Safeguard This

Dame Sarah Mullally continues to protest that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill merely has “insufficient safeguards”. She might have chosen her words more carefully. Sauce for the gander is always delicious, and within these Twelve Days it is also very much in season.

While the maintenance of liberal hegemony by the Boomer gynocracy always requires the destruction of those intergenerational networks of male friendship which are fundamental to dissent from it, the replacement of the far from blameless Justin Welby with Dame Sarah may turn out to be one of the last such coups, and in any case it has had nothing on the felling of such giants as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Alex Salmond, as well as the exiling of George Galloway, and the repeated attempts to bring down Nigel Farage and Donald Trump.

Like countless others, I myself have been collateral damage in a small such coup. But each and every member of the Board of the Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency, each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Committee, and each and every member of the Hexham and Newcastle Diocesan Safeguarding Team, now recognises that I am factually and morally innocent of any and all criminal charges that have ever been brought against me. Each and every Member of Parliament for the area covered by Durham County Council always has, as has each and every member of Durham County Council, each and every member of Lanchester Parish Council, and each and every bishop, priest and deacon of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. The plates have shifted.

Still, further to the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth, Lord Falconer has given the House of Lords the logically inescapable assurance that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to assisted suicide. Dame Sarah had already said that she might table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Assisted Suicide Bill, and might force a vote on that. She ought now to do so. All of the Lords Spiritual should then take that opportunity to defeat this Bill. Or why are they there? And why should the rest of us maintain any formal relations with the Church of England as such? The world has changed. Happy New Year.