The Thiefdom

Paul Knaggs writes:

Football is a game of two halves. One is played on the pitch. The beautiful game. The poetry of motion, the roar of the crowd, the working man’s game transformed into a billion-pound spectacle. The other half is played behind closed doors, where the paperwork lives. No cameras. No commentary. Just men in suits, long leaseholds, offshore companies and signatures that move millions from public funds into private property empires. It is this second half we need to examine. 

The Manchester City scandal has exposed what an independent Premier League commission described as years of financial deception: sham sponsorship contracts, sponsorship money the commission found had come in part from the club’s own owners rather than the sponsors, and misleading accounts stretching across nine seasons. The club disputes the findings and has appealed. But follow the money beyond the Etihad and another story begins. It leads to a mayor’s office, a public housing fund, and the streets of east Manchester. 

Because Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi United Group did not stop at buying Manchester City in 2008. Its investments extended into Manchester’s land, its housing, its regeneration. And according to The Telegraph’s investigation published on 8 October, three property companies ultimately controlled by the billionaire Gulf royal received around £55.7 million in taxpayer-backed loans from a public fund intended to tackle Greater Manchester’s housing shortage. New Little Mill Developments, Vesta Street Developments and Lampwick Developments: all registered in Jersey, all part of the Manchester Life partnership between Manchester City Council and ADUG. Lampwick alone took £24.5 million.

The approvals came at two Greater Manchester Combined Authority meetings in 2017, both chaired by Andy Burnham. The homes were built. The loans were repaid with interest. The paperwork went through the proper channels. And when academic researchers examined the Manchester Life developments, they found 1,468 homes delivered without a single affordable home among them. There is a district of east Manchester now called New Islington. Before the developers arrived, much of the surrounding neighbourhood was Miles Platting. Before that came the mills, and before the mills, the fields. Walk it today and you will find the worker’s bee cut into the old stone, the emblem of a city that told its people the wealth they made would come back to them. It never quite did. And the towers that have gone up beside that old stone, on ground their grandparents worked, were built with their money and let at rents they cannot pay. That is where this story becomes something much bigger than football.

Nine Boroughs Underwrote Manchester Housing Loans 

Here is the detail that turns a Manchester story into a Greater Manchester one, and it comes not from a newspaper but from the authority’s own accounts. In March 2018, the GMCA’s Treasury Management Strategy set out how the Housing Investment Loans Fund actually worked. The combined authority did not at that point have the legal power to borrow the money it was lending. So the loans were made by Manchester City Council, which held a £300 million loan from what was then the Department for Communities and Local Government. Government took the first £60 million of any losses. The remaining £240 million was guaranteed, and the guarantee had to sit with somebody. It sat with the other nine boroughs. In the document’s own words, “the other nine GM local authorities have each indemnified MCC for their share of the liability MCC has under the loan agreement with DCLG to repay a minimum of 80% of the Fund to DCLG in 2025.”

Read that again, and then read the dates. Those indemnities were live when the loans to Sheikh Mansour’s Jersey companies were approved in 2017. They only fell away in April 2018, when the loan book transferred to the GMCA. Which means that at the moment the money went out, the councils standing behind it were Wigan, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury, Salford, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford. Not one of them received a penny of those three loans. Not one of their councillors sat in the room. Had the schemes failed, the bill would have landed on the general funds of some of the poorest boroughs in England, places where the libraries were closing and the children’s centres had already gone. The loans did not fail. That is luck, not governance. And luck is not a system of accountability.

The GMCA’s Own Report Admitted the Misalignment 

The most damaging document in this story is not The Telegraph’s investigation. It is the GMCA’s own loans report, tabled in the same pack, which states plainly that “affordable housing and section 106 agreements are dealt with at a local level”, before conceding, in the same breath, that commitments had now passed £300 million and that work was “ongoing to revise the Investment Strategy to better align the future investment approach with the GMCA housing objectives.” That is a housing fund admitting, in writing, that affordable housing was somebody else’s department, and that its investments were not aligned with its own housing goals. It is not a leaked memo. It is a public report, tabled and approved, and nobody made a fuss because nobody was reading.

The results arrived exactly as the paperwork predicted. Across the £1.2 billion the fund eventually lent, eleven thousand homes were built, of which fewer than five hundred met the affordable threshold. Under five per cent. That figure comes from an independent evaluation the GMCA itself commissioned. Meanwhile Andy Burnham had stood for mayor in 2017 promising to end rough sleeping by 2020, to build ten thousand council homes by 2028, and to steer the housing fund away from luxury city centre schemes. Rough sleeping in Greater Manchester has since risen four years in a row. In 2024/25, the entire city region completed 611 social rent homes.

Why Repayment Does Not Answer the Housing Fund Question 

Let us put the case for the defence as well as its own lawyers would. These were loans, not gifts. Manchester Life says all three were repaid in full with interest, and that Sheikh Mansour’s investment vehicle put more than £160 million of its own capital into the first two phases of the development. The fund as a whole turned a £29 million profit for the combined authority and returned £20.9 million to the government that supplied the capital. Sir Richard Leese, then deputy mayor and a director of Manchester Life, is reported to have declared a prejudicial interest and left the room. The decisions were taken collectively by GMCA members. Chairing a meeting is not the same as taking a decision, and Burnham said in October 2025 that the lending had been done “very rigorously and properly”.

Concede all of it. Every word. And then notice what has just been conceded. A housing fund that reports its success in interest earned has already told you what it was for. This was not a housing programme that underperformed. It was a merchant bank wearing a mayor’s chain, and the homes were a by-product of the lending rather than the purpose of it. Nobody stole anything. Nobody had to. That is a heavier charge than corruption, because corruption can be prosecuted and this cannot. What it can be is named.

Manchester Life and the Norman Tenure That Never Left 

The arrangement the Normans brought with them in 1066 did not work by theft. It worked by tenure. Land was not owned by the people who worked it; it was held. A lord held of the King, a tenant held of the lord, and the value travelled upward to someone the tenant would never meet. The brilliance of the system was that nothing needed to be taken by force. The paperwork did the taking. Everyone turned up to the same fields in the morning, and what they made simply left by a route they had no standing to question. We have spent the better part of a thousand years trying to shake it off. The Levellers went at it. The Chartists went at it. The men and women who put that bee on those buildings went at it with union cards and co-operative societies and a conviction that a city could belong to the people who built it. And here it is again in Ancoats, wearing a lanyard. 

Because the council did not sell the land outright. It granted long leaseholds. The researchers at Sheffield, Adam Leaver, Jonathan Silver and Richard Goulding, found that the leaseholds, the property assets and the income rights were all held through companies in Jersey, with ADUG holding majority control of the British joint venture companies too. An earlier study by Tom Gillespie and Jonathan Silver had already traced more than four hectares of public land transferred for over fourteen hundred homes, none of them affordable, in a city whose own policy asked for one in five. Lampwick Quay, built with public money, was later sold on to PGIM, an American asset manager. So the public put up the land. The public put up the capital. Nine boroughs underwrote the risk. And the rent now leaves by a route the tenant has no standing to question.

That is not a housing policy. It is a tenure, and it has a name older than any of the economics being argued over this week. Nor is it a market, whatever Burnham thinks he is ending. Ask Aubrey Weis, the Manchester developer who spent a reported £3 million on barristers and forensic accountants arguing that the same fund had lent more than £500 million to one favoured developer, Renaker, on terms no commercial lender would offer. He lost at the Competition Appeal Tribunal and lost again at the Court of Appeal, although Lord Justice Zacaroli accepted that his arguments on the interest rates were well founded, and he has now applied to the Supreme Court. Whether Weis was right matters less than what his defeat demonstrates: a rival with three million pounds and five years could not get a proper hearing on whether a market existed at all. In March 2024, a meeting chaired by Burnham approved £120 million of loans to two Renaker vehicles in under a minute.

Burnham’s Manchesterism and the Osborne Blueprint 

Burnham has a word for all this. He calls it Manchesterism, and he has described it as the end of neoliberalism and as business-friendly socialism. In the same conversations he generously credits the original Greater Manchester devolution settlement to George Osborne and the late Sir Howard Bernstein. Bernstein was the chief executive of Manchester City Council. He also sat on the board of Manchester Life. The architecture now being offered to the country as the answer to Thatcherism was drawn up by Osborne’s department and a council officer sitting on both sides of a deal with a Gulf monarchy, and it produced fewer than five hundred affordable homes out of eleven thousand.

And nobody above it was watching. Asked directly in 2024, the National Audit Office confirmed that it has no authority over, scrutiny of, oversight of or involvement in the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loans Fund, and holds no information on the onward loans the combined authority made. More than a billion pounds of government money, lent to private developers, with no national auditor in the room. Devolution was sold to us as power coming home. What came home was the power to do this, in a building most of us have never entered, by people most of us cannot name. 

This is the model Burnham intends to export. More mayors, more combined authorities, more funds of this kind, each able to move hundreds of millions into private hands with no duty to publish the terms and no auditor with a remit to ask. Every new mayoralty inherits the same chequebook and the same silence around it. So the demand is not a resignation. It is paper. Publish the interest rates, the security, the risk assessments and the conflict-of-interest advice on all three loans. Publish the indemnities, so that the people of Wigan and Oldham can see what was pledged in their name. Publish the hospitality register for the full mayoralty, which the Liberal Democrat spokesperson Anna Sabine has already requested and which remains closed. And give the National Audit Office the remit it has told us in writing it does not have, before the next ten mayors inherit the same unwatched chequebook.

None of that requires anyone to have broken a law. All of it requires someone to stop finding it convenient that no law was broken. Burnham says he has not downplayed the seriousness of anything. Fine. Then publish, and let the seriousness speak. Eleven thousand homes went up in Greater Manchester on public money. Fewer than five hundred were meant for the people whose councils stood behind the debt. They did not take anything from us. We held the door, paid for the hinges, and called it devolution. The bee is still on the buildings. The question is who owns the hive.

Tight-Lipped About The Reasons

This afternoon, the Daily Mail published this, by Elizabeth Ivens, which is archived here:

An Oxford University professor is facing trial after being charged with possessing indecent images of children. Dr Lola Salem, 33, is a music lecturer at prestigious Oriel College, the oldest royal foundation college at Oxford, where King Charles is the 'official visitor' as reigning monarch. She was suspended by the college, whose famous alumni include Sir Walter Raleigh, after they became aware of the charges in June. She has also been barred from teaching students there and at fellow Oxford colleges Wadham and St Catherine's where she previously lectured in French. 

Dr Salem has been accused of possessing indecent images of children between May 2021 and February 2023. Three of the images are classed as category B, the second most serious category, and one is classed as category C. She is currently on bail after pleading not guilty to the charges earlier this year. She is expected to stand trial at Oxford Crown Court next year. Oriel College confirmed it 'was made aware of serious charges against an employee in June 2026'. It stated: 'This employee was suspended, pending the outcome of legal proceedings.'

French-born Dr Salem joined Oriel in 2022 and has been a lecturer in music at Oxford since 2018. The academic, who was educated in Paris and attended the world-famous Sorbonne University, completed her PhD at Oxford in 2022 on opera business, singers, economic and legal history in the 17th and 18th centuries. She was awarded a research fellowship in 2023 and has since 'devoted her time to examining artistic institutions, governance and cultural policy', according to her online biography. She describes herself as an 'academic, cultural strategist and fundraiser working in education, culture and the arts'. She has also worked in the media as a columnist for the Telegraph, a business development partner for The Critic magazine and has appeared on BBC Radio 3.

In the same paper, on Friday 2 October and archived here, Richard Eden wrote:

The gulf in their ages – he, at 59, is 26 years her senior – inspired much attention when their romance first bloomed, though arguably not as much as the disparity in their respective physical charms. After all, far from placing himself in the same bracket as Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Gove has instead spoken candidly about what he considers his deficiencies in ‘looks, charisma, all the rest of it’. Now, however, the former Tory Cabinet minister’s relationship with his girlfriend, the French academic Dr Lola Salem, has ended after two years.

‘They’ve parted,’ a chum tells me, adding that Gove has moved out of the west London flat they shared. ‘The split happened some time ago, but all parties have been tight-lipped about the reasons.’ They first publicly emerged as a couple in 2024 when they were pictured arriving at The Spectator magazine’s summer party, with Gove gallantly shielding Lola from the rain with an umbrella. Gove was later photographed leaning in to kiss her at a London restaurant. Not long afterwards, Gove, who had just stood down as an MP, was appointed The Spectator’s editor and, though discreet about his newfound love, he didn’t try to keep it secret.

There was certainly no danger that Lola would ever be in his intellectual shadow. With two degrees under her belt from Paris, she was awarded a doctorate at Oxford. Gove – memorably described by his ex-wife, my fellow Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, as ‘a heterosexual man in a gay man’s body’ – has admitted to having an intense crush on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. If, he joked, Ms Mahmood could see what he looked at on his computer, ‘she would discover that quite a lot of my browsing is me typing in “Shabana Mahmood images” or “Shabana Mahmood history”.’ Added Gove: ‘She’s gorgeous. I’m a huge fan. I’ll have to tell my girlfriend about this.’

Advance?

Adam James Pollock writes:

Canada has seemingly decided to stop sliding down the slippery slope of assisted dying. On Wednesday, the country’s Justice Minister, Sean Fraser, revealed that the Liberal government would be indefinitely suspending its plan to legalise assisted dying for individuals whose only condition is mental. Before this, legislation had been passed which meant that, from March of next year, Canadians could apply to end their lives solely on the basis of mental illness.

This law has now been shelved, with Fraser stating that the government has decided there is no medical consensus on when mental illnesses become incurable or untreatable, and that subsequently it would be impossible to discern in which circumstances individuals could be allowed to end their lives. Psychiatrists had repeatedly been making this point, including earlier this year to a parliamentary committee, conveying that it is not possible to prognosticate on mental illness. At long last, the government appears to agree.

Yet since 2021, people can apply to end their lives in Canada even if their death is considered to be “reasonably foreseeable”, meaning that many people with lifelong conditions which are not considered terminal, such as multiple sclerosis, can die by euthanasia. This seems to reinforce the precedent that has long been put forward — whether implicitly or explicitly — by those who advocate for assisted dying, that the lives of disabled people simply have less value than their able-bodied counterparts.

This two-tiered society has been evident in Canada for several years now. Christine Gauthier, the Canadian Paralympian and army veteran, asked for state assistance in making her home more accessible through the installation of a wheelchair lift. Instead, she was offered euthanasia. Roger Foley, who has a degenerative neurological condition and remains in hospital, has repeatedly attempted to access self-directed home care, yet he is continually told by hospital staff that his only real options are to put up with his limited care or end his life. There are countless other examples. The solution, which the Canadian government has finally taken its first steps towards, is not widening the scope for people to die, but instead providing people with the requisite care to live as meaningful and dignified a life as possible. 

Disability campaigners have been highlighting this plight in Canada for years, and it is one that has been echoed in great detail in Britain over recent months. This year alone, legislation which would have legalised assisted dying in England, Wales and Scotland have all been rejected, in large part due to the worries of disabled people that they would essentially develop a duty to die. Legislators including Baronesses Grey-Thompson and Campbell, as well as Lord Shinkwin, revealed how they are frequently treated as second-class citizens due to their disabilities, and how this would translate to an increased vulnerability under an assisted dying programme.

Hopefully, Canada’s change in direction will inspire other countries where assisted dying for mental illness is already legal to follow suit. In the Netherlands, for example, there have already been tragedies where lives have been ended when the individual’s mental-health condition could have been treatable, such as the case of an autistic boy between the ages of 16 and 18 who was euthanised following a failed suicide attempt, with the justification being that he was suffering mentally because of his autism. This is precisely the kind of horrific case Canada has just avoided. The Netherlands could, and should, avail of this shift in medical and legislative viewpoint and repeal its legislation.

Canada has taken the right first step in ensuring that people with serious illnesses or conditions — mental or physical — are not disproportionately adversely affected by assisted dying laws. The next step back up the slippery slope is to reverse the other recent expansion of the law that allowed those for whom death is not reasonably foreseeable to end their lives. Assisted dying laws that were initially billed as being the exception to the rule have rapidly become the status quo, and any government that seriously cares about its citizens should seek to stamp this out.

And Darren Major writes:

The former Quebec premier who oversaw passage of Canada's first-ever medically assisted dying law says he now feels conflicted after seeing how far the practice has progressed since then. Quebec's National Assembly passed the law in 2014 outlining conditions under which terminally ill patients could formally request medical assistance in dying (MAID). While the bill was initially introduced by the Parti Québécois, it gained multiparty support while Philippe Couillard's Liberals were in government.

The former premier told CBC's The House that he sometimes questions his 2014 decision after seeing how MAID has expanded in Quebec and Canada since that first law was passed. "It was clearly reserved for terminal or pre-terminal conditions with a defined, unfortunate road to the end of life. And this is not the case anymore," he told host Catherine Cullen. "I'm not sure that I would have again voted for that law with the extension that we have seen in the recent years." 

Two years after Quebec passed its law, the federal government passed its own MAID legislation — prompted by a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that said a prohibition of medically assisted dying ran contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Former prime minister Justin Trudeau consulted with Couillard before the 2016 federal MAID law was adopted. That federal legislation was struck down by the Superior Court of Quebec in 2019 because it was limited to those whose deaths were "reasonably foreseeable." The federal government passed a subsequent law in 2021 to fall in line with the court's ruling. Quebec took things a step further in 2024, allowing for people to submit advance requests for MAID before a person's condition, such as Alzheimer's, renders them incapable of giving consent.

Couillard, a former neurosurgeon, emphasized that the intention of Quebec's original law was to limit MAID to those solely suffering from a terminal illness. "I was warned about this by people opposing the law that told me, 'We see your motivation is good, but you will see, once you open the door you will not close it and it will open wider.' And this is what happened," he said. The federal government announced this week that, after deliberation in the wake of the 2019 court ruling, it wouldn't proceed with expanding MAID to people who are solely suffering from mental illness. (There are multiple cases before the courts arguing for further expansion to include people suffering from mental illness). 

Justice Minister Sean Fraser announced the government will not move forward with allowing medical assistance in dying (MAID) for those suffering solely from mental illness, angering some MAID advocates, but pleasing many in the medical community. "We need to create space for people to be able to provide consent when they know they're going to lose capacity in order to live out their remaining years rather than being put in a position where they fear they have to take that decision prematurely," Fraser said earlier this week. "We don't have the jurisdiction to create these services in the different provinces. We only have the jurisdiction to determine when a particular set of behaviours will be treated as criminal under Canada's criminal laws." 

Despite his current reservations, Couillard praised the passing of the original bill as "one of the best moments of democracy" during his premiership, noting that he allowed for a free vote within his Liberal caucus. But when asked, he said he does sometimes have regrets about passing the law. "In general, when this hits me, I think about specific patients that I've known in my medical career that were in such deep distress and pain that I think we did the right thing," he said. "But I hope we didn't go too fast. I hope we didn't take this as a trivial matter, which is certainly not the case."

But Sharon Kirkey writes:

Just as one debate over euthanasia is being settled, another is emerging over Canada’s plans to allow people to consent to medical aid in dying (MAID) at some future date when they are no longer of sound mind. In a surprise move this week, federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser announced the Liberal government is fine-tuning a bill to be introduced sometime this fall that, in addition to placing an indeterminate hold on MAID for mental illness alone, would decriminalize “advance requests” for doctor-administered death. Performing euthanasia on the basis of a person’s advance request “will mean that people will receive MAID when they no longer understand what is happening to them,” said Trudo Lemmens, a University of Toronto professor of health law and policy. 

Another thorny ethical concern: who makes the final call that it’s time to act on an advance request once the person has lost the capacity to decide for themselves? The Criminal Code generally requires that a person has the capacity to consent to receive MAID immediately before death is administered. The Liberal government is proposing to change that. Here’s a look at why that’s making some people nervous.

What are advance requests for euthanasia? 

Advance requests would allow people who have been diagnosed with a serious and incurable disease that will eventually lead to incapacity to draft a document outlining the specific conditions under which they would prefer to die, which would then be provided after they have lost capacity. In its report following a “national conversation” on the issue, the federal government offered the hypothetical example of a man named “Charlie” who, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, “decides that should his health decline rapidly and he starts experiencing intolerable suffering after he has lost capacity to make health care decisions, he would like to have MAID provided.”  His advance request would set out conditions that, for Charlie, would constitute “endurable and intolerable suffering,” a formal criterion for MAID. That could include not being able to feed himself, get out of bed or recognize his children. 

If these conditions were to arise, the advance request would state that it would be his explicit wish to be provided MAID. The Criminal Code currently requires that a person have capacity to give explicit, final consent before death. The only exception involves people who are close to a natural death and have already been approved for MAID and have a date set, but are at risk of losing capacity before the scheduled date. In those cases, people can sign a waiver of final consent. In March, Alberta became the only province to explicitly ban advance requests for MAID. Fraser said it will be up to provinces to decide whether to allow people to make advance requests. 

On Oct. 30, 2024, Quebec joined the Netherlands in accepting advance requests for people diagnosed with dementia and other serious conditions that will lead to incapacity. However, as the Montreal Gazette’s Aaron Derfel has reported, with no amendment to the Criminal Code, many MAID providers in Quebec are anxious about being prosecuted, despite the province’s directive to criminal prosecutors that pursuing doctors who comply with the provincial law would “not be in the public interest.” Even then, about 3,000 advance requests have now been added to a Quebec registry; between 30 to 40 deaths have been performed under the directives so far.

What have Canadians said about advance directives? 

According to the federal government’s recently conducted national conversation on the issue, an online questionnaire completed by more than 46,000 adults between December 2024 and February 2025 found 69 per cent supported advance requests for people diagnosed with a serious or incurable condition that will lead to a loss of capacity. Twenty-six per cent said they oppose them. Some participants in roundtable discussions said final consent is “an essential guardrail. Without it they said that vulnerable individuals would be at risk,” according to the report. Some questioned how people can make a truly informed decision, given they don’t know for certain what they’ll be experiencing in the future.

Likewise, some wondered how to manage circumstances “where the person meets the conditions set out in their advance request but appears to refuse MAID after they have lost capacity.” “Euthanasia for people who are incapacitated is a very, very delicate matter,” Montreal family physician Laurence Normand-Rivest said this week at a press conference on Parliament Hill organized by the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. “They don’t have the privilege to consent at the moment where we kill them,” Normand-Rivest said. “They show a lot of resistance. They need to be sedated. They don’t want an injection, and to have an IV … People think it will be a peaceful death but in fact we see a lot of struggle and battle when doctors euthanize incapacitated patients,” she said. 

Dr. Laurent Boisvert, a MAID provider and president of Quebec’s Dying with Dignity association, said that, in his experience, deaths performed under advance requests aren’t nearly so disturbing. He has personally performed three or four such MAID provisions. “I didn’t have this type of problem, but I know that at some point I can be in front of a patient who is quite aggressive, who doesn’t want to be touched and we need to sedate this patient” in order to insert the IV, Boisvert said. “But calling this a distressing procedure, I don’t think so.” People can appoint one or two trusted people — a spouse, an adult child — to make sure their advance request is respected, he said. In conversations with colleagues, “it seems that it has worked well (with) no big problems at this time,” Boisvert said. 

In a controversial 2016 Dutch case, a doctor ended the life of a 74-year-old woman who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years earlier, and who had drafted an advance euthanasia directive requesting euthanasia should she ever be admitted to a nursing home and no longer able to live with her husband. When her condition worsened, she was placed in a nursing home, where she began wandering the halls at night. “The nursing home doctor reviewed her case and decided that the woman was suffering unbearably, which would justify her wish to die,” Dutch media reported. 

On the morning of her death, the doctor secretly slipped a sedative into the woman’s coffee. She did not tell the woman she was about to die. Despite the sedative, the woman appeared to try to get up in the middle of the procedure and “resisted physically,” the doctor initially reported to the euthanasia committee. The woman’s son-in-law laid her back down so the doctor could inject her. The doctor was eventually acquitted of breaking Dutch euthanasia laws after a judge ruled the woman’s prior written request was sufficient and that there was no legal requirement for the doctor to verify the “current death wish,” BBC reported.

What do proponents say? 

Dying with Dignity Canada said the proposed legislation would only decriminalize advance requests in provinces and territories that also pass legislation permitting them, creating at best a patchwork system across Canada. “At worst, some people in Canada may never have access to advance requests in their province or territory,” CEO Helen Long said. Fraser, the federal justice minister, said advance requests would allow people at risk of losing their decision-making capacity “to live out their remaining years, rather than being put in a position where they fear they have to take that decision prematurely.”

What do opponents say? 

While he can understand the appeal they hold for some, psychiatrist Dr. Sonu Gaind said there are several unresolved concerns, including how people, once they lose capacity, could withdraw their consent. “Meaning that, if they change their mind, and they’ve lost capacity, what do you do? How do you deal with it? How do you know?” It’s a concern reflected in the coffee case in the Netherlands, he said. Advance requests are also based on what people think they would and would not want in the future. “We’re not very good at knowing how we’ll actually deal with things and cope with things” months or years later, said Gaind, a University of Toronto professor. Studies show people who suffer spinal cord injuries, for example, adapt in ways they never thought possible, he said. 

“How do we predict that for our future selves? We don’t know how we will actually adapt and feel in the future once something happens.” What’s not talked about enough, he said, is what gets “projected into the decision” to end a person’s life. “Once the person has lost capacity, then the agency for actually fulfilling their prior wishes falls on someone else,” Gaind said. “It’s inevitable, it has to: It falls on someone else to make a judgment that, ‘OK, have the conditions now been met’” to warrant MAID. 

It would fall onto an assessor, yet the MAID literature shows the personal views and values of the assessor influences the end-of-life decisions that are made, Gaind said. “You risk having an illusion that, ‘Oh, we’re compassionately fulfilling patient autonomy,’ but in fact are we now, in some of these situations, allowing internalized ableism of assessors to get projected onto these assessments of patients who’ve, at this point, lost capacity?” Others worry about coercion. “A court can undo a will that was unduly influenced,” Heather Campbell Pope, a lawyer and chair of Dementia Justice Canada, said in a statement. “But once MAID is provided, there is no meaningful remedy if we find later that the person was pressured to make the advance request” or pressured to go along with it, she said. “It is simply too late.”

Labour Held Starmer’s Old Seat; Nobody Won It

Paul Knaggs writes:

Keir Starmer left Holborn and St Pancras with a majority of 11,572. Labour has just kept it with 3,364. Six voters in ten did not turn out at all. That is not a mandate. It is a tenancy, which is at least appropriate in a constituency where roughly three quarters of residents rent the roof over their heads.

Sagal Abdi-Wali, leader of Camden Council since May and a former child refugee from Somalia, won with 12,292 votes. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, took 8,928. Ewan Cameron of the Conservatives came third on 1,922, Reform’s Peter Newman fourth on 1,612, and the Liberal Democrat Patrick Stillman trailed on 924. Turnout was 38.76 per cent, down from 54.1 per cent when Starmer last stood here two years ago.

Let me be fair to the Greens before I am hard on them, because the arithmetic deserves honesty. In 2024 their candidate David Stansell polled 4,030 votes in this seat. Polanski took more than double that on a turnout around eleven thousand votes lower. In share terms that is close to a tripling. A Green spokesperson said on the night that taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats showed how far the party has come, and on the face of the numbers that is not spin. In February the Greens took Gorton and Denton from Labour outright, with Hannah Spencer winning on a turnout of 47.62 per cent.

This is a party that is genuinely growing. That is precisely why last night was so bad for them. Gorton and Denton was a seat the Greens chose to fight. Holborn and St Pancras was a seat their leader chose to inhabit. Polanski did not send a promising local candidate into Camden and hope. He put his own name on the ballot, moved the national operation in behind it, and told the press in September that he would remain leader whatever happened. Nearly fifteen hundred doors were knocked in the first three days after Starmer’s resignation, before the party had even selected anybody. When you stake your personal authority on a contest, you do not get to grade yourself on vote share afterwards. When you stake your personal authority on a contest, you do not get to grade yourself on vote share afterwards.

And there is a number that should trouble Green strategists more than Abdi-Wali’s majority. In 2024, the independent Andrew Feinstein took 7,312 votes here with no party, no machine and no national profile beyond his own. Stansell took a further 4,030. Between them, the anti-Starmer left polled 11,342 in this constituency. Polanski, as leader of a national party in a by-election built around him, polled 8,928. Turnout was far lower, so the comparison is not a straight one. But a movement that absorbed Feinstein’s endorsement and Feinstein’s voters and still could not assemble Feinstein’s coalition has a problem it cannot solve with leaflets.

WHAT HAPPENED IN BRIGHTON 

The problem has a date and a place. On Saturday 4 October, at the Green conference in Brighton, members voted by 1,022 to 813 to adopt a motion declaring Zionism a racist, ethnonationalist political project, committing the party to a single democratic state and formally making the Greens the first explicitly anti-Zionist party in mainstream British politics. Fifty-five per cent to forty-five. A party split nearly down the middle, on the eve of the most important by-election in its history.

Polanski was not in the hall. He had left after his Friday speech to campaign in Camden. He had backed an amendment offering safeguards for Jewish members, and that amendment was defeated, but he did not stay to speak against the motion and he did not vote on it. Caroline Lucas, who led the party from 2016 to 2018 and remains its most recognisable figure, went on Newsnight and did not spare him. She said he should have been there and he should have voted. She called the motion flawed from top to bottom.

Asked directly whether Polanski should quit the leadership, she declined to defend him, saying instead that we should see what happens in the coming days and weeks, while allowing that he had been taken up with the by-election. Read that again. That is not criticism from an opponent. That is a former leader of the same party, invited on live television to say her leader should stay, choosing not to.

THE ARGUMENT THE GREENS DID NOT HAVE 

Here is the defence the Greens will offer, and it is not a stupid one. Party conference is sovereign. Members, not leaders, make policy, and a leader who overrides a membership vote is a leader of a different kind of party. The motion carries no disciplinary weight, as the party’s own spokesperson pointed out. Polanski was doing the job the membership had given him, which was to fight an election. There is something honourable in a party that argues in public rather than managing dissent in private, and anyone who watched Labour’s internal machinery grind through the Corbyn years should hesitate before demanding more discipline and less democracy. All true.

And all beside the point. The question was never whether Green members have the right to debate Israel and Palestine. They do. The question is what a party is for, and what it puts first when the two collide. In the week the Greens had their best ever shot at a Westminster seat, in a constituency where people are being priced out of the streets they grew up on, the party’s defining public act was a motion about the Middle East that split its own conference almost in half and that its leader was too busy to vote on. 

Abdi-Wali, for her part, campaigned on the thing in front of her. She pointed out that around 76 per cent of people in this seat rent, against a national average nearer 36. She was not an inspiring choice, and plenty on the local left regard her as thoroughly Starmerite. She did not turn up to the Camden Muslim Network hustings, and the organisers noticed. Her party’s vote fell by 6,592 from Starmer’s 2024 total. She won anyway, because she talked about rent.

BOUNDARIES 

This is the party that tells you to follow the science, right up until the science contradicts the Party Something has happened to the Green Party, and the Zionism motion is a symptom rather than the disease. This was once a movement that understood boundaries as a physical fact. A watershed. A green belt. A hedgerow. A limit on how much a river can take before it dies. Its whole claim on our attention was that some things must be protected whether or not protecting them is fashionable. That instinct has not disappeared, but it has been displaced. A party that built itself on defending the boundaries of the natural world has become notably less patient with boundaries elsewhere, including the ones women ask for around privacy, dignity and single-sex space.

This newspaper’s position on that is settled and will not be softened to keep anyone comfortable. Somewhere between saving the planet and relitigating the meaning of sex, the Greens wandered into territory where the people they most need to persuade cannot follow them. Polanski should not be hounded out over one defeat. He doubled his party’s vote in a Labour fortress and that is a real achievement, whatever happens next. But he set the test himself, and he failed it, and he was absent from the room where the damage was done.

THE TEMPTATION IN DOWNING STREET 

There is a man in Downing Street who should read this result more carefully than anyone in the Green Party, and his name is Andy Burnham. Burnham has been Prime Minister since 20 July. He was acclaimed unopposed, which is to say that not a single Labour member, let alone a single voter, was asked to endorse him. He entered the Commons in June through a by-election in Makerfield that existed only because Josh Simons stood aside to create it. He is the seventh person to hold the office in just over a decade. He has never led a party into a general election, and the next one is not due until August 2029.

So far, that has not hurt him. Survation’s poll of 2 to 5 October put Labour on 30 per cent against Reform’s 24, the party’s best figure since December 2024 and the third Labour lead of Burnham’s premiership outside the margin of error. His personal numbers are the sort no British prime minister has enjoyed in years: Opinium had him at net plus seven in late September, YouGov at plus five. The press has already given it a name. The Burnham bounce.

Every instinct in Labour’s machine will now whisper the same thing. Go now. Convert the bounce into a mandate before the Budget, before the winter, before the shine comes off. Holborn and St Pancras is the reason not to.  Look at what actually happened in a seat Labour held by 11,572 two years ago. The party’s vote fell by 6,592. The majority fell to 3,364. Starmer’s successor won, and won fairly, but she won by surviving rather than persuading. And the damage was not done by the right. The Conservatives went backwards here in raw votes. So did Reform. So did the Liberal Democrats. Everything Labour lost in this constituency, it lost leftwards.

That is the part that should keep Burnham awake, because it is the mirror image of the thing that got him here. Tim Bale of Queen Mary University put it plainly to Al Jazeera last week: very little of Labour’s recovery comes from Reform voters switching to Labour. The bounce is built on left-leaning and liberal voters coming home. Those are precisely the voters Polanski spent five weeks in Camden trying to take away, and he took 8,928 of them.

Now set that against the arithmetic of 2024. Labour won 411 seats on 33.7 per cent of the vote, the most efficient and the shallowest landslide in modern British history. A majority of that size built on a third of the vote does not degrade gently. It holds, and holds, and then it collapses all at once, because hundreds of seats sit within a few thousand votes of changing hands. Labour is currently polling between 28 and 30 per cent. In February, the Greens took Gorton and Denton from Labour on a swing large enough to rank among the biggest Labour by-election losses since 1931. In Makerfield, Reform’s candidate still polled 15,696 votes while losing. Burnham cannot squeeze the Green vote by moving right, and he cannot hold off Reform by moving left. Two fronts, pulling in opposite directions. There is no campaign clever enough to solve that in six weeks, which is all a general election gives you. The honest case for going early is that legitimacy is a real problem, that an unelected prime minister governing on another man’s manifesto has limited authority, and that the bounce may never be higher than it is this month. All fair.

But a general election called to settle a legitimacy question of your own making is not a mandate, it is a gamble with other people’s livelihoods as the stake. Burnham has nearly three years. The question is not whether he can win an election now. It is whether he can give people a reason to vote for him in 2029, and that reason will not be found in a poll. It will be found in rent, in bills, in water, in buses, in the things he spent nine years in Manchester saying a government ought to be judged on. He has the one thing Starmer never had, which is permission. He should spend it on something. The Greens did not lose Holborn and St Pancras to Labour. They lost it in Brighton, in a hall their leader had already left.

Assisted Suicide By The Back Door

Dr Anthony McCarthy writes:

The anthropologist Mary Douglas once noted of taboos: ‘Without the taboos, which turn basic classifications into automatic psychological reflexes, no thinking could be effective, because if every system of classification was up for revision at every moment, there would be no stability of thought.’

The taboo on suicide in our culture is powerful enough that promoters of the recently defeated Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill claimed that it was not concerned with ‘suicide’. The rich dishonesty of that stance was revealed when they sought to amend the Suicide Act of 1961 so that ‘assisting a person to seek to end their own life in accordance with the act’ would not fall foul of the prohibition on assisting suicide. The bill fell apart under scrutiny as the House of Lords, the House of Commons and, before that, medical royal colleges and disability groups – among others – showed it to be bad and dangerous legislation.

Yet, less than a month before the defeat of the bill, the British Medical Association (BMA) issued guidance clearly promoting the idea that doctors should assist in the suicide (here, suicide by omission) of patients under their care, whatever parliament may decide on ‘assisted dying’. As with the bill, the BMA’s guidance doesn’t use the word ‘suicide’ except to claim that what it proposes is not ‘assisting in suicide’ according to the law.

The BMA’s guidance is aimed at those ‘caring for patients who elect to voluntarily stop eating and drinking (VSED)’. It concerns specifically patients who ‘with the mental capacity to decide to do so, and in the absence of control or coercion, [make] an informed decision to stop the oral intake of food and fluids with the intention to end their life’. The guidance cannot bring itself to call such decisions ‘suicidal’, even though suicide is precisely the decision to end one’s life, by whatever means.

So what does the BMA recommend? It appeared to have as much difficulty with the term ‘assisting’ as it does with ‘suicide’. Repeatedly throughout its guidance, the BMA assures its members that whatever they are recommending, it is not assistance in suicide – not legally, at least.

Doctors are merely giving ‘information’, the BMA claims. But this ‘information’ includes tips on altering a patient’s diet in preparation for starvation or fatal dehydration. It instructs relatives not to offer food, and tells doctors what to do if one asks for food and water when delirious, and so on. In other words, doctors are actively encouraged to advise suicidal patients on how to prepare for and carry out their suicidal plan most comfortably, as with ‘decreasing caloric intake one week before’. Perhaps one day those intent on drowning themselves will be offered handy advice on overcoming hydrophobia as part of their ‘care’.

Faced with a suicidal person determined to starve and dehydrate themselves to death, the BMA tells its members that doctors should not ‘judge or try to persuade the patient to change their decision, and patients should not be put in a position where they are forced to justify or defend it’.

But doctors don’t simply exist to facilitate a patient’s wishes. In fact, doctors are forever persuading people to live healthier lifestyles, sometimes to an intrusive degree. Yet when it comes to those wanting to take the ultimate, irreversible decision against their life and health – the very values that make sense of the doctor’s profession – a suicidal decision is seemingly so sacrosanct that a doctor should in no way even try to persuade the patient to see life differently. There was a reason Hippocrates took it as paradigmatic of medicine that doctors should not use their skills to further a death wish of their patients.

According to the BMA, so sacrosanct are suicidal desires in this context that ‘conversations with family and friends to ensure that they understand the care plan and the patient’s desires may help to mitigate any deviations from the care plan not agreed to by the patient. This may be especially important if the patient elects to VSED at home.’

Heaven forbid that the family and friends of the suicidal patient might want to ‘persuade’ their loved one not to kill themselves, and that there be some ‘deviation’ from their plan for self-termination. The doctor, whose privileges derive precisely from caring for life and health, is here helping shield the patient from family and friends who may care for such things more than the doctor.

The BMA admits that doing so ‘may be difficult for doctors and healthcare professionals, ancillary staff, and families, as they instinctively want to care for their patients and loved ones’. It adds that offering ‘food and/or fluids to patients is usually good practice but this may not be regarded in the same way when the patient has elected to VSED.’ So ‘good practice’ no longer applies, and those wholesome instincts of care exhibited by health care workers and ‘loved ones’ must be suppressed.

Even the suicidal patient’s ‘request to drink or eat’ may, we are told, be ‘due to symptoms of thirst or hunger, rather than a genuine desire to reintroduce food and/or fluids to stop or prolong the process of VSED’. Faced with a patient begging for food or drink, the doctor is not to provide ordinary basic care immediately as a matter of course, but should rather weigh such requests against what the doctor thinks the patient ‘really wanted’ in light of earlier suicidal wishes.

Won’t all this bring about a terrible toll on doctors? A doctor who went into the profession to heal and care for fellow human beings, and is now assisting in the starvation and dehydration of a patient, may perhaps feel significant inner turmoil.

Fortunately, the BMA is on hand to acknowledge, in the tone of a tick-box commissar, that the ‘concepts of moral distress and moral injury may have salience here’.

Finally, lest any doctor be in any way unclear how to act, the BMA guidance helpfully suggests some examples of behaviour that must be prohibited:

‘When a patient has agreed to being offered food and / or fluids, doctors should not: attempt to entice them to change their minds about VSED, for example, by bringing in ice cream on a hot day; bring trays of food or glasses of liquid in front of them several times a day; repeatedly, and outside of the agreed upon intervals, ask them if they want to eat or drink; or purposefully prescribe medicines that need to be taken orally with liquids or food.’

Perhaps instead of giving dire warnings to doctors about the dangers of offering ice cream to a starving and suicidal patient on a hot day, the British Medical Association should revisit the foundational values of the profession. Recovery of some basic Hippocratic principles in this area might bring back some ‘stability of thought’ to an institution where it is strikingly lacking.

Catholicus

On this feast of Saint John Henry Newman, David Coates writes:

In February 1841 a series of letters entitled “The Tamworth Reading-Room” appeared in The Times, attributed to “Catholicus”. This nom de guerre was the pseudonym of John Henry Newman, at that time one of the heads of the “Tractarian” movement of the Church of England.

For eight years Newman had been publishing and editing the Tracts for the Times, in which he and his collaborators sought to recover and revitalise the Catholic character of the Anglican Church. Hostile both to the errors of Protestantism and to what they believed to be the “corruptions” of the Roman system, the Tractarians asserted that Anglican theology held to a “via media” which successfully preserved the doctrines of the primitive church. Yet it was precisely Newman’s study of the primitive church during the summer of 1839 which undermined his confidence, as his analysis of the Monophysite controversy during the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century demonstrated that the primitive church had never appealed to any “via media” but had always defended orthodoxy. This revelation shattered Newman, and by 1841 he was “on my death-bed, as regards my membership with the Anglican Church”.

“The Tamworth Reading-Room” was one of the last controversial works Newman published whilst an Anglican, and it is distinct from his other publications of this period in that it is not concerned with theological disputes between different communions. Instead, the letters assert the fundamental importance of religion in education in a manner which was intended to be acceptable to Christians of all denominations.

Newman was provoked to publication by a speech by Sir Robert Peel inaugurating the opening of a library and reading room in his constituency of Tamworth. Peel had been a source of irritation for Newman since the late 1820s, when he was still the MP for Oxford University and had reversed his earlier opposition to Catholic emancipation; Newman regarded this as a typical example of Peelite conservatism, which could always be relied on to swallow the opinions and the presumptions of its liberal opponents after a few years fruitlessly opposing them. The critique which the heart of the Tory Party would later make of Peel following his reversal of opinion in the Corn Laws crisis of 1846 was already developed by Newman in 1841.

Newman’s basic critique of Peel’s speech was that it was identical in content to the defences of secular and utilitarian education which the Whig Lord Brougham had been promoting for the previous 15 years, and that if an unknowing reader were to “take it up without looking at the heading, he would to a certainty set it down as a production of the years 1827 and 1828 – the scene Gower Street, the speaker Mr Brougham or Dr Lushington, and the occasion, the laying the first stone, or the inauguration, of the then-called London University”. Newman recognised that, unlike Brougham, Peel understood the importance of religion, but that Peel’s belief that religion could be derived from science was fallacious.

During Peel’s opening address he had asserted that discussions of religious controversy ought to be excluded from the Reading Room, but that a greater knowledge of the physical sciences would improve man’s moral condition. It wasn’t that Peel sought to exclude religion, but that he believed that “an increased sagacity will… make men… better qualified to comprehend the great scheme of human redemption”, and that familiarity with science should lead to “more enlarged conceptions of God’s providence, and a higher reverence for His name”. For Newman, this was to misunderstand the core differences between these two activities. As he was later to assert in The Idea of a University, “Induction is the instrument of Physics, and deduction only is the instrument of Theology.” The former uncovers facts and seeks to arrive at conclusions about them; the latter begins from revelation and seeks to deduce consequences.

Newman was entirely dismissive of Peel’s suggestion that a knowledge of science could improve a man’s moral character. He attacked the assumption that virtue was to be founded in knowledge, or vice in ignorance. Ethics derives from faith, and faith operates on man in his fullness, not simply on his rational faculties: “Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion… No one, I say, will die for his own calculations; he dies for realities.”

Contained within “The Tamworth Reading-Room” is an early anticipation of the phenomenology of belief which Newman would develop at such great length and with such precision in his late masterpiece, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). He asserts the need for belief to speak to the heart of man, not simply his head. It is imagination and description which is the spring of action, and not reason. “After all,” Newman asserts, “man is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. He is influenced by what is direct and precise. It is very well to freshen our impressions and convictions from physics, but to create them we must go elsewhere.”

This is not to deny the importance of human reason, nor of the enormous benefits which can derive from a study of the natural sciences. Newman recognises that scientific pursuits are “intrinsically excellent and noble… worthy of a place in a liberal education, and fruitful in temporal benefits to the community”, yet he asserts that no ethical doctrines can be derived from them: they offer neither consolation nor motivation. “The material world, indeed, is infinitely more wonderful than any human contrivance; but wonder is not religion, or we should be worshipping our railroads.”

Newman anticipates the danger of “scientism”, instead presenting a pedagogy which has religious truth at its core. All scientific knowledge is useful and worth pursuing for its own sake, but one should never mistake intellectual cultivation for moral instruction. A decade later, as president and rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman was able to apply his theories, developing a faculty dedicated to all the branches of human knowledge, but which had theology at its core.

The final letter in “The Tamworth Reading-Room” was published on February 27. On that date Tract 90, the final production from the Tracts for the Times, was also published. Tract 90 attempted the impossible: a hopeless effort to provide an interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England which would be consistent with Catholic teaching. He was condemned by his own bishops and obliged to cease publishing on matters of religious controversy.

Two years later, in February 1843, he would publish a retraction of his hostile comments towards the Roman Catholic Church, and later that year resigned his living. Received into the Church in 1845, it was on November 1, 2025 that the Anglican parson who had once published under the name “Catholicus” would finally be recognised by Pope Leo XIV as the 38th Doctor of the Church.

Safety and Security

Reform UK "investigated" Dan Jukes and James Orr, and it magically cleared them. Anyone who welcomed that should welcome the Green Party's internal exoneration of Lubna Speitan, which ought to happen on the principle that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander.

Five days after the Green Party conference vote on Zionism, no broadcaster has been able to find a Palestinian to interview. But far from downgrading the British Consulate General in Jerusalem, which is 188 years older than the State of Israel in which it has never been located, that mission should have been upgraded to the British Embassy to the British-recognised State of Palestine. It still should be.

As has been the case for over a year, the United Kingdom recognises Palestine as a sovereign state. That state is at peace with His Majesty, and the State of Israel is at war with it. Enlistment by a British citizen in the Israeli Defense Forces is therefore a criminal offence under the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870. Any policy of not prosecuting dual nationals who had been conscripted would still not be the law, and anyone else would be bang to rights. Or do we have two-tier justice?

The unrealistic people are the proponents of a two-state solution, the borders of which will never be agreed. Ultimately, the only viable option is a single democratic and nonracial state at least from the River to the Sea if not throughout the former British Mandate, with constitutional rights, including the right of all of its citizens to live anywhere on its territory, upheld by an independent judiciary and by vigorously free media. That is undeniably remote now. But so what?