Trumpian Treason?

In the last days of Tony Blair, the DUP was waiting for Gordon Brown because it expected a friendlier hearing from a Scots Presbyterian. I thought of that when, saying what Nigel Farage had said three years earlier to the month, Donald Trump expressed the only view of the Irish Question that could ever be held by any President of the United States, or by anyone formed in the American tradition who had not experienced a conversion to the very, very, very old school of Toryism in the manner of T.S Eliot or Chips Channon.

Like all Presidents, Trump is surrounded by people who articulate his own and any President’s instinct that Perfidious Albion had unjustly partitioned both of the twin republics that rightfully covered the whole of Ireland and the whole of North America. The prominence of the Orange Order in the history of Canada is not unnoted in certain highly influential American circles, even if it is the 26 Counties rather than the Six that will soon approximate to Canada on assisted suicide and on gender self-identification; the former, at least, has now been actively thrown out by Westminster, Holyrood and the Senedd, and would never have stood any chance procedurally at Stormont.

Like Farage, in wishing to transfer two million people into the European Union, Trump was also saying what was thought by the overwhelming majority of that fairly small minority of people in Great Britain who had any view on the matter. There is at least one Catholic church in every town, almost always built by the Irish. But there is almost never an Orange Hall. Even among people with no skin the game, the feeling would be that the inability of the Irish to get on with each other was a matter for the Irish. Saint Patrick’s Day is huge, while scarcely a soul would know what the Twelfth was. Ulster Unionists have the heaviest Irish accents that anyone has ever heard.

Where in Great Britain does anyone march behind a Union Flag while wearing a bowler hat? But as every year for the last 30 years to my knowledge, and no doubt longer than that, the Last Night of the Proms was a sea of EU flags. Those have always been the people who could afford the tickets. Three years ago, that same flag flanked the King when he addressed the French Parliament. That could not have happened without both his permission and that of the then British Government. Both of the new unitary authorities in Surrey will be controlled by the Liberal Democrats, the same party that, topically, controls Portsmouth City Council. Those who wave the Confederate flag as an expression of Southern pride do at least refer to “the Lost Cause”. But those who wave the EU flag as an expression of Southern pride regard their Cause as anything but Lost, and they are anything but powerless economically or culturally. George Osborne has just called for reaccession to the Customs Union. Think on.

Meanwhile, American law enforcement agents have staged a dawn raid on the private London flat of an American diplomat accused of sexual offences against children, and smuggled him out on a cargo plane before our own Police could investigate. Embassies are closed for less. And that is before mentioning that Trump had said that Britain would not be prepared to travel the distance necessary to reclaim the Falkland Islands again, but that he himself would be willing and able to settle the dispute between a Prime Minister whom he despised and a President who was a stalwart of his fan club.

The most visible member of that club in Britain at the moment is Daniel Thomas, who in 2016 was one of three men who tried to kidnap a rival drug dealer, got the wrong man, and then apologised to him on Facebook. Having gone to town on their stupidity, the judge gave Thomas a much lower sentence than the other two, for the same crime. How very informative. Thomas’s balaclava-clad Blackshirts are policed in nothing like the manner of those who merely held up placards in support of Palestine Action, with the closure of the key Port of Dover for a working day considered unworthy of the slightest punishment, unlike the tiresome antics of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. Two-tier policing, indeed. Now ask Thomas about both Northern Ireland and the Falklands. Now ask Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, especially in view of his Irish citizenship and his heavy financial dependence on ferociously pro-Argentine Israel. Now ask Rupert Lowe. And now ask Farage, of whom Paul Knaggs writes:

Every political party in Britain, combined, reported £15.2 million in donations during the entire five-week campaign that decided the 2024 general election, the strictly regulated “pre-poll” period when parties must declare weekly. This week, two men gave one party almost five times that in two days. Across the whole of 2024, the year the country actually voted, every party in Britain raised just shy of £100 million between them. Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne needed 48 hours to hand Nigel Farage’s Reform UK nearly three quarters of that sum, on their own, with no election even called.

On Friday, the cryptocurrency trader Ben Delo gave Reform thirty-six million pounds, the largest single donation any UK party has ever received, saying he wanted “a fair fight and a level playing field.” On Saturday, Harborne, until then Reform’s biggest backer, matched it pound for pound. Asked why, he skipped Delo’s language about democracy altogether. His “competitive spirit,” he said, had inspired him to match it. Farage thanked them both, saying the party could now “fight that election on a level playing field.” Nobody involved used the phrase seventy-two million pounds without also reaching for the word fair.

Reform currently holds eight of the House of Commons’ 650 seats. Its deputy leader, Richard Tice, gave a clearer account of what the money actually buys than either donor did, telling LBC it would let the party “employ campaign managers… in almost every constituency across the country.” That is not levelling a playing field. That is buying one, outright, before a single vote has been cast in the next election.

Remember who is doing the buying. Delo made his fortune co-founding BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that let traders move enormous sums with barely a check on who they were or where the money had come from. In 2022 he pleaded guilty in the United States to failing to implement anti-money laundering controls at the platform, and was pardoned last year by Donald Trump. A man once convicted over an exchange with too few defences against dirty money is now, alongside Harborne, the single largest financial backer of a British political party, at the exact moment that party is under criminal investigation for how it handles its own.

Days before Delo’s donation, the Metropolitan Police confirmed a criminal investigation into Reform UK over allegations it broke the law barring foreign donations, after an undercover documentary by Channel 4 News and the investigative outlet Verbatim filmed two of Farage’s most senior aides discussing how a reporter posing as the British son of a wealthy American backer might funnel money into the party’s accounts, or pay for private polling instead. Farage was in the room for part of that conversation. Both aides resigned within days. Farage has called the sting entrapment and denies Reform has ever taken illegal foreign money. A separate parliamentary standards inquiry is examining an undisclosed personal gift worth around five million pounds that Farage received from Harborne, who had already put some fifteen million pounds into the party before this week and has now gone past fifty million pounds of his own giving. None of this has been proven in court.

Parliament had a chance to stop exactly this, and shelved it days before the money arrived. After Nathan Gill, Reform’s former member of the European Parliament for Wales, was jailed for more than ten years for taking bribes to make pro-Russian statements, an independent review led by Philip Rycroft recommended a £100,000 annual cap on donations from British citizens abroad and a ban on cryptocurrency donations, both in force since March. Those rules only bite on donors based overseas. Neither Delo nor Harborne needed to worry: both are now UK residents. The Labour MP Stella Creasy tabled an amendment that would have closed that gap entirely: a hard cap of £100,000 on donations from any individual or company, resident or not. Polling for the Good Law Project found 92 per cent of voters back a limit like it. Last week, Creasy withdrew the amendment after ministers promised to tackle mega-donations through a new taskforce. Days later, two men gave seventy-two million pounds to one party in under 48 hours. Duncan Hames of Transparency International UK had already warned what would happen: without a cap on size, “the door remains open to anyone wealthy enough to walk through it.”

None of this makes Reform’s underlying complaint baseless. Incumbency carries advantages no spending cap touches: broadcast access, press relationships, decades of accumulated name recognition, all of it scaled to seats already held rather than votes cast or standing in the polls. A party stuck on eight seats despite regularly leading national surveys has a real grievance there.

But that is not the grievance seventy-two million pounds in two days is correcting. A party whose senior aides were filmed discussing how to route a foreign backer’s money through an invented son, whose leader faces a standards inquiry over an undisclosed personal gift, and whose deputy leader has already had donations flagged to the National Crime Agency, is not an underfunded outsider levelling an unfair contest. It is a party drowning in cash from the same two men who supplied more than sixty per cent of its funding last year. That is not a broader base of support. It is the same narrow one, with more zeros.

None of this should let Labour off the hook, and we have never pretended otherwise. In September 2024, in the one-week gap between Rishi Sunak calling the general election and the start of the reporting period that would have forced immediate disclosure, Starmer’s Labour accepted four million pounds from Quadrature Capital, a hedge fund structured through the Cayman Islands with holdings in Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other arms and fossil fuel firms. As we reported at the time, it was the largest single donation Labour had ever taken, timed to slip past the one week of scrutiny that might have embarrassed the party before polling day.

His successor has since done a version of the same thing, closer to home. Before entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham built part of his reputation on opposing exactly this kind of politics, arguing publicly, as recently as June this year, for a cap on large donations to curb the influence of wealthy backers. He made the same complaint back in 2010, when he said his own party’s leadership contest had been distorted by big money. Weeks after his June intervention, Burnham’s first register of financial interests as Prime Minister showed close to three hundred and fifty thousand pounds in gifts and donations behind his own leadership campaign, including thirty-five thousand pounds from his former Manchester night-time economy adviser Sacha Lord, twenty-five thousand from the former Autoglass chief executive Gary Lubner, fifty thousand from a production company owned by a television executive and Labour donor, more than twenty-two thousand from Labour Together, since renamed ThinkLabour, and a sixteen-thousand-pound staff secondment from the accountancy firm Ernst and Young. None of it was illegal, and all of it was eventually declared through the proper register, the same way any MP’s outside support must be. But “eventually” is doing a lot of work in that sentence: the money arrived, and did its job, months before the public had any way of knowing where it came from. It surfaced only once Burnham had already won. He has separately been accused of failing to declare a £6,600 VIP hospitality trip to Japan within the required time, an allegation he has yet to resolve with the parliamentary standards commissioner.

Set the three stories side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. Starmer took millions from an offshore hedge fund and the public found out about it only once the moment it might have cost him votes had passed. Burnham took hundreds of thousands from wealthy individuals and a corporate secondment and the public found out about it only once the moment it might have cost him the leadership had passed. Delo and Harborne handed Reform seventy-two million pounds in a system with no cap at all, and told everyone immediately, because unlike the other two, they had nothing to hide and no reason to wait. Three parties, three different mechanisms, one identical outcome: the public learns who paid for power only after the question of who holds it has already been settled.

This is the trajectory worth worrying about, because Britain is not the first country to travel this road. In the United States, where individual and corporate money has flowed into elections with almost no ceiling since the Citizens United ruling in 2010, the pattern is no longer disputed. Independent analysis by the watchdog OpenSecrets has repeatedly found that the better-funded candidate wins the overwhelming majority of Congressional races, sometimes above 90 per cent of House contests in a single cycle, and that sitting incumbents, who attract the most donor money by far, are re-elected at rates in the nineties election after election. Money does not guarantee a win every time. But across enough elections, in enough seats, it stops looking like an input to democracy and starts looking like its precondition.

There is an old saying that covers this without needing a single statistic: he who pays the piper calls the tune. Nobody writing a cheque this size, whether it is Ben Delo, Christopher Harborne, Lord Sainsbury, or a hedge fund based in George Town, is doing it for the pleasure of watching democracy flourish. They are buying proximity to power, and the tune that gets called afterwards tends to be theirs, not the electorate’s. That is the real cost sitting underneath every one of these donations. It is not simply that rich men can buy elections. It is that the politicians elected this way owe their position to people who are not the voters who put them there, which means the people meant to be represented, the ones paying for all of this in the end through their taxes, their rent and their falling wages, increasingly are not. Britain does not need to become America to see where that road leads. It only needs to keep walking down it at the current pace.

Harborne says seventy-two million pounds between two men was inspired by nothing more than competitive spirit. Nine in ten voters say they want a cap on exactly that kind of spending. Parliament chose the billionaires’ instinct over the country’s, and two prime ministers in a row have shown they can live with a similar arrangement for themselves. Until that changes, elections in Britain will keep being decided by whoever pays first, and governed, afterwards, by whoever they were really paying for.

While of Thomas, Peter Hitchens writes:

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the lumpy stormtroopers deployed on our streets (including the street outside our offices) last week by the new national figure ‘Tommo’. It would also be hard not to cackle at Kent Police’s description of their carefully-planned appearance on Dover streets last weekend as ‘spontaneous’. Tommo is a retired kidnapper, who failed at that ancient trade, and also (so we are told) a born-again Christian. I am tickled by the idea of ‘Tommo’, real name Daniel Thomas, trilling ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’ in whatever Church, chapel or tent he worships at. I await the moving publicity video with sanctified soundtrack.

Did you notice his black-clad followers wear shorts rather than grown-up trousers? This is very odd. Having had a private education, can Mr Thomas be unaware of a previous (but fictional) organisation called the Black Shorts, a fascistic 1930s militia headed by the ludicrous Roderick Spode? This was the invention of the comic genius PG Wodehouse, also known for creating Jeeves and Wooster. Wodehouse wrote of Spode that he looked ‘as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla and had changed its mind at the last moment’, but Spode’s ferocious, glowering image was undermined by his secret life as a purveyor of frilly ladies’ underwear. Should we also not laugh at people who no doubt growl that we should ‘ban the burqa’ – while themselves wearing a garment which is rather like a burqa, the balaclava helmet?

But dare we laugh? The accelerating collapse of the conventional parties, especially over immigration, makes it almost certain that people of this sort will grow closer to actual power in the years to come. In France, the dubious National Rally edges towards office. In Germany the AfD, which has some creepy connections, does the same. In the USA, the increasingly erratic Mr Trump continues to stomp wildly across the country and the planet like a giant with a sore head. The problem is that, just like the conventional parties, these movements will fail. Mass immigration has already happened. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who posed as the scourge of migrants and so won office, has almost entirely failed to do anything to solve the problem.

These movements are like miracle cures which we buy in the hope they will work, then discard and replace with new, allegedly more powerful remedies. Until eventually we realise there is no cure, or that the cure will be much worse than the disease. Meanwhile our political system rots and loses confidence. Poverty, disorder and a strong intolerant state grow daily more likely. The governments of the last 30 years have much to answer for.

How Britain Escaped Assisted Suicide

Dan Hitchens writes:

In June 2025 Janet Daby, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East, started having nightmares: terrible images of death and dying that disturbed her sleep and haunted her conscience. She didn’t need a psychotherapist to interpret them. That month she had joined 313 other MPs in voting through an assisted suicide bill. She was beginning to think she might have made the wrong choice, and the 291 MPs on the other side might have made the right one.

There was one conversation that added to Daby’s doubts: someone she knew who had HIV and AIDS, and who many years before, with a bleak prognosis, had wished for the swift exit of an assisted death; but who had since found the right drugs, and made a decent life for himself. The kind of person who might be swallowed up by a state suicide service before he or she had the chance to find help. That was the kind of person she had endangered with her vote. And now it was too late.

But the British constitution, like life, sometimes gives you a second chance. The assisted suicide bill, which had floated through the House of Commons on a cloud of expensive PR and vague-minded goodwill, now had to negotiate the House of Lords, a place filled with real experts who have also been around the block a few times. In the Commons, you count as a medical authority if you used to be a family doctor; in the Lords, you only qualify if you’ve run a royal medical college or been CEO of the National Health Service. A lot of people assumed that the Lords (who are appointed, not elected) would have to wave through a bill of such importance, given that elected representatives had approved it. The Lords themselves were less persuadable.

And as they examined the bill, over a long period in late 2025 and early 2026, they began to uncover the same kind of problems as Janet Daby. The Royal College of Psychiatrists pointed out, to a committee convened by the Lords, that if people were depressed, the state would help them kill themselves—without asking too many questions about what help they needed. Experts in coercion observed that if people were being psychologically terrorized by an abusive partner, the state would help them kill themselves. One organization after another pointed out that if people fell through the gaps in Britain’s rickety health and care system, the state would help them kill themselves. However much supporters intoned the phrases “bodily autonomy” and “right to choose,” this all began to sound less than impeccably progressive.

More revealingly yet, the bill’s champion Lord Falconer—the last member of the Blair circle still somewhere near the center of British politics—happily embraced the more sinister implications of the proposal. What if, he was asked, people chose an assisted death because they were poor? Well, he said, if they met the broad medical criteria, it was “their choice.” What if it was because they couldn’t access good palliative care? A pity, but “we have to give everybody this choice on the basis of the way the world is for them.” Philosophically, this seemed naive about the nature of freedom. Politically, it sounded nuts. The Lords did not pass the bill. An MP, indignant at this supposed affront to democracy, reintroduced it to the House of Commons. And Janet Daby got her second chance.

Britain has many problems: a broken economic model, a fragmented culture, a political class that seems consistently unequal to the massive challenges facing it. But we are also the inheritors of a remarkable set of institutions, which continue to elevate even the second- and third-rate people who dominate them. You hear many complaints that the quality of parliamentary rhetoric, and of MPs themselves, has declined steeply. And yet the procedures of parliament—the endless committees, the formal debates, the curious relationship between the Commons and the Lords—were, as it turned out, the best way to examine the issue of assisted suicide.

Other countries have debated the subject, but nowhere has devoted so much passion and forensic analysis to the issue. Witnesses were called. Speeches—some extraordinary speeches—were given. Bitter exchanges broke out. And the result was that an initial majority of fifty-five dwindled, over two years of furious back-and-forth, into a deficit of sixteen.

What swung the result? Perhaps less one issue than a steady accumulation of doubts. Hospices and care homes might be closed or defunded—this was explicitly threatened by one of the main proponents of the bill. Disabled people would come under pressure. People would die because the health system had failed them. The high costs of care would provide a powerful incentive for death. The purpose of the National Health Service would be redefined. The supporters of the bill, when they heard objections like this, responded with baffled impatience. Didn’t people understand this was inevitable? It was summed up by the popular Labour MP Jess Phillips, who when asked whether the NHS was in a fit state to deliver an assisted suicide regime, replied: “Of course the NHS isn’t in a fit enough state . . . but you cannot stop progress happening.”

This, for many MPs, was a kind of progress Britain could not afford, and today the bill was voted down by 286 votes to 270. A lot of those who had previously voted for the bill stayed away or abstained. A smaller number, like Janet Daby, switched to oppose the bill. Nobody—not one MP—switched the other way. This is what losing an argument looks like.

The Houses of Parliament themselves are crumbling into the Thames; after a century and a half, they have become a considerable safety risk, and need extensive renovations that Britain will struggle to afford. But on the right kind of evening, lit up against the sky, they are still the most beautiful sight in London.

Don't Be A Divvy

In the spirit of the Trump Dividend, will there be a Farage Dividend? From Ben Delo's £36 million, each of the United Kingdom's 48 million voters could look forward to 75p. After all, what else is Reform UK going to do with that sort of money? It will be practically impossible to spend in British politics. On what, exactly? This is not the country where Delo had to be pardoned by Trump, although not before he had served 30 months' probation and paid a civil penalty of $10 million.

Andy Burnham has caused this. There never was a Leadership Election, so where did the investments in his campaign go? We certainly know what one of them bought, with 10,000 free labourers to be sent by force to the supermarket in which the Sainsbury family retained an interest of 15 per cent. Now Burnham cannot cap political "donations".

In much the same spirit, PIP, an in-work benefit, is partly to be paid in kind as if it were not already used to buy things, and undergraduates are to be made to do "work experience". The first, in particular, will be an administrative hellhole to rank with having the judge decide whether or not to have a trial by jury, necessitating a whole new stage of proceedings. But that is not the point of any of these three measures.

All of this is frankly to pay for wars, so let us never again hear the cry that trade unions should keep out of foreign policy. While I am no Green, it is also the case that nothing is more environmentally destructive than a war such as was being made the pretext for these domestic measures, although it is worth mentioning that the people advocating the benefit cuts, the cuts to public services, and the restrictions on civil liberties, had always wanted those things anyway.

So there cannot indeed be national security at the expense of social security, a view that most supporters of all parties already shared. That way would lie civil unrest, and then a lot worse than that, fomented and funded by enemies abroad that were neither Russia, nor China, nor Iran, as we already see in the Israeli, and increasingly the American, support for Argentina over the Falkland Islands, a support that, even leaving aside the Israeli arming of Argentina in 1982, had been asserting itself bombastically for weeks before the recent sanctioning of the West Bank settlements by Britain and 11 other countries.

Such financial and other assistance is of the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who now needs to be interrogated very vigorously on his attitude to the Falklands; of Patriotic Platform, whose all-black outfits with face-coverings suggest that they were trying to attract rather than repel young male jihadis, as, by way of cultural misunderstanding, would account for their felt need to show a bit of leg; of the Homeland Party, the exposure of links to which has already necessitated the expulsion of Reform's Councillor Daniel Astley of Newcastle; of the Patriotic Alternative that provided the dating pool of the sitting Conservative Councillor Lillith Osborn of Glastonbury; of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who will be a Conservative MP soon enough; of Susan Hall's Pink Ladies; and of the Restore Britain out of which their founder, Orla Minihane, has been driven because her Irish background was deemed to render her a "mudblood". The enemy is in plain sight.

Knowing What We Know Now

Gosh. David Blunkett has just told Newsnight that if he had known then what he knew now, then he would not have supported the Iraq War. Now pose that same question to his protégé, Andy Burnham.

Everyone knows that the attacks of 11 September 2001 came from Saudi Arabia. Some of the survivors' relatives said so today in New York. One of the Saudis' al-Qaeda and IS proxies is now the President of Syria and we are supposed to be delighted. The Houthis are fighting the Saudis in Yemen and we are supposed to be appalled. Such are the predictable and predicted disappointments of Donald Trump.

What would Trump do if the Republicans did win the midterms after all? Would he pay the Trump Dividend? How? But if he did not, then there would be riots in the streets, and a whole lot worse.

Give Life A Chance

Esther Rantzen says that she is now too ill to travel to Dignitas. What is she afraid of? Dying? As Paul Knaggs writes:

MPs rejected a fresh attempt to legalise assisted dying on Friday, defeating the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by 286 votes to 270. Support for the bill fell by 44 MPs on last year’s vote. Three Labour opponents, including a minister who resigned after her own terminal diagnosis, said the result reflected a bill that was “unsafe and unworkable”, not a change of heart on the principle.

MPs voted on Friday to reject a fresh attempt to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, defeating the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by 286 votes to 270, a majority of 16, after a debate lasting more than four hours in the House of Commons.

The result brings to an end, at least for this Parliament, a two-year campaign to change the law. MPs had twice backed the legislation before: at second reading in November 2024, by 330 votes to 275, and at third reading in June 2025, by 314 votes to 291. Both times the bill, sponsored then by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, went on to the House of Lords. Both times it stalled there. An unprecedented number of amendments from peers meant it ran out of parliamentary time before the 2024 to 2026 session ended, and the bill fell without becoming law.

It returned to the Commons on Friday under a different sponsor. Lauren Edwards, the Labour MP for Rochester and Strood, drew a high place in this year’s private members’ bill ballot and reintroduced the legislation, unchanged, on 17 June. The bill would have allowed adults in England and Wales with fewer than six months to live to apply for an assisted death, subject to approval from two doctors and an expert panel. That panel replaced an earlier safeguard, a sign-off from a High Court judge, which had been stripped out and replaced at committee stage in 2025.

The swing in the numbers tells its own story. The proportion voting against barely moved, down from 291 last year to 286 this time. What collapsed was support for the bill itself. Just 270 MPs backed it on Friday, a fall of 44 on the 314 who voted for it in June 2025.

Burnham’s Assisted Dying Abstention: His First Big Test 

The vote was the first major free vote of Andy Burnham’s premiership, and it exposed how much has changed since MPs last considered the bill. Burnham became prime minister on 20 July, taking over from Sir Keir Starmer after Labour’s local election losses in May and mounting pressure over the government’s direction. Starmer voted for the bill in June 2025, while keeping the government officially neutral. Burnham chose not to vote at all, telling colleagues in a letter that he did not want to “unduly influence the debate” as prime minister and that it should remain “a genuinely free vote”.

Burnham had indicated in the past that he supported the principle of assisted dying. But in the weeks before Friday’s vote he told MPs he believed the funding of palliative care needed to be fixed before Parliament could properly consider legalising it, a position that put him closer to the bill’s opponents than its sponsors, even from the sidelines.

Three Labour MPs who voted against the bill, Ashley Dalton, Dame Meg Hillier and Jess Asato, issued a joint statement after the result was announced. “This is not a moment for celebration,” they said, adding that they understood “the deep concerns of so many people across the country who have campaigned hard for a change in the law”. They said none of the relevant royal medical colleges, professional bodies or experts would attest to the bill’s safety or workability, and that the government’s priority should now be to “fix our NHS and sort out social and palliative care before we even consider introducing assisted dying”.

Dalton’s opposition carried particular weight. The West Lancashire MP resigned as a health minister earlier this year and is undergoing chemotherapy for stage four metastatic breast cancer. She told the Commons that people with terminal diagnoses had been “scaremongered” into believing their deaths would be horrific, and that it was often impossible to say with confidence how long someone actually had left to live. “I don’t know how long I will live,” she said. “It could be months. It could be years.” She called the bill “unsafe and unworkable”.

She was not alone in raising doubts about prognosis. Dr Zubir Ahmed, the Labour MP and cancer surgeon, told the House that six-month estimates were an unreliable basis for a life-or-death decision. “When I am asked to prognosticate as to whether someone has six months to live or not,” he said, “I am as often wrong as I am right.”

The Royal College of Psychiatrists had already raised what it called serious concerns about safeguarding people with mental illness under the bill. Archbishop Richard Moth, the Archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, called the legislation “wrong in principle” and “deeply flawed”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, also opposed it. Earlier in the bill’s passage, the Labour MP Peter Lamb switched from abstaining to opposing it outright, telling constituents in Crawley that the legislation was being pushed forward “in the shadow of a funding crisis in the hospice sector, with hospices closing or being scaled back across the country”.

Palliative Care Funding and the Assisted Dying Bill Vote Result 

For the bill’s supporters, the defeat was a bitter one. Lauren Edwards said the result was “hugely disappointing”, not for herself, she said, but for “the many thousands of terminally ill people and their loved ones who were given hope when the Commons voted for this bill last year”. She argued that support for the principle of assisted dying remained as strong among MPs as before, and that Friday’s objections were about process, not principle. “A minority in the House of Lords used procedural devices to block it and MPs baulked at insisting that they do their job,” she said. “Assisted dying will come in this country, as it is already doing all across the world, but not soon enough.” 

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP and a supporter of the bill, said afterwards that she was “devastated”. Claire Hazelgrove, another Labour MP, used her speech to describe her mother’s death from a rare blood cancer, saying she had died alone under what Hazelgrove called “the harmful status quo”, and that “not all pain can be palliated”. 

What the vote leaves unresolved is the thing almost every MP who spoke on Friday, whichever way they voted, agreed on: that palliative and social care in England and Wales is not what it needs to be. Opponents of the bill used that gap to argue reform was premature. Its supporters used the same gap to argue that people are already suffering and dying badly for want of choice.

Burnham, who abstained on the bill itself, is the one now left holding the argument he made from the sidelines, that the funding has to be fixed. He no longer has the option of leaving that question to the next parliamentary vote. There may not be another one for years. “Assisted dying will come in this country, as it is already doing all across the world, but not soon enough,” said Lauren Edwards MP, sponsor of the bill, speaking after its defeat. But others are saying, “First, let’s give life a chance, with better social care.”

Scene and Herd

I am not a member, but after the Workers Party denied the Green Party victory in the Burnage by-election to Manchester City Council, We Are All The Workers Party Now over at Postliberal Central, where Yuan Yi Zhu writes:

By a vote of 286 to 270, MPs have voted to reject an attempt to revive the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which was first introduced in 2024 by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater and passed by the House of Commons last year, only to fail in the House of Lords.

Had the bill passed through all its stages in the House of Commons, it would have been guaranteed to become law, thanks to the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 which allow legislation to be enacted without the assent of the upper house under certain criteria. But the bill’s promoters could not get enough of their supporters to show up this time, while opponents’ resolve, if anything, stiffened in the intervening period.

What changed? First of all, the departure of Keir Starmer from the scene certainly made a difference: it is no small thing for the prime minister to be personally in favour of such a measure, or indeed to be opposed to it, as Andy Burnham indicated a few weeks ago. While today’s was a free vote, many MPs will have seen the change at the top of the Labour Party as a sign that they could afford to skip this particular early Friday sitting.

Whether Burnham quietly put his finger on the scale is unclear, but a week before the vote the Government quietly released a new impact assessment which raised the initial estimate of the number of people dying through assisted deaths in its first decade from 13,500 to more than 25,000. It also admitted that vulnerable populations may be more likely to be coerced into suicide. That, and a stream of horrific news stories from jurisdictions where assisted dying is legal, must have had an impact too.

Meanwhile, the attempt at using the Parliament Acts clearly backfired. For the procedure to be invoked, the bill had to be reintroduced in almost exactly the same form as it stood when it passed the House of Commons last time. This meant that a bill which even its supporters acknowledged was flawed — witness promoter Lord Falconer’s 76 amendments — was put in front of the House of Commons, with no guarantee that its manifold problems could be fixed in the short time available.

The bill’s promoters attempted to cynically weaponise the upper house’s scrutiny in their favour, by casting the issue as a People vs Lords debate. But today’s life peers are not the hereditary backwoodsmen whom David Lloyd George stared down. Instead, they include disability activists, palliative care specialists, and social care experts: it was hard for many progressive MPs, even those committed to the abolition of the appointed upper house, to disregard entirely the opinion of such people.

Today’s debate could not be called Parliament as its best, the common refrain heard on the green benches when it voted for the bill at second reading. There were indeed many low points, such as Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George urging the Commons to vote for the bill so that “we don’t allow the Lords to have the victory they want,” as though the bill concerned a trifling issue instead of state-provided suicide. Lauren Edwards of Labour, to use the most charitable interpretation of her comments, demonstrated an embarrassing lack of understanding about the Parliament Acts. But there were moments of greatness as well. No one who watched it will be ever able to forget the sight of Labour MP Ashley Dalton, suffering from Stage 4 cancer, urging her colleagues against succumbing to the emotional blackmail of stories of horrific deaths to enact the legislation in the name of people like her.

Assisted dying once seemed an invincible progressive juggernaut. Its promoters like to think of themselves as the contemporary suffragettes, gay rights activists, and anti-racism campaigners. But the cautionary tales from places such as Canada and the Netherlands, as well as grassroots opposition, have stopped its progress in the British Isles. Westminster has joined the Senedd and the Scottish Parliament in rejecting assisted dying, and only tiny Jersey has legalised it. Today’s vote is a victory for human dignity and a reaffirmation of the duties we have for each other, in life as well as near death.

Liam Stokes writes:

At a time when the global systems on which we all rely appear increasingly fragile, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has sounded the alarm over yet another cause for concern. In a new report entitled “Ready to Grow”, the NFU showed how British domestic food production has faced a steep decline in recent decades. Over the past 30 years, self-sufficiency has fallen across 10 out of 11 key commodities such as wheat, vegetables and meat, while agri-food imports are up 70%.

This is cause for serious concern. Just a few weeks ago, my house became engulfed in the fine smoke billowing from a wildfire near the Westbury White Horse, some 14 miles away, while my neighbour began prudently installing air conditioning. Britons have lived through the hottest summer since records began, following closely on the record-breaking heat of last year. Persistent days of more than 30-degree weather brought drought, wildfire and discomfort across the country.

It takes a complex web of delicate natural and human systems to bring food to Britain’s tables — a web that grows more complicated the further it is stretched around the globe by a network of logistics, working non-stop to keep shelves stocked. Yet as those systems begin to face severe strain, it is alarming to consider how much food is produced beyond the country’s shores.

Britain has always imported food as a trading, seafaring nation. No one sensible is talking about food autarky, not least because total self-reliance would leave the country vulnerable to localised disasters. The question is whether the growing reliance on global food networks is sustainable in a world of climate shocks, rising international belligerence and unpredictable artificial intelligence.

Food is designated as Critical National Infrastructure — a series of essential assets which keep the country running — but just last week the National Audit Office produced a report stating that Defra has not done enough to strengthen resilience, and the country’s ability to absorb catastrophic events remains untested despite rising risks.

The solution may not be as simple as building a patriotic wall of cattle sheds and wheat silos, however. Domestic production is dependent on an industrial base of fertilisers, animal feed, food-grade chemicals and gases that have been significantly outsourced overseas. The worst self-sufficiency figures don’t relate to good old British beef and bread, but to fruit and vegetables, for which Britain is only 17% and 55% self-reliant respectively. In 1995, the country was producing 74% vegetables domestically.

A strategic response would be to boost not only British farming, but the whole agri-industrial base and certainly horticulture too. Perhaps less intuitively, British ecology needs to be boosted. It’s too easy to assume that a food-first paradigm pits farming against nature, but to do so would be to misunderstand the lessons that summer wildfires provided. Britain needs functioning ecosystems more than ever, not only to provide the soil, water and pollinators that agriculture has always demanded, but to mitigate the shocks of flood, drought and fire that are becoming the new reality. Tree cover and floodplains are essential food infrastructure.

The looming threats of AI and climate change might provoke anxiety, but perhaps a more useful response would be humility. Relying on food produced thousands of miles away is pure hubris in an uncertain world. Let’s bring at least some of that infrastructure home.

Ralph Leonard writes:

In the wake of the Labour government imposing sanctions on settlements in the West Bank, Israel retaliated by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have at least one ally remaining in Britain, however, as Nigel Farage hyped up his relationship with the Israeli government on Wednesday. While the Reform UK leader claimed to have “emphasised the Falklands issue […] and its importance to the British people” following a diplomatic spat over the islands, he also proclaimed that, if elected, his party would reverse the West Bank sanctions and “undo the damage” caused by the Labour government.

However, this raises the question of whether a Reform government will adequately advance Britain’s national interest, rather than just kowtow to foreign states, particularly Israel. Former Reform parliamentary candidate Matt Goodwin said last year on GB News that the party will put “Britain first…not Pakistan, not Gaza, not any other foreign policy”, but when fellow panellist Aaron Bastani asked whether this rhetoric applied to Israel, Goodwin started stumbling over his words. It was a sign of just how much of an Achilles’ heel the issue is for Reform.

The British Right tends to be pro-Israel, largely out of a notion of “Western” solidarity against the threat of Islamism. Another reason is that Israel resembles the model of a strong, sovereign nation-state with military and economic power, capable of unapologetically defending its borders and dismissive of outsiders which try to dictate its policies. It’s therefore natural that British conservatives might view the national interests of Israel as complimentary with those of the UK.

Yet it’s now increasingly apparent that these national interests are not interchangeable at all, and that in some cases they even come into conflict with one another. Explicit support from Israeli government ministers for Argentinian irredentism over the Falklands is a clear example of this.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before, either. During the Falklands War, Menachem Begin’s Israel supported the Argentine junta (which persecuted Jews), partly out of a lasting Anglophobic sentiment held by the Israeli Right since the days of the British Mandate. If it wasn’t evident then that British conservatives’ affection for Israel frequently wasn’t reciprocated, then it should be now.

Reform voters are therefore justified to be aggrieved with Farage for not forcefully asserting Britain’s national interest in the face of foreign aggression. His comments give ammunition to the accusation that he is “Israel first” and out of touch with what domestic voters want. British opinion on Israel has become increasingly negative in the last couple of years, while a majority of Britons support the sanctions against the West Bank settlements. Reform is operating in a political environment where unconditional enthusiasm for Israel is thin on the ground.

This isn’t the first time that Farage has shown his enthusiasm for the Jewish state. When the Americans and Israelis began their war against Iran earlier this year, the Reform leader criticised then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not permitting the use of British military bases. He then rolled back his position to one of “staying out” after the consequences of the war and its unpopularity became unavoidable.

Farage could perhaps take inspiration here from Mark Carney and Claudia Sheinbaum, the Prime Minister of Canada and President of Mexico respectively. Carney is a liberal and Sheinbaum is a Left-populist, yet they both govern as patriots — not just in terms of pursuing the national interest but in standing up for their country’s honour when it has been infringed, as with their responses to Donald Trump’s annexationist fantasies. It should be no surprise that they are popular with their publics as a result.

Though Farage is not in power, this does raise questions. If he were prime minister, would he really govern like a patriot? Would he defend Britain’s national honour, even against ostensible allies? One does not need to become pathologically hostile to Israel, let alone Jews, to understand that what’s good for Britain and what’s good for Israel are two distinct things. This week has revealed that defending what’s good for Britain might mean facing off against the Israeli government, and it’s a reality that Farage needs to recognise.

And David Littlefair writes:

In January 1924, a breathless editorial in the Manchester Guardian marvelled at the prospect of the first ever government run by the Labour Party. A minor miracle had transpired: Ramsay MacDonald, the bastard son of a farmhand, had been elected to lead a government “whose most prominent men are drawn from the humblest rank of society”. Even the Daily Express wrote admiringly of the collection of former foundrymen, miners and seamstresses sitting on the government benches around MacDonald. Here was “unquestionable ability, as well as new blood”.

Just over a century later, Labour — as it is still quaintly known — has begun to rediscover the concept of social class that was once the foremost reason for its existence. Earlier this week, Bridget Phillipson, Minister for Women and Equalities, announced the creation of a new “class unit” within the Office for Equality and Opportunity. “We have been squeamish about class for too long,” said Phillipson. Reporters were quick to identify the unit’s purpose as “improving outcomes for white working-class people”. The government clarified, bashfully, that the class unit would examine disparities across all ethnic groups.

Things do seem to be changing from the era when identity, rather than class, seemed to rule the Left’s moral calculus. In August, the American Democratic politician Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez admitted on ABC’s This Week that perhaps some of the new socially radical politicking that had overtaken the institutions of the Left for a generation hadn’t landed quite as intended. “Woke One was crazy!”, she said.

In truth, it was never really clear what so-called wokeness had to offer a majority of working-class people in Britain. As Woke 1.0 spread from the USA to our shores, it brought with it a moral diagnosis that resonated in America, where some states had struggled to move on from the Reconstruction era, but bore a smaller relevance to the malaise in much of the post-industrial Britain of the modern era. Prosperity and opportunity had begun to centralise in cities and vanish from Britain’s much less diverse towns and coastal regions. Social attitudes had seen huge progress. Race wasn’t the immovable roadblock in life that it once was.

My generation came to political maturity riding a wave that crested alongside Woke 1.0. We began walking into institutions equipped with a politics shaped by the 2008 banking crisis, the expansion of the EU’s migration covenant and the introduction of the Equality Act in 2010. It was an era where the moral leadership of the Left, once the de facto voice of working-class people, became dominated by people for whom “the white working class” were a distant species.

The former industrial communities of Britain’s regions were something modern politicians left behind en-route to a career in London after Oxbridge — and why wouldn’t the aspirational leave? Margaret Thatcher’s decade long war on local council democracy had left millions with little power at the ballot box. Everything meaningful was now decided in the capital.

Otherwise, the white working class were a group many of the Left had never actually met. They were to be spoken on behalf of in student meetings — the way a primatologist might talk about what was best for the gorillas in their charge at a zoo. Rather than considering the diminishing life chances and outcomes of millions of people on lower incomes as a central part of their politics, my generation were encouraged to adopt a series of niche causes under the doctrine of “intersectionality”. It was as though working-class life was a solved problem and not something collapsing around us.

For this more bourgeois iteration of the Left, the emotional pull of Woke 1.0, and maybe, dare I say it, a bit of traditional liberal guilt atonement, held an appeal that was easy to ratify just by looking out of the front door. We lived in big cities and in Britain’s most metropolitan boroughs, there really are still notable gaps between people’s prosperity that can be predicted based on their skin colour. Those who might object to making these concerns the most prominent pillar of our politics could easily be presumed to only do so because of prejudice. In reality, the gaps on the doorstep weren’t nearly as wide as those between metropolitan Britain and everywhere else.

The country we maligned for its supposed backward social attitudes was quietly becoming the most regionally unequal major economy in the developed world. Large swathes of Britain had been torn to shreds by austerity not with a bang but a whimper. Traditional Labour politicians like Ellen Wilkinson or even Ramsay MacDonald would have marched the breadth of the country to do battle on issues like unemployment and closing factories. By the mid-2010s, this was an unsexy, even faintly embarrassing cause — largely forgotten, maybe a bit nostalgic. The odd episode of Benefits Street would present the collapse of working-class communities as something with a cosmic justice to it: they were always lazy, weren’t they? John Harris would conduct a Guardian-sponsored safari around the shuttered high streets of provincial England, furrowing his brow in befuddlement as people told him they were planning to vote to leave the EU, but couldn’t say exactly why.

Working-class institutions, like trade unions, had been collapsing for years. Deindustrialisation, something the Left had largely given up trying to stop, had robbed unions of anyone to represent and deprived millions of working-class people of a decent job to go to after school. Culturally, the white working class were becoming unmentionable. They had been absorbed into the wider and varied “white” group by the Equality Act, their life outcomes masked by this sleight of hand.

“As education secretary Angela Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys — and was pilloried for her trespass” Those who did mention the white working class — the last few political figures that had lived similar lives, like Angela Rayner, who left school, pregnant, aged 16 to become a care worker — were shushed. As education secretary Rayner spoke about the needs of white working-class boys being “pushed down the food chain” due to the focus on ethnic minorities and women, but was pilloried for her trespass. Even to mention the group seemed to risk resurrecting the ghost of Enoch Powell, like a monster from an Eighties horror movie coming back to life. It was a faux pas to mention the white working class. It could only be assumed that the speaker didn’t realise that working-class people now came in all colours.

None of this handwringing stopped the least well off white working class kids’ educational attainment utterly collapsing. White British kids on free school meals have the lowest higher education participation rate in Britain. They are less likely to spend age 19 in further education than Roma Gypsies.

As rolling the dice on higher education has become the only accepted way of creating social mobility in Britain, it isn’t hard to understand why people in these communities feel a profound loss of hope. The Social Mobility Commission — which will apparently become surplus to requirements following the creation of the Class Unit — places the least diverse former industrial and mining areas, such as the North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as the places least likely to allow someone to make generational progress. The Sutton Trust’s Opportunity Index shows a yawning gap in educational attainment between London and places like the North East and Cornwall.

Swathes of Britain being completely left behind has been a quietly accepted part of our national story for more than a decade. The story briefly came to a head during Brexit, only to be quickly dismissed by the political Left. The fact that the old Labour heartlands voted for Brexit in spite of what sensible people in London were telling them to do was seen simply as an inconvenience that their betters would need to muddle through. It was the spasm of a palliative patient whose bedside vigil often gave them cause to yawn and glance at their watch — a victory for the far-Right that any right-thinking person would reject.

Nevertheless, the broader political realignment that Brexit represented refuses to go away. In the recent Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] party dominated the votes of a community that looks like a facsimile of left-behind Britain: shuttered industries, a low rate of higher education, too disillusioned to bother much with politics. The AfD’s platform hoovered up and sent to the polls exactly the kind of working-class voters that have fallen off Britain’s electoral rolls over a generation of hopeless disengagement. Saxony-Anhalt was an election infused with a sense of the injustice of regional inequality too: 73% of voters there believed that East Germans are second-class citizens. The result is that Neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, ex-Stasi officers and Putin apologists are now more trusted to run a swathe of Germany than the old parties of the working class.

Labour’s answer to the British version of this disengagement suggests that some within the party are at last waking up to the anger present in swathes of working-class Britain. However, the tools it has unveiled look much like those that have already produced unremarkable results.

For many years the moral component of modern social justice has amounted to a kind of human flower arranging. How many protected characteristics can you gather and display in your vase to prove that Britain is a caring society?

The creed of modern social justice was that Britain’s growing prosperity would be accompanied by the assurance that more of the beneficiaries would have a certain colour skin, or a certain preference for other’s genitalia, or a certain bodily or mental difficulty. Now the working class will be included in this bouquet of virtue.

It isn’t yet clear exactly how big a change this could be. Perhaps new positive discrimination access schemes of the kind that have become common (and commonly gamed by middle-class climbers) will be developed. Now Britain’s social justice engineers will be encouraged to say: “Look, we have a black person, a disabled person, a gay person AND a poor person.” Where previously an applicant being white and poor only gained one virtue point, now perhaps it could gain two.

The expanding prosperity that undergirded the politics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is evaporating. It hasn’t existed in parts of Britain for a long, long time. DEI politics has shown that it can take the ever-more centralised wealth of Britain and divvy it up among a more diverse fortunate few. It hasn’t shown any ability to provide for the parts of Britain clinging on by their fingertips.

In 2024, the Institute for Public Policy Research published its report, “State of the North”, detailing for the umpteenth time how the Britain that was remade by industry closure during the neoliberal turn was full of sicker people with shorter lives. It showed that wealth inequality was set to grow in spite of a Labour government: there will be an average gap of £228,800 per head between the wealth of those in the South-East and the North by 2030. The authors proposed “Germany-style levels” of investment — nearly £8 billion a year for 15 years — to start closing the gap, referencing Germany’s history of “solidarity taxes” between West and East since reunification. IPPR proposed that this would be achieved by wealth taxes that mostly land on the South. But then, even that level of investment hasn’t worked to keep faith in the political system of Germany, as downward mobility leaves people hyper-vigilant, hoarding, worried about losing or being forced to share what little is theirs.

Andy Burnham came into No. 10 promising to be a prime minister for “The North”. But his previous economic advisor and Goldman Sachs chief economist Lord Jim O’Neill has already come out strongly against taxing the wealthy regions. His argument: London will need even more investment if any growth is to reach the rest of Britain. The money markets seem to agree that borrowing to restore prosperity to the once proud working-class areas of Britain should come at a punishing cost. A cost it isn’t clear anyone is willing to pay.

Will working-class voters buy into the idea that “social class” can be solved by being granted a protected diversity status? It’s not hard to wonder what someone like Ramsay MacDonald might think of such a measure; “class” was once the entire reason a Labour politician got out of bed in the morning. 

But it speaks also to the mindset of the modern political class: that more unity can be created if more people can be given permission to be recognised as “in need” by their betters. The Labour of old knew that working-class people didn’t want this politics of pity: they wanted a politics of dignity. They built institutions, friendly societies, social insurance schemes, working men’s clubs and trade unions as a living demonstration of their ability to stand on their own feet, not reliant on other people to decide whether they can be given a leg up for the sake of meeting a quota.

Clearly, the working class of deindustrialised Britain will need to wait for anything that would mimic the gigantic leaps of change that Labour once provided: homes where there were once slums, work where there was once unemployment, an NHS where there was once sickness, a welfare state where there was once desperation. A New Jerusalem. In the meantime, the white working class can celebrate their induction into the world of DEI. One more flower in the bouquet.

Party Cards

In 2019, Margaret Hodge was resident in Islington North, where she wrote “Antisemite” on her ballot paper rather than vote for Jeremy Corbyn, whom she had once surreptitiously recorded in the forlorn hope that he might say something anti-Semitic. She has never forgiven him for his role in exposing the rampant abuse in Islington’s children’s homes when she was Leader of the Council. So she committed an act that was and is expulsionable from the Labour Party. I for one would not want to share that distinction with her, but at the very least she ought now to lose the Labour whip in the House of Lords. If not, why not? The same question presents itself in relation to the Reform UK whip in the House of Commons. She supports the Blackshirts against the RNLI, so how could that continue to extend to Suella Braverman?

Is David Mencer still a member of the Labour Party? From a country four years younger than Hodge, he has told LBC that, “Jerusalem has always been the capital of the Jewish people, [since] London was still rubbing sticks together to make fire.” As Sohrab Ahmari, a son of a very ancient civilisation indeed, explains, “Around 1000 BC, both the people living in and around Jerusalem and those who inhabited the British Isles used the same percussive method to make fire. Both more often than not kept fires, rather than strike new ones.” But the key point is that Mencer was the Director of David Lammy’s London Mayoral campaign, which is about to be relaunched. Good luck with that.