Wednesday, 7 May 2025

A Particular Moment In Time

And so was saved the skin of Lucy Powell. At Prime Minister's Questions, Kemi Badenoch never even mentioned it. She could have worked it in about the Winter Fuel Payment or whatever. But now no one is talking about it anymore. Powell survives to trumpet on.

Nor did anyone ask Keir Starmer why he had never even replied to a letter on 24 March, so nothing to do with the local elections whatever Patrick Christys may think, from seven MPs and six Peers, with five of the former and two of the latter Privy Counsellors, and, if it matters, only one of the 13 a Muslim. That letter, calling for immediate British recognition of Palestine, has been made public the day after an eighth MP stood up in the House of Commons and told it:

Israel is an important security, trade and democratic partner, but that does not give it a blank cheque. The fact is that 13,000 children have been killed and 25,000 have been injured, maimed or wounded—some of them have been orphaned. I have been in this House for 20 years, and for many years I have supported Israel—pretty much at all costs, quite frankly—but today I say that I got it wrong. I condemn Israel for what it is doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza and the west bank. I withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel and what it is doing right now in Gaza. Of course the hostages should be released, of course Israel has a right to exist, and of course Israeli and Jewish people should have the right to live in peace, but so do the Palestinian people. I have said it before, and I will say it again: the life of a Palestinian child is as precious as the life of a Jewish child.

This is a particular moment in time. We have had lots of statements over the past 18 months. Not only is this not Parliament’s greatest hour, but I am really concerned that this is a moment in history on which people will look back and in which we have got it wrong as a country. Will the Minister stand up to our friends and allies in the United States and make a strong stand for humanity, for us to be on the right side of history and for having the moral courage to lead, not just to follow the United States, and to make a difference? That is why we are all elected here. Let us stand up for life. Let us stand up for all children, not just Jewish children.

Any Labour MP who said that would certainly lose the Whip, and probably be expelled from the Labour Party. But this was Mark Pritchard, like all of the 13 a Conservative. The knives may be out for Badenoch. But that should give no heart to Robert Jenrick.

Indian Smoke Signals What?

Osso Buco alla Milanese at Casa Santa Marta tonight, so they were not going to miss that by electing a Pope and then having to go home. The Barbaresco is flowing as I type. The smoke had to be black.

But what colour would the smoke be if, between now and the reconvening of the Conclave, we were all blown to smithereens by either or both of Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons? So much for nuclear deterrence, but of course we already knew that.

For a solution in Kashmir based on the self-determination of its people, our nuclear-threatened species obviously needs both India and Pakistan. For India, we need its "special and privileged strategic partner", Russia. And for Pakistan, we need the country to which it relates as Israel does to the United States, China. This is the real world.

But realism is not opportunism. At the 2024 General Election, the Conservatives' only gain was Leicester East, while at Harrow East, Bob Blackman received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities.

In 2019, the BJP campaigned openly for the Conservatives in 48 marginal seats, rallying a community that was economically right-wing, socially more liberal than visible ethnic minorities in general, and 65 to 67 per cent Remain-voting. The Conservatives have to keep that fairly new base. As the recent local elections demonstrated, socially liberal, pro-EU Thatcherites make a case-by-case judgement each time as to which of the old Coalition partners was better-placed to advance that ideology, or at least that sensibility. Meanwhile, having lost Muslims over Gaza and because Keir Starmer had already repudiated unanimous Party Conference support for Kashmiri self-determination, Labour needs to replace that vote with something.

If local authorities are not supposed to have views on anything much beyond bins and potholes, then someone had better tell Reform UK. Blackman could do it. As Leader of the Opposition on Brent Council, he blocked the two thirds majority that would have given Nelson Mandela the Freedom of the Borough when he came to Wembley Stadium, before going to court to stop any recognition of the fact that there had been a simple majority for that award.

Whoever God Sends

Pray.

And Robert Harris wrote a novel, which was turned into a feature film. Works of fiction. There is no more reason to treat him as an expert on the Conclave than to base public policy on Adolescence.

Now pray.

A Resigning Matter


UK firms have exported thousands of military items including munitions to Israel despite the government suspending key arms export licences to the country in September, new analysis of trade data shows.

The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel in breach of an undertaking only to sell them to the US manufacturers Lockheed Martin as a way of ensuring the fighter jet’s global supply chain was not disrupted, something the government said was essential for national security and Nato.

The findings have led the former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell to call for a full investigation, adding it was a resigning matter if the foreign secretary, David Lammy, was shown to have misled parliament in breach of the ministerial code when he told MPs in September that much of what the UK sends to Israel was “defensive in nature”.

McDonnell said “The government has shrouded its arms supplies to Israel in secrecy. They must finally come clean in response to this extremely concerning evidence and halt all British arms exports to Israel to ensure no British-made weapons are used in Netanyahu’s new and terrifying plans to annex the Gaza Strip and ethnically cleanse the land.”

The research – conducted jointly by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Progressive International and Workers for a Free Palestine – uses Israeli tax authority import data to try to uncover what the continuance of the 200 arms export licences has allowed Israel to import. It covers the first seven months of the Labour ban to March.

In September, the Labour government suspended 29 arms export licences for offensive use in Gaza, leaving 200 arms licences in place. It also gave a carve-out for equipment used in the F-35 programme, saying national security required that the F-35 supply chain remained intact.

The suspensions were due to a clear risk that Israel might use the arms to commit serious breaches of international humanitarian law. Ministers have repeatedly assured MPs that the arms export licences remaining in place did not cover goods for use by the Israeli military in the conflict with Hamas.

Lammy, for instance, told parliament in September the continuing licences covered items such as “goggles and helmets for use by one of the UK’s closest allies”.

The Foreign Office has not published details of what the continuing licences covered.

But the new research raises questions over whether that distinction between supplying equipment for Israel’s offensive and defensive purposes is, or ever was, valid, especially if, as it appears, it provided a loophole for sales of munitions to Israel. The UK has no means of checking how the munitions it exports are used by the Israel Defense Forces.

This latest research indicates that 14 shipments of military items have been sent from the UK to Israel since October 2023, including 13 by air to Ben Gurion airport and one maritime delivery to Haifa that alone contained 160,000 items.

Since September 2024, 8,630 items were exported under the category “bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and similar munitions of war and parts thereof – other”.

In addition to weapons, four shipments were made after September of 146 items under a customs code identified as “tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, motorised, whether or not fitted with weapons, and parts of such vehicles”.

Most of the shipments, valued in total at just over £500,000, occurred after the UK government suspended the arms export licences in September.

The Israeli data provides a code number identifying the type of export, details on country of origin, the value of the items, the month shipped and whether transported by land or sea. Neither the supplier or customer is listed.

On the commitment not to sell F-35 components to Israel directly, the report finds that the monthly pattern of UK shipments of aircraft parts to Israel is largely unchanged since September, but the data does not reveal if they are military parts.

And Dania Akkad writes:

A wide range of UK-made military goods and arms, including F-35 fighter jet parts, have continued to be sent to Israel even after the British government suspended 30 arms export licences in September, Israeli import data revealed in a report on Wednesday suggests.

The report released by three campaign groups says parts for the jet, which has been critical for Israel's war on Gaza, appear to have arrived in Israel as recently as March, five months after the UK said it had suspended its direct exports over concerns they might be used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Data from the Israeli Tax Authority cited by the Palestinian Youth Movement, Workers for a Free Palestine and Progressive International shows that 8,630 separate munitions have been sent from the UK to Israel since the suspensions.

The munitions fall under a category of import labelled "bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and similar munitions of war and parts thereof".

Most of the shipments cited in the report happened after the government's arms suspension.

Soon after the suspensions, Foreign Secretary David Lammy told parliament that "much of what we send is defensive in nature. It is not what we describe routinely as arms".

The report's authors write: "On the basis of the evidence in this report, it appears that David Lammy has misled parliament and the public about arms shipments to Israel."

The UK's Department for Business and Trade did not respond to a request for comment.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told The Guardian: "This government has suspended relevant licences for the [Israeli Defence Forces] that might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.

"Of the remaining licences for Israel, the vast majority are not for the Israeli Defence Forces but are for civilian purposes or re-export, and therefore are not used in the war in Gaza.

"The only exemption is the F-35 programme due to its strategic role in Nato and wider implications for international peace and security. Any suggestion that the UK is licensing other weapons for use by Israel in the war in Gaza is misleading.

"The UK totally opposes an expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza. We urge all parties to return urgently to talks, implement the ceasefire agreement in full, secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas, and work towards a permanent peace."

Calls for investigation

In response to the study, nearly two dozen MPs have written to Lammy, calling on him to come before parliament to respond to the allegations.

"We urge the government to disclose the details of all arms exports to Israel since October 2023 and to immediately halt all arms exports to Israel," they wrote.

"This could not be more urgent given the risk that British-made weapons could be used to enact Netanyahu’s plan to annex Gaza and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people."

They said that the public "deserves to know the full scale of the UK's complicity in crimes against humanity".

Former Labour shadow chancellor and MP John McDonnell and MP Zarah Sultana, who signed the letter, are also calling on the prime minister to launch an investigation into whether ministers misled parliament and the public and make it clear that if the ministerial code has been breached, they must resign.

"If parliament has been misled by the foreign secretary or any minister it is a resigning matter and more importantly it attracts potentially a charge of complicity in war crimes," McDonnell said.

Sultana said the findings showed the government "has been lying to us about the arms it is supplying to Israel while it wages genocide in Gaza".

"Far from 'helmets and goggles', the government has been sending thousands of arms and ammunition goods and [is] even still supplying components of the world's most lethal fighter jets," she said.

The report's release comes a week before the government is set to return to the High Court to face a legal challenge, brought by Palestinian rights group Al-Haq and the Global Legal Action Network, to its arms exports to Israel.

Over a year into the judicial review, the case has most recently focused on the government's decision to continue sending UK-made F-35 parts to Israel through third countries.

Emily Apple, media coordinator for the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, which has been supporting the judicial review, said the report had shattered the claim, made by successive governments, that the UK arms export regime is robust and transparent.

"Our arms export regime is not fit for purpose and this government is complicit in Israel’s horrific war crimes. Time and again it has either refused to act or manufactured loopholes to prioritise arms trade profits over Palestinian lives. This has to stop," Apple said.

"And if this government refuses to stop, it is down to all of us to take action to end the UK’s role in Israel’s genocide."

98 Weeks On

Nominations have been closed for 98 weeks, so when is the election?

If I sought election to any other public position now, then I would rapidly find myself just another death in custody under a Starmer or post-Starmer Government, and most especially if Labour had also taken back control of Durham County Council this week.

But I was a public governor of County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust from 2017 to 2020, having been elected unopposed, an extremely unusual occurrence. Unopposed among the 90,000 or more people in the part of County Durham that I was elected to represent. I failed to be re-elected by three votes, on a recount. Yet I was again elected unopposed not far off two years ago, a double feat that I am not aware that anyone else has ever managed, and which has caused the position to be kept vacant ever since. I am determined to have it for at least as long as I was elected to it. Do your worst. As, now under both parties, you are already doing to far better than I.

Arrest Watch: Day Seven

I am far from alone in positively expecting me to be arrested today or early tomorrow morning.

We shall see.

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

The Hunt Is On

Over half of the jobs advertised on Reform UK's website are to work from home, and by Sunday it had already suspended the newly elected Councillor Donna Edmunds of Shropshire County Council because she had indicated her intention to join a new party led by Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib as soon as it existed. Yesterday, she resigned from Reform.

We still await Louise Haigh's resignation statement to the House of Commons, and it is has always been inconceivable that Keir Starmer had not known about her past. She and ever-more others are of course right that the electorate has not just expressed its desire for more of the same, only even more quickly. That is what we are going to get, though.

Zack Polanski is personally implicated in the anti-Semitism scam against Jeremy Corbyn, and the Greens, of whom he is already Deputy Leader, support NATO and the war in Ukraine, in keeping with the fanaticism of the governing Greens in Germany. Polanski is also challenging for the Leadership because he considers the existing Co-Leaders too soft in their resistance of the acknowledgment of biological sex. There are good reasons why I have not joined the Workers Party. But I would still vote for it. It never will be, but if Labour were more like the Workers Party, or the SDP, then Reform would hardly matter.

For the Conservatives, meanwhile, the challenger is the Liberal Democrats, and vice versa. Across the socially liberal, pro-EU, Thatcherite heartlands, mostly but not exclusively in the South, millions of voters make a case-by-case judgement each time as to which of the old Coalition partners was better-placed to advance that ideology, or at least that sensibility. The Conservatives do not need a Leader who could beat Reform. They are barely in competition with Reform. They need a Leader who as the Lib Dems swept through, say, Surrey last year (a county council that they would have taken last week if the elections had not been postponed), nevertheless managed to hold on to, say, Godalming and Ash, even if by only 891 votes. Imagine that such a person had been Culture Secretary, Health Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Hunt is on.

Remain Vigilant, Indeed

Whom are we supposed to believe that Iranians wanted to attack in Britain? Jews? There are 10,000 in Iran, served by 30 synagogues. There are Jewish schools. There are kosher shops and eateries. There is a matzah factory in Tehran. There is a reserved Jewish seat in Parliament. Why travel to Swindon, with one small synagogue?

Meanwhile, actual Nazis were applauded on the streets of London. Their deportment was not marching, but a handful of unarmed Ukrainians did walk through London as part of the VE Day parade. In the words of Jonathan Dimbleby, "I wonder whether Ministers are aware of what Ukraine's role was in the Second World War?" Followed by details. From 41 minutes here. That interview really was live.

That George Simion is banned from Ukraine is because he supports the incorporation into Romania of the whole of Bukovina, and while he did come out against further arming of Ukraine after Donald Trump's second inauguration, his position on the present conflict is whatever Trump says. He is in general extremely anti-Russian, and not unrelatedly he wants all of Moldova, as well the Timok Valley. Those positions, and his views on the ethnic minorities inside Romania, make him genuinely Far Right in a way that cannot be said of Călin Georgescu, whose merely battier views he does nevertheless share.

But Simion is pro-EU, pro-NATO, basically pro-war, and a supporter of Israeli settlement and annexation of the West Bank, so he is allowed whereas Georgescu was not. By the way, Israel now says that it also intends to occupy forever even Gaza, the Biblical Philistia, which could not be done without mass ethnic cleansing or genocide. Any such intention was "an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory" until, well, yesterday.

If it is a conspiracy that you want, then look out for the description of the annulment of last year's Romanian elections in such terms as, "after declassified intelligence documents revealed an alleged Russian influence operation." Was this operation alleged, or was it revealed? It could not have been both. Show us the declassified documents.

Arrest Watch: Day Six

I am far from alone in positively expecting me to be arrested sometime between now and tomorrow.

We shall see.

Monday, 5 May 2025

Take The Cap Off


Pity Rachel Reeves. Having hailed herself as the glass-smashing first female chancellor of the UK, the proud comprehensive school girl once derided as “boring, snoring” by a Newsnight editor is now tasked with disappointing party faithfuls over as many fiscal measures as possible before the next reckoning with the electorate.

This of course is the strategy that put Labour into Number 10 last year, a commitment to thrift being the key principle of the Keir Starmer premiership — perhaps its only principle. For her sins Reeves has spent the last few years refining her George Osborne impersonation, even making an example of the £28bn Green Prosperity Plan by slashing the annual commitment to £4.8bn.

Now off-the-record briefings from government ministers suggest the Treasury will retain the symbolic two-child benefit cap as it mulls its child poverty strategy due out in June. “The cap is popular with key voters, who see it as a matter of fairness,” according to a source who spoke to The Guardian.

The spirit of fairness means that usually only a family’s first two children are entitled to child tax credit or Universal Credit. (Confusingly, the cap does not apply to the benefit called Child Benefit). As you might expect, the wheeze came from Osborne in the wake of the 2015 general election, taking effect from April 2017.

While the measure was touted on cost-saving grounds — removing the cap would eventually cost £2.5bn a year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) — it is hard not to detect the whiff of old conservative disdain for subsidising feckless parents. In the seedier comment sections of certain newspapers, this is combined with suspicions that it is not white British families who would be the chief beneficiaries of a change in policy.

Certainly, it would be costly. But equally certain is that the cap contributes to child poverty, which continues to rise, much to the horror of many of the people who voted for Labour last year. The Child Poverty Action Group has estimated on the current trajectory that the number of children in poverty will increase from 4.5 million today to 4.8 million by 2029.

But both left and right rather miss the elephant in the maternity ward: however you look at it, Britain is not having enough babies. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the total fertility rate in England and Wales dropped to 1.44 children per woman. It has not been at the replacement level of 2.1 since the early 1970s, with immigration the only reason our population has not declined.

Worrying about birth rates has thus far been confined to the fringe right and autistic-seeming men with Substack newsletters. Yet any wonk with a spreadsheet should realise there is a relationship between the long-term viability of the state and the existence of adults in 20 years time who might pay taxes to fund it.

It is hardly as if the problem is unique to Britain. South Korea and Japan are only the most extreme cases of what happens when you eschew the short-term costs of child-rearing and later find you’re struggling to pay for an ageing population. And the two-child cap isn’t the only way we are robbing Maddie to pay Margaret.

There are of course the stagnant wages that millennials and zoomers have enjoyed since the financial crash. According to the IFS, median incomes grew by only 6 per cent between 2009 and 2022, about a fifth of what you’d expect over a similar period pre-recession. You can combine that with rental or mortgage costs, which many on middling salaries struggle to pay in some urban areas, as well as money that must be spent on childcare for families with two working parents.

It would take a longer piece than this to entangle how much of this was intentional, but had recent governments been aiming to bring down the birth rate it’s a difficult policy stack to improve on. Many couples considering parenthood understandably feel they are working against how our economy is structured.

As everyone knows at this point, these cracks have been partially painted over with mass immigration. Certainly they have kept hospitals staffed and Deliveroo in business. But where newcomers integrate they either adopt the birth rates of natives, at which point you are back at square one, or they form insular diaspora communities.

Pulling the migration lever will probably become harder anyway, as birth rates fall around the world which signals that culture and technology are as much behind this trend as anything financial. In the case of the West, our cultural focus on individual success, coupled with the widespread availability of contraception, was always likely to reduce birth rates — and it should be added that there have been many upsides to this.

Abolishing the two-child benefit cap is unlikely to radically change things, not least because it overlaps with a household benefit cap. In other countries, doling out benefits has not had a significant effect on how many people choose to have kids. South Korea has spent more than $270bn trying to convince its citizens to have kids, and its total fertility rate has now fallen to a historic low of 0.72 per woman. / The reason it matters is symbolic. The British government should not be telling its citizens to be two and through with having kids. For one, the replacement rate is 2.1 per woman. More fundamentally, children should not be conceived of as fiscal liabilities who must be merely tolerated before they can enjoy the fruits of self-actualisation.

If we believe we’ve built a country worth living in, we must surely think it better that children are brought into existence to enjoy it with us. If we retain the two-child benefit cap, we might as well accept our fate as a glorified care home with a country attached.

And what care? Jamie Gillies writes:

This month will be a significant one for the debate around assisted suicide in the UK, as politicians at both Holyrood and Westminster once more consider legislation. On 13 May, members of the Scottish Parliament will debate and vote on a bill from Liberal Democrat politician Liam McArthur to legalise the practice north of the border. The Westminster bill, proposed by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, is scheduled for report stage three days later, following the publication of an impact assessment at the end of last week.

Now McArthur has suggested that he will raise the minimum age in the Scottish legislation from 16 to 18, citing the example of laws in Oregon and Australia. With the debate on his bill due first, a vote against assisted dying at Holyrood would galvanise opposition to a law change down south. Conversely, a vote to progress his bill would be seized on by proponents at Westminster, who have emerged from committee scrutiny somewhat bruised.

A report published last week on McArthur’s bill sheds some light on questions that will shape the Holyrood debate — and, by extension, discussions in Westminster. The document from the Scottish Parliament’s health committee, which has gathered evidence on the bill, makes no comment on its “general principles” but suggests areas which require further consideration. These include “issues around human rights, coercion, eligibility criteria, provision of assistance, self-administration and conscientious objection”.

Three statements in the report are particularly worthy of note. Firstly, it concedes that the definition of terminal illness in McArthur’s bill is broad enough to cover people who “may not be approaching death for a considerable period of time”. Unlike the Leadbeater bill, McArthur’s proposal includes no requirement for a life expectancy timescale. To be eligible, a patient need only have an “advanced”, “progressive” condition from which they are “unable to recover”, and which is “expected to cause their premature death”.

This controversial approach has drawn criticism from various groups, who note that people with disabilities, dementia or anorexia could be eligible under this definition — a thought that will make many MSPs uncomfortable. Parallels may be drawn with permissive assisted dying regimes abroad, such as Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) programme. It remains to be seen whether proponents of assisted suicide at Holyrood would be willing to amend the legislation to reduce its scope, but McArthur has been defensive of his definition to date, claiming that doctors would make appropriate judgements.

Secondly, the report acknowledges the potential for incremental expansion of assisted suicide legislation, citing a risk of McArthur’s bill being “subject to human rights or other court challenges” that “could result in eligibility for assisted dying being extended over time”. This gives credence to a central opposition argument that a “narrow” law is no guard against mission creep. This statement should also be noted at Westminster, where Leadbeater has promised a law which has the “strictest protections and safeguards of any legislation anywhere in the world”.

The health committee’s report also notes “particular complexities” with aspects of the bill that are beyond the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament, including sections on the provision of lethal substances and conscientious objection. This adds an additional layer of complexity to the coming debate, and raises hard questions for proponents. One legal expert in Scotland has warned that conscience protections offered on the face of the legislation “might ultimately be meaningless”.

Much rides on the debate at Holyrood in two weeks’ time. As with the debate at Westminster last year, the onus will be on supporters of assisted dying to explain how serious problems associated with the practice can be overcome. The muddled definitions highlighted by last week’s report should provide cause for serious concern.

Whistle-Stop Tour

If you alone could hear the dog whistle, Lucy Powell, then what did that make you? Powell halved her majority last year. Keep saying that until it quite sinks in. In 2024, a Labour MP halved her majority from 2019. Not that she is singularly useless. Leader of the House of Commons is not a policy role, yet if Powell held on, then Keir Starmer would demonstrably have no one else to fill even that.

I have been rightly taken to task for the following: "Reform has won County Durham, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, the south east of Northumberland, and a by-election in Bridgend. Even Kent has a coalfield, and Staffordshire has two, so from Labour's point of view, at least there was no longer a South Yorkshire County Council to lose to Reform." As I should have added, the council and the mayoralty were both up in Doncaster, and while Labour's Mayor Ros Jones held on against Reform UK by 698 votes, whereas her majority over the Conservatives had been 10,213 in 2021, Reform took 37 of the 55 council seats. It is Doncaster rather than Sheffield that is on the East Coast Main Line because when that backbone of Britain was built, then the coal on which its trains ran was king.

Politicians who talk about things like "remoralisation" are setting themselves up for one hell of a fall, and a party that promises to "erect statues of great British figures" is inviting the ridicule than which nothing could be more British. But on economic policy, Reform voters turn out to be decidedly left-wing, at least compared to the officially designated centre ground. If the Labour Party were what people who had not been paying attention imagined that it used to be or least ought to be, then its means of dealing with the challenge of Reform, whose challenge is indeed to Labour, would be obvious. Starmer would have us believe that he had now accepted both Brexit and the fact of biological sex. If that were true, then seeing off Reform would be easy.

Labour took back the Red Wall last year, and is now fighting to keep it from Reform. For the Conservatives, the struggle is with the Liberal Democrats. By a wide margin, the Coalition was the most enduring and, from its own point of view, the most effective Government of the period since 2010. From austerity to Libya, what it got done was appalling. But it did get those things done. For five whole years. Iain Duncan Smith resigned because its welfare policies were too vicious, although they had been perfectly acceptable to Harriet Harman as Acting Labour Leader, and they had nothing on what Liz Kendall was doing today. But no Lib Dem ever resigned from the frontbench for any policy reason. On the backbenches, only one Conservative voted against the war in Libya, but no Lib Dem did so. Not a single one.

So the Lib Dems are sweeping the Thatcherite, socially liberal, Remainer heartlands, mostly but not exclusively in the South, because the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are the parties between which socially liberal, pro-EU Thatcherites, and the 1980s were a time of moral chaos while the Thatcher Government dismissed opposition to the Single European Act and thus to the Single Market as "Loony Left", choose on a case-by-case basis when seeking the more effective vehicle for their ideology that, though hugely mistaken, is nevertheless coherent. They are not "Anywheres". The places where this is the electoral battle are very much Somewhere. David Goodhart has always been wrong about that, and, as a son of the liberal haute bourgeoisie, surprisingly so. Not only are his posited tribes less than entirely distinct, but each of them has a deep culture that includes strong local, regional, national, international and global concerns and connections.

Arrest Watch: Day Five

I am far from alone in positively expecting me to be arrested sometime between now and Wednesday.

We shall see.

Sunday, 4 May 2025

Arrest Watch: Day Four

They love arresting me at the weekend so that they can hold me for an extra day.

They especially love arresting me at Bank Holiday weekends so that they can hold me for an extra two days.

And I am far from alone in positively expecting me to be arrested sometime between now and next Wednesday.

We shall see.

Steady EDI

The acronym in Britain is "EDI". "DEI" is American, the E stands for something different, those two letters are a universe, and the use of "DEI" in Britain is far more telling than a South African accent. Like an Australian or New Zealand accent, quite a lot of Reform UK voters have Marianne Overton's white South African accent, with Reform taking the votes of a high proportion of the people who spoke in each of those tones. I merely observe this, while wondering whom Donald Trump meant by Afrikaners, since Afrikaans is the first language of the majority of Coloureds, even if not of my cousins in the community of which that is most emphatically the name, and Coloureds are the majority of, so to speak, native speakers of Afrikaans. Trump may or may not know these things, but Elon Musk certainly does.

That said, Dame Andrea Jenkyns is opposed to Nigel Farage's assertion that Special Educational Needs were being overdiagnosed. The 10 years between them are a true generation gap. Farage may have been one of the last Boomers, but he is still of the school of thought that, "There was none of that in my day." A lot of us are highly critical of the policy response to anthropogenic global warming, but the people who deny its existence are something else. A lot of us wish that we had been more critical of the policy response to Covid-19, although we were right to have followed the medical advice while it stood, but the anti-vaxxers were something else, and many of them have mutated into deniers of the existence of SARS-CoV-2. There will always be, as there has always been, a debate to be had about immigration, but racists, including "race realists" or what have you, are something else. And something similar is emerging in relation to Special Educational Needs and Disability, by no means only in childhood, although it would be bad enough if it were.

Does the National Health Service spend £40 million per year on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion? If so, then that is peanuts to the NHS. Dame Andrea has already been famously unable to find a single EDI Officer in the employ of Lincolnshire County Council. And according to the TaxPayers' Alliance (so, if anything, an overestimate or an exaggeration), annual spending on all EDI roles across all local authorities in the entire country is £23 million, the crumbs of peanuts, 35p per person. Yet that money could indeed be better spent. On the inclusion of those of us who recognised that equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity; regional equality and regional diversity, and so on down within, for example, a county; the equal sovereignty of diverse states; and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. That would certainly be preferable to pursuing Zia Yusuf's doomed applications for injunctions, judicial reviews, and the rest, which would be liable to have the applicants banned from bringing any more such vexatious frivolities. Yusuf could afford these actions, so let him pay for them.

Saturday, 3 May 2025

High Needs Block

To address Labour switchers to Reform UK, Keir Starmer has taken to The Times, as if that were what they read. What does Morgan McSweeney have to do to get sacked? But when George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election, then Rishi Sunak gave a Prime Ministerial statement on the steps of Downing Street, and it was just as hysterical as that sounds. Reform's capture of Runcorn and Helsby has brought out none of that, even though it took control of 10 councils at the same time. Anyone would think that it were part of the club.

Ah, yes, 10 councils. The crisis in local government is because funding from central government has been cut by well over half. Almost all councils have had to put up Council Tax to plug the gap, because most of what they do, it would be unlawful for them not to do, since those services are statutory. Moreover, the Dedicated Schools Grant has four Blocks that are strictly ring-fenced, and the High Needs Block protects such SEND spending as there is, meaning that a council simply could not reallocate the money that was being spent on conditions that councillors thought were being overdiagnosed or did not exist.

Nor can even the Leader of the Council sack staff, who answer to more senior Officers. In turn, those would be positively obliged to act if councillors threatened to do anything unlawful. The Council sets policy; it is for Officers to implement it. For example, that would apply to working from home. All in one of the most unionised sectors in existence, and facing Scrutiny Chairs drawn from the Opposition no matter how small. Some people are about to get the shock of their lives.

Beyond The Realm?

None of yer AI-generated. The next Pope should post a photograph of himself dressed as Donald Trump. Like that of the Canadian Liberal Party, the victory of the Australian Labor Party (no one knows; the word is spelt the British way in all other contexts in Australia) is not in itself anything to celebrate, and that of Mark Carney or Anthony Albanese gives no cause for joy even by those standards.

But both results, complete with the losses of Pierre Poilievre's and Peter Dutton's own seats, demonstrate that the mere insinuation of a connection to Trump is toxic in the Right's beloved "Anglosphere". Even in the United States' largest trading partner, with which it shares the world's longest border, within 100 miles of which lives the huge majority of the Canadian population. And even in the United States' closest military ally, the only other country to have participated openly and officially in every American war since 1945.

So much for the British Government's insistence that it had to remain neutral on the Trump Question. That was not the only reason for Labour's wipeout on Thursday, but it clearly did the party no good. The strong showing for Reform UK indicates a body of pro-Trump opinion, while the gains by the Liberal Democrats, who came second, and by the Greens indicate the strength of anti-Trumpers. But the Lib Dems are mostly fighting, and beating, the pro-Trump Conservatives. It is Labour that needs to worry about Reform. It needs to get off the fence.

Grander figures even than Keir Starmer have managed. On the twenty-seventh of this month, the King, who is 76 and seriously ill, will have made the three thousand mile trip to Ottawa to deliver the Speech from the Throne, the first time that the monarch will have done that in person in 48 years. Whatever his words, his message could not be clearer. Across at least five parties and two Independents in the House of Commons alone, the British Right has a choice to make.

Romania’s War On Democracy

Călin Georgescu does not believe that the Moon landings took place, and he does not believe that water is H20, but he does believe that there are nanochips in carbonated drinks, and he does believe that he met a “non-human” at the United Nations. Yet if Romanians want to vote for him, then that is a matter for them. There are probably now people with some or all of those views on English county councils. The pre-emptive coup against Georgescu was in favour of Elena Lasconi, a bog standard liberal-Rightist who got the gig because she was recognisable as a newsreader, so a Romanian Anna Soubry. I would not vote for her, either. Nor would the Romanians. But they did vote for Georgescu. As they would again, or no one would be going to such lengths to prevent them from doing so. Christopher Caldwell writes:

No matter who wins Sunday’s first round of the Romanian presidential election, it is a crisis for the country, for the European Union and for the relations of both with the United States.

This is the second attempt to hold the election. The regularly scheduled one was annulled last December amid accusations of candidate and government corruption. Călin Georgescu, a Romanian nationalist, populist admirer of Donald Trump, mystical Christian and opponent of the Ukraine war, came seemingly out of nowhere to win the first round. He took 23% of the vote on the strength of a charismatic TikTok campaign, advancing to the second round against the centrist Elena Lasconi. For the first time since Communism, the country’s invincible-looking political establishment seemed to have been shut out of the presidency.

That’s not so odd: Romania today is (by European standards) poor, unequal, corrupt and war-weary. Its population peaked in the last years of communism at almost 25 million. Today, through a combination of emigration and lost mojo, it is just 19. Sharing a longer border with Ukraine than either Poland or Hungary, it has become a hub for the Nato war effort. And for Ukrainian refugees, 180,000 of whom can claim temporary protections. These, of course, include housing, employment and social programmes for which natives aren’t eligible.

Like all members of the EU, Romania is prone to bitter clashes between Europhiles and so-called “sovereigntists”. The EU confers the prestigious status of being “Western”, along with membership in profitable trading networks. Big majorities of Romanians still back it. But the 1992 Maastricht treaty, which commits all member-states to an “ever closer union”, turned the EU into a machine for grinding up systems of national self-rule, whether newly regained (as in the case of the former satellite states of the Soviet Union) or ancient and hallowed (as in the case of the pre-Brexit United Kingdom). Sovereigntists tend to thrive where the responsibility for solving desperately important problems — like mass immigration — is taken out of national hands, and those problems go unsolved.

Romania has followed a different path. The decades-long dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu was particularly brutal, and the violent exit of Romania from communism unique. Ceaușescu was executed alongside his wife on Christmas Day 1989. Romanian sovereigntists have found it hard to rally citizens to the cause of winning back powers for their own democracy, the way the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice party (PiS) managed to do in Poland until 2023, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian Fidesz and Robert Fico’s Slovakian Smer continue to do today.

That has now changed. Georgescu is in some ways a thrilling political novelty: an accomplished civil servant and diplomat, a scientist of distinction, and a would-be policymaker of some sophistication. (He has called for Romania to be more “Hamiltonian”, referring to the first American treasury secretary’s aggressive, nation-based industrial policy. US supporters of Donald Trump’s trade policies often sound similar notes.) Georgescu is also religious in a way that swept many of his Orthodox co-religionists off their feet, promising to “trust in God with His power of love”. Romania is a society of relatively high church attendance (about a quarter) and trust in religious hierarchies. It is also a place where fascist movements of the Twenties and Thirties were tightly linked to Orthodoxy, and to mysticism too. Georgescu can come off as weird, conspiratorial and over-indulgent of his country’s fascist past. Covid, in his view, was a “plan-demic”.

How could such a candidate score as high as Georgescu did? The Constitutional Court was eager to find out. It called for a recount, which found no irregularities. On 6 December, though, with second-round voting already underway, the court cited material declassified by the country’s Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) to annul the elections on the grounds of national security, not of election irregularity.

The “declassified” material actually consisted of assertions, not previously classified proofs. But the relevant authorities all winked at this deficiency. Weeks later, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, who had summoned CSAT in the first place, explained that election meddling was actually “nearly impossible” to prove. The actions “are so broad and complex that only state actors can do that… And here it was Russia.” We know it’s Russia, he assured us, because “they hide perfectly in cyber space”. The lack of evidence of meddling became the main evidence of meddling.

The EU didn’t fuss much, either. Romania and Bulgaria were due to be admitted to the EU’s Schengen open-borders regime this New Year’s Day, barely a month later. No one alluded to Romanians’ cancellation of elections — even if it was a step more serious than those for which the commission had sought to bring the less-Europhilic Hungarians and Poles to their knees. “Fully in Schengen,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted to Romanians, “where you belong.”

The Biden administration — barely three weeks after its own electoral ouster by Trump’s forces — issued a statement casting the election result in a dubious light. The ambassador in Bucharest signalled that remedial intervention might be welcomed: “Our hope,” she wrote, “is that whatever decisions might or might not be taken… Romania’s strong track record as a reliable democratic partner in Europe and in the Euro-Atlantic community will not be tarnished.”

In this context, one can understand why J.D. Vance alluded to the incident in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Were Romania’s authorities acting to prevent Russia from gaining influence within the European Union? Or to prevent the Trump-era United States from gaining influence within the European Union? Such suspicions would not be out of line. If Vance shares them, then his intervention in Munich would seem not overboard but restrained.

And that makes the present situation potentially grave. Since last December, there have been two loudly asserted contrary accounts of what happened in Romania’s halted presidential election: either Georgescu won the first round with the votes of actual Romanians or someone faked up such a result through the clever deployment of TikTok. Everything we have learned since December favours the first, more straightforward explanation. Early in the year, Georgescu announced he would run in the do-over election, and his polling numbers shot up even higher than they had been last year. He was beginning to flirt with an absolute majority.

In February, Georgescu was arrested on charges involving “incitement to actions against the constitutional order”. The Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu, still serving as prime minister after his third-place finish in the presidential election, had said authorities would show “extremely strong evidence” for a prosecution.

It has not been forthcoming. BBC 4’s Crossing Continents sympathetically interviewed a Romanian media researcher credited as an “important source of information for the authorities” on the Georgescu matter, and asked whether his “massive uptick” in social media traffic had come from Romania or abroad. “I think my subjective opinion is both”, she said. “It’s externally with internal help, but this is how the Kremlin playbook of propaganda works.” Her complaint about Georgescu’s campaign offers no proof of corruption or criminality beyond the “subjective”. She only finds Georgescu’s view of Romania’s history repugnant and inadmissible: “That’s a very, if I am allowed to say, MAGA narrative about the history of Romania, glorifying the past of Romania that was never in a state of glory, glorifying the sovereignty of Romania in a historical period, but we actually didn’t have it, glorifying history that for us just means torture, pain.” This is not necessarily wrong as a historical assessment. But it is wrong as a democratic modus operandi. Under present circumstances, it is unlikely to strike Georgescu’s followers as reasonable grounds for nullifying a presidential election.

The assertion that Georgescu’s rise somehow defies reality does not account for TikTok reality. In January, a month before Germany’s federal elections, the Left Party there was in low single digits and given little chance by most pundits of getting any seats at all in the Bundestag. But when Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic candidate for chancellor, cooperated on an anti-immigration bill with the hardline Alternative for Germany, the Left’s leader Heidi Reichinnek gave a barn-burning, reel-ready parliamentary speech. Watch it on TikTok. She warned that another Nazi wave was on its way, that Merz was its henchman and only the Left could stop it. It was a scenario implausible enough that, in Romania these days, it might count as “disinformation”. But in a mostly free country, Reichinnek had every right to say it. She obviously believed it. Her talk doubled the party’s membership in a matter of days and on election day the Left had 64 Bundestag members.

Whether Romania’s secret police has evidence against Georgescu is something unknowable except to them. That’s the problem.

But we do know enough about the state of Romanian voters’ minds to pass judgement on what happened with its democracy last autumn. Obviously there was a genuine wave of rebellion behind Georgescu. We can tell from the behaviour of voters and candidates in the months since. In Georgescu’s absence, George Simion, a member of the Right-wing Alliance for the Union of Romanians, is well ahead of the pack in the latest polls, at around 30%. (Georgescu once belonged to the AUR but was ousted for speaking sympathetically of the Legionaries, an interwar fascist group.)

Simion has risen primarily by consolidating his party’s base. More conventionally conservative than Georgescu, more sympathetic to the war in Ukraine, less a charismatic outsider, he has nonetheless tried to drape himself in Georgescu’s cause, showing up to Easter services with him. Simion even suggested he might make Georgescu his prime minister if elected. And he attended the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington. Victor Ponta, a savvy former Social Democratic prime minister, considered an ideological chameleon — he, too, made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. The centrist candidate Crin Antonescu, former leader of the Liberal party, is probably the last, best chance for the decades-old Romanian establishment to hang on. Yet one Romanian political scientist told the French newspaper Libération that nowadays, in some of his rhetorical flights, Antonescu “could pass for a member of [Marine Le Pen’s] National Rally”. Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan, another tough-talking member of the establishment, has been trying to squeeze out Lasconi. Antonescu is thought to have the better chance of beating Simion in the second round. Shaken by the persistence of a disruptive war and the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the Romanian political landscape is changing.

Again, there is much that is unknowable for those who are far from the backrooms of Bucharest. But among the candidates who are actually running and are betting their careers on an accurate diagnosis of the Romanian mind, there is a working assumption that the votes Georgescu won last autumn reflected a genuine uprising, not a bot-generated simulacrum. If they are right, then it is possible that we really did see an election brazenly stolen in a vital European Union country. The consequences will extend beyond these coming elections.

And what is the origin of that “invincible-looking political establishment”? Romania was not part of the Soviet Bloc. It had a ghastly regime, not least from the point of view of the valiant Byzantine Rite Catholics. But not a Soviet satellite one. In fact, that regime had particularly close ties to Britain. To our shame, but there we are. English and French, rather than Russian, were taught in schools. No Romanian troops participated in putting down the Prague Spring. More than once, the Soviet Union came to the brink of invading Romania. There was absolutely no question of giving back what is now the Romanian-speaking western part of the cut-and-shunt state of Moldova.

That bring us to the National Salvation Front, overthrowers of Nicolae Ceaușescu, and originators of the present political class in Romania. Their objection to Ceaușescu was not that he was pro-Soviet. It was that he was anti-Soviet. They emerged out of the Moscow-backing, because Moscow-backed, faction within the Communist Party. In 1989, the Soviet Union still had two years left to go, and few were those who thought that it would collapse entirely. The execution of the Ceaușescus for the "genocide" of 34 people, and for having dared to throw parties at their house on major holidays, was the last great triumph of the Soviet Union, taking out a man who was vicious and brutal in himself, and who was duly knighted by Britain, but who was nevertheless a dedicated opponent of Soviet power. Those who took him out have run Romania ever since. They now do so within both the EU and NATO.

Impact Assessment

Try reading this with autism.

Asish Joshi writes:

Hundreds of people would seek an assisted death in the first year of a service being available, with that number potentially rising to just over 4,500 after 10 years, according to a government report.

A 149-page impact assessment into the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, measuring the financial impact of the proposed legislation, was published on Friday afternoon.

It estimated there could potentially be between 273 and 1,311 people applying for an assisted death in the first year, rising to between 1,737 and 7,598 in year 10.

And it found the establishment of a Voluntary Assisted Dying Commissioner and panels would cost an estimated average of between £10.9m to £13.6m per year.

The impact assessment found healthcare costs at the end of life could be reduced by as much as an estimated £10m in the first year of an assisted dying service and almost £60m after 10 years.

But, the document noted that cutting end-of-life care costs "is not stated as an objective of the policy".

The bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons on 29 November 2024 with a vote of 330 to 275.

Speaking after publication of the document, she said: "I am grateful to the government for these detailed and thorough assessments of the impact of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill currently going through parliament.

"I'm pleased that MPs now have two full weeks to consider the assessments before the next Commons debate at Report Stage on 16 May."

Supporters of assisted dying will be confident the impact assessment's findings will not sway any MPs and the bill will pass in May and not be derailed ahead of the final vote expected on 13 June.

The timing of the document, which has been prepared by civil servants, has caused some anger among opponents of the bill.

Some have suggested the report was deliberately released to coincide with the results of the local elections.

'We need better care not killing'

Responding to the publication of the impact assessments, Dr Gordon Macdonald, CEO of Care Not Killing, said: "At a time when we have seen how fragile our cash strapped health care system is, how the hospice movement has a £150m black hole in its budget, and when up to one in four Brits who would benefit from palliative care but aren't currently receiving it, introducing so-called assisted dying would be an incredibly dangerous policy that would put pressure on vulnerable, elderly and disabled people to end their lives prematurely.

"We need to fix the UK's broken and patchy palliative care system so everyone can have a dignified death. 

"We need better care, not killing."

Changes to the bill since the original vote mean the High Court will no longer need to sign off on assisted dying cases.

Instead, decisions will go through a new panel of medical and legal experts.

And Alexander Raikin writes:

On 31 January, 2024, Wade was running out of time. He had tried everything to persuade his 28-year-old daughter, Marge, that she could get better. But Marge had been scheduled to die by assisted suicide at 2 p.m. the next day at the family’s home in Alberta, Canada. He was horrified. Marge was autistic, vulnerable, and had no diagnosed physical illness. Her autism made her different from her peers — and lonely, no doubt — but Wade knew this was no reason to terminate a young life.

He had to do something. So he went to the courts. The legal claim he filed on that frigid winter day would put Wade on a quest no father should have to face: saving his daughter’s life from a Canadian health system that at times appears more committed to delivering death than protecting health. By taking legal action, he managed to delay Marge’s death for a while. But he is set to lose the battle.

Wade and Marge aren’t the real names of this story’s subjects. The case is under a Canadian publication ban issued by a provincial court in Alberta, leaving Marge’s family reluctant to speak on the record. Yet with the pro-euthanasia Liberals re-elected to power in Canada and assisted-suicide legislation swiftly clearing obstacles in Britain and New York state, among other jurisdictions, their story must be told: for it highlights the slippery-slope expansion of the categories of patients deemed eligible for suicide-by-doctor, once the practice is legalised.

After the January notice came the details. The last physician to assess her for assisted suicide, a family doctor practicing with the Alberta Health Services (AHS), took fewer than 24 hours to review and approve her application. And although the neurologist treating her for fatigue and pain assessed her as “normal”, another family doctor, unknown to her parents, declared her to be terminally ill. The clinic at which this family doctor practices referred UnHerd’s request for comment to AHS, which told UnHerd that “as this is before the courts, we are unable to provide comment”.

“She tells us that she’s getting [Medically Assistance in Dying], and of course we freak out”, Wade tells me. “I was new to MAiD. I didn’t know anything about it.” He describes his daughter, Marge, as an intelligent young woman. He loves her, and he was saving money for her to be independent, to move her from the family home to her own apartment. She was healthy, but convinced she was sick.

Her only diagnosed conditions were autism and ADHD, which made it difficult for her to keep in touch with her friends during Covid lockdowns or to hold down a job. Her life was nocturnal and online, and that worried him, as did the sort of online peer pressure that bears down especially on younger women. Wade says: “For the last eight years, she has spent a lot of time online researching medicine and adverse medical conditions”. She slept through the day and stayed up most nights until 4 a.m. or later as she accessed “online support groups and chat rooms with other people who share her sickness”.

Canada has become a warning light for the limits of enforcing safeguards for euthanasia. Even though hundreds of reported violations of Canada’s criminal law on euthanasia were never fully investigated by authorities, Marge’s story is different. She has thus far refused to make public the diagnosis on which she based her application for suicide. Her father, however, insists that it’s her autism that has caused to her become fixated with being sick — terminally so.

In Canada, intellectual disabilities or mental illness alone are no reason for people to receive MAiD. That’s unlike the Netherlands, where at least five people with intellectual disorders younger than 30 cited autism as their primary motivation for euthanasia. Canada is supposed to be different — at least, until 2027, when the country will expand the law to approve assisted-suicide requests for cases of mental illness alone.

As it is, to qualify for euthanasia in Canada, you need any two physicians or nurse practitioners to say you meet the eligibility requirements. You must be over 18 years of age, mentally competent, eligible for health care, and have a “grievous and irremediable” physical illness or disability. Marge’s autism, her parents have argued in court, means that his daughter “is vulnerable and is not competent to make the decision to take her own life”.

It was 2021 when Marge first filled out the form — without telling her parents — asking to die. AHS, the public health-care system, connected her with two physicians. Although one physician deemed her eligible without any diagnosed physical symptoms, according to Wade, the second denied her application, presumably because she had no terminal illness. She seems to have only met some of the requirements, although it is impossible to know for sure without access to her MAiD assessment. Alberta’s policy was that in the case of a tie, the suicide would not proceed.

But Marge was determined.

In 2022, she went doctor-shopping. She found another physician, an Alberta family practitioner, who intervened and supported her (their clinic didn’t reply to UnHerd’s request for comment). Unknown to the family, this doctor signed a change in her “Goals of Care Designation”, which is the medical standard used in Alberta to indicate how severely ill someone is. The doctor switched it to the most extreme category, which in some Canadian provinces indicates the likelihood of imminent death; that was almost three years ago.

The following year, in 2023, she applied for assisted dying a second time. Once again, the two physicians consulted disagreed. (The clinics at which these two practice didn’t reply to UnHerd’s request for comment; AHS declined to comment, citing the court case.) This time, however, the so-called MAiD navigator, who sherpas patients through the process, connected Marge with a third doctor as a “tiebreaker”. The chosen physician was the same one who had approved Marge’s MAiD application the first time, and did so again, within 24 hours.

It was only then that her parents found out from Marge that she had been approved for assisted suicide. Her parents pushed back. Tempers flared. And the MAiD navigator claimed that Wade was a “safety risk given his threats” fewer than two weeks before she was set to die.

Her father couldn’t understand how any doctor could think Marge was qualified to die. “I thought MAiD was for, like, you’re dying anyway. So, we’ll just speed it up because you’re suffering. That’s what I thought it was for”, he tells me. “And I’m thinking, well, how could this be for Marge?” So, the day before her “MAiD provider” was meant to pay a final house visit, when a physician and a nurse would bring the lethal but now routine injection of a sedative, a coma-inducing agent, and a neuromuscular tranquiliser, Wade filed a last-minute court challenge. He claimed that Marge did not have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition”, that her only diagnosed illnesses were mental, not physical, and that her second tie-breaking assessor was not independent.

That day, an initial judge granted the temporary injunction to block physicians from ending the life of Wade’s daughter. But then the case went to trial.

This was the first time anywhere in North America that a legal assisted suicide for a non-terminally ill patient, approved by any two physicians, was stopped by a court, at least in its preliminary stage. The judge, Justice Colin Feasby, of the Court of King’s Bench, Alberta, ruled that Marge’s father had a reasonable cause of action that the correct protocols around assisted dying weren’t followed. Marge had no terminal illness. Neither of the MAiD assessors appeared to be experts on Marge’s autism. And the independent assessor appointed as tiebreaker wasn’t, either.

Once it came to ruling on the substance of the dispute, however, the judge wouldn’t consider whether Marge qualified for assisted suicide; no evidence was accepted on even naming the condition for which she was approved. Any criminal prosecution, the judge ruled, could only happen after Marge is dead: “Parliament has put its trust in doctors and nurse practitioners, and it is not for this Court to second guess that choice.”

In Britain, Kim Leadbeater — a member of Parliament whose proposal to legalise the practice is set for a critical vote in the House of Commons this May — recently claimed that “there would be an injunction” by the parents of a person with a learning disorder if their child was choosing to die for the wrong reasons. In response to this, Wade says, “I know it won’t work”. When his injunction was thrown out, the judge ruled that his doubt didn’t matter. “As a court”, Judge Feasby held, “I can’t go second-guessing these MAiD assessors … but I’m stuck with this: the only comprehensive assessment of this person done says she’s normal”.

The ruling was no surprise. Since the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalised euthanasia, scarcely any judges in Canada have found problems with euthanasia safeguards. Rather, past rulings reinforced that MAiD wasn’t expansive enough. The 2019 Truchon v. Canada case expanded the practice to include nonterminal illnesses. Failing those who weren’t dying, the ruling said, would be tantamount to discrimination against people without a terminal illness.

One of the two plaintiffs, Jean Truchon, a 51-year-old euthanasia advocate with spastic cerebral palsy, requested to die because he was suffering from a severe disability that prevented the use of his arms. Yet Truchon also told a friend that he would have chosen to live if he received adequate support at home.

The Trudeau government chose not to appeal the decision, despite opposition from virtually every prominent disability-rights organisation in Canada.

In Marge’s case, too, Canadian disability groups mobilised against the ruling; they agreed with Wade that disabilities shouldn’t be compared to a terminal illness. At stake is a future where disability supports are neglected for immediate and cheaper death-on-demand, only for those whose disabilities are too profound or serious for the state to support

In September, some of the largest Canadian disability groups launched a constitutional challenge against euthanasia based on nonterminal disabilities. The suit claimed it is an “appalling injustice” to offer suicide just on the grounds of disability. “It is not just wrong”, says Krista Carr, the executive vice president of Inclusion Canada, in an email to me. “It is discriminatory and violates our most fundamental rights.”

Yet even if that constitutional challenge triumphs, it will be too late for Wade. He says he has spent more than $150,000 in legal fees, half of it through credit-card debt; a further legal appeal would have to come from money he doesn’t have. But the expense did not bother him: “This is just money. We can make it. We can’t go to the store and buy another Marge. I don’t regret it at all.”

His legal challenge failed, but it restarted Marge’s assisted-dying process from the beginning. He tells me she had applied again. Meanwhile, in April 2024, Wade appealed the court’s decision, which delayed any further assisted-suicide approval until October that year, when his appeal case was to be heard. But Marge began starving herself that June, so he dropped the appeal a week later.

More recently, I received another message from Wade. Marge’s third application to die had been approved. Wade waits, angry and terrified, to receive the scheduled appointment of his daughter’s death. It could happen anytime.

Arrest Watch: Day Three

They love arresting me at the weekend so that they can hold me for an extra day.

They especially love arresting me at Bank Holiday weekends so that they can hold me for an extra two days.

And I am far from alone in positively expecting me to be arrested sometime between now and next Wednesday.

We shall see.

Welcome To The Outside

Of the four remaining Labour members out of 98 on Durham County Council, two gained their seats from the Conservatives. Here at Lanchester and Burnhope, congratulations to Alison Gray. But the other, at Barnard Castle, is Chris Foote-Wood. If you know, you know.

Reform UK does not correspond to the Alternative für Deutschland, nor Nigel Farage to Călin Georgescu, although it will doubt turn out very soon that the same could not be said of some people who were now councillors. But Reform should note well events in Germany and Romania. Including the detention and deportation of Chay Bowes, which echoes the demands to shut down GB News.

In fact, does Reform imagine that it is not already subject to measures such as have just been imposed on the AfD? Those, such as Farage, with long histories in politics but not in the uniparty could not possibly be so naïve. But people new to political activism, or used to a lifetime in the Conservative Party, may well have no idea, in the way that attendees at the Countryside March thought that the lightest policing of any demonstration that any of us had ever seen, or have seen to this day, was "heavy-handed". Now as then, welcome to the outside.

Entrenching Deprivation

Peter Sagar writes:

It was reported in The Guardian on 25th April that the £5 billion programme of disability benefits cuts planned by the Labour government would disproportionately hit people living in North East England, so “entrenching deprivation”, according to new analysis.

It was further said that, “the consultancy Policy in Practice has looked at how the proposed changes would affect individual regions and local authorities, and found the impact across the UK starkly uneven”.

Policy in Practice

Research done by Policy in Practice has shown that by the end of the current parliament:

  • 800,000 people are expected to lose PIP worth between £3,800 and £5,700 
  • 1.7 million people currently on LCWRA will be impacted by the freeze, worth over £500 per year each in real terms, by 2029 
  • 440,000 new recipients of LCWRA are set to be awarded half the current value, losing £47 per week, or £2,450 per year 
  • 230,000 people could lose both PIP and LCWRA. Combined, these households could lose over £9,000 per year.
The loss of PIP is accounted for in the first bullet point, but the loss of LCWRA is worth £97 per week or £5,000 per year

Of all the regions in the country the three hardest hit will be the Northwest, Wales and worst of all North East England.

The analysis undertaken by Policy in Practice in a Freedom of Information request showed that in North East England nearly 170,000 people are going to be affected, which is 6.2% of the population, the highest of any region in the country, with £400 million lost.

By way of comparison, only 0,21% of people in the Southeast will be affected and a mere 0.16% of people living in London.

Hardest hit authorities

Additionally, three of the five hardest hit local authorities are in the North East:

  • Hartlepool, which is the second worst hit local authority area
  • South Tyneside, which is third worst hit local authority area
  • Redcar and Cleveland, which is the fifth worst hit local authority area

In terms of the impact of the cuts, Policy in Practice says that, “together this means that deprived areas that have more people on disability benefits who risk losing out also see a greater proportionate impact – impact that hits an already struggling local economy. These reforms will work against efforts to level up local economies unless the cuts to disability benefits are replaced by other forms of investment”.

Newcastle Citizens Advice Bureau

Hannah Cooper from Newcastle citizens advice bureau told me recently that, “the government recently published its impact assessment for the proposed changes. Citizens Advice is extremely concerned that the government predicts 3.2mn families will financially lose out on an average of £1720 per year as a result of these changes.

“We believe that this will particularly impact families with children in contradiction with the government’s stated aim of reducing child poverty. The impact assessment also supports this, suggesting that an additional 250,000 people (including 50,000) children will be in relative poverty after housing costs in 2029/30.

“The vast majority (96%) of families that lose financially have someone with a disability in the household. These families are estimated to represent 20% of all families that report having someone with a disability in the household.

North East Labour MPs

In response to the cuts, it has been reported that the following North East MPs are considering rebelling against the government, when the issue comes before parliament:

  • Mary Kelly-Foy, City of Durham 
  • Ian Lavery, Blyth and Ashington 
  • Emma Lewell-Buck, South Shields
  • Andy McDonald, Middlesbrough and Thornaby East
  • Grahame Morris, Easington

Why the cuts will harm the North East

Deven Ghelani, the director of Policy in Practice, was reported as saying that local authority leaders needed to understand how people in their areas would be affected, to prepare for rising service demand and to protect the people most at risk.

“These reforms will have an uneven impact on different parts of the country,” he said. “Some parts of the country will get a double whammy because they have a smaller economy and will lose a larger share of it.

“One of the reasons they have a smaller economy is that they have more people impacted so the proposals have a serious risk of entrenching existing patterns of deprivation.”

Yet again, the North East is being hit by policy directed from London, while at the moment we seem powerless to prevent it.

Policy in Practice are holding a webinar about the impact of the cuts and what can be done to mitigate them on 27th August. You can register for it by clicking here.

Cash Is A Lifeline

The Government refuses to protect the right to use cash. This is not about being against cards or apps. I use mine all the time. This is about vulnerable people, local circular economies, and civil liberties. In France, Article 642-3 of the penal code bans traders from refusing cash payment. We need that here. No, the legal tender thing does not cover it. You are not in debt to the vendor until you have the goods.

A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. And the combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable. As Gaby Hinsliff writes:

Opening my wallet, I’m down to my last five dollars. Dog-eared leftovers from a foreign holiday that I keep forgetting to take to the bank, they have somehow ended up being the only physical money I always carry, now there are so few places to use the British folding stuff.

Our village pub was for years a cash-only enterprise, possibly as a means of deterring customers from outside the village (long, gloriously eccentric story), and I keep a few pound coins rattling around the car for shopping trolleys. But using actual money feels mildly eccentric in most places now, or even faintly shady: increasingly cafes and bars are adopting “no cash” rules upfront to save the hassle of carting their takings to some faraway bank branch. Half of us have recently been somewhere that either didn’t accept cash or positively discouraged it, according to a survey by the ATM network Link. But since most people long ago switched to tapping a card reader, what’s the problem?

Well, there’s the fact that, as a House of Commons Treasury select committee report suggested this week, it’s the most vulnerable who still depend on cash: older people either terrified of being scammed or struggling to get to grips with apps, people whose credit rating is too trashed to get a bank account, adults with learning disabilities who can more easily understand that when cash is gone it’s really gone, and women squirrelling away “running away money” their partners don’t know about. (One of the most upsetting stories the MPs heard was from a woman whose abusive partner had withheld the electronic bill payment for the kids’ school lunches: the school didn’t let her pay in cash, the only way she had of getting around his control of their account.)

And then there’s the fact that, as Spain discovered during this week’s massive power outage, cash may no longer be king but when the worst happens, it’s still a critical spare to the heir. Sweden backtracked last year on plans to become a cashless society amid fears of becoming less resilient to saboteurs and hostile actors.

Last but not least, meanwhile, is the faintly embarrassed “am I mad to think this?” sense triggered by the speed of America’s descent into dystopia, that having a source of money no ill-intentioned future government could track or summarily freeze for political reasons is an underappreciated safety net. Clinging on to cash is one of those strange issues uniting traditionalists suspicious of change – tellingly, Reform’s 2024 manifesto promised to stop Britain becoming a cashless society – with conspiracy theorists convinced the global elite is after their assets, radicals of all stripes, small business owners sick of being charged by banks for card transactions and anti-poverty charities pointing out that cash is a lifeline for people on tight budgets.

Even gen Z, in theory more open to digitalised lives, have taken to the TikTok and Instagram-fuelled cult of “cash stuffing”, or disciplining your spending by taking out a week’s cash and sorting it into different envelopes for specific purposes. Once the envelope is empty, the spending stops. Thousands follow the big cash stuffers’ faintly hypnotic videos of them counting out crisp tenners and stashing them neatly into pastel folders: like all those videos of influencers sorting their cereals into labelled glass jars, it speaks to a need for control, order and a sort of reassuring homeliness, reminiscent of your granny keeping the week’s housekeeping in a biscuit tin. (Though, much like the biscuit tins, cash stuffing at home must be a boon for burglars.) As with the physical habit of reading newsprint, once confidently predicted to be dead by now, the longterm trajectory towards digital may be clear but letting go of something you can physically hold in your hand takes far longer than anyone thinks.

Banks would love a cashless society, of course: the less physical currency swilling round the system, the easier it is for them to shut down all their branches and go wholly digital, forcing reluctant customers to phone a call centre or more likely message a chatbot if they need help. So much cheaper than maintaining an anchoring, human-employing presence on high streets where there’s little else left but vape shops.

But let’s just say that the past few decades have not given me enormous confidence in the social worth of unquestioningly doing whatever banks want. Which is why I’ll be hanging on, for the foreseeable future, to an increasingly pointless handful of cash.