The Second Oil Crisis Is Here

Amir Handjani writes:

Most people of a certain vintage think back to 1973 when seeking a historical parallel to the global energy crisis radiating from the Third Gulf War — the war of choice launched by President Trump against Iran in conjunction with Israel. While the comparison with the 1973 oil shock is usually made too quickly and without sufficient precision, it is directionally correct: America and the world will soon be in the grips of an energy crisis as dramatic and as world-historically transformative as the one that defined the Seventies.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the second oil crisis is already here.

On October 17, 1973, the Arab members of OPEC announced a 5% monthly production cut after Washington airlifted weapons to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Next came a full embargo against the United States and the Netherlands (the latter boasted one of Europe’s most pro-Israel governments at the time and was used as a staging ground for US support to the Jewish state).

The price of crude surged to $11 a barrel, up from $3, in a matter of weeks. American gasoline prices jumped 40% by November. Lines formed at filling stations. The Western world was in crisis. The US economy tipped into stagflation and remained there for the rest of the decade. By the end of the Seventies, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a speech diagnosing a national “malaise” and a “crisis of confidence”. He also urged his countrymen to wear sweaters in lieu of burning fuel to warm themselves.

The embargo lasted five months. The damage lasted a decade. Japan, which imported almost all its oil, restructured its entire industrial base around electronics and fuel efficiency. That pivot made Japan’s economy more innovative, the envy of the world for the next 20 years. The crisis also created the International Energy Agency and the first serious strategic-petroleum-reserve frameworks that still exist today: after what the global economy went through that decade, countries wanted to deal with the issue collectively, coordinating in preparation of the next embargo.

But there is a crucial difference between then and now. In 1973, the disruption resulted from a political decision by producers to turn off the tap. Supply could theoretically have been restored the minute politics changed.

What we confront now, as a consequence of Trump’s Iran war, is more complicated: chokepoint closure, damaged infrastructure, insurance markets in disarray, fields shutting in (temporarily closed). And the scale is simply not comparable. Around 20 million barrels a day move through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 20% of global consumption and nearly a third of all seaborne oil trade. The 1973 embargo, damaging as it was, didn’t come close to these conditions. This is a supply disruption brought about by Iran in response to Tehran being attacked by two nuclear powers, and its ramifications won’t soon be contained, much less reversed.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest. That makes room for two shipping lanes, each two miles across. Around 100 vessels a day transited the Strait in normal times, 60% to 70% of them tankers or liquid-natural-gas carriers. Saudi Arabia moves 38% of the crude, Iraq another 22%, and the United Arab Emirates 13%. The top five exporters between them account for 93% of all the crude that goes through that passage.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have constructed pipelines for just this type of contingency. Together, they can route about 2.6 million barrels a day around the Strait, approximately a third of Gulf export volumes. Iraq and Kuwait have no such option, however. And Qatar, which supplies roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG, has no alternative route to market, either. This is a structural problem that sheer capacity alone can’t overcome.

Since 28 February, commercial shipping through the Strait has nearly ground to a halt. Tanker traffic dropped 70% in the first days and then fell to near-zero as jacked-up insurance premiums rendered the economics impossible. Most of the vessels still moving are from the Iranian dark fleet. Washington has been reluctant to target them, wary of what Tehran would do to Gulf energy infrastructure in retaliation. Protection-and-indemnity war-risk coverage was suspended as of 5 March. The Trump administration floated the idea of sovereign-level tanker insurance, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly walked back the brainstorm. That would have put US taxpayers on the hook for damaged cargo, while the US Navy has made it clear that it lacks the ability to offer protective escorts in the near future.

In short, without insurance, ships don’t move.

Iraq’s three main southern oilfields have seen production collapse by 70%, falling to roughly 1.3 million barrels per day, down from 4.3 million. Onshore storage is filling because there is nowhere to send the crude. Fields that shut in don’t simply restart if and when a ceasefire is announced. Reservoir pressure, infrastructure condition, damaged terminals — all factor in, to the world economy’s detriment.

The timeline for restoration is weeks at best and months in the most realistic cases. Even today, the market is pricing a clean restart. Yet that assumption has very little basis in how the Middle East actually operates.

Brent, a key oil benchmark, is now trading north of $106 a barrel. That is the number that gets attention, but it is everything that this number triggers that needs to be examined.

Liquified petroleum gas and naphtha (liquid hydrocarbon used in the petrochemicals industry) move through the Persian Gulf in enormous volumes, and almost nobody outside the energy sector thinks about them. Naphtha is what petrochemical plants, heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia, run on. Those plants make plastics, fertilisers, packaging, and the agricultural chemicals that go into growing the food we consume. When naphtha supply is disrupted, the effects don’t show up at the pump. They show up six to 12 weeks later in the price of a bag of flour, a bottle of cooking oil, a box of cereal.

We watched this in slow motion after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Ukrainian wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and fertiliser were never formally sanctioned. But the disruption to trade finance, shipping insurance, and port logistics was enough to send food prices into a commodity super-cycle that hit Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Bangladesh harder than anywhere else. Governments already stretched by their Covid fiscal response had nothing left to absorb the extra shock. The Third Gulf War threatens a repeat — on a much wider scale.

Then there’s LNG. Qatar has declared force majeure on LNG exports, freeing itself from delivery obligations, after drone strikes hit its export infrastructure. Qatar accounts for roughly a fifth of global LNG supply. The IEA estimates a full Hormuz closure would pull more than 300 million cubic meters per day out of the global gas market, about twice what Nord Stream carried at its peak. There is no spare liquefaction capacity sitting idle somewhere that can cover that. Australia, the United States, and West Africa are all running near full capacity. Asia and Europe will end up competing for the same cargoes, bidding up prices that eventually land on ordinary consumers.

A ceasefire in the next 30 to 60 days, followed by a slow normalisation of shipping, probably keeps Brent somewhere between $110 and $130 and takes at least half a point off global GDP. That is the optimistic scenario, and it requires things to go well politically in a region where things have a habit of going, well, boom.

Beyond 90 days, the picture darkens considerably. Shut-in fields, damaged port infrastructure, an insurance market that can’t simply switch back on, storage constraints that have permanently altered production profiles in some fields. Iran’s own military spokesperson has already warned publicly to get ready for oil at $200 a barrel. Analysts at Rystad Energy have Brent at $135 by June if the war runs for four months. Markets are not pricing that yet. They were not pricing a pandemic in February 2020, either.

The IEA, founded in the wake of the 1973 crisis, has now coordinated the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history: 400 million barrels across more than 30 countries, with the United States contributing 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is an extraordinary intervention. It is also, as analysts at Bernstein noted, only about 15% of the daily supply lost due to the Hormuz closure. The barrels also take 60-90 days to meaningfully reach the market. It buys time but doesn’t fundamentally deal with the problems outlined above.

The United States isn’t insulated from these price shocks. The Trump administration has been fighting to tame inflation, and that fight gets considerably harder if oil stays above $100 a barrel for any length of time. Trumpian spokesmen gloat about domestic production, serenely unaware that oil and gas are fungible global commodities: a chokepoint several thousand miles away will drive up prices everywhere else — that is, unless Washington is prepared to contemplate an export ban.

The picture is still bleaker elsewhere. As consumers, China, India, Japan, and South Korea together account for around 75% of the crude that transits the Persian Gulf. China alone sources more than half of its 11-million-barrels-a-day import requirement from the Middle East. For those countries, this is literally the lifeblood of their economic development.

And as it was in 1973, the people who absorb the worst of it will not be the ones with the hedges and the trading desks. They will be in Cairo buying cooking oil, or in Karachi watching the price of flour move out of reach. They will be working-class Trump voters on low incomes who need to fill up their tanks to get to work. Half a century on from the first oil crisis, a narrow passage can still bring the global economy to its knees.

Scotland Should Reject Assisted Suicide

John MacLeod writes:

It was just after New Year 2019 and, in a central-Scotland city, Donald — seventy-eight, a clergyman, theologian, author and journalist — suddenly felt dreadfully unwell.

The alert Lewisman had always been vigorous and strong and rarely bothered doctors. His GP that day felt uneasy, and promptly directed Donald to the Brutalist pile of a certain local hospital.

That was Thursday. On Friday, hours apart, Donald was put through two emergency abdominal operations. On Saturday morning, the consultant — who had not even bothered first to summon wife and family — calmly told him he had aggressive, end-stage cancer of the colon.

He had, he learned, but weeks to live and might never even be able to leave hospital. “We were shocked by what we saw,” the assistant surgeon breathed later that day as we reeled from the news.

For, dear reader, Donald was my father.

Had the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Act been on the statute-book — MSPs face the final vote on Orkney MSP Liam McArthur’s Bill today; it passed first-reading last May by seventy votes to fifty-six — the learned physicians could have pressed Daddy to consider euthanasia.

There are, gratifyingly, signs that McArthur’s Bill is already in serious trouble — as Kim Leadbeater’s similar proposals seem now to be foundering at Westminster.

Three MSPs who backed the measure in principle last May — including, last Monday, the political weathercock that is Russell Findlay, leader of the Scottish Conservatives — have now reversed their position. If four more flip their vote, McArthur’s Bill is sunk.

They are increasingly anxious about coercion, be it by covetous offspring or abusive and controlling husbands.

The penny, too, has finally dropped that very few adults truly grasp the finality of death until about the age of twenty-five — it takes that long for the prefrontal cortex of the brain to hardwire — and that it is most unlikely, left in the hands of Providence, you will die in racked anguish.

My own position, as a very poor Christian, is that the triune God is the author of life, that my times are in His hands and — be it soon or distant — I quietly leave my eventual demise, its cause and circumstances and timing, to His gracious decree.

But this is not, these days, an outlook on life widely held. And, in January 2019, my loathing of euthanasia became far more personal than that.

With difficulty, ten days after the surgery, I took my father home to die. Not that he was allowed to leave the Soviet bloc, to which said infirmary spiritually belongs, without signing a “red letter” — the timid agreement that, should his heart conk out, he was not to be resuscitated.

Something began to feel a bit off. Far from fading away, my father began ever so slowly to rally. He ate a little more each day, struggled out of bed and tried to dress smartly. One morning I clipped his toenails — an interesting new experience; but he was still too sore to bend — and, one evening, he even finished most of the Southern fried chicken, crispy French fries and gravy I had tenderly concocted for him.

Then, like a thunderclap — tissue-samples had been sent away for biopsy — the histology came back.

The consultant had made a mistake. Daddy did not have cancer of the colon at all. He had in fact a very rare cancer of the appendix — pseudomyxoma peritonei — and in unusually unhurried form.

It might, I suppose, have caught up with him when he was about a hundred and ten. For now, he rapidly mended and made a slow but complete recovery. By a sunny Saturday late in March he was out in the garden planting potatoes.

He went on to enjoy arguably the best four years of his life, wrote several books, had several holidays on his native island, kept up his Stornoway Gazette column and preached and lectured.

As late as October 2022, my father was still carrying 25-kg sacks of compost through his townhouse to the back-garden. Presiding at the dinner-table and still throwing his decisive weight around: on occasion, especially in the house-arrest months of Covid, we had epic rows.

After some enjoyable grousing, we forgave that hapless consultant. Cancer of the bowel is one of the commonest and chief killers in Scotland. And often presents uncommonly.

Pseudomyxoma peritonei is extraordinarily rare: few doctors ever see a case in their entire career. The same consultant did us one great service: months later, he quietly dissuaded my father from undergoing an epic operation in Basingstoke — the “Sugarbaker Process” — for what doctors jocularly term the jelly-belly cancer.

It takes hours and hours, it is not without risk, and, given Daddy’s regained and high quality of life, it made scant sense. There was, too, the concern that the eagerness of Basingstoke consultants to do it might have owed something to academic, The Lancet derring-do.

I read once that men typically think about sex nineteen times a day. The trouble with euthanasia is that, by contrast, we are very reluctant to think about death at any time — those eyes of fire that search out all.

Opinion-polling on assisted dying always shows enthusiastic support for a question like “Do you agree you should have a right to die with dignity and without unbearable suffering?”

But deeper polling, digging down and with some enlargement on the facts, soon unearths profound unease.

There are lazy and widely-held assumptions in the pro-euthanasia case. This, I personally believe, is largely driven by hatred, conscious or otherwise, of any Judeo-Christian restraints on our passions. So much opposition to it, honked brain surgeon Dr Henry Marsh to The Sunday Times in 2017, “is all bloody Christians”:

They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn’t that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity? 

We tend to think that doctors never make mistakes. That it’s a breeze to kill with a prescribed injection or swallow. In fact, from the Netherlands to Canada, it often goes horribly wrong.

We fool ourselves that offspring or relatives would never, but never, press for Grandma’s swift, convenient slide into eternity because they seek fast inheritance for that little place in the south of France.

We fear that dying is a dreadful, wracking, painful experience. I have sat by several death-beds, seen a lot of dead bodies, decreed an embalming, screwed shut a few coffins, filled in many graves and even helped dig the odd one.

Please do not be frightened: I have no idea where you live. But having witnessed last days, last hours and last gasps, I have never seen anyone who wanted to die or who passed away in terror and agony. Daddy, in nearly sixty years of pastoral ministry, never saw one either.

We all used to know this. Until well after the Second World War, most in Britain died at home, not in hospital. Every grandmother knew the natural processes involved. Folk were not afraid of it: every housewife, just within living memory, was expected to know how to “lay out” her dead.

My late MacLeod grandmother, born in 1912, was so good at this task — certain aspects are not for the squeamish — she was frequently summoned by neighbours when bereavement struck.

Now so few of us even see — far less handle — a cold corpse that imagination has wrought its worst and all reason is out the door.

Few have seen so many people die as Dr Christopher Kerr, of New York state and one of the world’s foremost experts in palliative care. He is adamant. “It’s actually quite hard to die in a sufferable state. Because, to die, you need to be able to sleep, and to sleep you need to be comfortable.

“Pain is overstated as an issue — way overstated. Confusional states, agitation, psychogenic distress, disturbed sleep, or changing sleep architecture — these are much more likely to be issues we treat.”

About 10 per cent of deaths, Dr Kerr says, are acute. “The rest are essentially forecastable. It’s seldom a falling off the cliff — it’s a slow slide. I ask, ‘Well, what were they like two months ago, four months ago, six months ago?’ And it’s that trajectory that’s going to take them to the end.”

As for the moment of death itself? “It’s remarkable how undramatic it is — how anticlimactic.” Indeed, when Dr Douglas Glass slipped into the Queen’s Balmoral chamber on 8th September 2022, no one in the little bedside vigil had even noticed Her Majesty had stopped breathing.

I find the phrase “assisted dying” truly offensive. We have been helping our loved ones to die for millennia. Holding their hand, fetching and carrying, washing and sterilising things, hushing concerns and fear, prayer and praise by the bedside. Making sure, at every moment, they are clean, they are safe and they are comfortable.

For the new, terrifying moral order we might shortly tumble into, take a look across the pond.

In 2016, Canada passed “Medical Assistance In Dying” legislation that granted, on supposedly strict terms, euthanasia.

It was only, declared the Government, for people with terminal illness. Then, in 2021, the law was broadened by Bill C-7: MAID would now be available to people with non-terminal conditions.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, even crowed about the cost savings it would create: whereas the old MAID regime saved $86.9 million per year — a “net cost reduction”, in his sterile words — Bill C-7 would create additional net savings of $62 million per year.

Healthcare, particularly for those suffering from chronic conditions, is expensive; but assisted suicide only costs the taxpayer $2,327 “per case,” Giroux enthused.

And we might do well to ask ourselves who has long funded those slick social-media campaigns in this land for assisted suicide. Can we be confident it is not, for instance, private health insurers keen to save a few bob?

MAID will change again next year. People with mental illness will also be eligible for euthanasia. And some Canadians already talk about making it available to children: since 2017, the number of Canadians annually put down like a tired old tabby-cat has quadrupled.

My father outran his cancer, but he could not outrun the weight of years. Hospitalised briefly with aspirate pneumonia, late in October 2022, he was never well again.

By New Year he was already eating less and less, leaving the house less and less, withdrawing emotionally, and (critically) sleeping more and more — as we ran up and down stairs, attending to the latest summons, measuring out pills, leaving two pint-glasses of cold water by his bedside every night.

And, at his express decree, only drawn from the kitchen-tap. Dr Kerr’s slow slide…

Somehow, by immense effort of will, my father stayed on his feet into May 2023. Then he collapsed. Daily Marie-Curie hospice carers became our new friends and family. Beyond the odd yip of frustration, there was no suffering.

On the final Wednesday — I later learned this is a phenomenon known as “terminal elation” — he was unexpectedly bright enough to sit up in bed, call for the paper, check his emails, phone his siblings for a chat, and inquire as to the sprouting progress of the potatoes he had planted weeks earlier.

He even ate some mussels for his supper and braved a spoonful of chocolate-mousse from my hand. “Ah, John,” he chuckled, “don’t be coming at me now with new things.”

Increasingly he “visioned,” murmuring serenely to people and spirits we could not see. His late parents, possibly, his beloved grandfather or long-gone schoolfellows — death-divided friends at last who met to part no more.

Daddy died peacefully, with a faint half-smile, on the Sabbath evening after long hours of unconsciousness. In his own home and his own room. We were all with him. His body had simply worn out, wound down and stopped.

The following day, in the sort of death certificate conversation you never want to have, his GP and I agreed he had died of old age.

We buried my father a week later, by the shore of the Butt of Lewis township where he had been born in November 1940. A peerless day of Hebridean summer. I began the shovelling myself as, high overhead, a joyous skylark praised her God.

And Our Hearts Shall Yet Burn

Several years ago, I casually mentioned Saint Patrick's Day to one of this parish's most active teenagers, of solidly County Durham Catholic stock, and he had literally never heard of it. Today, as a daily Mass-goer when possible, I had entirely forgotten about it until I went to church and the septuagenarian pianist (don't worry, we have the organ on Sundays) insisted on having a couple of verses of Hail, Glorious Saint Patrick. Everything else was for Lent, though, and there were no more people than there would have been anyway. The world turns.

Still, Saint Patrick is also the Patron Saint of Nigeria, where they brew a 7.5% ABV Guinness that may now be purchased on these shores, and if Great Britain did not already contain more practising Catholics and active priests who had been born in Nigeria than who had been born in Ireland, then it very soon will. And that is just Nigeria, never mind the whole of Africa, and never mind the entire Global South. Also, that is just Catholics, never mind the Anglicans of whom two thirds in the world were in Africa, and never mind Protestants in general.

The re-Christianisation of Britain will need to be seeded by immigration on a scale that had never previously been contemplated, while protecting and extending the workers' rights and the social provisions that were themselves an expression of Christian principles. Ah, Christian principles. Christian values. Christian heritage. Ask for a definition of any of those from, say, John Cleese of The Life of Brian, the showing of which in schools has contributed very significantly to the de-Christianisation of this country, and continues to cement it.

That is the Britain that he and his fans wish to Restore, in which the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church all wrote suspiciously similar reports on abortion so that David Steel could write them up as a Bill that they all then supported, in the first case even within the parliamentary process itself. Notice that "the child abuse crisis" in the Catholic Church in Ireland has mysteriously gone away since Ireland acquired abortion laws as liberal as would soon come into effect over here. Once that and assisted suicide were done and dusted, then expect all talk of child abuse in the Catholic and Anglican churches in Britain to go away, too. And if the Archbishop of Canterbury did attend tomorrow's Lords votes on abortion up to birth, then do not assume that she would vote against it. Since the issue became live, so to speak, then with the possible exception of Rowan Williams, none of her predecessors would have done. Or did.

Chain of Causation

If a victim of industrial injury or disease had an assisted suicide, then that would break the chain of causation, depriving any dependents of financial compensation. How could any trade unionist vote for this?

Peace Camp?

Throwing them off roofs is done by the so-called Islamic State, which the proponents and prosecutors of this war cannot distinguish from the Islamic Republic of Iran, just as they thought that al-Qaeda was 50 per cent Shia. But if Mojtaba Khamenei is as the rumour mill would have us believe, then notice that, by any means, he is still alive.

And consider that, in order to end this war, Lindsey Graham's hour may have come at last. Conquest, indeed. Or if Lady G preferred to be Moses rather than Joshua, then Reform UK is now Britain's most popular party among gay men, so over to them. It is really not news how very, very, very right-wing a lot of gay men were. Well, not to some of us, anyway. My BA was Theology at Durham. Need I say more?

Fundamental Change By The Back Door

Abbie Llewelyn writes:

A former chief executive of the NHS has warned the assisted dying Bill contains a “Trojan horse clause” for fundamental change to the UK’s health service “by the back door”. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, as currently drafted, would establish a process within the NHS for people with six months or less to live to seek an assisted death. Lord Stevens of Birmingham has argued assisted dying is outside the scope of the current NHS and it should be established separately, if at all.

The independent crossbench peer particularly took issue with a clause in the Bill which states ministers may make regulations “for any provision that can be made by an Act of Parliament, the only constraint being that they may not amend the Act itself”. Lord Stevens said he would regard this “as a Trojan horse clause for fundamental change to the National Health Service by the back door”. He added such powers are “very rare” and this exact wording has only been used before in Brexit-related legislation.

The former NHS boss supported amendments put forward by fellow crossbencher Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a professor of palliative medicine who is the former president of the British Medical Association and a vice-president of Marie Curie. Speaking on the 11th day of committee in the Lords, Lady Finlay had said her amendments “make it clear that any health or social care professional involvement in the assisted death service is separate from their health or social care employment, and their employer must know of their involvement”. She added: “This is a separate service that must not jeopardise the care of other patients.

“The Royal College of General Practitioners clearly stated that any legislation must ensure that any assisted dying service should be seen as a stand-alone service and not be seen as core GP work. They are clear any assisted dying service needs to be separately and adequately resourced and not in any way result in a deprioritisation of core general practice or palliative care services.” Lady Finlay said the patients would “continue to have their usual clinicians look after them as always, whilst in parallel they could be assessed for eligibility against the criteria”.

She later said: “These amendments would create a clear, streamlined service with greater transparency and with clear, defined oversight that is more easily monitored. “They’ve been written to respond to the request from the Royal College of GPs, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Association for Palliative Medicine that an assisted death service must be a separate service.”

Leading psychiatrist Baroness Murphy, however, warned the separation of assisted dying would lead to “isolation” of dying people in the decision-making process. She also said it would be “unlikely” that any clinician providing care for patients will take part in any assessment. “It is utterly crucial that we should not separate these people off when they are in the process of dying and reject them,” she said.  “It should be part of the palliative care provided to them. It almost certainly in other countries usually happens as part of a palliative care service… we should not separate them off, we are there to support them during this process.”

Conservative former minister Lord Deben, however, rejected the idea that assisted dying is part of palliative care, and argued many people see it as a “wholly separate thing”. He said: “Palliative care, looking after people in the very best way that we can in the most difficult time of their life, is utterly separate from the idea that they can instead decide to kill themselves. Now it is perfectly reasonable for some people to want to have that choice. But it must be a distinct choice. It must not be mixed up.” Lord Deben, who was a government minister under John Major and Margaret Thatcher, added that he fears assisted dying will become a “cheaper alternative” for terminally ill people.

Labour peer Lord Falconer of Thoroton, a former government minister who is behind the Bill in the Lords, said: “I’m absolutely sure that Lord Stevens is not wanting the patient to have to embark upon a very complex bureaucratic procedure. He’s given reasons why he wants it kept separate from the NHS. My position as the sponsor of the Bill is whether it’s precisely separate or not, is not for me a key question. The question is that, if you are a patient and you want an assisted death, there is a practical and safe way of doing it that does not place an undue burden upon the patient. He said Lady Finlay’s proposal was “too separate from the care of the patient”. Lord Falconer later responded to an intervention from Lord Deben on whether assisted dying is part of palliative care, and said: “Dying is about giving somebody a good death. I think palliative care is about exactly the same thing.”

Charles Lane has seen it in action:

Dr Menno Oosterhoffleaned forward in his living-room chair, took a sip from his coffee mug, and told me about the first time he ended a patient’s life. She was 18 years old and had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, an eating disorder, and autism. Despite years of treatment, she was still bedeviled by negative thoughts, and she told Oosterhoff, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry in the Netherlands, that she couldn’t stand any more suffering. He suggested deep brain stimulation, an invasive procedure sometimes used to treat severe OCD. She insisted that she wanted help dying instead. Dutch law gave Oosterhoff the power to grant her request. In 2002, the Netherlands began allowing doctors to administer death to patients who make “voluntary and well considered” pleas to end “unbearable” suffering from any medical condition—provided there is no “prospect of improvement” and no “reasonable alternative” to dying.

Eighteen-year-olds are adults and can request euthanasia even over family objections. Children as young as 12 are also eligible, with parental consent; for 16- and 17-year-olds, only parental consultation is required. Oosterhoff’s patient had no physical illness, fatal or otherwise; he concluded, rather, that she was “mentally terminal.” An administered death would be preferable, he thought, to prolonged suffering or the possibility of unassisted suicide. To comply with the law’s requirement of “due care,” he consulted another psychiatrist and convened a “moral case deliberation session.” Telling me about his internal conflict at that moment, Oosterhoff’s previously casual tone became more intense. At the age of 70, he is no longer an adherent of the strict Dutch Calvinism he’d learned as a child, but he said he felt haunted by the idea of “final judgment” in the afterlife; his patient’s request for euthanasia made him think, God is testing me.

So Oosterhoff imagined a dialogue with God. If he didn’t help the girl die, God would ask him why he had allowed her suffering to continue. “I was anxious,” he would reply, but God would say, “I told you: You should do what your conscience tells you.” If Oosterhoff did end his patient’s life, however, God might reproach him for having acted without knowing all of the consequences. In that case, he imagined telling God: “You didn’t make it clear enough. I did what I could.” On the appointed day in October 2022, Oosterhoff went to the girl’s home and asked one last time whether she wanted to die. When she said yes, he injected her with a series of chemicals: first lidocaine to numb the area where the needle entered, then a coma-inducing drug, and finally rocuronium, a muscle relaxer, to stop her breathing. Afterward, a colleague asked Oosterhoff whether he still felt anxious about the final judgment. “No,” he replied. “If this is not good, then God should make a better user manual for our life.”

The right to die by euthanasia is popular in the Netherlands. It is even a point of national pride. The country has a tradition of decriminalizing once-taboo behaviors, such as prostitution and marijuana use, which allows them to be managed under the law. It’s a reflection of the high value that Dutch culture places on individual autonomy—the notion that “our thoughts and beliefs are holy and should not be interfered with,” says Rosanne Hertzberger, a former member of Parliament from New Social Contract, a center-right party. “People say, ‘Who are you to tell me what to do, what to think?’”

But while absolute prohibitions might feel oppressive, they can also be useful, because they spare us the costs of making difficult moral choices—and the potentially catastrophic risks of getting them wrong. Seeking euthanasia for psychiatric reasons is the grayest of gray areas. It’s very hard to know whether a suffering person could get better, and the desire for death can be a symptom of the illness itself. The decision to die is drastic and irreversible; should it really be left up to a young person whose brain is still developing, and who is susceptible to influence by peers and authority figures?

Now Dutch physicians, politicians, and journalists are beginning to sound alarms. The overwhelming majority of physician-assisted deaths in the country of 18 million still involve terminal physical illness—about 86 percent of the 9,958 cases in 2024. But the number of people who received euthanasia solely on the grounds of mental suffering spiked from 88 in 2020 to 219 in 2024. In that five-year period, doctors ended 675 lives for psychiatric reasons, more than in the previous 18 years put together. Especially troubling is the number of very young people requesting euthanasia because of their mental suffering. In 2024 alone, 30 people ages 15 to 29 were killed because of psychological conditions. This represents 3.1 percent of all deaths in that age bracket in the Netherlands.

Oosterhoff played a prominent role in these developments. With his inhibitions vanquished after his dialogue with God in October 2022, he personally administered lethal injections to 12 psychiatric patients in a 13-month stretch from 2023 to 2024. The oldest was in his 50s. The youngest were 16 and 17—the first minors in any country ever lawfully euthanized for mental illness. These represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of people who reached out to him in response to an aggressive advocacy campaign he launched through social media, TV interviews, and a book, Let Me Go. The termination of lives that could be expected to go on for decades, based on psychiatric diagnoses and prognoses that are inherently far less certain than those for physical illnesses, has spawned a wrenching debate—one that is tame by U.S. standards but vicious for the Dutch.

“Most psychiatrists intuit that it’s not a logical thing to equate somebody with a death wish at 25 and somebody with two weeks to live at age 80 wanting to die in a dignified fashion,” Jim van Os, a psychiatrist and the chair of neuroscience at the Utrecht University Medical Center, told me. Doctors are generally reluctant to speak publicly about the issue, he said, because they fear being branded as opponents of euthanasia generally. But in September, van Os was one of 87 Dutch psychiatrists and health-care professionals, along with 46 colleagues from other countries, who signed an open letter to the Dutch Psychiatric Association, warning that current practice “inevitably carries the risk that psychiatric patients will die unnecessarily by euthanasia.”

As populations age and traditional religion loses influence, the demand for a right to die is rising globally. Some form of doctor-assisted death is now allowed in 12 countries, and more are likely to legalize it soon. So far only the Netherlands and Belgium regularly see cases of euthanasia for psychiatric reasons, but the law in some other countries doesn’t rule it out. Canada, where 16,499 people were medically euthanized in 2024, is likely to start permitting psychiatric euthanasia in 2027. With 12 U.S. states and the District of Columbia allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to terminal patients, and New York set to join them in June, Americans also have something to learn from the Dutch experience. It suggests that the right metaphor for the risks of euthanasia is not a slippery slope but a runaway train.

Supporters call Oosterhoff a savior; detractors consider him a fanatic. Either way, he looks the part. His face—framed by white hair, crisscrossed by age lines, and rendered strangely magnetic by unusually small, ice-blue eyes—has become the face of psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands. That role was confirmed last fall when Dutch public television broadcast Milou’s Battle Continues, the most-watched TV documentary of the year. It tells the story of Milou Verhoof, a 17-year-old girl who received euthanasia from Oosterhoff to end her psychological suffering. Once the cheerful daughter of a well-to-do family, Milou was deeply shaken at age 11 by the near-fatal illness of her beloved brother. At 13, she was raped and spiraled into post-traumatic stress, depression, and violent self-harm. At a secure in-patient facility, she was reportedly sexually abused again, by a fellow patient. She made several suicide attempts and requested euthanasia, but psychiatrists demurred—until, in late 2022, her family contacted Oosterhoff after learning about him through the media.

Milou’s story could be told as an indictment of the Netherlands’ mental-health system, which failed a troubled, victimized teenager and then had nothing left to offer but medicalized death. But the documentary—which was chosen as Dutch public television’s entry for this year’s International Emmy Awards—adopts the viewpoint of Oosterhoff and of the girl’s parents, who praise Oosterhoff for understanding their daughter’s suffering, respecting her autonomy, and sparing both her and them a lonely, undignified suicide. As Milou’s mother, Mireille Verhoof, put it in an email to me: “Because of Dr. Oosterhoff’s extremely careful and cautious approach, we as parents trusted that his conclusion—that Milou truly could not go on and that the days were unlivable for her—was the only correct one and confirmed what we as parents had long seen in our child.”

Before dying, Milou got her nails done and picked out an evening gown and high heels to wear in her coffin. On October 2, 2023, Oosterhoff gave her a lethal injection in her childhood bedroom. “Girl, have a good trip,” he told her, as her mother and father looked on. “You’ve been through so much.” Oosterhoff spoke at her funeral.  In April 2024, 14 psychiatrists and doctors wrote to the Dutch public prosecutor to raise concerns about Milou’s case, including the way Oosterhoff publicized it. Two months before he euthanized her, Oosterhoff recorded a video conversation with Milou about her wish to die. After her death, he posted it on the website of the KEA Foundation, which he established to support psychiatric euthanasia and to encourage more psychiatrists to perform it.

The doctors’ letter suggested that Oosterhoff’s video exploited Milou, who, they wrote, “may not have been fully decision-competent to assess her own right to life or adequately safeguard her care needs in a situation of acute distress.” The Dutch newspaper NRC published a transcript of part of the video, in which a despondent Milou says, “I would have liked to have had another life, but that was not granted to me.” Oosterhoff then asks how she would respond to those who might say, “Yes, but you’re still so young.” Milou answers, “It’s not about age; it’s about the suffering.” Oosterhoff replies with an approving murmur. Milou continues, “I tried everything I could to make it better,” as Oosterhoff nods.

The doctors sent their letter privately and didn’t explicitly request a criminal investigation, but when Oosterhoff found out about it he fired back in the media, demanding that the letter’s authors apologize. They refused. To this day, he is furious, insisting that everything he did was consistent with the law and that, as he puts it, “Milou wanted attention for her situation.” Oosterhoff’s foundation has since removed the video from its website but he insists that it “contains nothing controversial that I would need to hide.” (He declined my request to see the video, telling me it has since been destroyed.)

Oosterhoff has a point. All of the euthanasias he performed were reviewed after the fact, as a matter of standard procedure, by the Netherlands’ Regional Euthanasia Review Committees (known by the Dutch initials RTE), and his conduct passed muster. Without a finding of fault from the RTE, prosecutors would have been very unlikely to start a criminal investigation into Milou’s case. The RTE, however, was designed on the assumption that it would need to review a moderate number of relatively clear cases—not the thousands of euthanasias, including psychiatric ones, now flooding the system. RTE panelists do not conduct independent investigations but rely on physicians’ written reports, augmented in a few cases by additional questioning. Oosterhoff says the RTE called him in to discuss Milou’s case because of her young age.

As a practical matter, doctors have little to fear from the RTE. From 2002 to 2024, it found that physicians failed to meet all of the “due care criteria” in just 144 out of 110,591 euthanasia cases, including 14 of the 1,123 psychiatric-euthanasia cases. Of these, prosecutors took exactly one case to court. Marinou Arends faced murder charges for allegedly euthanizing an unconsenting elderly patient in 2016. She was acquitted and later made a knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau, in recognition of her career as a geriatric physician. Whatever procedural checks and balances surround euthanasia in the Netherlands, the system necessarily relies on an individual physician’s judgment as the ultimate safeguard. And to spend time with Menno Oosterhoff is to understand vividly that there is no such thing as a purely professional judgment on euthanasia. His approach seems to reflect his idiosyncratic, still-unfinished spiritual journey as much as his medical training or expertise.

Born in 1955 into a household where God was a looming presence and the afterlife an everyday concern, Oosterhoff was a teenager when he watched his beloved father waste away from cancer. In his book, Oosterhoff recounts feeling guilty for hoping his father would die, and relieved when death ended his suffering. Six years later, his older brother also died after a painful illness. Around the time of his father’s death, Oosterhoff was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he now controls with the help of medication. At his home—a cozy hobbit hole of a place in the northern Dutch village of Thesinge, well stocked with artwork, houseplants, and dog beds—he told me how the condition influences him. “OCD,” he said, “means you are hyperaware of the existential problems of life: death, responsibility, loneliness, the purpose of it all.” This led to his interest in medicine, because it gave him “a very strong conscience.” He became a specialist in treating patients with OCD.

While he was in medical school in the 1980s, Oosterhoff left Christianity for anthroposophy, the “spiritual science” founded by the 20th-century Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which teaches that the collective human spirit evolves through the reincarnation of individual souls. Unable to conquer his doubts about that idea, Oosterhoff eventually soured on anthroposophy too. But he retained his own version of another anthroposophical doctrine: that morality consists in finding a balance between equally damaging extremes, not obeying absolute imperatives. He views euthanasia as a middle path between two evils: on the one hand, allowing a patient’s suffering to continue, and on the other, causing an unnecessary death. “Not giving euthanasia has consequences too,” Oosterhoff told me repeatedly, almost like a mantra. One consequence, he says, is that “mentally terminal” people might end their lives on their own, impulsively or violently. For Oosterhoff, the idea that psychiatric euthanasia reduces the risk of suicide is one of the strongest rationales for making it available. Yet scientific evidence for this theory is scant. From 2020 to 2024, as psychiatric euthanasia reached new heights among Dutch young people, the suicide rate for those ages 10 to 30 also hit 21st century highs of 8.8 per 100,000 men and 4.7 per 100,000 for women. Suicide is the leading cause of death for this age group.

Gender is another worrisome issue. In the Netherlands, twice as many women as men attempt suicide, but only half as many complete the act, because women tend to use less violent and less reliably deadly methods. The availability of euthanasia, a guaranteed method, thus makes it more likely that suicidal women and girls will die. Of the 30 people under age 30 who received psychiatric euthanasia in 2024, 25 were female. Oosterhoff concedes that psychiatric diagnoses and prognoses are inherently less certain than those of physical illnesses. “The scientific basis of psychiatry is still very, very unclear,” he said. “A lot of things people say are just based on nothing.” But to him, this doesn’t mean that psychiatrists should refrain from making life-or-death judgments. Rather, they should forge ahead, guided by their good intentions and by a patient’s autonomous will. Psychiatrists, he said, are trained “to help people to not lose hope and to find sparks of light and so on. But is that honest ad infinitum? Or is there a moment that you say, ‘That is the opinion of this person themselves. My opinion is no better’?”

His euthanasia patients’ reactions, as Oosterhoff remembers them, vindicate his approach. “The gratitude for what I did is so immense sometimes,” he told me, emotion thickening his voice. Two days after ending Milou Verhoof’s life, Oosterhoff euthanized David Mulder, a 31-year-old man with chronic depression. As he prepared the lethal injection, Oosterhoff recalled, Mulder told him, “You’re my hero.” What defenders of psychiatric euthanasia fail to acknowledge is that “people are always ambivalent about the death wish,” Koos Neuvel, the editor in chief of the Netherlands Journal of Literature and Medicine, told me. This was the conclusion he drew from interviewing numerous patients with mental illness who had considered euthanasia, for his new book on the subject, Finally at Peace./ Neuvel became a critic of the Dutch mental-health system after witnessing the experiences of his teenage daughter, Nora, who suffered from severe anorexia. Despite years of psychiatric treatment, she finally died of starvation after refusing to eat or drink. Today Neuvel is one of a small but growing number of Dutch journalists challenging the media’s portrayal of psychiatric euthanasia. “It’s always presented in the same way: that it’s an important thing to do and it’s necessary for the doctor to cooperate with this and that the death wish can’t be changed,” he said.

In 2024, the psychiatrist Mascha Mos posted one such story on a medical blog, about administering euthanasia to “a 34-year-old man with OCD, depression, later-diagnosed autism, tinnitus, and personality disorders.” For a distraction while she inserted the needle, he watched a video game in demo mode. “I picture him lying on his couch, with Grand Theft Auto playing in the background, in his neat, tidy, darkened home,” Mos wrote. “What a brave and heartbreaking decision he made to request euthanasia. And how courageously he followed the process, considering his problems.” To Neuvel and other critics, such portrayals romanticize euthanasia for mental illness, creating a risk of social contagion. That concern is shared by the Euthanasia Expertise Center, an organization in the Hague that specializes in facilitating doctor-assisted death for patients whose regular physicians cannot or will not perform it. In December, the center issued a statement noting that it “saw a spike in registrations” after every positive media story about euthanasia. It warned that public perceptions “did not match reality: for only a very small number of young people with psychological suffering is euthanasia possibly the best outcome.”

What young patients really need from psychiatrists, Neuvel believes, isn’t help with dying but reasons to keep living. “Even if the patient has lost all hope, the doctors shouldn’t give up hope,” he said. “There’s always something people want to live for, that they find interesting.” Lisa Tiersma, a 27-year-old graduate student in Utrecht, was treated for 10 different psychiatric diagnoses as an adolescent, including a two-year hospitalization. She attempted suicide, feeling her treatments were going nowhere. What kept her going through her worst times, Tiersma told me, was her dream of studying music. Today she teaches piano and performs original compositions. Her song “Help Me,” an exploration of her struggles with mental illness written under the stage name Left Lynx, earned a prize in the 2022 European Songwriting Awards. “I wouldn’t say I’m fully recovered,” she said, “but I do have a purpose, a will to live. And I think that’s what matters in the end.” Last year, Tiersma’s psychiatrist, possibly probing for suicidal tendencies, asked her what she thought about euthanasia. She told me the question struck her as “planting a seed, but it’s not the right kind of seed.” Her own experience had taught her that staying hopeful can be hard. “But that is still not a reason to give up,” she said.

The ultimate concern for Dutch critics of psychiatric euthanasia is that death will become just another treatment option in a mental-health system plagued by long waits for sometimes inadequate care. In 2025, the Euthanasia Expertise Center and Foundation 113, a suicide-prevention group, surveyed nearly 400 young people who had sought euthanasia. Nearly all reported negative experiences with Dutch youth care or mental-health services. Yet Oosterhoff and like-minded colleagues have campaigned for even lighter regulation of doctor-assisted dying. Ideally, they say, a patient would have the same psychiatrist through an entire “euthanasia trajectory,” from clinical treatment to deciding to die to the lethal injection. As matters now stand, many psychiatrists balk at administering death to patients with whom they have established treatment relationships. Thus those intent on being euthanized “doctor-shop” for someone who will do the job.

Few critics of psychiatric euthanasia propose that the Netherlands ban it completely. Instead they advocate for reforms, such as a higher minimum age and more robust oversight by the RTE. For now, such changes seem unlikely. In 2025, the New Social Contract party proposed a three-year moratorium on euthanasia for mental illness of people under 30; the Dutch Parliament voted it down. D66, the socially liberal party that spearheaded the euthanasia law a quarter century ago, opposed the resolution. “By proposing a moratorium you chop away at the foundation” of legal euthanasia, D66 Parliamentarian Wieke Paulusma said. She faulted moratorium advocates for second-guessing “well-educated professionals who are continuously deliberating.” The Dutch legislature did vote for more research into the issue, though D66, now the Netherlands’ ruling party, opposed that as well.

There’s a better chance that the Dutch Psychiatric Association will toughen its guidelines on euthanasia, which it is currently reviewing, including a minimum-age requirement. That would lack the force of law but could shape standards of professional responsibility. In December, Accare, a Dutch mental-health center for people younger than 23, announced that “as a rule we do not provide euthanasia to minors and young adults.” But “a legal age limit, such as the one Belgium applies at eighteen, is a sensitive subject in the Netherlands,” a recent NRC article explained. After all, saying psychiatric euthanasia for young people should be avoided in the future implies that it should have been avoided in the past. That would reflect badly on a lot more people than just Menno Oosterhoff. Defenders of the right to die, van Os said, “can’t be nuanced about it, because they feel the whole euthanasia house will crumble.”

Oosterhoff’s own career as a euthanasia provider is probably over. In March 2025, he let his medical license expire, so he can no longer treat patients or end their lives. After two years of text messages and phone calls from euthanasia seekers, he was burned out; he told one TV interviewer that he felt like a doctor working in Gaza. Oosterhoff told me he has no regrets. When it comes to the deaths he has administered, he seems to inhabit a separate, self-contained ethical universe in which he has used all of his experience, intellect, and erudition to rationalize—successfully, in his view—the taking of youthful life. “Morality,” he told me repeatedly, “is not anxiety for punishment but enthusiasm for the good.” During our conversation, he seemed to waver only once, when I asked about the risk to society if psychiatry endorses the notion that psychological suffering can be as hopeless as end-stage lung cancer. Wouldn’t that be destructive in a world where people with mental illness already struggle to find purpose? "What is good for one patient can be bad for the whole community—that’s a very difficult thing," Oosterhoff acknowledged. In performing euthanasia, he said, he looked “to the individual patient,” adding that public policy is “not my work.”

Musing about unintended consequences, Oosterhoff mentioned the myth of Pandora’s box and Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice. And he brought up Aktion T4, the Nazi program in which German psychiatrists euthanized children and adults with mental illness and other disabilities. That surprised me: The victims of Aktion T4 were completely uninformed and unconsenting, a crucial distinction with psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands, as Oosterhoff noted. Listening to Oosterhoff, however, I realized that the difference between the two programs is not absolute. Euthanasia patients in the Netherlands make the choice to die—but when a teenager is suffering from psychiatric illness, can that choice really be considered an expression of autonomous will? The rationale for euthanasia in Nazi Germany was racial hygiene; in the Netherlands today, it’s autonomy and compassion. But Dutch physicians who perform euthanasia also accept the principle that some lives are better not lived. “I’m shocked that so many psychiatrists and nurses worked with Aktion T4,” Oosterhoff said. “Then, of course, I think, What am I doing? How will the future judge about me? I don’t know. I only can say I did what I thought I should do.”

Cavalier About Its Security

With Palantir taking over the NHS, and with digital ID and live facial recognition coming down the supercliché to all of our pockets, consider this, Hannah Devlin and Tom Burgis:

Confidential health data has been exposed online on dozens of occasions, a Guardian investigation can reveal, raising questions about the safeguarding of patient records by one of the UK’s flagship medical research projects. UK Biobank, which holds the medical records of 500,000 British volunteers, is one of the world’s most comprehensive stores of health information and is credited with driving breakthroughs in cancer, dementia and diabetes research. But scientists approved to access Biobank’s sensitive data appear to have sometimes been cavalier about its security.

The files, which seem to have been inadvertently posted online by researchers using the data, do not include names or addresses, but they may still pose privacy concerns. One dataset found by The Guardian contained millions of hospital diagnoses and associated dates for more than 400,000 participants. With the consent of a Biobank volunteer, The Guardian was able to pinpoint what appeared to be extensive hospital diagnosis records for the volunteer, using only their month and year of birth and details of a major surgery they had undergone.

One data expert said the scale and persistence of the problem was “shocking” at a time when AI and social media were making it ever easier to cross-reference information online. UK Biobank rejected the concerns, saying that no identifying data, such as names and addresses, were provided to researchers. In a statement, Prof Sir Rory Collins, the chief executive of UK Biobank, said: “We have never seen any evidence of any UK Biobank participant being re-identified by others.”

‘They said they would hold our data securely’

Founded in 2003 by the Department of Health and medical research charities, UK Biobank holds genome sequences, scans, blood samples and lifestyle information of 500,000 volunteers. Last month, the government extended Biobank’s access to volunteers’ GP records. Scientists at universities and private companies across the world apply for access and, until late 2024, were free to download data directly on to their own computer systems. Before this point, data had been inadvertently published online and Biobank appears to still be grappling with the problem.

The issue emerged because journals and funders increasingly require researchers to publish the code they have used to analyse large datasets. When intending to upload code, some researchers have also accidentally published partial or entire Biobank datasets to GitHub, a popular online code-sharing platform. UK Biobank prohibits researchers from sharing data outside their systems and says it has introduced further training for all researchers.

In the past year, the data leaks appear to have become a more urgent concern to UK Biobank. Between July and December 2025, it issued 80 legal notices to GitHub, which has complied with requests to remove data from the internet. Yet much still remains available. Some of the data files contain just patient IDs, or test results for small numbers, others are more extensive. One dataset found online by the Guardian in January contained hospital diagnoses and associated diagnosis dates for about 413,000 participants, along with their sex and month and year of birth. A data expert, who reviewed the file said: “It sent shivers down my spine to even open. I deleted the file immediately. It was very detailed and felt like a gross invasion of privacy even to glance at.”

To test the risk of re-identification, The Guardian approached several Biobank volunteers, two of whom had undergone medical procedures in the timeframe within the data and agreed to share these details with an external data scientist. One volunteer, who provided treatment dates for a fracture and seizure, could not be located in the dataset. A second volunteer, a woman in her 70s, shared her month and year of birth and the month and year she had a hysterectomy. Only one person in the dataset matched these details. The apparent match was corroborated by five other diagnoses from the records that the volunteer had not initially disclosed.

“Effectively you were rehearsing the main parts of my medical history to me without me having given you any information at all. I didn’t expect that,” the volunteer said. The woman said she was not too concerned about her own data being exposed and intended to remain a participant, saying that she viewed UK Biobank’s work as “extremely important”. But, she added: “I’m more concerned about whether Biobank has broken its agreement with people. They said they would hold our data securely … I just feel as though that has to come into the equation.”

UK Biobank said the re-identification scenario tested by The Guardian did not highlight a privacy risk because without additional information it would be impossible to identify individuals. A Biobank spokesperson said: “As we have communicated to our participants, including on our website: ‘If a participant puts information that reveals something about their health and identity, such as genealogy data, on a public website, this could make it possible for their identity to be discovered by cross-referencing UK Biobank research data.’ You have simply demonstrated why we tell participants not to do this.”

The spokesperson added that Biobank had taken extensive measures to protect participants’ privacy, including proactively searching GitHub, contacting researchers directly and issuing legal takedown notices, actions which they said had led to about 500 repositories being removed. Many of these, it said, contained only patient IDs, not health data.

‘There are tensions between driving research with data and protecting privacy’

Privacy experts said UK Biobank’s approach appeared at odds with the reality that many people, reasonably, shared some health information online and that in an age of AI this could readily be identified and cross-referenced. “Are these people aware that the internet exists?” asked Prof Felix Ritchie, an economist at the University of the West of England. “The idea that they can rely on their volunteers never putting any other information out there about themselves is an entirely unreasonable thing to expect.”

Dr Luc Rocher, associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who reviewed several Biobank datasets found online, said that removing identifiers often did not guarantee anonymity and that simply knowing a person’s birthday and, say, the date they broke a leg might be enough to pinpoint their record with high confidence. “Once identified, that record could reveal sensitive information such as a psychiatric diagnosis, an HIV test result, or a history of drug abuse,” they said.

Prof Niels Peek, professor of data science and healthcare improvement at the University of Cambridge, said the scale of the problem was “shocking”. “If it had happened once or 10 times I’d probably say: ‘It’s not great that it’s happened but at the same time zero risk is impossible,’” he said. “Hundreds. That’s a little bit too much.”  In Peek’s view, Biobank’s actions show it has taken the issue seriously and “done everything that one can reasonably expect”. But, he added: “The scale and persistence with which this has happened demonstrates that there are huge tensions between the ambition to drive health research with data at scale and the legal and ethical imperative to protect people’s privacy.” Experts questioned whether Biobank will be able to fully regain control of the data released online. Despite researchers and GitHub having taken down most of the offending repositories in response to Biobank’s requests, many of the relevant files remained available on a code archive website until shortly before publication.

And consider this:

On Friday 13 March, Companies House was made aware of a security issue which meant that a logged-in user of our WebFiling service could potentially access and change some elements of another company’s details without their consent after performing a specific set of actions. This was not accessible to the general public. Only users with an authorised code and logged in to the service could have performed this action. We closed WebFiling at 1:30pm on Friday 13 March while we investigated and resolved the issue. The service has been independently tested and is back online as of 9am on Monday 16 March.

What data may have been affected

Our investigation has established that specific data from individual companies not normally published on the Companies House register may have been visible to other logged-in WebFiling users. This includes dates of birth, residential addresses and company email addresses. It may also have been possible for unauthorised filings — such as accounts or changes of director — to have been made on another company’s record. We want to be clear about what was not affected:

• Passwords were not compromised.
• No data used as part of our identity verification process, such as passport information, was accessed.
• No existing filed documents, such as accounts or confirmation statements could have been altered.

We believe that this issue could not have been used to extract data in large volumes or to access records systematically. Any access would have been limited to individual company records, viewed one at a time by a registered WebFiling user. Our investigation indicates that this issue was introduced when we updated our WebFiling systems in October 2025.

What we are doing

We have proactively reported this incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). We are actively analysing our data to identify any anomalies, and we’ll be emailing every company’s registered email address to explain how to check their details and what steps to take if they have any concerns. If we find evidence that anyone has used this issue to access or change another company’s details without authorisation, we will take firm action.

What companies should do now

We are asking all companies to check their registered details and filing history to make sure everything appears correct. If a company has a concern, please raise a complaint and include evidence to describe the concern. We have no reports at this stage of data having been accessed or changed without permission. However, our investigation is ongoing. We’ll provide further updates as our work progresses and we remain committed to being transparent throughout. We’ll soon be publishing a page with more details to answer any further questions you may have.

An apology

I recognise that this incident will have caused concern and inconvenience to many of the companies and individuals who rely on our services. I am sorry for that. Companies House takes its responsibility to protect the data entrusted to us extremely seriously. We have taken swift action to secure and restore our service, and are committed to doing everything in our power to support those affected and to making sure that our services continue to merit the trust placed in them.

Andy King

Chief Executive Officer, Companies House 

Registrar of Companies for England and Wales

In other words, for five months until today, absolutely anyone in the world could view the private dashboard of any of the United Kingdom’s five million registered companies, see the personal details of its directors, and change those details as held by Companies House.