Substantial Risk

The women's estate may be different, but I doubt that very much, so if Carla Foster has mental health problems, then they are not being addressed in prison, which is full of people with unaddressed mental health problems. But that does not necessarily mean that they ought not to be there. Trust me on all of this.

Foster's daughter had a name. Lily. Say her name. But why did the Crown Prosecution Service prosecute a usefully vulnerable woman whose son had usefully special needs? Why was she given a far longer custodial sentence than many other people had been given for all sorts of other heinous crimes? Why was it pointedly too long to be suspended? Is the CPS full of pro-lifers? Is the Bench? Would such a judge ordinarily have been given a case such as this to hear?

As there is talk of a Royal Pardon or some such for Foster, recognise that this is all to secure the repeal of section 58 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. Know when you are being played. Yet being 162 years old does not, in itself, make a law wrong. This Act is no dead letter. It establishes the offences of actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm, and malicious wounding.

And far from the abortion law's not having been revisited since 1967, one of Margaret Thatcher's last acts was to make it grounds for abortion, "that there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped."

No such abnormality need be specified, there is no definition of a substantial risk, there is no definition of serious handicap, and this is strictly distinct from the grounds, "that the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman or any existing children of her family."

Thus has Britain had legal abortion up to birth, without any suggestion of risk to the life or health of the mother, for 33 years. Just claim that there was an undefined substantial risk that if the child were born, then it would suffer from such unspecified physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped in an undefined way. When there is not a lockdown, then this happens every day.

So much for our overlords' Europeanism. Look up the abortion laws in most EU member states, by no means only the historically Catholic ones. So much for the EU, that Britain could have had such a wildly outlying abortion regime. There were no boatloads, planeloads, or Channel Tunnel trainloads of women from the Continent seeking abortions in Britain during the several decades when they could come here unimpeded, but there you go.

Yet even that is not enough for some people. A vulnerable woman with a special needs son has had to be found to prosecute under section 58, and she has had to be sent to prison for longer than most people would have been given for almost anything, so that the pressure could be built up to repeal that section and thus to legalise abortion up to birth unconditionally, while the woman was secured a Royal Pardon by, let the reader understand, Suella Braverman of National Conservatism.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.