea of what to do, why or how.

So, the whole Starmer Premiership was based on an accident and a lie. It wasn’t meant to happen and when it did, it pretended to be one thing, but was in truth the very opposite. Starmer, the accidental leader who feigned to be Corbynite but was viciously anti-Corbyn.

Defenders of Starmer in the Party and the press would argue that none of this mattered, all that did was destroying Corbyn and the wider left and therefore making Labour electable again. Well now, there are two big problems with this approach, as events since have shown. The first is that the deceptive position that McSweeney landed on to secure hyper-factional control of the Labour Party was broadly the right one for the country and its progressive majority. This is irony number three. Corbyn never had the skills nor the ambition to lead Labour, but the broadly social democratic policy platform of economic intervention set out in the 2017 manifesto was the kind of thing the country needed then and still does. Hence its popularity and how close Labour got to power then. But this wasn’t about what was right for the country, it was about the total control of Labour. By ditching the policies that were good for the country, the right was purposefully opening the door to all on the left-wing in Labour, inviting them to leave. Remember Starmer in a nationalised television address told them “You know where the door is”. This, combined with an industrial scale of expulsions for the most spurious reasons and the rigging of parliamentary selections, was the method to refashion Labour. Losing hundreds of thousands of members was to be welcomed. As ideas and policy were dropped, all that was left was a vacuous ‘stability equals change’ mantra.

And the left did leave, initially to the doomed Your Party and then to the Greens, who (irony number four) built pressure from the left on issues such as Gaza and immigration which culminated in Labour losing the Gorton and Denton byelection, sealing Starmer’s fate. You reap what you sow.

Second, and perhaps even more problematic for the McSweeney method, is the issue of political behaviour and culture. The Starmer experience begs the meta question, can you build a good politics and a good society based on bad behaviour? Can the means justify the ends, or do means always shape the ends? It is of course a matter of degree. Serious politics must be about compromise but without being compromised. But when your whole electoral pitch is probity and yet you inject the system with such naked cynicism, then people notice and feel it. The gap between the image Starmer wanted to portray of reliability and integrity, and what people saw could not be bridged – even via sticking plaster politics.

Eventually a lack of intellectual foundations, and in this case a profound anti-intellectualism, will always catch up and trip up any political project. Politics to Starmer was simply about his personal good judgement, both moral and practical. There was no wider intellectual project, and no method of implementation beyond his command. As such it was a profoundly unpolitical regime, imbued with a level of arrogance that meant despite the years they had to prepare for government, they refused to dig any foundations beyond what was needed to secure forever their control of the party. Failure was baked in.

Starmer’s vapid but rapid ascent and descent reveals much though, not least about what the party looks for in a leader. There is still a strong hankering within the party to return to what has been called ‘the long 90s’, the era in which Labour seemed to be able to govern in a managerial style because there were few distributional or global conflicts. Everyone and everything seemed largely to be OK. But they weren’t. Despite some successes, New Labour never challenged the underlying orthodoxies of Thatcherism. The left behind were still largely left behind. And that was before the global crash, Brexit, COVID, endless austerity, then a cost-of-living crisis and now Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism, climate change and the threats and opportunities of AI. More than anything, Starmer seemed to offer the route back for the ‘centrist dads’ who just wanted things to ‘go back to normal’. It was a forlorn hope.

At a deeper level, the whole Starmer episode revealed the rather dark heart of the party’s right and their old culture of ‘labourism’ that sustained it: a managerial, tribal and paternalistic approach to politics. I held out little hope for the Corbyn project, an energetic wave of ideas, groups and people shackled to a rather lacklustre surfer. But despite his big leadership win in 2015, his subsequent re-election in 2016 and the quite amazing electoral result in 2017 (I know he didn’t win but he came much closer to victory than anyone suspected), the legitimacy and validity of Corbyn’s leadership was never accepted by the party machine, a huge chunk of the PLP or the media. In the end they got their way, but the foundations of their project were rotten.

For a while at least, if you are cynical and ruthless enough, then you can fool and frighten enough of the people enough of the time through the bureaucratic manipulation of votes and selections, and by creating a toxic environment of fear in which members self-police their comments to avoid punishment. But you can’t fool or frighten all the people all the time, you certainly can’t rule a country by this method, let alone transform it.

So, despite Starmer claiming there would be no such thing as Starmerism, we can detect in its actions and behaviour what it was as a political project. Ultimately it was a crude and cynical attempt to reassert control over Labour, not just to beat the left but to eradicate it for good. To achieve these ends, any means could be justified.

Just like Corbyn, Starmer came, saw, won, lost and disappeared. Whether he leaves more of a trace remains to be seen. The likes of Darren Jones, Steve Reed, and McSweeney himself, will plough the furrow of right-wing nostrums about financial orthodoxy, immigration and law and order. They will seek to keep a grip on the deep state of the Labour machine, the PLP, NEC and the regional offices. It is, after all, ‘their party’. Only last week someone from their camp leaked a paper on their strategy for Starmer’s survival to embarrass his successor.

Meanwhile, the long tail of McSweeneyism hobbles Labour in terms of its culture of hyper-factionalism, the narrow talent pool it allowed to enter parliament and the restrictions, via the manifesto, it placed on the necessary ideas to transform our country. Not least the ability to raise sufficient taxes.

So, what is to be done as a consequence of this analysis? Broadly, the response to Starmerism should be to look at what it did and do the opposite. So don’t reject political vision, embrace it to galvanise direction, purpose and energy. What sort of lives and what sort of society do we deem to be good? The only real lodestar for Labour must be the creation of a much more equal society via a much deeper democracy. Below that needs to be a coherent sense of what kind of robust political economy is going to support this vision of a good society, which in turn demands a constructively critical relationship with capital in all its modern forms. All of this is obviously much easier said than done, but is an essential foundation for any successful Labour government.

And any notion of a transformative government, of the kind people are crying out for, demands a theory of change and the countervailing powers to overcome forces that will resist because they want a very different kind of society – one that continues to be much less equal, sustainable or democratic. This starts with the party itself, not seeing it as something to be massively diminished and the rump controlled, but the place in which prefigurative ideas for the kind of society you want to create are encouraged, not least via members developing their influence and voice nationally and locally. It means that in the fragmented party-political system, which Labour’s failure in office and hyper-factionalism helped create, Labour develops more constructive relationships with other progressive parties and develops that approach wider still into civil society. If Labour wants to transform the country, then it isn’t going to do it on its own from the parliamentary green benches or old offices in Whitehall. Finally, it needs a leader who can pull all this together and communicate a hopeful and compelling narrative of change. But that alone while necessary, is far from sufficient.

With Starmer gone, we are witnessing in real time whether Labour can put in place a project which learns from and breaks with Starmerism and isn’t just Starmerism 2.0.

The United Nations: A Useful Failure

Heather Penatzer writes:

Another year, another United Nations General Assembly that slows traffic to a crawl for ordinary New Yorkers. They (and many other Americans) ask: what’s the point, beyond global political theater?

For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable.

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects? 

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War. 

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.” 

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent.

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity.

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more.

When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience.

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.

Call It Evil

Kristen Ghodsee is starting to get there, and we should assist everyone on the same road gently but firmly, as is indeed possible:

Follow the news out of Washington for a week, and the usual vocabulary of political criticism starts to feel insufficient. Words like “authoritarian” and “illiberal” describe styles of governance. They say much less about what it is like to watch an administration indulge shameless sadism, pursuing cruelty for its own apparent enjoyment. The word that fits better is one many on the Left have trained ourselves not to use: “evil.”

Our reluctance is not without reason. Evil calls to mind a Sunday school admonition or George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” a phrase that helped sell the immoral and disastrous war on terror. A long materialist tradition treats moral ideas as downstream of economic realities and cautions against idealism that overly concerns itself with the questions of values and culture. Evil conjures childish boogeymen and unhelpful abstractions, not the social structures we want to seriously analyze.

At the same time, the Left’s case for decent wages, housing, health care, and a world beyond class divisions is indisputably a moral case — whatever our theory says about the mechanics at play. And we don’t try to hide this: indeed, our movements often succeed best when we combine people’s self-interest with their sense of justice, neglecting neither.

On some level, we know that we can’t do without the language of good. A new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by philosopher Susan Neiman, argues that we can’t do without the language of evil either, and that rejecting it has left us disarmed. Neiman contends that the Left has surrendered moral vocabulary to fundamentalists and in doing so has let a bleak theory of human nature pass for plain realism. She traces that theory to distorted readings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and to a deliberate, well-funded effort by American business to spread it.

Neiman directed the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, from 2000 until earlier this year and has written about evil for decades, most notably in Evil in Modern Thought. Her other books include Learning from the Germans and Left Is Not Woke. In this interview, Neiman spoke with Kristen Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Everyday Utopia, and a frequent contributor to Jacobin.

Ghodsee and Neiman discussed why the Left needs moral language, and the perils of ceding it entirely to the people most likely to use it toward immoral ends. They also discussed where Neiman parts ways with many Marxists, how Germany’s official campaign against antisemitism became a crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights, and the problems of essentializing any experience, including that of class.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: The title of your book enjoins us to use explicitly moral language to describe politics in the Trump era. You suggest that many on the Left feel uncomfortable using words like “good” or “evil” or “truth” because of their religious connotations. Why is the language of morality necessary to the Left, especially in this political moment? Susan Neiman: It’s common to condemn the Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law. We forget that the rule of law only works if people commit to upholding it even if a legal decision goes against their self-interest — and that’s a moral commitment. James Madison knew that even the best constitution was no protection without “virtue in the people.” The Founding Fathers were less averse to moral concepts than we have become, especially on the liberal left.

Let’s dispense with a widespread misunderstanding that good and evil are religious ideas. Moral intuitions precede theology. Religion is a response to the problem of evil, though I don’t think it’s a very successful one. Every culture recognizes evil, whatever their religious practices. You could call it “awareness of injustice.” That’s something that children, most primates, and according to one study, even rats display.

My favorite argument that morality precedes religion comes from the Bible itself, when Abraham urges God not to punish the innocent with the guilty — not to accept collateral damage. That suggests that even should you have a direct line to the Lord himself, he isn’t the source of your moral judgment

It’s true that religious believers are more comfortable using moral concepts, and it’s equally true that fundamentalists abuse them. But why should we allow the most powerful tools in our language to be appropriated by those who are least able to use them responsibly? People are moved by those concepts, which appeal to deep intuitions and emotions; better to learn to analyze evil than deny what we can see every day. If the cold-blooded murder of fishermen, or schoolgirls, or peacefully protesting demonstrators isn’t evil, what is? Words like “authoritarian” are simply too weak to do it justice.

I don’t think Zohran Mamdani uses the word “evil,” but his campaign was premised on moral values, and its success cannot be reduced to affordability. He leaned hard on questions of justice, in particular the injustice that most people who keep New York City running cannot afford to live there. And his steadfast condemnation of the genocide in Gaza — which initially seemed a huge liability — is a great source of his popularity. We’re so used to politicians abandoning their principles when it suits them that Mamdani’s display of integrity became a source of credibility, creating hope he won’t sell out on other issues. We should also remember that the most successful (albeit only partially so) leftist movement in US history was the civil rights movement, which roused millions of people through a clear moral message

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Although written in clear and accessible prose, this short book grapples with complex philosophical issues. It forces readers to confront some of the most vexing theoretical issues of leftist politics over the last two centuries. Haunting this debate are the specters of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel and the perennial tension between idealism and materialism.

For you, Marxism is far too wedded to the idea that the economic relations of production determine our superstructural concepts of good, evil, justice, love, and so on. Why should the Left reclaim the power of ideas in its pursuit of progressive change?

Susan Neiman: Most of my work has been devoted to making complex philosophical issues accessible to general audiences, since I believe philosophical assumptions are a greater part of our lives than we recognize. Take statements like “Be realistic” or “That’s just human nature.” As used in ordinary language, they imply a web of assumptions about the world we take for granted because we haven’t reflected on them. Materialism is one of the most basic.

Like anyone who learned from Karl Marx, I’ve spent hours in arguments about differences between materialism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism, whether there are major differences between the early and late Marx, and how to get around the fact that his nineteenth-century predictions did not hold up. A long seminar wouldn’t do those arguments justice, much less a short interview.

Bertolt Brecht’s dictum “First comes the grub, and then come the morals” is chronologically correct. When people are hungry or homeless, they don’t have much energy to reflect on morality. Once their stomachs stop rumbling, they begin to think about justice. Marxism’s biggest paradox is that it inspires people through demands for justice — i.e., moral claims — while theoretically undermining the basis of that inspiration. Ideas move people in powerful ways — often rather bad ones, as nationalism today shows.

I admire the misread and forgotten Eduard Bernstein, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Although he was Friedrich Engels’s literary executor, he rejected dialectical materialism, which he thought was an insult to workers, who were just as capable of being moved by ideals as anyone else. He was also an early feminist and supporter of gay rights. Bernstein wrote that “social democracy needs Kant, who shows that materialism is the most deceptive ideology, and that contempt for ideals, the elevation of material facts to omnipotent powers is simply deceptive.”

The Enlightenment is now so dismissed that it’s often forgotten that Marxism was once seen as the culmination of Enlightenment thought — both by its defenders in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example, and by its Nazi opponents. On that view, Marx’s contribution was to insist that the ideals of the Enlightenment demand material realization — not that those ideals were reducible to material interests. It’s a subtle but important difference.

Call It Evil argues that we’ve been conditioned to accept materialism as a fact, not an ideology. The idea that moral concepts are just superstructure is supported by crass misreadings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, reinforced by Michel Foucault. I show how these misreadings of Smith and Darwin created a sense of inevitability you can read in any newspaper, without ever asking whether they are debatable philosophical assertions. Since the end of the Cold War, the sense of inevitability has become stronger.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Most secular people today imagine evil as something diabolical, but Hannah Arendt talked about the “banality” of evil. You also wrote a groundbreaking book, Evil in Modern Thought, exploring the concept’s dimensions. Many Marxists would argue that our social conception of “evil” emerges from the base of our material experience of the world, but you suggest that there is a kind of Platonic form of pure evil that exists independently of our social realities. That’s why we know it when we see it and why it’s such a powerful concept.

Can you talk about your use of this word? What is the rhetorical power of “evil,” for instance, over “awful”?

Susan Neiman: You can measure the rhetorical power of “evil” by the number of people — mostly on the Left — who object to it. It’s striking how many point out that it’s a dangerous term that can be abused, as if that had never occurred to anyone who’s thought about the subject. “Awful” can apply to a filthy apartment or a bad boyfriend. If it’s all you have to say about a genocide, you have failed to grasp what genocide is.

Marx’s contribution was to insist that the ideals of the Enlightenment demand material realization — not that those ideals were reducible to material interests. It’s a subtle but important difference.

I’m not a Platonist, and I don’t believe that evil exists independently of social realities. Until the mid-eighteenth century, most people did. I do believe that it’s something we recognize and can learn to recognize better.

Arendt’s work was crucial in showing us that the most dangerous forms of evil emerge not from sadism or cruelty but from our tendency to go along with systemic structures around us and not rock any boats that might disturb our lives. That she turned out to be wrong about the man Adolf Eichmann, as was proven by tape recordings that were unknown in 1963, doesn’t undermine the validity of her claims. Genocide cannot be committed by a few consciously evil people alone. It requires millions who accept them.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: As I read your book, I kept thinking about David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and how many contemporary debates about capitalism and socialism lean heavily on different conceptions of “human nature.” You show how American conservatives used their money and influence to fund the creation of think tanks and university programs in neoliberal economics and evolutionary psychology to protect their economic interests. Through their foundations and societies, they propped up men like Milton Friedman who asserted that all societies are based on greed and self-interest.

Do you think that conservatives are somehow more effective at weaponizing ideas than progressives, and if so, why? But also, given that these ideas were promoted by those most likely to financially gain from them, isn’t this a textbook case of the economic base determining the superstructure?

Susan Neiman: I found Graeber and Wengrow’s book liberating, though I wish they’d given Jean-Jacques Rousseau more credit. His argument should be music to their ears: we have no access whatsoever to the deeds, much less the thoughts and drives, of our prehistoric ancestors, so we project conceptions of human nature onto the past that suit our political projects. The Dawn of Everything was important for that argument; another related book is Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory. You cannot defend socialism without questioning the conception of human nature that capitalist ideology has taught us to take for granted. Everyone reading these words has surely encountered people who insist that socialism is nice in theory, but human nature ensures that it can’t work in practice.

When I began work on this book, I assumed that the various ways this ideology is blasted at us were just unfortunate coincidences; everything else seemed too conspiratorial. Looking further, particularly at Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s excellent The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, I realized how deliberate the mythmaking has been.

Certainly, economic interests can play a huge role in shaping and spreading ideologies. I’m just denying that they always determine them. And you’re right that conservatives are better at promoting ideas than leftists; a classic of mid-twentieth-century conservatism was called Ideas Have Consequences. Once leftists acknowledge that they do, we’ll get better at defending them.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Your wonderful chapter on propaganda starts with an anecdote about moving to Berlin in 1982 and listening to East and West German news broadcasts. What did these broadcasts teach you? Why do you think Americans are so particularly bad at recognizing propaganda? And why do you think propaganda erodes our capacity for moral judgment?

Susan Neiman: Those broadcasts were great background for reading Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, published a few years later. It’s not that I suddenly believed everything the East Germans broadcast, but I understood how context and framing, even without deliberate lying, could create completely different takes on reality.

The experience also inoculated me against a later lie, namely that the West Germans did a better job of dealing with the Nazi past than the East Germans. It’s a West German myth now accepted in much of the world. Few West Germans were spreading that myth in the 1980s, since anyone with basic knowledge of German could tell it was the East, at the time, that was reckoning with the Nazis — incompletely, but far more than the West, which wanted to sweep that history under the carpet. That’s a useful lesson for thinking about Cold War America as well.

Americans are bad at recognizing propaganda because our biggest piece of propaganda is that we have none. Possibly a silver lining of Trump’s attack on the media, and the media’s complicity with it, is that Americans will better recognize how worldviews can be shaped by political interest. I fear, however, that his weaponization of the phrase “fake news” leads people in a different, nihilistic direction: there is no news that isn’t manipulated to maintain power.

I don’t think we can have real moral judgment without considering competing views. We might accidentally behave morally, but it isn’t judgment if it isn’t reflective, and that means not taking your own morality for granted. It’s much easier to reflect if you are confronted with different moral and political assumptions. Too few Americans have opportunities to do that.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: In your chapter on why Gaza matters, you walk back some of the claims you made in your previous book, Learning from the Germans. What happened in Germany after October 7, 2023, that made you see things differently?

Susan Neiman: The problems started before October 7; they came to a head in 2019, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party proposed a parliamentary resolution banning Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It was a brilliant and sinister form of — can I call it Jew-washing? By embracing the government of Israel, the AfD hoped to answer charges of neofascism. How could it be fascist if it unconditionally supports the State of Israel? It also advances one of its main goals, which is keeping Muslim immigrants out of Germany.

No one challenged it, because the other parties were afraid to be seen as less philosemitic than the AfD, so they immediately passed a similar resolution, which resulted in canceling artists, writers, journalists, and others who can be described as “close to BDS,” i.e., anyone who supports Palestinian rights. And many of us are Jewish.

This created the biggest political/cultural debate of the last six years, which took place in television, radio, in print, and in parliaments. Learning from the Germans had argued that Germany’s historical reckoning was flawed, but it did better than any other country in facing the evils of its past history. The recent debates exposed the depth of those flaws in ways that forced me to revise my views. German reckoning suggests that as long as one is nice to Jews, any Jews, one has done one’s duty in opposing Nazism. This is an extremely simplistic understanding of fascism, ignoring the real lesson of Nuremberg: the importance of upholding human rights, and that they apply to all humans — including Palestinians.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: You also write about how the far right has weaponized antisemitism, not only Trump in his attacks on US universities but also Alternative for Germany, which recently won almost 44 percent of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. What does what you term “philosemitic McCarthyism” look like in practice?

Susan Neiman: The AfD provides a perfect example, but it is not alone. In 2022, I cohosted a conference in Berlin, Hijacking Memory, examining the weaponization of antisemitism among right-wing parties in seventeen countries. Predictably, the press accused us of antisemitism. The reception illustrated the problem we were analyzing!

People have been fired from jobs and had projects, exhibits, or appearances canceled. Those hardest hit are Muslims and people of color who support them. Americans will see parallels in the second Trump administration. What’s particularly infuriating for leftist Jews like me is this: Even if they don’t give a damn about Palestinians, why in the world do they think these kinds of repression protect Jews? On the contrary: targeting other groups, allegedly to protect us, only increases antisemitism. If I were paranoid, I’d suspect a conspiracy.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: In your chapter on woke identity politics, you warn that leftists should not replace racial essentialism with class essentialism. While social classes are obviously fluid and we all have multiple allegiances, don’t you think there is a profound difference between those of us who must work for a living versus those who can live off the dividends and capital gains generated by their (often-inherited) wealth? There is a real bifurcation between the owners of capital (and their heirs) and the rest of the population who must sell their time, labor, or attention to survive, the so-called 99 percent. How can any universalism encompass the billionaires?

Susan Neiman: I agree with Mamdani that there’s no good reason for billionaires to exist. Apart from die-hard ascetics, most of us who work for a living can imagine a luxury or two we wish we could afford. But it’s impossible for anyone to buy a billion dollars’ worth of treats; the point of making that much money is to exercise political power, as billionaires are doing with increasing shamelessness. Particularly given how much of their wealth depends on other people’s labor, that’s an injustice that cancels any form of democracy.

The notion of class has changed so much since Marx’s day that it’s unhelpful to depend on it; far better is a universal conception of justice.

There are profound differences between those who live on dividends and those who work for a living, just as there are profound differences between men and women, and between people of different ethnicities. Those are differences in experience, which is why it’s so important for different voices to be heard, but essentializing those differences is a metaphysical mistake with dangerous political consequences. And the notion of class has changed so much since Marx’s day that it’s unhelpful to depend on it; far better is a universal conception of justice, which occasionally moves even members of the ruling class to action. Where would we be without Engels’s dividends?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: You end by claiming that socialism offers a way out of the morass we find ourselves in today. Can you talk about your vision of socialism?

Susan Neiman: In my last book, Left Is Not Woke, I offered a normative definition of what it (should) mean to be left today. There are three principles common to both leftists and liberals:

1. We are universalists, not tribalists, because we believe that genuine connections and obligations do not depend on origins.
2. We believe in a principled distinction between justice and power, even though the distinction is often abused.
3. We believe that progress toward more just and fulfilling societies isn’t inevitable, but it is possible.

In that book, I argued for a popular front between leftists and liberals in a time of rising fascism. But there’s a fourth principle that distinguishes leftists from liberals: Social rights — to health, education, housing, fair labor practices, and leisure — are not “benefits” or “safety nets” but rights as important as political rights to speak, vote, travel, or worship as we please.

Like Bernstein, I think those rights could be achieved through democratic processes. I’m well aware that this can look utopian at this moment. My book is meant as a contribution to the conceptual changes that must happen for a peaceful revolution to take place. In a world that’s armed to the teeth, anything else is too dangerous.

Rage And Sadness Visible

Kevin Yuill writes:

I stood in Parliament Square 10 days ago among a motley group of individuals opposed to assisted dying, waiting for the result of the vote on Labour MP Lauren Edwards’ assisted-dying bill. Whereas those demonstrating in favour of assisted suicide wore signature pink t-shirts, reflecting the campaign’s neat, middle-class support, we included fundamentalist Christians, Muslim doctors, Reform UK supporters, hardened left-wing activists, atheist disabled advocates and a colourful trans person with dwarfism. Other times, many of our side would have been at each other’s throats. But on Friday, we stood together.

As a BBC crew pointed a camera in our faces to record our responses to the vote, I was worried that I might be sick, given my nerves. Not, perhaps, a good look on television. It was a real battle to ensure that all MPs against the bill could vote. Reform’s Suella Braverman, delayed on a train, bolted ahead of her security to get to the vote with 30 seconds to spare.

After the result was announced, the sickness vanished instantly and we cheered, more in relief than triumph. Those who had argued among each other went off to the pub together – including a Muslim doctor who had a Coke.

But now the sense of relief has subsided, it’s worth reflecting on a hugely important result. After the defeat of Liam McArthur’s assisted-dying bill in Scotland, the first rollback of the euthanasia regime in Alberta, Canada, and a referendum vote against assisted dying in Slovenia, we might wonder whether the momentum behind euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) has stalled.

Of course, those in favour of the UK’s assisted-dying bill immediately came forward with their own reasons why it failed. Labour MP Liz Kendall complained that the bill had been ‘scuppered by a tiny minority of unelected members of the House of Lords’. She insisted that the Commons vote against the bill belied ‘widespread and deep public support for assisted dying’.

These assertions are not grounded in fact. After all, the bill was defeated on Friday not in the Lords, but in the elected chamber, where Liz Kendall sits. And while among the public there is widespread support for assisted dying, it’s shallow support. The more people learn about assisted dying, the more they reject it. Palliative care doctors, who know most about the end of life, reject EAS by 82 per cent.

The truth is that EAS thrives when no one pays attention to it. The more light that is shone on the case for assisted dying, the more it falls to pieces. Campaigners assume that spending huge amounts of money on popularising simplistic slogans, or telling horrific end-of-life stories, will convince the public and silence the opposition.

But people’s common sense tends to cut through assisted-suicide campaigners’ rhetoric. It is common sense that ingesting poison with intent to die is suicide, no matter how much money is spent rebranding it as ‘assisted dying’. It is common sense to see that those with Down syndrome can be easily manipulated into assisted suicide if it is legal. It is common sense that killing is not medicine. One of the hallmarks of EAS regimes around the world is that they list the cause of death as the underlying disease rather than poisoning.

This cover-up – from California to Canada – has sinister echoes across history. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany ran a euthanasia programme known as T4. It led to the murder of more than 70,000 people deemed senile, mentally handicapped, mentally ill, epileptic and so on. The Nazis, using a similarly euphemistic phrase to ‘assisted dying’, called these murders ‘mercy deaths’. On 3 August 1941, Clemens August von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster, exposed the T4 programme in a brave speech:

‘The patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was.’

Under pressure from growing protests, Hitler halted the T4 programme on 24 August 1941, though less systematic murder of disabled people continued.

We should seek to emulate Galen’s stand against the T4 programme today. The more the false claims of assisted-dying proponents are questioned, the more the reality of what they want is exposed. The Lords held the assisted-dying bill to the light earlier this year. They showed that the bill’s much-vaunted safeguards were inadequate. They showed that someone with Down syndrome could be pressured into the ‘choice’ of assisted suicide and that women suffering domestic abuse might also be pressured into an early death. The Lords even brought to our attention the fact that companies like G4S might be employed to dispatch British citizens for a profit. The more light that is shone on these dishonest practices, the better.

The last word should be left to Ashley Dalton, the Labour MP suffering terminal breast cancer. As she told the Commons on Friday: ‘The idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false… It’s nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific.’

Imogen Garfinkel writes:

Two days before her Christian grandmother’s assisted dying procedure in Ontario, Canada, Brigitte Kranendonk sat her down to make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen. ‘I used very frank terms. I said: “Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?”’ The 83-year-old was in visible disbelief and began crying for 45 minutes. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Brigitte Stegemann, known affectionately to her family as ‘GG’ or ‘Oma’, wailed. ‘She was bawling. Inconsolable,’ Kranendonk, a real estate agent who shares the same first name with her late grandmother, tells the Daily Mail. 

In a cognitive test, designed to ascertain whether she was sound of mind enough to consent to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), Stegemann ‘got every question wrong’, believing her two living siblings to be dead, according to Kranendonk. Yet 48 hours after she wept uncontrollably at the notion of MAiD, Stegemann is said to have died with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood due to a botched first attempt at connecting the IV, administered by a nurse allegedly not wearing gloves. 

Kranendonk is currently in the process of desperately appealing to the Chief Coroner’s Office in Ontario, as well as the Patient Ombudsman and Belleville Police, in a bid to ascertain whether what happened the morning of July 10 at The Pearl care home in Cannifton was legal. Bereaved and distraught, she claims MAiD practitioners took advantage of her grandmother’s vulnerability to perform the procedure, which she alleges was carried out without express consent. ‘She was a vulnerable human being, and they saw an opportunity,’ Kranendonk says, her rage and sadness visible. She suspects the MAiD practitioners were inappropriately ideologically motivated, and believes the chain of events leading up to the procedure should be investigated. 

It is understood that the practitioners and care home, who have not commented publicly, maintain that Stegemann had legally consented to proceed. ‘No one had ever done MAiD at this residential home before: this was their very first MAiD procedure. So I don’t know if they just dropped the ball, because they didn’t know what they were doing.’ The moment of Stegemann’s death was anything but peaceful, as she had once wished. Recalling those nightmarish minutes, a traumatised Kranendonk speaks in the present tense, as if the procedure was still happening in slow motion. ‘There was a phenomenal amount of blood,’ she says, describing the way that the nurse failed to find the correct vein in the right arm to insert the IV, before switching to the left – but only after having ‘poked her about three or four times with the needle. It is all over my Oma’s arm, it is all over her nightie, soaking through her pillow, all over the sheets, there is so much blood. And throughout all this time, mind you, the nurse is not wearing gloves.’

Another episode that still haunts Kranendonk is from February: she says she had to convince her grandmother to accept a medical port, a small device placed under the skin to provide a direct way for medicine to reach a vein. After it was fitted, the 83-year-old repeatedly ripped it off, screaming: ‘I don’t want the death shot!’ Prior to Stegemann’s death that summer, Kranendonk had been her caregiver for 12 years, and her medical power of attorney for the past six. A year and a half before her death, the family made the decision to house Stegemann in The Pearl as her physical and cognitive health began to deteriorate. In February, she was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. But doctors were not certain about whether the diagnosis meant she had six months to live, or as much time as two years. 

For the past decade, Kranendonk had been carefully monitoring what her grandmother ate to keep her healthy, including limiting her sugar intake. Following the cancer diagnosis, she changed tack and allowed her to eat whatever she craved, deciding she just wanted her grandmother to feel as ‘joyful’ as possible in her final stage of life. She spoke to Stegemann about all options, and even brought up MAiD, explaining what the procedure would entail. She remembers her grandmother saying clearly: 'No, I don’t want that.’ Kranendonk says her religiosity, and the notion of displeasing God, was a large factor in why her German-born grandmother instinctively opposed assisted dying. 

Then came June, when Kranendonk and her husband went on a 10-day road trip. In the past, every time she was away, she received frequent phone calls from the residential home regarding her grandmother’s health. Everything seemed normal. She picked up numerous phone calls, and the doctors didn’t discuss a dramatic decline in Stegemann’s health – only that she had fallen over and would need a wheelchair. But towards the end of the trip, on July 3, Kranendonk received a different kind of call. It was from the home, saying they were going to book a MAiD assessment for her grandmother. Her health had apparently seriously deteriorated.

The news hit like a ton of bricks. Back in Cannifton, Kranendonk anxiously questioned a nurse at the residential home about who had initiated the MAiD conversation. ‘The nurse became very abrasive, very defensive,’ Kranendonk recalls. ‘She was like, “Well, I’m just trying to advocate for her. I’m just trying to do what’s right for her.”’ Soon after Kranendonk returned from her trip away, she discovered her grandmother had actually already had her first MAiD consultation. ‘No one called me,’ she says, explaining how she feels she was isolated from the whole process from the beginning. While her grandmother was certainly sick, Kranendonk found it difficult to believe that she had rapidly declined in health during her trip away, and privately questioned whether what the nurses told her was true.

‘I noticed that she had lost weight when I saw her after returning, but she had slowly been losing weight for a while. Regarding her rapid decline, I am not a doctor, but when I came back she was still eating, walking to the bathroom, very talkative and full of jokes. She never complained about pain in front of me, except when her stomach was being relentlessly pressed.’ Kranendonk maintains that Stegemann did not at any point make a formal MAiD application herself. But every time she tried to question whether MAiD was the right pathway for her grandmother, she feels she was made to feel crazy or burdensome by the medical professionals at the home.

‘I truly believe that one nurse really saw us as an obstacle,’ she says. ‘We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother. I think she really, truly believes that MAiD is the best for people, and shame on me for trying to stop that.’ Kranendonk made sure she was in the room for the second MAiD assessment, and it was there where she noticed the doctor speak in ‘really loose terms, never using the words death or dying’. ‘She explains MAiD to my grandmother by saying: “We’re going to give you medicine, you’re going to feel at peace. And I just want you to know that you won’t have a bowel movement.”’

‘She’s saying it in these strange terms, that aren’t literal,’ Kranendonk says, adding: ‘My Oma’s just kind of nodding. Her first language is not English, she is 83-years old and severely hearing-impaired.’ Kranendonk looked at the doctor, and said: ‘She doesn’t understand what you’re saying.’ That’s when the doctor allegedly turned to the grandmother, and offered: ‘We’re going to make sure you won’t have any more pain.’ During the cognitive assessment, which she also sat in on, Kranendonk claims that the questions were curiously designed, in that the doctor couldn’t immediately verify the answers. As opposed to questions such as who the prime minister was, or that day's date, the grandmother was asked personal questions, like how many siblings she had. ‘But none of that is in her records. They would not know if the information was correct, or not,’ Kranendonk says.

Even so, Stegemann got the answers wrong. She said she had no siblings, despite having 13. The doctor asked how many were still alive, and Stegemann answered, saying none. But two are still alive, and the grandmother had seen one only a month and a half before. ‘So we’re going through this assessment. None of the answers could be proven, unless I was there. There was nothing concrete. They’re supposed to be doing a cognitive assessment, and yet they picked questions that they can’t verify,’ Kranendonk says. According to government guidelines, a patient must be sound of mind and have a ‘grievous and irremediable medical condition’ to be eligible for MAiD in Canada.

Eventually, much to her discomfort, Kranendonk was asked to leave the room by the doctor, who continued the test. Waiting outside anxiously, Kranendonk was sure her grandmother would fail. But four minutes after the cognitive test was complete, the doctor announced that Stegemann was ‘deemed fit for MAiD, and we’re going to proceed’. Later on the same day, Stegemann confused the names of her daughter and her granddaughter. ‘I was astonished that she was given the okay,’ Kranendonk says, following the assessment on Tuesday, July 7. The doctor assured her that her grandmother would still be able to ‘deny’ MAiD on the day of the procedure, which was scheduled for Friday at 11am.

Then began an impossible balance. Kranendonk was determined to try and ascertain whether Stegemann had actually consented to MAiD – but she didn’t want to cause undue stress for the 83-year-old. Most of all, she just wanted to enjoy whatever time she had left with her beloved Oma, who she grew up living with as a child. Every summer and long weekend throughout her upbringing was spent with her grandparents – and the thought of losing Stegemann was heartbreaking. ‘Like, I’m already on limited time with her. So there's this balance, of wanting to get her to understand, and also still wanting to protect her – to not make her upset.’

On Wednesday, Kranendonk woke up after barely sleeping and prepared to visit her grandmother. But before she had a chance to enter the home, she got a call from the nurse, who said they planned to fast-track her grandmother's death to Thursday – simply because the doctor had an early opening. ‘I was like: “I’m not talking about this right now, I’m on my way to visit my Oma.”’ The nurse replied: ‘Oh, well, I already spoke to your Oma, and she agreed.’ But Thursday wouldn’t have allowed enough time for Stegemann’s pastor to arrive, or her son – depriving her of her dying wishes to be surrounded by her loved ones and prayer.

Kranendonk said Thursday wasn’t an option, so Friday was kept as the death date. She felt cornered. She was trying to protect her grandmother, but says the nurses were making her feel like an obstacle, standing in everyone’s way. The stress became overwhelming, and she felt like she had no control. That day, she says she marched up to residential home’s manager, to complain about how everything had been handled – how the process felt sped up, and lacked transparency. She demanded to see the MAiD paperwork, and to find out who was filling it in. The manager said everything had already been filled out the day prior, and her grandmother had signed it.

To this day, Kranendonk has not seen the paperwork allegedly signed by her grandmother, agreeing to the procedure – all of which was completed without any family members present. ‘I don't know who the witness was. I don’t know how they explained the paperwork to her. I don't know what they said to her. I have no idea,’ Kranendonk says, now horrified by what she views as lapses in proper MAiD procedure. ‘I’m sorry. How can we make this better for you?’ the manager asked Kranendonk. In a fit of rage and disbelief, she replied: ‘You guys have taken this whole MAiD thing and have just rammed it down our throats.’ Following the altercation with the manager, Kranendonk confronted her grandmother and explained what would be happening on Friday in vivid terms.

The conversation caused her to breakdown in tears and admit that she had made a mistake. ‘I just kept saying there's no mistake, there's no mistake. You don’t have to do this. The doctors are coming on Friday, and you just say no,’ Kranendonk recalls pleading. But it got to a point where Kranendonk didn't want to ‘keep fighting MAiD, and lose sight of who I’m fighting for’. Her grandmother was unwell, and confused, so she made the decision to just try and experience all the precious quality time she could have with Stegemann – while she still had a chance. And crucially, she trusted the nurses to not take advantage of the ailing woman.

‘My Oma wasn’t the only vulnerable one in that situation – I was. I was vulnerable in the loss and love of my grandmother, being her care provider, and I was vulnerable in trusting that they were making the right decisions. It all felt so sped up and in slow motion at the same time,’ Kranendonk says. On Thursday, the pair danced together to traditional German Polka music and ate ice-cream in her room. ‘We had the best day,’ Kranendonk recalls, tearfully. ‘I felt great leaving on Thursday.’ But she went home utterly confused. On the one hand, she was elated she had such a fantastic day with her grandmother. But on the other hand, she couldn't bear the possibility of what might happen the next day. ‘I was so split. Part of me was like, maybe it’s not going to happen. And then there was this underlying feeling of, oh God, what if it does?’

Since her grandmother’s death, many people have asked Kranendonk why she didn’t try harder to stop the lethal injection from taking place. In hindsight, she felt like she was in an unworkable situation. She at once wanted the best for her grandmother and wanted to respect her autonomy, but was terribly concerned that she had never once heard her say, out loud and clearly: ‘I want MAiD.’ ‘All I saw was her not understanding the process,’ Kranendonk recalls. When Friday, July 10 arrived, everything felt rushed again. The family took Stegemann out into the residential home's garden to share strawberry ice-cream – her favourite – and the pastor arrived, who started a round of prayers. ‘She’s very confused at this point,’ Kranendonk remembers.

At 9.30am – after 10 minutes of being outside – the MAiD nurse asked for the family to return indoors, despite the fact that they were told the doctor would not arrive until 11am. The nurse said that she needed time to get the IV started, and Kranendonk remembers telling her forcefully that they were not finished having time together as a family. ‘Well, how long do you need?’ she claims the nurse said, rather dismissively, in response. Once back inside the home, the nurse started the IV, Kranendonk alleges. According to Kranendonk, the doctor hadn’t even arrived, and her grandmother was not asked if she gave consent for the procedure to begin. The nurse struggled to insert the IV into Stegemann’s right arm, and ended up piercing her repeatedly with the needle before attempting her left arm. Kranendonk remembers in graphic detail the copious amount of blood, which made the whole procedure feel strangely unprofessional.

‘She’s asking us to hand her things, to flush out the needle. So we’re now a part of this. She’s asking us to grab things for her, and to hold things for her. This nurse is not wearing gloves. There’s blood all over her hands, there’s blood all over the place,’ she says, horrified by the memory. The doctor then entered the room and told Stegemann she was there to give her ‘medicine’, and asked if that was okay with her. ‘My Oma is not moving. She doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t say anything, and the doctor just said: “Okay, well, I’m going to proceed.”’ Within 10 minutes, Stegemann was pronounced dead. Due to how unresponsive she was, Kranendonk doesn’t know if her grandmother died shortly before the MAiD, because of the MAiD, or whether she was just in deep prayer.

She says that no heartbeat was taken, before or after the procedure. ‘What was concerning, though, is that that morning, I was crying. My grandmother looked at me and said, “If you don’t stop crying, I’m not going to sleep tonight.” She said that to me on Friday morning.’ It was only in the aftermath of Stegemann’s death that Kranendonk – overwhelmed with grief – began to believe that something went awfully wrong. She has subsequently learnt that nurses are strictly prohibited from pressuring a patient to pursue MAiD, and that all the correct paperwork for MAiD to take place must be submitted before a death date can be determined.

Stegemann’s paperwork was completed after her death, her granddaughter claims. ‘She did not consent the morning of the procedure,’ Kranendonk says, steadfast in her conclusion that her grandmother was euthanised against her will. She has consistently asked The Pearl to hand over her grandmother’s medical records, but all of her requests have been refused, she says. She regrets not applying for a legal injunction to prevent the MAiD from occurring, but she also didn't realise she had the right to ask for one at the time. ‘I was flying blind,’ she says. And crucially, her grandmother still needed medical attention in those final weeks. ‘We live in Canada, where medical care is not always easy to get. She still needed medical care. I could not just scoop her up and bring her home,’ she says. She trusted the government, and the medical establishment, not to take advantage of her grandmother. In the months since July, that trust has completely shattered. She says she has ‘settled a lot into prayer’, and is sharing her story as a way to give more education to care providers who may find themselves in similar scenarios.

A spokesman for Belleville Police told the Daily Mail: ‘This incident is currently open and under investigation with our Criminal Investigations Division. We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.’ Canada has one of the highest rates of euthanasia in the world, with MAiD accounting for 4.7 per cent of the deaths in 2023. The Daily Mail contacted The Pearl for comment.