Reasonable Sense

Joanna Hardy-Susskind tweets:

Hello members of the House of Lords. Welcome to the debate on jury trials. Pull up a seat - everyone disagrees and the entire thing is on fire. But, sadly for you, it lands in your lap today. First, don’t let them move sexual assaults and death by careless driving and some s20 GBHs and things like that to summary trial if the sentence is two years or below. You know that’s not right. You know they should not be tried summarily with no right of election.

Second, have a think if Magistrates (respected, trained, advised) should be locking citizens up for up to two years. Honestly, just think about it. It’s ok to say it out loud. I’ll go first: Volunteers - even trained and experienced and respected ones - should not be doing that.

Third, do you really think they’ll be giving this new cohort of serious either way trials to Lay Magistrates? By design or necessity they will - of course - end up before District Judges sitting alone who can sit for multiple days. Which is a BENCH DIVISION via the back door. Which is exactly, EXACTLY, what the government had to abandon in the Commons. Honestly. Very few Lay Magistrates can volunteer for two to three days at a time. And, those who can are likely to be retired or economically comfortable. Part heard trials go off for weeks or months. They won’t do it. Honestly, even if they start doing it, they’ll soon stop. The ‘serious’ (I use the term re: sentence only) either way offences of 12-24 months will soon find their way to a Judge alone for trial. Don’t let them introduce a Bench Division in a different building.

Fourth, do you really think this is going to speed things up? The Mags backlog is huge and growing. The Crown Court backlog is showing signs of stabilising AND a whole host of measures have arrived recently that will begin to bite. They’re moving one queue to another. What will happen is the Crown Court backlog will fall and will be held up as a success story. But, beneath it, will be a log-jammed Magistrates’ Court, with a traffic jam of human misery. That’s not what success looks like. It would be like the Health Secretary saying ‘Look! No queue for surgery!’ But then the camera pans to the GP queue and those waiting are gnawing off their own arms and extracting their appendix with a spoon.

Fifth, just don’t get me started on the diversity of the Magistracy. They can run all the expensive (!) recruitment campaigns they like - but no one is fixing this:

Sixth, if you do somehow think that death by careless driving or sexual assault with sentences less than two years should be tried in a summary fashion in a growing queue (ahem), then how do you feel about the automatic right of appeal being removed? Because this is all quite bonkers now, isn’t it? Let’s see what the Government say about the stats:

Hold on to your socks - they want to restrict something (important) that only amounts to four per cent of receipts, but appears to be rather successful (if 60 per cent fail, HOW MANY SUCCEED?) because they think - in light of their own reforms - more people might appeal? My god. And Crown Court Judges can’t speak publicly on this issue - and I don’t seek to speak for them - but if I were sitting as a Judge tasked with determining ‘leave to appeal’ applications from the Magistrates’ Court I would be very worried.

They say the proceedings in the Mags will be recorded. Honestly, I read court transcripts all the time and they are seldom short. When is a Circuit Judge (tasked, LET US NOT FORGET, with conquering the backlog) going to peruse the proceedings in a six witness harassment trial? When is a Circuit Judge going to find the time to watch CCTV, or ABEs, or consider legal argument from the summary jurisdiction? When are they going to write their reasons for allowing or refusing leave to appeal?

And will these applications for appeal be concisely drafted by experienced lawyers or will they be wheelbarrows full of handwritten dossiers and letters to MPs and AI slop because not everyone in the Mags will qualify for Legal Aid? I honestly think in the most simple of cases it would be quicker to hear the case again than wade through the transcript of the entire thing, the arguments, the law, the exhibits, and draft a response. Oh, and ask the government if they will ensure those subject to these new powers and new provisions will definitely qualify for Legal Aid so a lawyer can assist them and be remunerated at a rate commensurate with the seriousness of the offence. Honestly. Ask them that twice. Don’t get me started on some fraud trials randomly losing juries. What’s that even about? Juries aren’t stupid. They understand dishonesty when they see it.

So. There you go. It’s a failure of a Bill. It won’t work on its own terms, it won’t work on any reasonable sense of justice, it will simply move the queue for victims, and the underlying stats are laughable. Please. Do enjoy your debate today.

Wes Streeting: A Thousand Days To War

Paul Knaggs writes:

Every nation needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning. For a generation after 1945, Britain’s reason was to build: the health service, the council estate, the new town, the power station. In 1980, China found its reason in a border county of paddy fields and fishing villages across the water from Hong Kong. This weekend, Britain’s Defence Secretary told us what ours is now. Writing in The Telegraph on Saturday, Wes Streeting warned that by 2030 the force strength and war economy of Britain’s adversaries “could put them in a position to attack.” He went on: “That gives us a little over 1,000 days to complete our mission: to be ready with our allies to fight and win.” His “defining priority”, he said, is to make sure this country is ready to fight and win a war.

A Thousand Days to War: How to Telegraph Your Punches 

There is a basic principle in warfare: never give your enemy an unnecessary advantage. You do not announce the precise timing of an attack. You do not advertise the weaknesses in your industrial capacity. You do not reveal which supply chains, factories or infrastructure your survival will depend upon. Military planning requires secrecy, deception and the ability to surprise. Of course, deterrence also requires signalling strength. Governments must explain why defence spending is necessary, and adversaries already know that NATO is rearming. But there is a difference between demonstrating capability and turning an uncertain threat assessment into a public countdown. 

Streeting himself acknowledges the danger of sabotage. In the same article, he warns about hostile states disrupting British infrastructure and spreading fear among the population. Yet here we are, broadcasting a three-year horizon for national rearmament to the very adversaries accused of preparing attacks against us. If Russia really intends to prevent Britain from strengthening its military capability, what better opportunity to intensify cyberattacks, disrupt critical supply chains, target industrial projects or exploit Britain’s existing economic weaknesses? 

A government serious about defending Britain would protect its industrial preparations, secure its infrastructure and strengthen its economy. It would communicate the threat without making impending war the organising principle of national life. Instead, ministers appear more interested in preparing the public psychologically. On Wednesday 28 October, John Healey will deliver his first Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The order of events tells its own story. The countdown arrives at the weekend. The bill arrives midweek.

Healey’s Defence Resignation Shapes the 2026 Budget

John Healey is not an innocent bystander in this production. He is its architect. In June, serving as Keir Starmer’s Defence Secretary, Healey dramatically resigned rather than sign off on the funding limits behind the Defence Investment Plan. In his resignation letter, he scolded the Treasury for being “unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country”, insisting that a target of 3 per cent of GDP for defence spending by 2030 was what Britain must commit to. Within weeks, Prime Minister Andy Burnham made him Chancellor, telling MPs he had chosen him “precisely because of his commitment to the defence of our realm.” 

Pause on that admission. Of all the qualities a Labour Prime Minister might require from the man holding the nation’s purse; a strategy for working-class wages, an answer to the housing catastrophe, or a plan to revive the decayed industrial heartlands in northern seats like Healey’s own Rawmarsh and Conisbrough; Burnham chose to celebrate his Chancellor’s eagerness to write cheques for the military. Then came the inevitable tactical retreat. Once installed inside the Treasury, Healey suddenly discovered that fiscal restraint was a Chancellor’s “first priority”. The Treasury confirmed that Wednesday’s Budget will shelve the 3 per cent by 2030 target, pushing the reckoning into next year’s comprehensive spending review.

The immediate reaction was instructive. London defence stocks promptly shed roughly £1.7 billion in market value. Note carefully who flinched. It was not the patient languishing on an NHS waiting list or the family crammed into temporary housing. It was the defence contractor shareholders. The City understood perfectly what Whitehall avoids saying aloud: these arbitrary spending percentages are not about national survival, but corporate order books. Note who flinched. Not the patient on a waiting list. Not the family in temporary accommodation. The shareholders. The market understood something the public is rarely told plainly: these targets are not only about tanks and frigates. They are order books.

Behind the scenes, the Cabinet consensus remains absolute. Wes Streeting vowed in July that he would resign if Burnham failed to deliver the military cash, later warning the Commons Defence Committee that recklessly promising 3 per cent without identified funding could spark a market collapse akin to the Liz Truss mini-budget. The Chancellor and his Defence Secretary are not arguing about destination. They are merely bickering over the speed of the march, and deciding which public services will be thrown under the wheels to pay for it. 

A Party at War With Its Own Soul 

This is a Labour Party at war with itself. It no longer knows what it is for, so it has borrowed a purpose from someone else. This is a Labour administration that has lost all sense of domestic purpose, borrowing a mission from foreign capitals because it cannot conceive one for its own people. The arbitrary spending targets it treats with quasi-religious reverence were not hammered out in trade union branches or debated at party conferences. They represent the exact levy Donald Trump demanded of NATO, adopted by the alliance in The Hague in June 2025: an extraordinary 5 per cent of national income, with 3.5 per cent dedicated to core military hardware. A raw percentage is not a military strategy. Ministers have not told the country what these billions will buy, what a modern British defence posture should look like, or what specific strategic threat each pound addresses. The cash is pledged first; the justifications are manufactured afterwards.

The historical betrayal is stark. Labour has never been a party of absolute pacifism; Clement Attlee was a founder of NATO and oversaw the construction of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. But in April 1951, Aneurin Bevan, accompanied by Harold Wilson, resigned from Attlee’s Cabinet rather than introduce NHS prescription charges on spectacles and dental care to fund Korean War rearmament. Seventy-five years later, a Labour Chancellor owes his promotion to resigning because the state was not spending enough on weapons. The party that once walked out to defend free healthcare now hollows out green energy and transport budgets to pay for arms. 

The narrative being peddled relies on an untenable contradiction. We are asked to accept that an army unable to seize Kyiv from its smaller neighbour poses an existential, imminent threat to the most powerful military alliance on the planet. The press repeats the script, but the material reality falls apart under the light. This administration embodies all the moral vacuity of the Blair era without a shred of its political agility. It prepares the country for foreign confrontation, points to arms contracts to inflate GDP figures, and funnels public money directly into private corporate accounts. The Trussell network distributed more than 2.6 million emergency food parcels across Britain in a single year. Share prices in BAE Systems leap on every ministerial utterance, while systemic working-class deprivation fails to shift the markets by a fraction of a penny.

If this vast expenditure were genuinely intended to secure these islands; hardening the electricity grid, insulating our subsea internet cables, and providing a sovereign missile shield; it would merit principled support. But it does not. Much of this money simply purchases an expensive, permanent subscription to the American military-industrial ecosystem: buying American aircraft, American munitions, and American servicing contracts on Pentagon terms. Every pound transferred to Washington is a pound stolen from the industrial rejuvenation of Barrow, the Clyde, or Sheffield.

Who Pays the Bill, and Who Takes the Cut 

The distribution of sacrifice is no mystery. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has told us. When the Defence Investment Plan was published, the IFS found that around half of the extra money, an average of £1.7 billion a year, would come from cutting other departments’ investment budgets, with the heaviest cuts falling on transport and energy projects. Read that twice. This autumn the government has told households to keep three days of bottled water, tinned food and a torch in case the power fails. In the same year, it is raiding the energy investment that keeps the lights on to pay for preparations for war. The state that cannot keep the grid secure asks families to stock their cupboards against its failure.

And this is only the beginning. The IFS estimates that reaching 3 per cent of GDP by 2030-31 would need about £11 billion more in that year alone. In one illustrative scenario, which protects health and avoids real-terms cuts elsewhere, the gap reaches roughly £35 billion. That is a scenario, not a Treasury forecast. But the direction is not in doubt. The full NATO commitment of 3.5 per cent, the IFS calculated last year, is worth about £36 billion a year in today’s money, or £500 for every person in the country. Raising that through tax would mean 3p to 4p on every rate of income tax.

Now look at who collects. On 1 October, the Ministry of Defence published its own figures for 2025-26. Fifty-one per cent of new defence contracts were awarded without competition, the highest share since 2015-16. BAE Systems alone received just over £7.3 billion, 16.5 per cent of everything the ministry spent with industry, the largest share ever recorded for a single supplier. Another £744 million went straight to Washington through its Foreign Military Sales channel, and the F-35 and Trident tie British capability to American decisions for decades to come. The IFS has also noticed where the money lands at home. On past patterns, defence spending with British industry most benefits the South West of England and is least likely to benefit the North East. So the Heartlands pay for this through squeezed services and heavier taxes, while the contracts flow to a handful of firms, their shareholders and the defence corridors of the south. 

Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general and a Republican president, saw this coming. In 1953 he said that every gun made and every warship launched represents, in the final sense, “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Eight years later he warned his country against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex. Nobody could accuse Eisenhower of being soft on Moscow. He simply understood that a nation which organises itself around preparing for war will find that war’s suppliers end up organising the nation. 

Thousand-Day War, Thousand-Year Decline: Britain’s Imperial Overstretch and the Ghost of Shenzhen

Now cross the world to that border county of paddy fields. In 1980, Shenzhen became China’s first special economic zone. Its economy that year was worth 270 million yuan. By 2025 it was worth around 3.9 trillion yuan, roughly $557 billion, larger than Hong Kong’s. A city of more than 17 million people now stands where the paddy fields were. It is home to Huawei, Tencent and BYD, the electric car maker that now outsells Western rivals across much of the world. In the 1980s the Chinese coined a phrase, “Shenzhen speed”, for towers rising a floor every three days. The city minted fortunes as quickly as it poured concrete, and across China the World Bank estimates that close to 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty in four decades. 

None of this is a fairy tale, and The Tribune does not offer Beijing’s politics as a model. Shenzhen was built by migrant workers housed in factory dormitories, in a one-party state where independent trade unions are forbidden. Its housing is among the least affordable on earth. China is arming too: SIPRI says its nuclear arsenal, at around 620 warheads, is growing faster than any other, and its pressure on Taiwan and in the South China Sea is real. Yet here is the fact Westminster prefers not to dwell on. China has not fought a war since its brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. Its rise was built on container ports, factories, loans and supply chains, not conquest. It became the workshop of the world by trading with it. Whatever one thinks of the Chinese state, its economic model depends on the world staying open and at peace. Ours is being reorganised around the expectation that it won’t. 

That is the lesson of Shenzhen. It is not about systems; it is about purpose. A state chose a destination, committed public money and political will to reaching it, and measured its success by what stood on the ground. Britain knew how to do this once. Bevan built a health service out of a bankrupt, bombed-out country. The Attlee government put up around a million homes while paying off a war. The West today sets its targets in percentages of GDP for weapons, and calls that a vision. We import more than £70 billion a year in goods and services from China, a country ministers describe as a strategic threat, because we long ago stopped making things for ourselves. The proposed cure is not to rebuild the industrial base. It is to spend more on the armed forces while cutting the transport and energy budgets that a rebuilt industrial base would need.

Imperial Overstretch: When Arms Outpace Industry 

There is an old pattern here, and the historians have named it. In 1987, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers traced how dominant states decline when their military commitments outrun the economic strength that pays for them. He called it imperial overstretch. Habsburg Spain, the British Empire and, most instructively, the Soviet Union all walked that road. The Soviet case should give Westminster pause. The USSR was not defeated on a battlefield. It poured its wealth into an arms race while its factories decayed, its shops emptied and its people stopped believing in the future. It was out-built, not out-gunned. The West that won the Cold War did so as a civilisation still capable of building: motorways, universities, homes, a rising standard of living that made its promises believable. That West has lost its nerve. It no longer dares to advance. It cannot build a railway on time or a power station on budget, and it has quietly stopped promising its young people that they will live better than their parents. A political class with nothing left to offer at home reaches for the oldest motivator there is: the enemy at the gate.

Russia and NATO: The Gap Between Spending and Threat 

The casting of Russia as an imminent conventional conqueror of Western Europe collapses under the briefest scrutiny. The irony of a Russia that can’t beat Ukraine but is a threat to NATO. Start with the battlefield. In February 2022, Russia sent its army towards Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kherson and Mariupol at once. By March it held more than a quarter of Ukraine. Within weeks it had been driven back from the capital, and later out of most of Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. Four and a half years and an appalling loss of life later, it holds around a fifth of the country, still less than it held in the first month of the war. This is the army we are told could be ready to attack NATO by 2030. 

Then look at the money. According to SIPRI, Russia spent about $190 billion on its military in 2025. Europe’s NATO members alone spent $559 billion, nearly three times as much, before a single American dollar is counted. Add the United States and the alliance spent $1.58 trillion, more than half of everything the world spends on arms. A state that cannot subdue Ukraine is not about to roll across Poland. Streeting’s own wording gives the game away: he no longer claims Russia wants to attack, only that its “capacity” might allow it. 

Nor did this begin in 2022. In 1997 George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, warned that expanding NATO towards Russia’s borders would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” In 2008, NATO’s Bucharest summit declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”, over the objections of France and Germany. That same year, America’s ambassador in Moscow, William Burns, later director of the CIA, had cabled Washington that Ukrainian entry into NATO was “the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” 

Ukraine itself was divided down the middle. In 2010 its parliament legislated for non-aligned status. In 2013 its government stepped back from the EU’s association agreement, and the upheaval that followed brought down that government and handed Moscow the pretext to seize Crimea. The West did not let a split country find its own balance. It pressed a choice on it. Once the war began, Washington was candid about its purpose. In April 2022, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said America wanted to see Russia “weakened”. When the sponsor of a war declares that its aim is to weaken the other side, calling it a proxy war is not a conspiracy theory. It is a description. The weapons, the training and the intelligence come from the West; the dying is done by Ukrainians. 

Explaining a war is not excusing it. The invasion was illegal, and Ukraine’s dead are real. But a crime against Ukraine is not an attack on Britain. Russia has committed hostile acts on British soil, Salisbury among them, and those demand serious counter-intelligence, policing and protection for our cables and power grid. They do not justify placing the country on a thousand-day war footing. If public money is spent on defence, it should defend these islands. That is why The Tribune argued last year for a proper British air and missile defence shield, rather than spending targets dressed up as strategy. 

And the timing deserves scrutiny. On 21 October, three days before Streeting’s article, Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff spent hours with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg discussing an end to the war. Putin’s investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, greeted him at the airport, sat in on the talks and pronounced them “very productive”. Washington negotiates. London counts down. Where is Britain’s own diplomacy? A foreign policy that follows Washington wherever it goes leaves Britain exposed the moment American priorities change, and they are changing in front of us. 

There is also the matter of what “fight and win” would mean. SIPRI counts 12,187 nuclear warheads in the world at the start of this year, and the United States and Russia hold almost 86 per cent of them. A conventional war with Russia would not inevitably turn nuclear. But no minister can promise it would not, and past that threshold the word “win” means nothing at all. Deterrence is meant to make war unthinkable. A public countdown to “fight and win” invites the country to start thinking about it. That is the real audience for Streeting’s thousand days. Not Moscow, which knows the limits of its own army better than anyone, but us, in the stalls. A countdown is how you prepare a population to accept the cost.

Britain’s Alternative: A Thousand Days to Build 

Wednesday is the next act. Let it be a test. The countdown does not exist to warn Vladimir Putin, who understands the material limits of his own armed forces better than anyone in Whitehall. It is aimed squarely at the British working class. It is the psychological softening-up necessary to make ordinary people tolerate a hollowed-out welfare state, frozen public sector wages, and crumbling civic infrastructure. If John Healey believes our collective survival requires more billions for defence, let him make that argument openly on the floor of the House of Commons. Let Parliament scrutinise the classified intelligence assessments that supposedly justify this 2030 deadline. Let the public inspect every non-competitive tender, every cost-plus contract, and every direct subsidy paid to foreign arms cartels.

Every single pound spent on military procurement must carry uncompromising domestic conditions: British-made steel, British manufactured components, union-negotiated wages, and mandatory engineering apprenticeships for the northern and coastal communities devastated by fifty years of deindustrialisation. If private corporations rely on the public purse for their balance sheets, the public must take a direct equity stake in their assets. Defence spending must be restricted to the genuine defence of these islands, rather than projecting force on behalf of American imperial adventures abroad. Above all, the Chancellor must explicitly pledge that not one more penny will be pillaged from our transport, energy, and social security budgets.

Then, let this government summon that same urgent energy for the things that make a society worth living in. Let us see a thousand days of investment in sovereign, publicly owned energy, so no mother is told to keep a torch in the drawer against the collapse of the grid. Let us see a thousand days of structural steel for social housing, hospitals, and high-speed rail. Let us see a thousand days of skilled technical training in Sunderland, Rotherham, and Scunthorpe. Shenzhen illustrates the transformative power of a state that decides to produce. The Soviet Union demonstrates the fate of an empire that chose only to arm while its foundations crumbled away. Empires do not fall because they stop arming. They fall because they stop building.

Toxic All Round

Southwark Crown Court was the place not to be yesterday, with Chris Brown, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and Russell Brand all on the bill. If, as one strongly suspects, someone with the same convictions in the United Kingdom as Brown had in the United States would be denied a United States visa, then the reverse ought also to apply.

Yaxley-Lennon is noted for the Israeli flag beloved of every Far Right operation in the world this century, which would cause centrists to reconsider their own position if they were really any different. Israel has hosted Yaxley-Lennon as its honoured guest, all expenses paid. 70 years to the month after Suez, Aneurin Bevan’s assessment of Anthony Eden is no less true of Benjamin Netanyahu in relation to the Israeli security failing on 7 October 2023. Either he knew and he is too wicked to be Prime Minister, or he did not know and he is too stupid to be Prime Minister. Either way, Netanyahu is Yaxley-Lennon’s patron.

If the Arab parties held the balance of power after today’s Knesset elections, then heaven knows what Yaxley-Lennon and his ilk would find to say, since being a white settler redoubt was exactly what they liked about Israel. Nor does enfranchisement preclude being a victim of apartheid. Coloureds and Indians had the vote for the last 10 years of apartheid South Africa, but it was still apartheid South Africa.

And while Brand may or may not turn out to be guilty of any criminal offence, I first called him “Toxic Brand” as long ago as 2008, when he had that business with Jonathan Ross and the late Andrew Sachs. Even then, into our thirties, the Blairites thought that they were still my generation’s cool kids. And oh, how they hated me for not falling at his feet. There was nothing #MeToo about New Labour in its heyday.

In 2014, I was as critical of Brand’s book Revolution as everyone from Sunny Hundal, through Labour Uncut, via the Daily Mirror, to the Morning Star. We all recognised him as a figure of the libertarian ultra-Right, with views indistinguishable from those of Ayn Rand, a fact gushingly celebrated by Nigel Farage in The Independent. Calling him “Ayn Brand”, I offered to pay Brand’s rail fare to the Durham Miners’ Gala, to see how it would have received him.

Furthermore, I for one recognised a man who was older than I was, who even then was the age of a Cabinet Minister, and who was easily old enough to have had teenage children, yet who thought that 20 lost years of drug-induced torpor made him the voice of youth, or indeed of anything at all. That was how he was treated when, aged 40, he encouraged the young not to vote in 2015, leading Ed Miliband to give what was presented as an immensely important interview to Brand on YouTube. By then, Brand had been favourably reviewed in The Guardian, and he had guest edited the New Statesman, on the back of holding the same views as he held now, views to which his undisputed sexual behaviour was and is fundamental.

By Any Measure

Suella Braverman’s oceanic water bill on expenses would have lost her the whip of a serious political party. But any party with her in it is arguably unserious by definition, and the Chief Whip of her present one is Lee Anderson, which speaks for itself. As does Reform UK’s desire to give the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer to Robert Jenrick, whose stupidity is immeasurable.

Despite being married to an American, Jenrick told yesterday’s tiny and mostly poppy-free Reform audience that he wanted to “bring back” an imperial system of weights and measures that had never gone away, in order to boost trade with the United States, where the terminology may be the same, but it often means markedly different things from its meaning in the United Kingdom. For example, an American pint is about 20 per cent smaller than a British one.

In 1324, Edward II defined an inch as the length of three dry barleycorns placed end-to-end. Where are they? But the imperial system no longer relies on anything like that. For instance, a standard yard is legally fixed at exactly 0.9144 metres, because since 1959 all imperial units have been anchored directly to the metric system, meaning that the modern baseline of an imperial measure is in fact an exact metric definition. The imperial system is the metric system, just a very, very, very strange way of using it.

Demands for the imperial system alone come from people who could not calculate according to it, as invariably comes out when they are tested, but that is not a new phenomenon. Into living memory, the average customer could have had little or no idea whether or not his change was right, but took it on simple trust, a “high trust society” that it is bewildering that a journalist, of all tradesmen, would wish to see restored. Such people are convinced that the imperial system is eternal, as if the Bayeux Tapestry had somehow been made in feet and inches.

The thriving American wine industry uses the same 250cl, 500cl and 750cl bottles as everyone else, and it may also do litre ones, although the contents of those on the Continent are not always the best. But long ago, I was taught that a gentleman drank champagne by the pint. I am always amused at the suggestion in certain quarters that a pint of champagne was ideal for a couple to share at lunch, or for one person to have at dinner. I was taught these things, and I have taught them, at very different lunches and dinners than that. The only Briton ever to have been President of the European Commission was later known for taking a pint of claret to his desk in the House of Lords to get him through the afternoon.

Yet it turned out in 2023 that only 1.3 per cent of people wanted any extended use of the imperial system, so that was assumed to have been the end of that. It was a wild time, with Simon Heffer, close to Boris Johnson, calling for the return of pre-decimal currency specifically because there were references to it in nursery rhymes, although it says it all about Liz Truss that even Heffer now recognises that she is barking mad and that Johnson was almost as bad a Prime Minister. That was the background against which the consultation was launched. How the world turns. The 1.3 per cent figure did surprise me. And that was for any more use of the imperial system, never mind anything beyond that. I mean, I would repeal a Conservative Government’s domestic legislation and allow the sale of goods in imperial measures if that were what people wanted. But it turns out that they just don’t.

The peculiarly British compromise between the metric and the imperial systems is the most lasting monument to this country’s bitterest culture war in living memory, the one between scientists and humanities graduates in the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War. The question of turning away from the Old Empire and towards Europe was also in the mix, but it was secondary. Much of the Old Empire was going metric at the time, and almost all of it has now done so. Rather, this was and is about whether the weights and measures used in everyday life, and taught in schools, should be the ones used in science, or the ones named in Shakespeare.

Only named, of course. The imperial system dates only from 1824, 500  years after Edward II and his barleycorns, making it barely 200 years old. Far from being Arthurian, it suppressed numerous customary weights and measures across these Islands and the Empire, replacing them with ones that often bore the same names, as certain customary units on the Continent still have names such as livre, but which had most definitely been devised by a committee. Scottish pints and gallons were more than halved. The claim that the imperial system was “more natural” needs to be squared with the existence of different traditional weights and measures, and with the absence of any organic reversion to our own, much less emergence of them. When uncontacted tribes turn up, then do they know the number of yards in a rod, perch or pole?

Britain joined the EU in 1973. New Zealand has had only metric road signs, which there has never been any serious suggestion that Britain might adopt, since 1972. Was that the work of the EU? Although New Zealanders still sometimes give their height in feet and inches, and by convention announce their children’s birth weights in pounds and ounces, they have, again since 1972, measured even milk in the metric system, unlike the practice in Britain. By 1973, all schools in Australia were teaching only the metric system. Was that the work of the EU, too? All road signs there converted to metric in July 1974, and all cars made after that year have had only metric speedometers. Australians now rarely even convert their babies’ birth weights into pounds and ounces, and such units are employed for trading purposes only when exporting to the United States. Where there is residual use of imperial units in casual conversation in Australia, then it tends to be attributed to the cultural transmission of American English. But the reason why the American system is different, despite using much of the same vocabulary, is because it is older.

The American car industry made significant savings by going metric in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. The semiconductor industry is metric. Dual-labelling of goods is now mandatory for most products. NASA is required to use the Système international “except where impractical”, and it did so for the Moon landings. The Lunar Module’s onboard Apollo Guidance Computer displayed readouts in the feet, feet per second, and nautical miles in which the astronauts had been trained as jet pilots, but internally its software used SI units for all powered-flight navigation and guidance calculations, with values such as altitude and altitude rate converted to American conventional units only when they needed to be shown on the computer’s display.

Unlike, unless I am very much mistaken, any part of what eventually became the imperial system, the metric system was invented by an Englishman, John Wilkins, who managed to be both a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell and later a bishop in the Church of England. It is not a product of the French Revolution. The first attempt to mandate it in Britain was made in 1818, six years before the imperial system existed. Britain legalised the use of the metric system in 1875. Numerous industries have used nothing else in living memory, if ever. Even leaving aside how long ago Imperial Britain’s industrial zenith was, the bald claim that that was achieved entirely by the application of the imperial system does not stand up to the slightest analysis.

Who could possibly teach the imperial system these days? I hate to advocate for the other side, but Britain is in fact rather good at science. Yet imagine that the imperial system really were to be reincorporated into school Maths. Would you fail if you could not do it? That would be most people these days, deprived of the Maths certificate necessary to progress to further scientific education, for want of competence in a system that was not used for such purposes anywhere in the world. If you could find anyone to do so, then by all means teach it. But even those of us who probably quoted Shakespeare in our sleep ought not to wish to make anything else conditional on it. It is not as if it is Classics.

Yet at the popular level, a remarkably enduring compromise has taken hold. Britain is the only country in the world where the use of two completely different systems of weights and measures, but with only one of them taught in schools, could result in anything other than total collapse. We should cherish the fact that in ordinary conversation everyone gave their height and weight in imperial measures when only the metric system had been taught in schools since before most people had been born. The only problem is the legal ban on selling certain items in imperial measures by name, a piece of domestic legislation enacted by a Conservative Government. By all means let that ban be repealed. In practice, that repeal would change almost nothing. Corporate retail giants would have absolutely no intention of adopting the imperial system, but small traders should be free to use it if customers wanted it. At a significant markup, I expect. Almost no one under 60 would ask for imperial, since almost no one under 60 would ever have been taught it, but let those who wanted it have it. If they could afford it. Good luck to any licensed premises that sought to revert to the old measures of spirits, since those were shorter.

Have you ever had any trouble buying a pint of beer? Our own and so many other traditional weights and measures survive for the sale of bread or beer all across Europe because they are perfectly adequate, and even ideal, for the sale of bread or beer. But they are at least arguably too imprecise for anything much more than that, and an international scientific and technological culture could not function without a universally accepted system of weights and measures. And so on. Let anyone who wanted to do so buy or sell a pound of potatoes, although that is not an arduous thing to do within the present law, while the never threatened pint of milk or beer will always be readily available in the Republic of Ireland, which will never leave the EU, the rest of which the Irish increasingly call “the Mainland”.

Stepping Over The Dead

Following the horrific fall of al-Fashir, Britain has sanctioned 15 military commanders, militia leaders and security officials from ‌both sides of the civil war in Sudan, the Saudi-backed Sudanese Armed Forces and the Emirati-backed Rapid Support Forces. Yet John McEvoy writes:

Britain is expanding its aerial refuelling of Saudi fighter jets to include bombing raids on Yemen, despite a major spike in civilians being killed in these airstrikes. Wes Streeting initially said the UK would only provide air-to-air refuelling for Saudi jets patrolling the kingdom’s skies to ward off drone and missile attacks on airports and oil infrastructure by Yemen’s Houthi movement. The defence secretary is now letting British fighter jets join those patrols, as well as providing refuelling for Saudi airstrikes on “Houthi military targets in Yemen”. 

It comes as last month saw more civilian casualties resulting from Saudi airstrikes on Yemen than any other since 2022, according to the Yemen Data Project. At least 66 civilians were killed and a further 90 injured, with eight children among the dead. One of the deadliest strikes came on 22 September, when six civilians including a woman and two children were killed in the bombing of a residential home in the city of Mokha. That same day, Britain agreed to provide air-to-air refuelling support to the Saudi air force, supplementing the deployment of air defence equipment and UK personnel already in the region. Saudi forces struck a market in the Al-Taiziyah district of Taiz governorate five days later, killing seven civilians and injuring 40 others, including five children.

Defensive?

Despite the mounting civilian death toll, Britain announced this week that it will deploy Typhoon fighter jets and military advisers to help protect Saudi Arabia, and expand the scope of aerial refuelling. The UK government says this is “defensive” support while largely ignoring that the reignition of the conflict in July was triggered when Saudi-led forces bombed Sana’a airport. That attack on a civilian target in the capital of Yemen caused the breakdown of a UN-brokered ceasefire which had held for four years.

The Houthis, who are Yemen’s de facto government and control most of its major population areas, have since engaged in tit-for-tat attacks, a reciprocal blockade, and repeatedly hit King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh, killing over a dozen people. Britain’s Ministry of Defence said this week that the Houthis’ “attempts to destabilise the region and undermine the security and stability of the Middle East are unacceptable”. Defence secretary Wes Streeting announced “we will be deploying the RAF with Typhoons to mount defensive counter air activity against what is outrageous Houthi escalation that we’ve seen in recent weeks”.

Ten of Britain’s leading trade unions urged the government to end its involvement in the war, saying the UK government “should not collaborate with a military that has repeatedly violated international law and has been central to creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises in Yemen”. University of Sussex professor Anna Stavrianakis told Declassified: “We are told that deploying fighter jets to Saudi Arabia is good for our security, but it’s not. The primary cause of the current instability in the Middle East is the US-Israeli war on Iran: that is what is pushing up fuel prices. The UK should be using its diplomatic heft to rein in the US and Israel, not enable the Saudi military.

“Saudi Arabia has a terrible record in Yemen, responsible for what UN experts have said are likely war crimes. UK arms sales, military support and training make us complicit in those crimes. Now is not the time to be doubling down on that record but rather, putting all our efforts into political resolutions to the war in Yemen and an end to the assault on Iran”.

British support

Since Britain announced additional support for Saudi Arabia last month, as many as 20 Voyager air-to-air refuelling missions have been sent to the region from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. The transponders of these aircraft are turned off while overflying the Red Sea, making it impossible to determine precisely which air operations have been facilitated by Britain. This week, the MoD further announced “defensive counter air missions to support the protection of Saudi cities and critical national infrastructure against aerial attack”. That will involve an undisclosed number of Typhoon fighter jets flying out from Qatar, potentially equipped with the new Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) anti-drone systems. 

Declassified understands that the oil-rich kingdom will not be required to pay Britain’s military for its support. Asked whether violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) by Saudi forces are currently being monitored, an MoD spokesperson said: “Protecting civilians remains at the heart of our approach and the UK is clear that it expects all partners, including Saudi Arabia, to uphold International Humanitarian Law.” During the 2015-2022 Saudi-Yemen war, the MoD maintained a “tracker” database with more than 500 alleged IHL violations reportedly conducted by the Saudi-led coalition. 

Although the RAF says its own Typhoon jets will not directly bomb Yemen, arms exports to Saudi Arabia mean Britain is deeply enmeshed in this escalating conflict. In 2007, Saudi Arabia agreed to buy 72 Typhoons from British arms firm BAE Systems in a deal valued at £4.43bn. The MoD previously acknowledged that “BAE Systems personnel, including seconded RAF personnel, provide routine training support” to Saudi air force crews. It added that “BAE Systems personnel also maintain simulators providing synthetic training on the Typhoon platform”. BAE runs a weekly Boeing 737 cargo flight from its Typhoon factory in Warton, northern England, to Ta’if airbase, from where Saudi Arabia operates its Typhoon fleet.

The BAE cargo flight, which refuels at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, is believed to carry spare parts needed to maintain Saudi Typhoons. Saudi fighter jet pilots conduct their initial training on a fleet of British-supplied BAE Hawk aircraft, while their air force has another fleet of BAE-made Tornado aircraft which are not thought to be currently used in Yemen. Alongside the US, which sold Saudi Arabia F-15 fighter jets, the UK is one of Riyadh’s main suppliers of combat aircraft. In addition, Campaign Against Arms Trade recently revealed that the UK government approved £464.8m of arms exports for Saudi Arabia in the first quarter of 2026. The licences covered items previously used in Saudi-led attacks on Yemen including bombs and missiles.

Stretching the concept

Defence secretary Wes Streeting justified the latest package of military assistance by saying the “continuing attacks from the Houthis on our ally Saudi Arabia are absolutely despicable”. He added that the “targeting of the airport in Riyadh in particular shows the lengths the Houthis are going to escalate the situation in the region”. This support contrasts strongly with Streeting’s earlier statements on Saudi Arabia, which included advocating for an arms embargo in the House of Commons. In 2018, Streeting declared: “The UK’s ability to uphold the values of the rules-based international system is compromised unless we hold Saudi Arabia to account for the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Yemen”. Shortly after, he referred to Saudi Arabia’s killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and its bombing of a bus filled with school children as “red lines”. 

Eight years later, Streeting appears to be stretching the concept of “defense” in order to justify an increasingly important British role in the world, seen by some as “mission creep”. Houthi politburo member Mohammed al-Bukhaiti previously advised Britain “to think carefully before becoming involved in the aggression against Yemen. Entering the war will not solve the problem; instead, it will make Britain a party to the conflict and hold it accountable for the consequences”. Former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers told the Global Security Forum in Doha this week: “The Houthis are here to stay. They’re not going to be defeated, and they’re going to remain in control of a large part of Yemen for the foreseeable future”.

While Nesrine Malik writes:

Over the past few years, you can plot the plunge into global instability not only through the unchecked assaults on international law and civilian life, but through the decline and undermining of the authority and credibility of international institutions. The latest level in this spiral is the proposed appointment of Lana Nusseibeh of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the UN secretary general. Her bid has been rapidly gaining momentum and endorsements. And it has been met with outrage among the Sudanese.

Nusseibeh is the minister of state at the UAE and a former UAE ambassador to the UN. For the past three years, the country has been connected to – bear with me, this will be a long sentence – supporting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in Sudan, facilitating mercenaries to fight alongside the militia (which is accused of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and sexual violence), and appropriating international aid infrastructure to smuggle weapons into the country.

The war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) is an ongoing calamity of historic proportions. It is grinding and brutal, and has already resulted in hunger, displacement and a humanitarian crisis. Although it has drawn in external actors, multiple investigations and reports point to the UAE as the country that has in essence fuelled the conflict by aggressively sponsoring one side from the start. The result has been intractable conflict, unfathomable losses and relentless momentum fed by external supply lines.

The UAE’s role in Sudan’s war has been the target of years of media investigations, human rights activism and political condemnation. There were calls from two US congressmen to American media and sports organisations to end all associations with the UAE in response to its “abetting genocide” by “arming one faction”. In the UK, a complaint was submitted to the government demanding an investigation into the Manchester City owner and deputy prime minister of the UAE, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, due to the “abundance of evidence” of UAE involvement. Attention has been called to the well-established violations associated with the vastly wealthy and hitherto immune power, which has used that wealth to try to secure a toehold in territories in Africa with geopolitical significance. Sudan’s Red Sea coastline, its bountiful gold reserves and strategic location within the continent seemingly drew the Gulf power’s predatory eye.

In the face of all efforts to highlight the gravity and high stakes of the situation, the UAE has behaved with arrogance, dissimulation and, according to reports, the use of misinformation and digital propaganda. Wherever such prevarications were made, there was Nusseibeh, affirming the denial of “baseless allegations”, undermining the work of the international media and, in one instance that should surely be disqualifying, disputing the findings of a UN panel of experts.

In one instance, Nusseibeh was confronted by an indignant Sudanese man in Chad who rejected her whitewashing visit to his refugee camp, imploring her delegation to keep their aid and insisting that if the UAE wants to help, it should stop interfering and stoking the war. Another enraged refugee refused aid, saying the UAE killed her brothers. Against this backdrop, the appointment of Nusseibeh, who has been the face of the UAE’s Sudan strategy, would be a slap in the face to the millions of people suffering the horrors of war, a dereliction of duty towards those thousands who have already been killed, and a green light to the prolonging of conflict.

It has been a lesson, or I should say another lesson, about the extent to which so many of the pleas from those who purport to care about Sudan are performative. How so much of the rhetoric about Sudan or even cursory interest in it is a sort of box-ticking, name-checking exercise. Something to be put on the record – here is the official statement of concern for civilians, here is the pundit with their once-and-that’s-enough treatment, here is the post on X. Going beyond that, making the necessary links that render the conflict not just a sad clash of armed groups but a war in which powerful external parties have been allowed to play abjectly immoral and accelerating roles, is a step too far.

It has also been a lesson in how much a certain kind of Arab politics and mien goes a long, long way to securing consent and licence. Nusseibeh is an operator, that’s for sure, but she is also a beneficiary of a branding exercise that the UAE has been working on for a long time to ingratiate itself with western establishments. One pillar of that strategy has been presenting itself as a “moderate” Muslim country that is alive to the dangers of radical Islam (up to and including being allegedly linked to the funding and support of hard-right groups in Europe). The other is in the cultivation of close financial ties with the UK and the US, particularly with the Trump family, conjoining itself with political and business elites.

And it has understood that between the allied, the gullible and the ignorant, Nusseibeh can easily be presented as the obvious choice for the position as a Muslim woman with liberal credentials and a western education, regardless of the dark politics she advances and represents. It is hard for some to see beyond the facts of her CV – Wycombe Abbey, Cambridge University and, on top of that, of Palestinian origin, serving a country that has normalised relations with Israel. A high identity-politics jackpot.

All which makes Nusseibeh and the country she represents far more relatable and knowable to the world than the vastly weaker, poorer and underrepresented Sudanese people who have been victimised. The UAE, to put it simply, is seen as one of the club, its offences the private business of a country that is too wealthy to antagonise and too solicitous to spurn. Its rise speaks to this moment. At a time of big regional wars, multipolarity, energy crises and fraying norms, who better to become a global anchor than a country that is offering value-free transactional politics, is backed with sovereign wealth, and is expert in the opulent backroom gangsterism of the new world order.

Appointing a representative widely seen as one of the authors of Sudan’s tragedy to such a prestigious and influential post, one that only entrenches the UAE’s position and secures it even more wriggle room vis-a-vis its actions in Sudan, is not just another small way in which the business of international affairs is changing. It is a new chapter, one in which a perpetrator and its tribunes are not just not held to account, but crowned. The contempt is exceptionally bewildering even in an era of outrages. Nusseibeh’s appointment can only be secured by stepping over the dead, and turning backs on the living.

Why Assisted Suicide Failed In Britain

David Alton writes:

On September 11, 2026, commentators gasped as the U.K. Parliament rejected the “assisted suicide” proposal that had plagued its chambers for almost two years. The defeat was not only a cultural stake in the ground for common sense in the U.K.; it also cut short the apparent tsunami of assisted-suicide laws sweeping across the European continent and showed the world that the issue isn’t settled. Strikingly, this landmark decision came from the most socially and politically progressive Parliament in British history.

For many commentators, the defeat of the assisted-suicide bill was a major parliamentary upset that stopped a law change once widely seen as inevitable. However, for a team working, largely quietly and behind the scenes, at the heart of British politics, it took two years’ worth of round-the-clock effort. The walls of Right To Life UK’s London office in Westminster are lined with screens displaying live campaign analytics alongside whiteboards covered in parliamentary arithmetic and voting predictions. The scene bears a passing (if modern) resemblance to Churchill’s War Rooms, the nearby underground headquarters from which he directed Britain’s war effort. This humble base became the engine room for what British pollster Luke Tryl has labeled as one of the two “most successful 21st Century UK social issue campaigns.”

Right To Life UK seeks little press attention or public glory, putting the cause ahead of its profile. But those in the know in Westminster with whom I spoke throughout the campaign note that its connections reach across an extraordinary coalition, providing a perspective on and influence over the battle that few could match. One commentator called the organization the “powerhouse” behind the defeat of the assisted-suicide bill.

Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, Right To Life UK’s chief executive, attributes the victory to a “motley crew”: clinicians, disability advocates, MPs and peers “from different political tribes,” and the bill’s grassroots opponents across the country.

At the outset, the likelihood of defeating this bill looked bleak. Labour’s electoral landslide in July 2024 had led many to assume that its passage was a foregone conclusion. Prime Minister Keir Starmer was sympathetic and had made promises to pro-assisted-suicide campaigners that he would support their efforts. The bill was ushered in quickly by Kim Leadbeater MP after the new government came to power, and when the text was belatedly published, it was accompanied by spurious assurances of the strictest safeguards anywhere in the world.

Politicians were told that “assisted dying” was “compassionate” and “empowering” for those struggling at the end of life. But ending the lives of the weakest members of society is not true compassion. The case for protecting the elderly grandmother who fears being a burden, the disabled victim of domestic abuse being pressured to end her life, or the sportsman dealing with depression after learning of a terminal diagnosis is driven by a deeper compassion.

The first major vote on the initial bill, after Parliament’s first substantive debate on it, came and went. The House of Commons approved the bill in November 2024 with a majority of 55 votes, fewer than many had predicted. While disappointed by the setback, Hungerford-Morgan’s team did the arithmetic: 28 supporters changing sides would overturn that result. The organization began doing everything it could to find them. 

“A majority is made up of people, and people can change their minds,” Hungerford-Morgan says. “We had to understand what had persuaded them, and what might persuade them to think again.”

For years, Right To Life UK had been building an exceptional team of people via a highly selective recruitment process. Each one has sacrificed the possibility of a successful career in the private sector to give his or her time and talents to the cause.

The team secured national media coverage, mobilized constituents, and ran digital campaigns generating more than 100 million views of its posts and videos in a year. They had built a grassroots network of 250,000 supporters, becoming the largest right-to-life network in the U.K. and Europe. This reach carried their arguments far beyond the parliamentary debate.

“We had spent years building the team, the relationships, and the campaign infrastructure,” Hungerford-Morgan says. “That gave us a chance when the bill arrived. But we still had to win every vote.”

While traditional conservatives opposed the bill in large numbers from the start, growing numbers of parliamentarians from the left increasingly saw the need to defend the rights of those who face societal disadvantage, whether people with disabilities, the elderly, victims of domestic abuse, or ethnic minorities. After all, a desire to protect vulnerable people from an early death is not confined to any one political camp.

A U.K. government impact assessment warned that structural disadvantages could pressure such people into an assisted death, and that there was a risk that, if the bill passed, a higher proportion of people from ethnic-minority backgrounds in particular would seek an assisted suicide compared with their peers. For some, there was a fear that a likelihood of living in poverty or having inadequate access to care would make an early death desirable.

The plethora of voices willing to join the opposition to the bill was as diverse as it was broad. It included Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh leaders. It included Ann Furedi, formerly the chief executive of Britain’s largest abortion provider, who recognized the dangers posed by allowing a sick, vulnerable adult to opt for a premature death under implicit pressure that she was a burden on her family or the health-care system. And it included actress Liz Carr, Baroness Jane Campbell, and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, a former Paralympic athlete; each of these women used her platform as a disability-rights champion to challenge the assumption that people coping with life-shortening conditions would be “better off dead.” More than 350 disability organizations opposed the bill.

Before entering Parliament, I taught children with special educational needs. One was Ian, a boy with cystic fibrosis who died shortly after I became an MP. The memory of his short life has stayed with me through subsequent parliamentary debates. A child who needs others to help him live does not possess less dignity than the adult who imagines himself self-sufficient. Listening to disabled campaigners, I recognized the same insistence that dependence must never become a justification for abandonment.

Women’s-rights campaigners brought another perspective into view. Fiona Mackenzie’s The Other Half, a think tank focused on public policy affecting women, examined coercion and domestic abuse, while Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse warned of inadequate protections for vulnerable women. A controlling partner could not easily be detected by an assisted-suicide service; years of abuse can lead to unspoken and unseen pressures on a victim to shorten her life, meaning that the decision ceases to be a free one.

As the drumbeat of concerns became louder and louder in the press, politicians were compelled to pay attention. By June 2025, at the next vote, the majority held by the pro-assisted-suicide side was cut to 23 votes (314–291). This second defeat, though narrow, may have appeared to some as the time to withdraw and move on, but not at Right To Life UK. Only twelve MPs switching sides would be enough to win.

Hungerford-Morgan told me that those engaged in the fight knew that the cost of failure would fall on the vulnerable people they were trying to protect. The members of the coalition believed that victory was still possible.

The bill then went to the House of Lords. Here, a far larger number of experts were formally able to weigh in. A select committee was established to examine the bill’s proposals; several professional bodies that remained neutral on the concept of assisted dying identified serious technical problems with the bill that would put patients at risk. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had said it could not support the legislation as drafted, citing nine areas of concern. The Royal College of Physicians queried safeguards against coercion and the handling of uncertain prognoses. Pathologists raised alarm about the proposed coroner protocol and its deficiencies.

At this stage of scrutiny, data from overseas became important. The Right To Life UK team, along with other campaigners, had built a substantial body of research examining the risks posed to vulnerable groups in Canada, Oregon, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere around the world where assisted suicide is legal. Oregon’s figures, for example, recorded concern about being a burden as a motivation to hasten death among close to half of the patients who have opted for such an end under the state’s assisted-suicide law.

The warning stories from abroad are not hard to find. In Ontario, 54-year-old Amir Farsoud sought an assisted suicide while fearing homelessness. One doctor signed off on his meeting the medical criteria. When a crowdfunding effort helped him secure housing, he no longer wanted to die. In jurisdiction after jurisdiction, even where assisted suicide had been introduced on “narrow grounds” for “extreme scenarios,” the rules were loosened over time to allow similar appalling circumstances to manifest. People should not be offered death as a convenient alternative to adequate care and essential resources.

The concerns uncovered during parliamentary scrutiny were broadcast across the country. The public and media mood began to shift as more of the bill’s risks were understood. Calls to stop the bill intensified. Peers in the upper chamber simply did not have enough scheduled hours to address all the concerns being raised by experts. Scotland had meanwhile rejected, 69–57, its own assisted-dying proposal in its devolved Parliament, dampening the appetite for change. The Westminster bill ran out of parliamentary time. For two months, it seemed as if victory was at hand.

Yet the zealots campaigning for assisted suicide would not let the matter rest. In June 2026, a little-known Labour MP, Lauren Edwards, was given a once-in-a-career opportunity to bring forward a “Private Members’ bill” on any topic that she wished. Rather than picking something that would benefit her constituents, Edwards succumbed to pressure from the assisted-suicide campaign to resurrect the old draft legislation in near-identical form. Proponents hoped to use a little-known parliamentary device to bypass the House of Lords should the bill pass its next vote, triggering a mechanism that could quickly force the bill into law with no chance for peers to stop it.

All seemed to hang in the balance. But by reopening a debate that had exhausted MPs, the public, and the press for nearly two years, the pro-assisted-suicide campaign found itself on very different footing. Critically, the country’s political leadership had also changed. Andy Burnham had replaced Keir Starmer as prime minister and had a personal grasp of what was at stake. The new prime minister’s father, who has since died, was in a care home with dementia. Burnham knew the struggles that people already faced in accessing high-quality end-of-life care. He told the country that it was his view that the palliative and social-care system needed substantial reform before any further debate on assisted suicide could proceed. Anything less would put vulnerable people at risk, offering patients the “choice” of an early death or the alternative of months of waiting lists and unmanaged symptoms. Although Burnham maintained that the matter was to remain a “free vote” according to MPs’ consciences, his concern was enough to make some MPs pause and think again.

At the same time that political appetite for a law change was diminishing, so too was the public’s. The Other Half’s survey of 10,222 adults, the largest since the bill’s introduction, found that assisted suicide ranked outside the top five legislative priorities in every single British constituency. A majority in every seat wanted Parliament to prioritize fixing end-of-life care first. Right To Life UK’s final national poll, conducted by Whitestone Insight and published just before the September vote, found that 82 percent agreed that Parliament should first ensure that inadequate care would not drive people toward assisted suicide, while 72 percent agreed that MPs with serious concerns for vulnerable people should vote against the bill.

“We worked hard for every opportunity to get the evidence heard,” Hungerford-Morgan says. “Polling was showing that the public were increasingly aware of the major problems with the proposed law change; many media outlets had moved and were largely with us; yet you still have to persuade the person who casts the vote.”

The final key to success lay in the voices of MPs themselves. Zubir Ahmed, a prominent surgeon and parliamentary representative from Glasgow, wrote an article for The Guardian in which he offered his serious reservations from a medical perspective. Then Ashley Dalton MP brought the human side of the argument back into focus. She had kept her incurable breast-cancer diagnosis private during the initial debates. By September, she could speak openly of the fear and depression that a terminal diagnosis brings and of the difference good care can make. Patients should be offered adequate support when given such bad news, she argued, not a hastened death.

On the morning of September 11, the day of the decisive vote on the revived bill, it was too close to call which way the vote would swing. MPs rejected the assisted-suicide bill, 286–270.

MPs and peers from across the political spectrum gathered alongside advocates of the left and right to celebrate what they had achieved together. At a time when cooperation is viewed as contamination, there was something remarkably healthy about this group of people who had come together for the sake of the vulnerable. Their differences had helped get the job done.

Opponents of the bill had included Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s former socialist leader; Diane Abbott, a figurehead of the left; Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch; and Nigel Farage, the leading advocate for Brexit and leader of the right-wing Reform UK. Few causes bring those political figures together, but the threat of state-sanctioned suicide did.

Any fresh attempts to introduce assisted suicide will face a far steeper political hurdle. Anyone bringing a bill forward will have to answer a country that has learned to question its premises and promises. Hungerford-Morgan describes the next ambition as making the legalization of assisted suicide unthinkable by deepening public understanding of its dangers.

Canada’s government has now announced plans to indefinitely halt the expansion of its assisted-dying law to include mental health grounds alone, which had been scheduled to take effect next year. Legislation is still required, and proposed “advance requests” for euthanasia would expand another part of Canada’s law. Nonetheless, alongside Scotland and Westminster, this retreat punctures the idea that every country must travel inexorably in the same direction on assisted-suicide and euthanasia laws. The tide is perhaps turning.

Those alarmed by the direction of public life sometimes become so accomplished at describing decline that they forget that politics can also be harnessed for good. The remarkable story of the U.K.’s defeat of state-sanctioned suicide shows that the hard work of building alliances, communicating truth clearly in the press, and putting in the hard work to secure votes can produce success. We should all take a page out of the book of Right To Life UK and the many allies who stood with them.

This Is What Diplomacy Is For

At this rate, someone should choose Matthew Parris on Great Lives:

Not least among the curses Donald Trump lays upon the world is to poison good ideas by associating himself with them. This month a needed proposition recoils from the presidential kiss. The case for a deal between Ukraine and Russia grows more pressing as winter approaches. He’s right about that. But, with his loose talk, Trump befouls the whole idea of compromise. He insults Volodymyr Zelensky while his envoy, Steve Witkoff, praises Vladimir Putin as (the word sticks in the throat) “humanitarian”. Grotesquely skewed by his admiration for Putin, the deal Trump appears to envisage has sensible people turning away in disgust. Thus is the rug pulled from beneath the feet of those who don’t think Putin is humanitarian, do admire Zelensky, but do also want to see an end to this war. 

The conflict will have to be settled. Deals must sometimes be made with the worst of men. George Osborne, at least, has the courage to say so. This, from the former chancellor’s recent Political Currency podcast: “What is Britain’s contribution to the discussion of how you might try and bring this conflict to an end? Or have we just sort of given up? We’re just like, ‘Whatever we are, we’re 100 per cent for Ukraine and we’re not trying to find the landing zone’.” To those who think that “we’re 100 per cent for Ukraine” is a policy, I ask this: 100 per cent for what?

“Not an inch,” said ex-defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace. What, then, do the “not-an-inch” brigade of armchair warriors hold out as achievable? That Putin declares an absolute surrender, retreats from Crimea, pulls his forces out of all eastern Ukrainian territory, and … And what? Commits suicide? Declares himself, like Toad of Toad Hall, to be an altered Toad? Resigns? Or is overthrown in a Kremlin putsch and replaced by some nicey-nicey liberal democrat, whereupon Russia declares that the war was all a dreadful mistake and commits trillions from its struggling economy as reparation? Offer the Kremlin no ladder to climb down and smash a humiliated Russia to smithereens?

The not-an-inch brigade are living in fairyland. It is neither within the realms of possibility nor in anyone’s interests, except those of China, that Russia bleeds to death and simply collapses. There is, however, a more likely outcome if compromise is spurned: that this war continues indefinitely, the fortunes of both sides ebbing and flowing, the youth of both sides being killed in their hundreds of thousands, while the coffers of contributing European nations continue to haemorrhage billions. It’s worth glancing at some of the numbers. No official figures exist for the cost of this war so far but according to one government estimate Britain has committed £25bn for Ukraine, and we’re not the most generous contributor: Germany pays more and, on a per capita basis, 11 other European countries do too. And remember that every power station, warehouse, mansion block, railway or bridge that we see disappear in an orange flash in nightly firework displays will have to be rebuilt. Most of these bills have still to land.

No reliable figures exist, either, for the slaughter that is robbing Ukraine and Russia of hundreds of thousands of men, each precious to those who loved them. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that by June, Ukraine had suffered between 125,000 and 150,000 military deaths and Russia up to 450,000. This is more than half a million men, discounting the far larger number of grievously wounded and permanently disabled. Each is a mother’s son, each a colossal family tragedy. How do we cost grief, we who from afar cheer one side on, urge them to give not an inch and — safe from harm — growl about Honour with a capital H?

Honour is a hill on which too many have died. I’m sickened by this huffing and puffing from commentators who will never be called on to fight. Well may they glorify the ideal of sacrifice, declare that “we” owe it to the dead and urge others to fight on, but does it not occur to them as they enlist to their “not-an-inch” argument that the corpses of men, who if they could speak might beg us to desist from the wars that killed them, that the enemy is using exactly the same language of sacrifice and honour? Honour is a deity at whose feet both sides worship with equal fervour.

To hell with honour. How about realism, how about steadfastness in the pursuit not of absolute victory but a dispassionate acknowledgement of what is and what is not within our grasp? Let’s turn away from abstract nouns and turn instead towards concrete proposals. Some viable ideas swim into vision. When I was in Ukraine I did sense among the young people to whom I talked a half-furtive willingness to think about a deal. On what terms? First, a ceasefire. Then bring out the maps. What might Russia keep? Crimea, surely, which was not historically part of Ukraine. Next, a review of the eastern lands where Russian is the first language of most. Existing front lines would be a starting point but it would be more complicated than that. All this would be horse-trading: cynical, messy, protracted; but that is how many wars end.

There’s something much bigger though, something of supreme importance and absolutely the key (as I learnt when I was there) to unlock a buried Ukrainian willingness to compromise. Security. Why give away a third of what you claim, only to find that after a few years Vladimir Putin comes back for another bite? A deep distrust that a settlement would hold, rather than hostility to the very idea of settling, is what I believe discourages Ukrainians from negotiation. We — Europe and America — can answer that. Membership of Nato, incendiary to Russia, is a step too far. But a path to joining the European Union? This is possible, with security backing by some visible and permanent presence of European, American and international (but not Nato) observers.

The US would be foundational to this idea; and I’m not sure that Trump, who really does want to be seen as a peacemaker, would rule it out. Russia’s immediate response will be to reject such a proposal out of hand, while Zelensky will feel reluctant to give advance notice of everything Ukraine might finally concede. But sensible opinion in the Kremlin must be seeking ways of claiming victory while drawing a line under the conflict. Both sides may already, privately, see merit in something shaped like this. It’s getting from here to there that’s the challenge. That, however, is what diplomacy is for. It’s time to try it.