Tiers Before Bedtime

Nigel Farage's cameo at Prime Minister's Questions was his first utterance on the floor of the House since 25 March, but he did not stay for the Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2026, meaning that he still has not voted since 18 March.

Last night's riot in response to Farage's call for "pure cold rage" was his second time, after mass disorder had resulted from his false claim that the perpetrator of the Southport stabbings had been an asylum seeker and a Muslim. Farage's rare appearance in Parliament may have been to avoid the knock on the door, but an MP may be arrested in the Palace of Westminster as surely as at home. The House of Commons also has a power of expulsion, which might give the people of Clacton the chance of meaningful parliamentary representation.

And far be it from me to defend Kemi Badenoch, but Reform UK's misrepresentation of her is a missed opportunity. When she was Minister for Women and Equalities, she was Minister for Women and Equalities. There would be plenty in her record for Reform to exploit. Had the taking of the knee for Black Lives Matter by the England football team at the 2022 World Cup not been advocated by the then Immigration Minister attending Cabinet. Robert Jenrick.

Without Prejudice To The Generality

A ban on wheelie bins would make life so much simpler. No one ever knows which colour to throw at the Police. But Sikhs, as such, do not have an exemption from the law on knives. They are simply in the same position as tree surgeons, or as gentlemen attending the Royal Caledonian Ball. Section 139 (5) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 reads:

Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (4) above, it shall be a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that he had the article with him— 

(a) for use at work; 

(b) for religious reasons; or 

(c) as part of any national costume.

The Five Ks are equally binding on both sexes, and when John Ashby raped a Sikh woman because he had thought that she was a Muslim, then her kirpan was no use to her. It was not a tiny symbol originally, it has not always been one historically, and it may not always be one internationally, but it has always been one in Britain, where in no known case has it been used as an offensive weapon. To the charge of possession of a bladed article in a public place, Vickrum Digwa's defence was that it was a kirpan. The jury rejected that defence by convicting him of that charge. His father and brother face similar.

Any Advance On This?

Advance UK has deregistered as a political party. I was reminded only recently, having quite forgotten, that I had been there and done that. Although I have never taken as few as 154 votes for anything. Nor have I ever taken fewer than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, whose support at Makerfield is being split by Count Binface, such that their combined tally should be projected into the percentage of the electorate that was in favour of the retention of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister.

Neither Count Binface nor Howling Laud Hope will be on Question Time from Makerfield tomorrow, but nor will the candidate whom Ben Habib had already endorsed, Rebecca Shepherd of Restore Britain. Shepherd's husband is a Dutch-Indonesian immigrant. Is he a Muslim? At any rate, their business model is purely parastatal, consisting entirely of the provision of therapeutic equine activities to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Service of Wigan Council. To my mind, that is a noble pursuit. But would Restore voters agree? Would the professed 37,000 members of Advance, although the true number would become clear if we ever found out how much had been repaid in subscriptions? Would Habib? Would Rupert Lowe?

The defining issue of Restore is remigration, so it would presumably have sent Henry Nowak "back" to Poland with his father whom it would still deport, and it would presumably send Habib "back" to Pakistan. It would not, however, need to deport Stephen Yaxley-Lennon to Ireland, of which he was in any case already a citizen, since he lived in Spain. Yaxley-Lennon endorsed Advance at Gorton and Denton. Does he endorse Restore at Makerfield? And what of the Sikh immigration that, having been doing so for 20 years, he was still encouraging as an anti-Muslim bulwark until at least last month? Fringe Sikh figures have been appearing on his platforms for decades, as he has on theirs. Last night in Southampton, he delivered an almost comical speech against "Pakistani Muslims". What about them?

Charging Points

Anyone would think that Vickrum Digwa had got off. He is a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, and his mother, Kiran Kaur, is not going to be given litter-picking for having hidden a murder weapon. If she is an Indian national, then she cannot hold any other nationality, since India does not allow that, so she will be deported automatically upon completion of her pretty stiff sentence. But what of the further weapons-related charges against Digwa, his father and his brother? Why have they not also been charged with perversion of the course in justice in what was a murder investigation?

Speaking of charges, Bonnie Blue of Reform UK, and whose real name, assuming that it is different, I refuse to discover by Googling her, ought at least to face something if she went ahead with her latest cunning stunt. Outraging public decency? Conspiracy to corrupt public morals? If she really is pregnant, and she has lied about that in the past, then the concern at the risk of injury or infection to her unborn child is a welcome sign that no one truly believes in nothing more than "a clump of cells" that was "part of a woman's body" such that she was free to do with it as she pleased. Yes, of course the child ought to be removed at birth from so glaringly unfit a mother.

And speaking of sentences, why should the £1.8 million fine imposed on South West Water for having supplied the people of Brixham with cryptosporidium be paid by its customers, including the victims? If the provision to fine the company's directors and senior executives in person exists, then why was it not used? Or if there is no such provision, then how soon will there be?

Take Action Today

Here:

Once again, disabled and terminally ill people are being put at risk due to proposals to legalise assisted dying.

Assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill.

As a national, grassroots disability rights group opposed to the legalisation of assisted dying and euthanasia as deadly forms of disability discrimination, we have been campaigning hard against Kim Leadbeater’s Bill since its inception.

Kim Leadbeater’s Bill is not only unworkable, it is dangerous for people in vulnerable situations - including disabled people.

If the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

The cost of this Bill passing as it currently stands will be paid by disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure and harm, and by a cultural shift that places greater value on some lives than others. We cannot allow this to happen.

For disabled people, this Bill is an existential threat, for at least the following reasons:

• Coercion - this danger is significant and cannot be adequately addressed by proposed safeguards; it simply cannot always be detected. At-risk groups (e.g. people who are elderly, disabled or financially disadvantaged) may feel pressured to choose death to avoid burdening families, as has happened overseas.
• Safeguards - they won’t work in practice. The legislation is weighted towards promoting eligibility rather than preventing risk.
• Slippery slope - other jurisdictions have seen widening of access and removal of safeguards. There are insufficient checks and balances to be sure expansion won’t happen here, too.
• Palliative care - resources for assisted dying could undermine already underfunded hospice care. Hospices are already warning of a “funding crisis”. The Association for Palliative Medicine warns that palliative care must be prioritised first.

All MPs need to understand that disabled people are terrified of this Bill being brought back. We already have to fight far too hard to be able to live dignified and independent lives. Legalising assisted dying through this Bill, which threatens our autonomy and our options, will make that harder still.

It comes down to the sort of country and culture we want to live in. We can’t settle for less, which is what Kim Leadbeater’s Bill asks MPs to do. It asks MPs to address the challenge of how we care for and support people who are in situations where they need greater protection and support - including disabled people - by giving them a way out through assisted dying, instead of a way up through investment in excellent palliative and social care.

When you enter your postcode, you will then be asked to provide your details, and you will see a draft email that you can make changes to before sending it to your MP. When you hit send, this email will be sent to your MP along with a physical postcard to their Parliament address (you can see what that postcard looks like here) - both will include the contact details you have provided, so it is clear to your MP that the message has come from a real local constituent.

Disabled people and others at greater risk of pressure or harm need the support to live, not a law that exposes them to greater danger. This Bill does the opposite - it facilitates premature death and puts people at risk.

We must stop this dangerous Bill from returning. Take action today - your message could make all the difference.

The text reads:

I am writing to you as a resident of [your constituency] and as a supporter of Not Dead Yet UK, a grassroots disability rights group.

I am contacting you following the recent MP Private Members’ Bill ballot, as I have been alarmed by reports that assisted dying lobbyists are campaigning to persuade MPs near the top of the ballot to bring back Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill. I am very concerned about this and would be very grateful if you would reply to reassure me that you will listen to the voices of disabled people and not support the return of this Bill.

As Baroness Grey-Thompson made clear at a House of Lords Select Committee hearing last autumn about the assisted dying Bill, “there is no organisation of or for disabled people that supports this legislation”. She described the Bill as “a danger to disabled people”, a view widely shared by the disability community.

I find it extraordinary that MPs would consider bringing back a bill that is so widely opposed by not only disabled people but also countless medical Royal Colleges, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, professional bodies and other groups representing vulnerable people, including people with learning disabilities.

Polling published since the assisted dying Bill was first introduced has shown how wide the public’s concerns are about the assisted dying Bill that was introduced in the last parliamentary session, including in relation to its existential threat to disabled people.

These concerns remain significant because if the Parliament Acts were to be used to circumvent the House of Lords, as is the stated plan of campaigners seeking to persuade an MP to bring back the Bill, the Bill could not be amended, so all the concerns raised by groups such as Not Dead Yet UK could not be addressed.

This is particularly worrying because the House of Lords had not finished its work on the Bill when it fell. Peers were still considering serious concerns about whether disabled people would be safe under the Bill, including the risk that people could come under pressure or feel they had no real choice because they could not get the care and support they needed. These are not minor issues. They go to the heart of whether an assisted dying law would put disabled people at risk.

When MPs voted on the Bill, this further scrutiny in the House of Lords had not yet been completed. MPs who supported the Bill on the understanding that concerns would continue to be examined and safeguards could be improved should be deeply troubled by an attempt to bring back essentially the same Bill before that work has been done. Disabled people should not be expected to accept a Bill while serious concerns about their safety remain unresolved.

In relation to its impact on disabled people, a poll commissioned by Not Dead Yet UK of over 2,000 adults last summer showed the following:

- Two in three people (67%, including 72% of disabled people) agree that the UK Parliament should prioritise improving access to care for disabled people before introducing assisted dying (only 13% disagree). 

- 63% of the public and 67% of disabled people agree that some disabled people may feel a sense of responsibility to access an assisted death if they feel they are a burden on family, friends or society (only 16% disagree). 

- 60% of the public agree that some disabled people could be coerced into assisted dying by others who do not have their best interests at heart. 64% of disabled people share this concern. 

- 57% agree that disabled people who struggle to access the support they need, given the current state of the NHS and social care funding, may be more likely to seek assisted dying instead (only 17% disagree). This rises to over 6 in 10 (63%) for people who are disabled. 

- 59% agree that if disabled people are living in poverty, and benefits are being cut, they may be likely to seek assisted dying instead of struggling financially (again, only 17% disagree). This rises to 65% for people who are disabled.

In Canada, which first legalised assisted dying in 2016 under a law similar to the one proposed here (restricted to those whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable), disabled people have increasingly been put at risk under the country’s assisted dying law, with Paralympians and disabled veterans among those who have been offered an assisted death proactively without requesting it; one woman was offered an assisted death when she requested a stairlift. 

Roger Foley has written powerfully in the Herald of his experience as a disabled man living in Canada: “As Canada has expanded its assisted dying law, I have faced neglect, verbal abuse, and denial of essential care. I’ve been told my care needs are too much work, and my life has been devalued. Worse still, I have been approached and told by healthcare staff to consider opting for Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD). Instead of offering compassionate support to alleviate my suffering, it is suggested to me that I should end my life.”

England and Wales cannot follow this path - the risk is too great, which was one of the reasons why Scotland recently decisively rejected assisted dying.

Legalised assisted dying would change our country forever. Disabled people will hear the message loud and clear that their lives are not worth living - Parliament will have said as much by providing a means of assisting death while failing to ensure disabled people have all they need to live dignified, independent lives.

Many disabled people are terrified about this Bill and were greatly relieved when it failed to become law in the last session. I plead with you not to support the Bill being brought back. My mind would be greatly put at rest if you could assure me that you will oppose any such attempts and any future similar bill.

Thank you for your work on behalf of our constituency.

Yours sincerely,

Gateway to the World?

The only thing even funnier than the vanguard elite is the master race. The specimen in the first photograph, on the front line of the throwers of burning bins at the Police in Southampton, is Luke Jahn, the Portsmouth Branch Organiser of the National Rebirth Party. That party is shown in solemn assembly in the second photograph, while the third is of its Leader, Alek Yerbury. Form an orderly queue, Aryan maidens.

Suddenly, the likes of the National Rebirth Party like the Poles, in stark contrast to their attitude either 10 years ago or 85. As for their fellow travellers in and around the Conservative Party, Reform UK and Restore Britain, the weapon used to murder Henry Nowak was found by the jury not to have been a kirpan, which has never been known to have been used as an offensive weapon in this country, while the exemption of the kirpan from from the ban on bladed articles in public places goes back to the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Who was the Prime Minister in 1988? She also allowed into Britain more than 10,000 Vietnamese boat people who had illegally entered Hong Kong, before giving British citizenship to tens of thousands more who were then still there. "Maggie would have stopped the boats"? Would she hell.

Having made his successful call for "pure cold rage" in an unchallenged Emergency Address to the Nation, such as every MP should take to issuing, Nigel Farage characteristically did not turn up to Shabana Mahmood's statement to the House of Commons. He did contribute to a Westminster Hall debate on Monday, but he has not been heard on the floor of the House since 25 March, and he has not voted since seven days earlier again. Yet he has never been known to miss his other paid work. Both Reform and Restore want greatly relaxed gun laws, yet they also want to ban the kirpan, which has never killed anyone in Britain, where it takes a form that could not do so. Contrast that with the Orange Order, which marches with its three-foot longswords drawn, Wazir Khan rather than Guru Gobind Singh. Still, at least Reform does not promise Restoration at the hands of the Cromwell Club. Either you are laughing at that, or we are laughing at you.

Assuaging The Gilt

Perhaps it is because the first ever sovereign bond was issued by the Bank of England as recently as 1693, so 27 years after the discovery of gravity. In other advanced economies, the bond markets are to varying degrees important. But only in Britain are they given the anti-democratic constitutional status that, for all his misplaced hope in the Labour Party, Andy Beckett describes:

Should politics always be dominated by economics? Should questions about how governments and voters pay for things – whether by earnings, taxes or borrowing – be settled before we consider the wider consequences?

In an anxious capitalist democracy such as Britain, with a modern history of patchy economic success and intermittent but recurring crises over public debt, the answer may seem obvious: governments and voters always need to behave in ways that fit with the market forces that shape our economy.

This is the assumption behind most of the debate about Labour and the bond markets. Pundits and politicians on the centre left as well as the right, and many mainstream economists and bond traders, all agree that whoever emerges as prime minister from the current undeclared leadership contest will have to design their spending policies according to what “the markets” – as they are called with reverent vagueness – find acceptable. As the once radical, now more conventional historian and journalist Paul Mason wrote recently: “Put simply, ‘defying the bond market’ is like trying to defy gravity.”

Such supposed reality checks have been delivered to Labour governments since at least the mid-1970s, when Jim Callaghan’s embattled administration was forced to agree to spending cuts in order to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Even Tony Blair’s much more secure premiership deferred nervously to free-market orthodoxies. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” he told the 2005 Labour conference. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.”

Yet to see current capitalism as a force of nature, which cannot be held back or made to change course by governments in any way, is to underestimate all the effort that has been required to establish and sustain this economic model: busy conservative thinktanks, countless rightwing election campaigns, endless corporate lobbying. Free-market fatalism also requires a belief in economics as a set of simple laws – rather than a complex, contested, often inexact science, full of disagreements about the importance of and relationships between different economic interests and dynamics. As the late Samuel Brittan, one of the Financial Times’ most worldly commentators, once put it to me: “All economics is a construct.”

One of the most constructed – and therefore ideologically loaded – concepts applied to today’s UK economy and politics is “stability”. Broadly speaking, the financial markets understand it to mean a relatively long-serving government that keeps spending, debt and inflation under control. Such stability, the argument goes, allows businesses and investors to plan for the long term.

A more sceptical, less credulously pro-capitalist argument could also be made about this sort of stability, however: that some business interests actually want stability so they can behave in risky, destabilising ways and then be bailed out by the government if they get into trouble, as the banks were after the financial crisis. For some free marketeers, state intervention is always wrong – until suddenly it’s not.

Stability can also be defined in many ways the financial markets don’t think about much, if at all: social stability, climate stability, consistency in the provision of public services, cohesion between the nations of the UK, the continuation of traditional party politics and the current electoral system, and of faith in democracy itself. By all these measures, the market-pleasing austerity policies often followed by British governments since 2010 have produced not stability but the opposite.

Unless Labour takes an approach to governing less hemmed in by conventional economic thinking, this spiral of instability will probably deepen. As the investment analyst Cris Sholto Heaton writes in MoneyWeek: “What Britain needs is … pro-growth, pro-business policies combined with huge investment in physical and social infrastructure … to facilitate this and address the growing anger and despair that voters feel. Gilt [bond] investors seem averse to any hint of the latter [approach]. They appear not to fully appreciate that the consequences of the failing status quo will be much more populist governments.”

Arguably ever since Margaret Thatcher’s government replaced Callaghan’s, capitalism has often worked in Britain in a more short-term way than in much of Europe and Asia. For an unpopular Labour administration to persuade the financial markets and corporate establishment that much better-funded government will be better for the country – and also for the long-term prospects of many businesses – won’t be easy. It’s the perennial problem of left-leaning governments in the more conservative capitalist countries: how to convince instinctively suspicious, sometimes tribally rightwing business interests that a more functional state and a fairer economy will produce better economic outcomes.

Yet there are signs that Labour may be about to try. Andy Burnham argues that the UK has a sluggish economy and unhappy society because people are paying too much for essentials, often provided by privatised utilities that prioritise profits, shareholders and executive pay over delivering a functional or affordable service. His argument shows the influence of the thinktank Common Wealth and other well-informed leftwing critics of the economic status quo who contributed to Labour’s thinking during the iconoclastic shadow chancellorship of John McDonnell.

Until recently, that phase had seemingly been erased from the party’s history. But with Keir Starmer government’s initial economic orthodoxy having generated paltry gains and almost no political credit, and now being overtaken by events such as the inflationary war in the Middle East, even the usually cautious chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is sounding bolder. “I will not tolerate anyone exploiting a crisis to make a quick buck off the back of hard-working people,” she says, apparently condemning exactly the way many companies operate in this country. Meanwhile, the once thoroughly Blairite Wes Streeting writes: “The centre-left’s task is not simply to speak the language of markets more fluently than the Conservatives. It is to ensure markets serve society rather than dominate it.”

With the Tories and Reform UK promising yet more austerity, despite its unpopularity, a political space is opening up for Labour – one that its biggest rivals for the left-leaning vote, the Greens, are already exploring. It’s far too early to say that the domination of British politics by conservative economics is coming to an end. But that mindset is more vulnerable than for a long time.