In Fact At War

Peter Hitchens writes:

Are we in fact at war with Russia? Has our ambassador to Moscow, Nigel Casey MVO CMG, been quietly warned to have his bags packed and his passport ready for a rapid departure? Will his beautiful residence be shuttered? Will the residence’s Union Jack – visible from the Kremlin across the Moscow river – be pulled down after almost 100 years of annoying whoever rules Russia?

How would we know? Nobody actually declares war any more. This country was the last nation to do so. In 1942, we declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Since then, such formalities have gone out of style. So it might in fact have happened.

The former head of the British secret police, MI5 (well, they’re not spies, so what else are they?), Eliza Manningham-Buller, seems to think so. She has mused publicly that Britain may already be at war with Russia.

She thinks this is because of the depth and intensity of cyber attacks, sabotage and other hostile activity orchestrated by Moscow against the UK. Fiona Hill, the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, also recently argued that Russia is at war with Britain.

Then there was the curious event at Gatwick airport on September 27 when the former MP George Galloway was detained by ‘counter-terror’ police as he returned, via Abu Dhabi, from a visit to Russia.

Now I have many times clashed with Mr Galloway on public platforms, especially on his readiness to defend gruesome regimes such as Cuba or the old Soviet Union. And he once made a personal attack on my late brother which was so ferociously rude that it would always prevent me from being on friendly terms with him.

But this still looks like the heavy hand of the state to me. If the police have any evidence against Mr Galloway, let them put it to the CPS and, if necessary, the courts.

That is what happens in free countries. What they did to Mr Galloway looks more like what they do to dissenters in, well, Russia. The powers revealed are quite frightening.

I was glad to see the former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg was equally disturbed, saying on Twitter: ‘It is important to defend free speech for people with whom one very strongly disagrees.’

Police said Mr Galloway was stopped under schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019.

This is another of those fishy catch-all laws Labour and Tory governments have slipped through Parliament on the pretext of fighting terror, since 2001. It allows an officer to stop, question, search and detain a person at a port to determine ‘if they have engaged in hostile activity’.

It gives me the creeps, alongside the similar tyrannical sanctioning of video-blogger Graham Phillips, another man I do not like, for holding the wrong opinions on the Ukraine war. Have we quietly crossed a line from peace to war?

I preferred the days when our leaders had to declare war and explain why they were doing this dangerous, hard, uncertain thing. I suspect they do not do so because they do not really know why.

I confess that I do not know why either, and I have tried to understand the reason for many years now. What are the air raid sirens like in your town these days?

And:

Apart from being against murder, I refuse to have any detailed opinions about the Manchester synagogue atrocity.

Police, and most media, remain brainlessly uninterested in the worldwide correlation between rampage attacks and growing use of marijuana. So they don’t investigate it.

If it is present here, we may never know. But others are waking up. In The Wall Street Journal last week, reporter Allysia Finley joined some dots. The recent Dallas shooter, Joshua Jahn, was a marijuana user.

‘He often posted on a Reddit forum for cannabis users. In April 2016, he pleaded guilty to trafficking marijuana. Next year, he moved to Washington state – one of the first to legalise cannabis for recreational use – to work on a pot farm.’ Likewise Robin Westman, who attacked a Minneapolis school church service, worked in a marijuana dispensary. Mass shooters Nikolas Cruz, Jared Lee Loughner and Devin Patrick Kelley were heavy marijuana users.

Yet, as Ms Finley bitingly pointed out, everyone is worrying about the supposed ill-effects of paracetamol. ‘That’s just as well for the Big Pot lobby.’

As Kathy Gyngell writes:

A study published in June that I have just come across provides unsurprising but nonetheless devastating and irrefutable evidence linking increased cannabis use with rising rates of breast and testicular cancers in young Americans.

The study covers the period between 2000 and 2019. The aim was clear: to test the hypothesis that the increasing incidence of testis and breast cancer in adolescent and young adult (AYA) Americans correlates with their increasing cannabis use. Its conclusions are stark: that North America has evidence which implicates cannabis as a potential etiologic factor contributing to the increasing incidence of breast carcinoma in young females and testis cancer in older adolescent and young adult males, and in most races and ethnicities. Temporal correlations suggest that a carcinogenic effect of cannabis is rapid, leading to cancer within a few years after cannabis exposure. You can read this extremely detailed and careful study here.

Its overall study design involved comparing breast and testis cancer incidence trends in jurisdictions that had and had not legalised cannabis use. In the US, both breast carcinoma in 20- to 34-year-old females and testis cancer in 15- to 39-year-old males had annual incidence rate increases that were highly correlated (Pearson’s r = 0.95) with the increase in the number of cannabis-legalising jurisdictions during the period 2000–2019. Both were significantly greater during the period 2000–2019 in the cannabis-legalising than non-legalising states. (My italics)

During the period 2000–2019, registries in cannabis-legalising versus non-legalising states documented a 26 per cent versus 17 per cent increase in breast carcinoma and 24 per cent versus 14 per cent increase in testis cancer.

In the same age groups, the study (predictably) found Canada had an even greater increase in both breast and testis cancer incidence than the US. A UNICEF study on the well-being of children had already confirmed that Canadian adolescents (aged 11 to 15) have the highest rate of cannabis use among the 29 advanced economies of the world. Of particular concern that legalising advocates would do well to note is the considerable percentage of the Canadian youth who are daily or weekly users – approximately 22 per cent of boys and 10 per cent of girls. And that amongst the older 16-19s the upward trend in use which increased to 43 per cent in 2023 compared with 36 per cent in 2018 follows the country’s nationwide legalisation of cannabis for over-18s in 2018.

This link between cannabis and these forms of cancer should come as no surprise. A report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) in February this year identified non-seminoma testis cancer as the cancer type most closely linked to cannabis use.

More shocking is that this relationship has been known about for years. In 2009, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle investigated the possibility of a link ‘after learning that the testes were one of the few organs in the body to contain receptors for the main psychoactive substance in the drug, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)’. The same scientists noted that there had also been a rise in testicular cancer cases that had ‘mirrored the rise in marijuana use since the 1950s’.

The 2025 study is of course of a different type and order of magnitude. It was certainly needed. Its findings warrant the utmost attention of our national and local public health authorities which were so zealous to promote child covid vaccination but have remained over the years so strangely silent about cannabis.

This valuable study should also serve as a warning to cannabis legalisers including Sir Sadiq Khan that their endorsement of the drug and indifference to the impact of legalisation on teen health is not just irresponsible but near-criminal. 

Postscript: There are other disturbing elements regarding the underlying mechanisms noted in the study’s findings. These, its authors state, ‘may involve genotoxic effects, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction caused by cannabis, leading to genomic instability’. For further elucidation of this a 2024 study published in Addiction Biology provides some key insights into cannabis-cancer pathobiology and genotoxicity. You can read this report here.

The Possibility of Healing

As Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally has already told the House of Lords that, if necessary, she herself would table an amendment to deny Third Reading to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and would force a vote on that.

As Archbishop-designate of Canterbury, she ought to make clear that she will certainly 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?

A Public Health Approach

Truly, Nigel Farage sets the agenda. He wants to legalise drugs across the board, Richard Tice wants to legalise at least cannabis, and Lee Anderson signed a select committee report in that direction in 2023. Are those now the views of Ann Widdecombe and Danny Kruger? They are avowedly the views of Zack Polanski, who demonstrates that he has never lived with drug dealers by imagining that, given the opportunity, they would register for VAT. So much for the Green Party.

There cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today. Unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. And now, the Green Party is behaving as if it were, in perhaps the only ideological turn even worse than straightforward fidelity to its reactionary roots and Philosophical Basis.

Instead, we need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that include the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. And Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools, as pro-drugs propaganda is routinely.

A bodybuilding enthusiast, if you doubt that Jihad Al-Shamie had some sort of substance abuse problem, then, again, you have never lived cheek by jowl with those who combined that interest with one in physical violence. “Jihad” strikes South Asian Muslims as an odd name, but Al-Shamie was an Arab, and specifically a Levantine. So yes, that was his birth name. And yes, his family has been both very outspoken in support of the Palestinians, and utterly appalled at his actions. As many members of Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were killed yesterday by the Police as were killed by Al-Shamie, while the Police injured another congregant, so synagogues might pause for thought as to whether they would be safer if they were more heavily policed.

Those availing themselves of their right to heckle David Lammy need to reflect on their own desire to deny to others the exercise of the right to peaceful protest. The deaths of two people, one of them at the hands of the State that wanted to issue us all with digital ID, are not a reason to refrain from protesting against a genocide that that same State was arming and for which it was flying nightly reconnaissance missions. If, as is extremely unlikely, there was a specific policy trigger to Al-Shamie’s actions, then it was most likely the proscription of Palestine Action by Yvette Cooper, who granted entry to every foreign speaker at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, and who, as a close ally of the former right-wing Labour Leadership of Durham County Council, kept me in prison twice as long as I had been assured in writing that I would be, until the very last date by which the judge had insisted from the Bench that I was to be released on the almost explicitly stated grounds that, guilty pleas or no guilty pleas, I was obviously innocent of those and of all other charges that had ever been laid against me.

Nor are those deaths a reason to refrain from protesting against the taking hostage of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Being famous for nothing except her political activism, Greta Thunberg may be many things, but she is not a virtue-signalling celebrity. Nor is Chris Smalls, one of the great trade unionists of the age. And nor is my comrade, Dr Yvonne Ridley. If Prevent, which is in any case based on a proven hoax, had not been bothering blind wheelchair-users and octogenarian clergywomen, then it might have noticed Al-Shamie. A great deal more plausibly, he might have been picked up if there really had been a war on drugs. Then again, if he truly was a Syrian Islamist, then he was a supporter of Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is otherwise Abu Mohammad al-Julani in the manner of “Tommy Robinson”, and who is seen here with a more than deserving target of Mancunian baracking and jeering.

That would be a repetition of successive British Governments’ transformation of Manchester into the world centre of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that went on to bomb Manchester Arena. Britain invaded Libya in order to install such people as its new regime. From the ensuing civil war, the Royal Navy rescued both Salman Abedi, who went on to carry out that bombing, killing himself in the process, and his brother Hashem, who went on to be a key figure in the planning of that bombing, and who in April of this year threw hot cooking oil over, and stabbed with makeshift knives, three Prison Officers at HMP Frankland, members of our community here in County Durham. Not least in view of the imprisonment of Nicolas Sarkozy, a reckoning is long overdue. It is not the only one.

Another example would be the employment and engagement by The Times and the BBC of Melanie Phillips, who knows perfectly well the fineness of the line, if there is one, between denying the existence of a people and denying that the individual people who so identified had the right to exist; in other words, to live. Her view that the lives of her own ethnic group were simply worth more should disqualify her from a public platform. A pity, because she is very sound about drugs. But so are other people, from whom we ought to hear instead.

Tendency Tacticians, Indeed

40 years ago today, the key fact about that speech by Neil Kinnock was that its central claim was a lie. Liverpool City Council did not sack anyone when it hired taxis to hand out redundancy notices “to its own workers”, as if it might have handed them out to anyone else. Those notices were an accounting device. No job was lost. By contrast, the privatised rail operators really have been known to hire taxis to take their engine drivers to the work, because the booking system had failed. Having reverted to chatterbox type in old age, what has Kinnock had to say about that? What has anyone? After all, Kinnock is directly to blame for the situation. After his “finest hour”, “the speech of his life” on the “insurmountable” need to win a General Election, he lost two of them, the first to a Prime Minister who had to be removed by her own party during the course of that Parliament or that party would no longer exist, and the second to John Major.

And whence came the great threat to Conservative Party’s very existence in 1990, such that even the mighty Maggie had to be sacrificed to save it? Many others tried, but the only organisation that ever succeeded in getting rid of Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Party. If it loved her in life as much as it loves in her death, then it had a very, very, very strange way of showing it. In her memoirs, the extremely bitter chapter on the Poll Tax makes it clear that she laboured under no delusion that she had been removed because of “Europe”. That was the cover story, but “Europe” had not been the reason why scores of Conservative MPs had been on course to lose their seats. The content, rather than the tone, of that policy did not change under her successor. By contrast, the Poll Tax was abolished completely, with a reversion in all but name to the previous system of domestic rates. The Conservatives then unexpectedly won the General Election of 1992, when Thatcher retired from the House of Commons. 

Thatcher made absolutely no bones about the fact that the campaign against the Poll Tax had been organised by the Militant Tendency, and that is perfectly true. When she said that her defenestration and the Poll Tax’s consequent abolition had been a capitulation to Militant, then she was wholly correct. The question is what level of cooperation there was, entirely bypassing the Labour front bench and the Opposition Whips’ Office, between Militant on one side and Conservative MPs on the other. Dave Nellist was always hugely popular across the House. Think on. And while thinking on, consider that had it been left to the Labour Party, then the Poll Tax would still be there. Faced with yet another increase in energy prices, the campaign of non-payment is an extremely high risk strategy, and I am neither encouraging anyone to join it, nor seeking to dissuade anyone from doing so. I am saying only that something like this has worked in the past. This may be the only possible route to bringing our utilities and other essential amenities back into our own public ownership rather than that of other people’s states, which overcharge here in order to keep prices low at home. No one can claim to be patriotic or conservative while supporting the ownership of key parts of our national infrastructure by foreign states as such.

Privatised utilities are a racket. The same product, via the same wires or pipes, cannot possibly cost different amounts from different companies. Never mind from the same company, but on different tariffs. The utilities are currently delivered by cartels of pretend-competitors, instead of being where they belong, in public ownership. Among the numerous benefits of a return to public ownership, there should be a National Grid for water, and the approval of the House of Commons should be required before energy or water prices, as well as many other things such as public transport fares, could be increased.

Last year, Thames Water had to secure the approval of its Class A bondholders, the likes of Silver Point and Elliott Partners, for an emergency loan of three billion pounds, despite having paid a dividend of £158 million only in July. Those bondholders then failed to secure a veto over whether that loan would be used to settle the hundreds of millions of pounds in regulatory fines that were due in the following year, which is very nearly up. If, as indubitably applies to the water companies, something would have to be nationalised rather than ever be allowed to go bust, then it does not belong in the private sector. Most of the world accepts that axiomatically. England is one of only two countries with privatised water. At the point of privatisation, the water companies were debt free, as befitted the monopoly suppliers of something that everyone had to have, and the raw material of which fell out of the sky for free. The money that those companies pay out in dividends would easily cover any infrastructure costs. 

Yet leakage is out of control, and raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers, our lakes and our seas. In 2022, Thames Water, typically of the sector, declared a billion pound profit in order to pay dividends, despite being £12 billion in debt. So we are all expected to bail it out, at whatever rate happened to be demanded by the shareholders, themselves largely foreign states as such. They should be told to forget it. Those shares are worth what anyone else would now pay for them. How much is that? More broadly, since dividends are supposed to reward investment, then they should be limited by the Statute Law to the Bank Rate plus risk on the capital provided by the original share issue, with customers awarded shares for all capital converted from their payments. In April, in a move perilously close to making itself useful, Ofwat began investigating the water companies for spending many times more on refurbishment projects than operators in comparable countries, leading to much higher bills.

Likewise, the standing charges on gas and electricity are 50 times the cost of maintaining the networks, and although they are supposed to protect the suppliers from going bankrupt, not only have they repeatedly failed to do so, but they have never come down when those suppliers have been eye-wateringly profitable. Just abolish them. We need to harness the power of the State to deliver an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and this country’s vast reserves of coal. Around those twin poles of nuclear power and of clean coal technology, let there be oil, gas, lithium, wind, solar, tidal, and everything else, bathing this country in heat and light. This is why we have a State. There is always climate change, and any approach to it must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. In Britain, we must be unequivocal about regretting the defeat of the miners in 1985. Is Kemi Badenoch? Is Nigel Farage? Is Ed Davey? Is Zack Polanski?

We sent our manufacturing to India and China, yet we have the gall to criticise their carbon emissions. And we expect to depend for energy on the Sun, the wind and the tides, precisely because it is beyond our power to stop them from doing what they do and we just have to live with it, yet we also expect to be able to stop climate change rather than finding ways of living with it. Let there be solar, wind and tidal energy in the mix. The base of that mix is nuclear and coal. The coal without which there can be no steel, and thus no wind turbines or tidal turbines, just as there could be no rigs, pipelines, or power stations. Britain stands on one thousand years’ worth of coal, and was the world leader in clean coal technology until the Miners’ Strike. Again, do not vote for anyone who will not say that the miners were right.

Fracking? There is no problem with any energy source in principle, but none of that shale gas has turned up yet, and if it is anywhere, then it is in heavily populated areas that could do without the earthquakes, the poisoned water, and all the rest of it. Any economic arrangement is a political choice, not a law of physics, and the “free” market cannot deal with climate change while defending and expanding our achievements. That is precisely why it is being promoted. But instead, we need the State, albeit a vastly more participatory and democratic State than has often existed. The energy sources to be preferred are those which provided high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs.

The Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Act has left Abellio East Midlands Limited with a contract that will not end until October 2030,  XC Trains Limited with a contract that will not end until 12 October 2031, and First Trenitalia West Coast Limited with a contract that will not end until 17 October 2032. Who knows who will be in government by then? Moreover, the rolling stock will remain in private hands, adding exorbitant rent to every ticket. Where is that money going? To whom? See also HS2, PPE, Test and Trace, the Bibby Stockholm, the Rwanda Scheme, the arms companies, and everything else that is very good at kicking back to politicians while employing retired top brass. Why have Michelle Mone and Doug Barrowman not been arrested? I do not agree with Unexplained Wealth Orders without a conviction, but they are the law, so where are the Orders against that pair? As with Peter Mandelson, all other members of the House of Lords should go on strike if Mone ever again set foot in the place. Mone, Barrowman and Mandelson are the characters that our present economic arrangements form as a feature and not as a bug.

Thanks to the all-of-the-above energy policy, let there be instead an all-of-the-above transport policy based around public transport free at the point of use, including publicly owned railways running on the electricity that public ownership would also supply to charging points in every neighbourhood and village. Astonishingly, and yet not, the fewest charging points for electric vehicles are in the coalfield areas. Also, never forget that, when we can catch them, buses carry far more passengers than trains do, but those passengers tend not to be politicians or the “opinion-forming” sort of journalists. And so on. Let a thousand flowers bloom. In a well-tended, well-watered garden.

Trying To Correct The Fault

I have had only positive experiences of the Police, as also of the Prison Service and of the Probation Service, which has signed me off with nothing but pleasure at having made my acquaintance. Of course, they all stated more or less openly, and in some cases frankly, that they did not believe a word of any allegation against me. In May, a judge said much the same thing from the Bench even after I had pleaded guilty.

To say the least, I am under no "safeguarding" restriction, after one of the most cordial meetings that I have ever had in my life, with someone who had come all the way to Lanchester on a Sunday for the purpose and who expressed delight at having met me "at last". I get that a lot. The line is not merely that the original allegation against me was disproved. It is that no such allegation was ever made. I told you so.

Yet while watching this Panorama, I was going to tweet that if you still wanted digital ID, then you deserved it, but we did not. Then they pulled the plug. Thus was the cake iced, with a cherry on top.

Stable?

A sometime member of Tony Blair's Cabinet is alleged to have said either, or possibly both, "David Lindsay is just a fact of life, you may as well complain about Elton John" or "David Lindsay is just a fact of life, you may as well complain about Rod Stewart". One of the lay great and good of this Diocese has "the David Lindsay Rule", according to which, "If you behave like royalty, eventually people will assume that you are and treat you as such." Those rank with the canon lawyer in these parts who pronounces that, "David Lindsay has the force of local custom."

Two well-connected Corbynites were unaware that I was at the urinal around the corner when one asked the other that if the monarchy were to be abolished, "What would you have instead? David Lindsay?" George Galloway once promised live on air to take a seat in the House of Lords if I did. A member of Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, on learning the origin of the word "grandee", opined that, "That sounds like something they would give to David Lindsay." Another offered me a peerage "when I'm Prime Minister" so that I could be Foreign Secretary because, "You're the international idea of an Englishman."

But I have never claimed to be English. My father was not English. My mother is not English. I have lived here for eleven twelfths of my life, but unlike two of my siblings, I was not born in England. That last distinguishes me from Suella Braverman, who was born in London, yet who contends that, "I am not English. I am a proud British Asian." Which other proud British Asians who were born in England are not English, according to Braverman? Which proud British Asians who were born in Scotland are not Scottish? Which proud British Asians who were born in Wales are not Welsh? Presumably all of them. Braverman was Home Secretary twice. Twice. In that capacity, she forwarded her work emails to her private account. Digital ID, anyone?

Rishi Sunak should join Claire Coutinho and Braverman's archenemy, Priti Patel, in demanding Braverman's removal from the Conservative Party. Would Nigel Farage take her, and lose Zia Yusuf? There would always be Ben Habib, who would no doubt be delighted at such drawing of attention to the fact that he had been born in Pakistan, where had lived until he was 14. If Advance UK would welcome a brown MP who trotted out the line about a stable and a horse, then its brown candidate for Prime Minister was not even born in the stable.

A Significant Factor

Counting chickens and all that, but hope springs eternal:

The pro-life charity Right To Life UK has welcomed the announcement that the “two-child benefit cap” is to be scrapped, as evidence suggests it has been a significant factor in many women’s decisions to have an abortion.

This evening, it was announced that Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is set to lift the two-child benefit limit in the November budget.

The two-child benefit cap was introduced in 2017, affecting households that had a third or subsequent child born on or after 6 April 2017, but it is likely that awareness of its introduction began to influence women’s decision to have abortions earlier in that year.

An analysis of official abortion statistics for England and Wales shows that between 2016 and 2021, the number of abortions had by women who had previously had two or more births resulting in a live or stillbirth (this includes the population of women affected by the two-child benefit cap) increased by 25.96%. At the same time, the number of abortions had by women who had previously had one or no births resulting in a live or stillbirth (this includes the population of women not affected by the two-child benefit cap) increased by only 9.89%.

This data shows there has been a disproportionately large increase in abortions among mothers with two or more other children over this period.

The results of a survey suggest that the two-child benefit cap was a significant factor in many of these mothers’ decisions to have an abortion.

The abortion provider BPAS surveyed 240 women with two or more children who had had an abortion between March and November 2020. Of these, 59% said they were aware of the two-child benefit cap prior to their abortion.

Of those in receipt of tax credits or universal credit, and therefore most likely to be affected by the two-child benefit cap, 57% “said that the policy was important in their decision-making around whether or not to continue the pregnancy”.

Among those women surveyed, one said “I did something I never imagined I would ever do… But at the back of my mind all I kept thinking is how would I have managed financially… I had to do this”.

Another said “[The two-child limit] was a big factor for me. My husband has lost his job so we are on a very tight budget and when we looked at our finances we realised we couldn’t afford to have another baby”.

Similarly, another woman said “If there was no two-child limit I would have kept the baby, but I couldn’t afford to feed and clothe it … I’ve really struggled to come to terms with [my decision]”.

Cabinet ministers support change

The two-child policy was introduced in 2017 and “prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for more than two children”.

The announcement of the scrapping of the two-child benefit limit came after cabinet ministers and Whitehall officials tasked with exploring ways to reduce child poverty reportedly recommended lifting the cap as the most effective method.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that the cost of removing the two-child limit to the taxpayer would be £3.4 billion. However, they say “this is equal to roughly 3% of the total working-age benefit budget; it is also approximately the same cost as freezing fuel duties for the next parliament, or cutting the basic rate of income tax by half a penny”.

According to The End Child Poverty Coalition, the loss of benefits as a result of the two-child benefit cap is worth £3,514 per child impacted in 2025/26. Government data shows that in April 2025, 469,780 Universal Credit households were affected by the two-child limit policy.

Alisdair Hungerford-Morgan, Chief Executive Officer of the charity, Right To Life UK, said “We welcome the announcement from the Government that it will be scrapping the two-child benefit cap. This is a significant step in the right direction in terms of improving support for pregnant women.”

“When women discover they are pregnant, they should be met with the practical help and support they need to continue their pregnancy, not told that they will receive less financial support for their next child than for their previous children.”

“The two-child benefit cap was introduced in 2017, affecting households that had a third or subsequent child born on or after 6 April 2017, but news of its introduction likely began to influence women’s decision to have abortions earlier in that year.”

“Official data from the Department of Health and Social Care shows there has been a disproportionately large increase in abortions among women with two or more previous children compared to women who had one or no children between 2017 and 2021.”

“The results of a survey of women with two or more children who had had an abortion suggest that the two-child benefit cap was a significant factor in many of these women’s decisions to have an abortion.”

“Of those in receipt of tax credits or universal credit, and therefore most likely to be affected by the two-child benefit cap, 57% ‘said that the policy was important in their decision-making around whether or not to continue the pregnancy’.”