Bench Marks

Empowered to lock you up for 18 months with no automatic right of appeal to the Crown Court, what do you think will be the class and ethnic profile of these 18-year-old magistrates?

I was born in September, so I was 18 for all but the first couple of weeks of the Upper Sixth. The school leaving age is now 18, so almost everyone, having started the course, is going to see it through. How employable would anyone be who had not done that? We are talking about the practically unchallengeable verdicts and sentences of white, upper-middle-class schoolchildren.

Under Indictment

From Donald Trump's own mouth, this is about the oil, and he and his cronies will be taking control of Venezuela. If this stood, then in 100 years' time, what were now the world's largest proven oil reserves, as well as vast reserves of gas, will be owned by Trump's descendants, backed up by the United States military in the way that the British Army and the Royal Navy gave effectively unlimited guarantees to outfits such as the East India Company.

Venezuela's oil and gas exports have mostly been to China, whose Special Envoy, Qiu Xiaoqi, met Nicolás Maduro hours before he was abducted, and may or may not have left Caracas. Israel has recognised Somaliland as somewhere to which deport the Palestinians, but also to block Chinese access to the Red Sea. What, then, of the declaration of "the State of South Arabia" in South Yemen by the UAE, which is a member of BRICS? Whither the Djibouti that hosts the Chinese Army's first overseas base, and which has agreed to host a Chinese spaceport? Whither the vast Somali Regional State of the Ethiopia that joined BRICS at the same time as the UAE? And whither the comparably enormous North Eastern Province of Kenya?

You need not suggest that some of us would have supported this incursion if Joe Biden had made it. Your claim that we must love this, that or the other feature of the existing regime is exactly what you said about each and every one of these wars, but we have been right about all of them. Every single one of them has made a very bad situation even worse, exactly as we predicted, and we are now saying the same thing both about Venezuela and about Iran.

And speaking of making a bad situation worse, both Laurence Fox, perhaps half in jest or perhaps not, and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon of the Epstein Files, repeatedly and in deadly earnest, have called on Trump to effect regime change in Britain, where there is a huge and permanent American military presence. That may not happen, but something will. Amusing though it is that Fox or Yaxley-Lennon should present himself as a scourge of the cocaine trade, Enoch Powell told Margaret Thatcher that he would have fought for Britain even if it had had a Communist Government. How far the Right has fallen.

It Has All Gone Caracas

From 13 March 1979, Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch of a People's Revolutionary Government of her Marxist-Leninist Ministers. On 25 March, it effectively suspended the 1974 Constitution by proclaiming the People's Laws, of which People's Law Number 3 declared, "The Head of State shall remain Her Majesty the Queen and her representative in this country shall continue to be the Governor-General who shall perform such functions as the People's Revolutionary Government may from time to time advise."

Then on 25 October 1983, the invasion of Grenada put the Queen at war with herself, as her father had once been. On 30 October, Margaret Thatcher told the BBC World Service that, "We in the Western democracies use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into other people’s countries, independent sovereign territories. If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people, there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world."

Whatever happened to Juan Guaidó? Was he not supposed to have been the "rightful" President of Venezuela? Oh, well, María Corina Machado has lost an election more recently, if only by proxy, so I suppose that it must be her now. She was given the Nobel Peace Prize for wanting to privatise PDVSA, the oil and gas company. To that end, Donald Trump put a $50 million price on the head of President Nicolás Maduro, and with Pete Hegseth launched a campaign of mass murder. Machado warmly welcomed those moves, openly coordinating with Trump towards her avowedly detailed plan for the first 100 hours after regime change. If the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to a dissident in Saudi Arabia or in North Korea, then would that person have made it to Oslo, even if too late for the ceremony? Yet Machado did. What a fearsome despot Maduro clearly was.

The stated grounds for this invasion are not even supposed to be taken seriously. Everyone knows that the real reason is to take control of the world's largest proven oil reserves and of vast reserves of gas. This is not about drugs. There is no known direct trade route in cocaine from Venezuela to the United States, where in any case the bigger problem is fentanyl. The cocaine trade through the Caribbean is mostly to supply the much more lucrative market in Europe. Prince Harry's visa has never been revoked. Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández. And Machado is a legaliser who, let the MAGA heartland understand, is also in favour of abortion. She is a cookie-cutter liberal Rightist who accordingly echoes Shabana Mahmood in naming Thatcher as her political heroine, presumably with the above caveat. She would be an Establishment Democrat in the United States, or a bog standard Labour MP in Britain. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, only ever arising by their joint enterprise.

Firmly in that tradition, Machado has backed the genocide of Gaza to the hilt, she has called Trump a "visionary", she has invited both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to invade Venezuela in order to install her as Trump has now done, and she joined Javier Milei and Kevin Roberts in crossing the Atlantic to address last February's Make Europe Great Again rally in Madrid, alongside Viktor Orbán, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Matteo Salvini, Andrej Babiš, Martin Helme, Krzysztof Bosak, and the host, Santiago Abascal. Organised by Patriots.eu, that rally announced that formation's first associate member. Likud. Of course. Ties are also strengthening with the BJP. Of course. Just do not mention the burning churches from Bethlehem to Bishnupur. So much for the anti-Fascism of our own dear centrists, who of course also wanted to keep us subject to the legislative will of many of these people, a condition to which they yearn to return us.

So much for the FIFA Peace Prize. So much for America First, a mantle that could not be claimed by any supporter of this adventure when seeking the Presidency of the United States. Laugh out of the room anyone who wondered "What if Russia did this in Ukraine?" or "What if China did this in Taiwan?" but who had supported the intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. And now as then, so much for wanting to stop the boats, whether from Venezuela or from Iran, where the Blairites and the Yaxley-Lennonists alike, both subcultures awash with cocaine, want to restore a monarchy while wanting to abolish the British one. To the Blairites, at least, monarchy is backward. So it must be what is best for Iranians. Think on.

Javid Shah?

The Department for Business and Trade still publishes advice on how to trade with Iran and do business there. Should the regime fall, then what might realistically replace it? Not ideally. Realistically. The longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim was to install the weirdest political cult in the world, which had been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population was under 30 years of age. The Americans relocated that People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) to Albania between 2013 and 2016, not without local resistance, although it also maintains a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.

Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden’s, Bush’s and Blair’s Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn. Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But these people really did and do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet they were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.

Now, though, affections seem to have been transferred to the extremely pro-Israeli, and overtly Israeli-backed, partisans of Reza Pahlavi, hitherto a ridiculous fantasist supported by almost no one else in the world apart from a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. But the cause of Henry Tudor was ridiculous once. We now know that the Whig magnates were in constant contact with the Jacobite court in exile, just in case. Bourbon and Bonaparte Restorations were romantic fantasies until they happened. People scoffed at the Eastern European governments in exile in London until they were installed in their own capitals. Why, the overthrown Tsar of Bulgaria even came back as Prime Minister. And here we are.

Throughout this century, the Israeli flag has been conspicuous at Far Right events the world over, and those in support of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon have also featured most or all of the Iranian monarchist flags in Britain outside specialist museums of one or more of Persiana, royalty and vexillology. Israel now wants the Pahlavis, so the Americans will presumably jump to it, and Donald Trump would be glad to do so, recognising kindred spirits. Half the American electorate would now vote for Trump if he were dead, and will vote for his dynastic successors at every opportunity. At last, the United States has a conservative movement and party in the purest Old World sense, straightforwardly loyal to rule by a particular House. Yet it is not, as had once seemed likely, the Bourbonesque Bushes, but America’s Bonapartes. Or Pahlavis. Like Napoleon, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi even crowned himself. Your move, Donald.

The Anglo-Saxon populist and Far Rights have finally found a monarchy that they liked. They hate the King as a second generation Green and as an Islamic fellow-traveller, if not in fact a Muslim, while their occasional allies, Loyalist rather than Royalist as befitted the heirs of the Roundheads and of the Covenanters, consider the King pretty much deposed for having prayed with the Pope. The populists, at least, want Alberta, which would almost certainly be joined by Saskatchewan, to secede from Canada either as a satellite republic of the United States, or as integral part of it. For that matter, if Bougainville did indeed secede from the King’s Realm of Papua New Guinea to pursue alignment with the King’s Realm of the Solomon Islands, then would it nevertheless do so as the republic that it had tried to become in 1975?

But I digress. The hardest British republicanism that I have ever encountered has always been among the Blairites. Such are the centrists who, agreeing with the populist Right in principle as they usually do, are also cheering on the protestors in Iran, even calling, as is their wont, for military intervention. They think that monarchy is backward, as any American or Israeli politician or commentator does axiomatically. And like those, they think that Iranians want and need a monarchy, albeit one that turned 100 only last month and which reigned for all of 54 years in the vast sweep of Persian history. Remember, though, that we who have doubts are the racists.

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.

To Control The Parameters

Dan Hitchens writes:

Tell me if this sounds like scaremongering. According to one Westminster insider, if the assisted-suicide bill passes, people might receive lethal drugs simply because their care costs are too expensive. The same source argues that feeling like a burden could be seen as a ‘legitimate’ reason for an assisted death. Others are even blunter: one peer believes someone might be assisted to die because of their difficult circumstances – ‘for example, because you are poor’. Or because you don’t want to get – to put it crudely – ‘worse and worse and more disabled’.

Who is issuing these melodramatic warnings? The first two remarks come from the Commons sponsor of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, Kim Leadbeater. The other two are from its Lords sponsor, Lord Falconer. It’s nice, in a way, to have some honesty about what this era-defining legislation would mean if it is approved by the House of Lords. To begin with, the reform was sold as a precisely targeted option for a tiny number of people beyond the help of palliative care: one MP predicted it would apply to ‘40 patients a year’. Now, anyone can see that it is a societal sea change, and the bill’s proponents scarcely try to deny its more unsettling implications. Every time they speak, the assisted-suicide campaign loses a little more of its shine.

And it has been a very shiny campaign, endlessly polished up by a small industry of lobbyists and PR people, and handled ever so gently (with a couple of distinguished exceptions) by a broadcast media that have struggled to grasp the – not especially complicated – issues. But you can’t get away with that forever.

In parliament, Leadbeater and Falconer have repeatedly struggled to defend their position, often descending into incoherence – as when Leadbeater argued that doctors should be able to raise assisted suicide with children, as this ‘creates safeguards’. At other moments, they have relied on outright fabrication, misrepresenting the nature of assisted suicide where it has been legalised. At the same time, a long list of organisations has denounced the bill as amateurish and dangerous. It’s bad law, say Liberty and the specialist Lords committees on legislation. It relies on decision-making mechanisms that are not in line with ‘good clinical or professional practice’, says the Royal College of Physicians. The bill’s indifference to the causes of suffering borders on ‘therapeutic nihilism’, says the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

The nightmare scenarios come easily to mind. Given the astronomical cost of care, can I justify draining my family’s savings when the speedy alternative is there for the asking? Even leaving money out of it, the feeling of being a burden is ubiquitous among those ill enough to qualify for an assisted death. By establishing a National Suicide Service, the legislation drags into its scope all kinds of people whose lives are already at risk. Homicide experts warn that the bill could be ‘the worst thing, potentially, we have ever done to domestic-abuse victims’. Eating-disorder charities say the bill puts their clients at ‘grave risk’. The bill is ‘very dangerous’, says the government’s adviser on suicide prevention.

Yes, under the bill, you need a six-month prognosis, but half of these are incorrect, and a fifth of people who receive one are still around three years later. You need to have ‘mental capacity’, but this is an extremely low threshold – a severely depressed person might pass a capacity test with flying colours – and Britain’s biggest mental-health charity, MIND, says it’s ‘really clear the safeguards… are not adequate’.

If the bill becomes law, then, we should imagine, not a few telegenic campaigners being given – to take Esther Rantzen’s example – ‘the chance to die in my favourite place, my New Forest cottage’, but a significant proportion of the most vulnerable people in the country being funnelled towards… well, towards what exactly? The scheme has been kept deliberately vague, but it looks set to involve all the clumsiness of the big state and all the ruthlessness of the private sector. The NHS, whose founding principles would literally be redefined to include assisted suicide, will provide the service, perhaps in the ‘hallways, offices and cupboards’ where one in five A&E patients is now treated.

At the same time, it seems likely to be a contract offered to the least squeamish health provider out there, at a profit margin ‘impossible’ to predict, according to care minister Stephen Kinnock. Whoever gets the contract, it seems unlikely that they will have a financial incentive to ensure every safeguard is followed to the letter. The experience of other jurisdictions is that the monitoring is desultory, the supposedly rigid requirements are ignored or abolished, and after a while dubious deaths are greeted with a shrug. One New Zealand doctor, after recounting some disturbing cases from her country, told me: ‘These are not surprises to all of us who campaigned against it. There’s no surprises in any of these consequences.’

Or as Sir John Chilcot observed in his inquiry into the Iraq disaster: ‘We do not agree that hindsight is required.’ As with Iraq, blindingly obvious risks are being downplayed because the man at the top has decided the end goal. ‘Keir wanted it to happen’, one aide explained to The Guardian last year. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

It also appears, thanks to a sensational recent leak, that Starmer wanted to pretend otherwise. A 2023 strategy document recommended a private members’ bill – the most slapdash means of lawmaking – as a way of providing ‘political cover’ for the Labour Party, while allowing the government to ‘control the parameters of legislation carefully through working with advocacy groups and government civil servants to draft the legislation’.

Starmer has thus avoided accepting responsibility, as has everybody else. MPs voted the bill through on the promise the Lords would fix it. Now pro-assisted-suicide Lords are trying to intimidate their colleagues into waving the bill through, since it passed the Commons, after all.

At least Tony Blair put himself front and centre and accepted the buck stopped with him for the Iraq decision. It would be fitting, for our own age of institutional failure, if the biggest political blunder of a generation was forced through without anyone admitting they were responsible, and if it came into effect only after its originator has retired from politics into a second career of international NGOs and corporate boards.

Trapped In An Unjust System

The Independent editorialises:

The Independent has long campaigned for justice for the prisoners who are still serving the indefinite sentences that were abolished 14 years ago. Imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences were scrapped because they were an affront to the basic principles of justice – and yet those offenders serving them at the time continued to do so.

There are still 2,400 of them, given no release date, imprisoned until they can satisfy the Parole Board that it is safe to release them, and faced with a return to prison if they break the often stringent conditions imposed on them.

Governments of both parties have refused demands by prisoners’ families, retired judges including John Thomas, the former lord chief justice of England, and The Independent for IPP prisoners to be resentenced and treated in the same way as other offenders.

Their situation is bad enough, and the toll on their mental health is severe, but, for the 233 of them transferred to hospital for mental health treatment, a further injustice awaits. In a twist resembling Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, as soon as they get better they are returned to prison, where they continue to serve their indefinite sentence – the very condition that contributed to their mental health crisis in the first place.

We understand that this is not a cheerful note on which to usher in the new year, but we hope that readers, including ministers, will read our reporting of some of the cases in which offenders are trapped by this modern-day catch-22.

Thomas White, for example, now aged 42, was handed an IPP sentence for stealing a mobile phone. After 13 years, during which time he set fire to himself and smashed his face on the floor, he was transferred to hospital. He has told his sister “it’s all a lie” after learning that he will be returned to prison – without a release date – as soon as his mental health stabilises.

The Independent appreciates that the Parole Board has to err on the side of caution when considering applications for release. It does not want to be blamed for crimes committed by former IPP prisoners, many of them psychologically damaged, especially when the original intention of the legislation was to provide additional protection for the public from particularly dangerous criminals. However, more IPP sentences were imposed than was expected, and they were often handed down for relatively minor offences. Some of the worst cases are of people who have now been imprisoned for 20 years for the original offence of stealing a phone or a laptop.

It is not up to the Parole Board to change the system. That is the responsibility of ministers, including the prime minister, the justice secretary, and James Timpson, the prisons minister at the Ministry of Justice.

Lord Timpson said last month: “We cannot take any steps that would put victims or the public at risk.” But it is impossible to eliminate risk altogether, and the harm done by this injustice now greatly outweighs the danger to the public.

Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller described absurd moral universes of totalitarianism and war that seem a long way from Britain in 2026. Yet there are people in this country, this year, who are trapped in an unjust system as extreme as any in fiction.

Let us hope that 2026 is the year that Sir Keir Starmer, David Lammy and Lord Timpson find the courage to end this Kafkaesque stain on Britain’s justice system.