Call It Evil

Kristen Ghodsee is starting to get there, and we should assist everyone on the same road gently but firmly, as is indeed possible:

Follow the news out of Washington for a week, and the usual vocabulary of political criticism starts to feel insufficient. Words like “authoritarian” and “illiberal” describe styles of governance. They say much less about what it is like to watch an administration indulge shameless sadism, pursuing cruelty for its own apparent enjoyment. The word that fits better is one many on the Left have trained ourselves not to use: “evil.”

Our reluctance is not without reason. Evil calls to mind a Sunday school admonition or George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” a phrase that helped sell the immoral and disastrous war on terror. A long materialist tradition treats moral ideas as downstream of economic realities and cautions against idealism that overly concerns itself with the questions of values and culture. Evil conjures childish boogeymen and unhelpful abstractions, not the social structures we want to seriously analyze.

At the same time, the Left’s case for decent wages, housing, health care, and a world beyond class divisions is indisputably a moral case — whatever our theory says about the mechanics at play. And we don’t try to hide this: indeed, our movements often succeed best when we combine people’s self-interest with their sense of justice, neglecting neither.

On some level, we know that we can’t do without the language of good. A new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era by philosopher Susan Neiman, argues that we can’t do without the language of evil either, and that rejecting it has left us disarmed. Neiman contends that the Left has surrendered moral vocabulary to fundamentalists and in doing so has let a bleak theory of human nature pass for plain realism. She traces that theory to distorted readings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and to a deliberate, well-funded effort by American business to spread it.

Neiman directed the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, from 2000 until earlier this year and has written about evil for decades, most notably in Evil in Modern Thought. Her other books include Learning from the Germans and Left Is Not Woke. In this interview, Neiman spoke with Kristen Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Everyday Utopia, and a frequent contributor to Jacobin.

Ghodsee and Neiman discussed why the Left needs moral language, and the perils of ceding it entirely to the people most likely to use it toward immoral ends. They also discussed where Neiman parts ways with many Marxists, how Germany’s official campaign against antisemitism became a crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights, and the problems of essentializing any experience, including that of class.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: The title of your book enjoins us to use explicitly moral language to describe politics in the Trump era. You suggest that many on the Left feel uncomfortable using words like “good” or “evil” or “truth” because of their religious connotations. Why is the language of morality necessary to the Left, especially in this political moment? Susan Neiman: It’s common to condemn the Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law. We forget that the rule of law only works if people commit to upholding it even if a legal decision goes against their self-interest — and that’s a moral commitment. James Madison knew that even the best constitution was no protection without “virtue in the people.” The Founding Fathers were less averse to moral concepts than we have become, especially on the liberal left.

Let’s dispense with a widespread misunderstanding that good and evil are religious ideas. Moral intuitions precede theology. Religion is a response to the problem of evil, though I don’t think it’s a very successful one. Every culture recognizes evil, whatever their religious practices. You could call it “awareness of injustice.” That’s something that children, most primates, and according to one study, even rats display.

My favorite argument that morality precedes religion comes from the Bible itself, when Abraham urges God not to punish the innocent with the guilty — not to accept collateral damage. That suggests that even should you have a direct line to the Lord himself, he isn’t the source of your moral judgment

It’s true that religious believers are more comfortable using moral concepts, and it’s equally true that fundamentalists abuse them. But why should we allow the most powerful tools in our language to be appropriated by those who are least able to use them responsibly? People are moved by those concepts, which appeal to deep intuitions and emotions; better to learn to analyze evil than deny what we can see every day. If the cold-blooded murder of fishermen, or schoolgirls, or peacefully protesting demonstrators isn’t evil, what is? Words like “authoritarian” are simply too weak to do it justice.

I don’t think Zohran Mamdani uses the word “evil,” but his campaign was premised on moral values, and its success cannot be reduced to affordability. He leaned hard on questions of justice, in particular the injustice that most people who keep New York City running cannot afford to live there. And his steadfast condemnation of the genocide in Gaza — which initially seemed a huge liability — is a great source of his popularity. We’re so used to politicians abandoning their principles when it suits them that Mamdani’s display of integrity became a source of credibility, creating hope he won’t sell out on other issues. We should also remember that the most successful (albeit only partially so) leftist movement in US history was the civil rights movement, which roused millions of people through a clear moral message

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Although written in clear and accessible prose, this short book grapples with complex philosophical issues. It forces readers to confront some of the most vexing theoretical issues of leftist politics over the last two centuries. Haunting this debate are the specters of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel and the perennial tension between idealism and materialism.

For you, Marxism is far too wedded to the idea that the economic relations of production determine our superstructural concepts of good, evil, justice, love, and so on. Why should the Left reclaim the power of ideas in its pursuit of progressive change?

Susan Neiman: Most of my work has been devoted to making complex philosophical issues accessible to general audiences, since I believe philosophical assumptions are a greater part of our lives than we recognize. Take statements like “Be realistic” or “That’s just human nature.” As used in ordinary language, they imply a web of assumptions about the world we take for granted because we haven’t reflected on them. Materialism is one of the most basic.

Like anyone who learned from Karl Marx, I’ve spent hours in arguments about differences between materialism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism, whether there are major differences between the early and late Marx, and how to get around the fact that his nineteenth-century predictions did not hold up. A long seminar wouldn’t do those arguments justice, much less a short interview.

Bertolt Brecht’s dictum “First comes the grub, and then come the morals” is chronologically correct. When people are hungry or homeless, they don’t have much energy to reflect on morality. Once their stomachs stop rumbling, they begin to think about justice. Marxism’s biggest paradox is that it inspires people through demands for justice — i.e., moral claims — while theoretically undermining the basis of that inspiration. Ideas move people in powerful ways — often rather bad ones, as nationalism today shows.

I admire the misread and forgotten Eduard Bernstein, a founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Although he was Friedrich Engels’s literary executor, he rejected dialectical materialism, which he thought was an insult to workers, who were just as capable of being moved by ideals as anyone else. He was also an early feminist and supporter of gay rights. Bernstein wrote that “social democracy needs Kant, who shows that materialism is the most deceptive ideology, and that contempt for ideals, the elevation of material facts to omnipotent powers is simply deceptive.”

The Enlightenment is now so dismissed that it’s often forgotten that Marxism was once seen as the culmination of Enlightenment thought — both by its defenders in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, for example, and by its Nazi opponents. On that view, Marx’s contribution was to insist that the ideals of the Enlightenment demand material realization — not that those ideals were reducible to material interests. It’s a subtle but important difference.

Call It Evil argues that we’ve been conditioned to accept materialism as a fact, not an ideology. The idea that moral concepts are just superstructure is supported by crass misreadings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, reinforced by Michel Foucault. I show how these misreadings of Smith and Darwin created a sense of inevitability you can read in any newspaper, without ever asking whether they are debatable philosophical assertions. Since the end of the Cold War, the sense of inevitability has become stronger.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Most secular people today imagine evil as something diabolical, but Hannah Arendt talked about the “banality” of evil. You also wrote a groundbreaking book, Evil in Modern Thought, exploring the concept’s dimensions. Many Marxists would argue that our social conception of “evil” emerges from the base of our material experience of the world, but you suggest that there is a kind of Platonic form of pure evil that exists independently of our social realities. That’s why we know it when we see it and why it’s such a powerful concept.

Can you talk about your use of this word? What is the rhetorical power of “evil,” for instance, over “awful”?

Susan Neiman: You can measure the rhetorical power of “evil” by the number of people — mostly on the Left — who object to it. It’s striking how many point out that it’s a dangerous term that can be abused, as if that had never occurred to anyone who’s thought about the subject. “Awful” can apply to a filthy apartment or a bad boyfriend. If it’s all you have to say about a genocide, you have failed to grasp what genocide is.

Marx’s contribution was to insist that the ideals of the Enlightenment demand material realization — not that those ideals were reducible to material interests. It’s a subtle but important difference.

I’m not a Platonist, and I don’t believe that evil exists independently of social realities. Until the mid-eighteenth century, most people did. I do believe that it’s something we recognize and can learn to recognize better.

Arendt’s work was crucial in showing us that the most dangerous forms of evil emerge not from sadism or cruelty but from our tendency to go along with systemic structures around us and not rock any boats that might disturb our lives. That she turned out to be wrong about the man Adolf Eichmann, as was proven by tape recordings that were unknown in 1963, doesn’t undermine the validity of her claims. Genocide cannot be committed by a few consciously evil people alone. It requires millions who accept them.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: As I read your book, I kept thinking about David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and how many contemporary debates about capitalism and socialism lean heavily on different conceptions of “human nature.” You show how American conservatives used their money and influence to fund the creation of think tanks and university programs in neoliberal economics and evolutionary psychology to protect their economic interests. Through their foundations and societies, they propped up men like Milton Friedman who asserted that all societies are based on greed and self-interest.

Do you think that conservatives are somehow more effective at weaponizing ideas than progressives, and if so, why? But also, given that these ideas were promoted by those most likely to financially gain from them, isn’t this a textbook case of the economic base determining the superstructure?

Susan Neiman: I found Graeber and Wengrow’s book liberating, though I wish they’d given Jean-Jacques Rousseau more credit. His argument should be music to their ears: we have no access whatsoever to the deeds, much less the thoughts and drives, of our prehistoric ancestors, so we project conceptions of human nature onto the past that suit our political projects. The Dawn of Everything was important for that argument; another related book is Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory. You cannot defend socialism without questioning the conception of human nature that capitalist ideology has taught us to take for granted. Everyone reading these words has surely encountered people who insist that socialism is nice in theory, but human nature ensures that it can’t work in practice.

When I began work on this book, I assumed that the various ways this ideology is blasted at us were just unfortunate coincidences; everything else seemed too conspiratorial. Looking further, particularly at Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s excellent The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, I realized how deliberate the mythmaking has been.

Certainly, economic interests can play a huge role in shaping and spreading ideologies. I’m just denying that they always determine them. And you’re right that conservatives are better at promoting ideas than leftists; a classic of mid-twentieth-century conservatism was called Ideas Have Consequences. Once leftists acknowledge that they do, we’ll get better at defending them.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Your wonderful chapter on propaganda starts with an anecdote about moving to Berlin in 1982 and listening to East and West German news broadcasts. What did these broadcasts teach you? Why do you think Americans are so particularly bad at recognizing propaganda? And why do you think propaganda erodes our capacity for moral judgment?

Susan Neiman: Those broadcasts were great background for reading Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, published a few years later. It’s not that I suddenly believed everything the East Germans broadcast, but I understood how context and framing, even without deliberate lying, could create completely different takes on reality.

The experience also inoculated me against a later lie, namely that the West Germans did a better job of dealing with the Nazi past than the East Germans. It’s a West German myth now accepted in much of the world. Few West Germans were spreading that myth in the 1980s, since anyone with basic knowledge of German could tell it was the East, at the time, that was reckoning with the Nazis — incompletely, but far more than the West, which wanted to sweep that history under the carpet. That’s a useful lesson for thinking about Cold War America as well.

Americans are bad at recognizing propaganda because our biggest piece of propaganda is that we have none. Possibly a silver lining of Trump’s attack on the media, and the media’s complicity with it, is that Americans will better recognize how worldviews can be shaped by political interest. I fear, however, that his weaponization of the phrase “fake news” leads people in a different, nihilistic direction: there is no news that isn’t manipulated to maintain power.

I don’t think we can have real moral judgment without considering competing views. We might accidentally behave morally, but it isn’t judgment if it isn’t reflective, and that means not taking your own morality for granted. It’s much easier to reflect if you are confronted with different moral and political assumptions. Too few Americans have opportunities to do that.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: In your chapter on why Gaza matters, you walk back some of the claims you made in your previous book, Learning from the Germans. What happened in Germany after October 7, 2023, that made you see things differently?

Susan Neiman: The problems started before October 7; they came to a head in 2019, when the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party proposed a parliamentary resolution banning Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). It was a brilliant and sinister form of — can I call it Jew-washing? By embracing the government of Israel, the AfD hoped to answer charges of neofascism. How could it be fascist if it unconditionally supports the State of Israel? It also advances one of its main goals, which is keeping Muslim immigrants out of Germany.

No one challenged it, because the other parties were afraid to be seen as less philosemitic than the AfD, so they immediately passed a similar resolution, which resulted in canceling artists, writers, journalists, and others who can be described as “close to BDS,” i.e., anyone who supports Palestinian rights. And many of us are Jewish.

This created the biggest political/cultural debate of the last six years, which took place in television, radio, in print, and in parliaments. Learning from the Germans had argued that Germany’s historical reckoning was flawed, but it did better than any other country in facing the evils of its past history. The recent debates exposed the depth of those flaws in ways that forced me to revise my views. German reckoning suggests that as long as one is nice to Jews, any Jews, one has done one’s duty in opposing Nazism. This is an extremely simplistic understanding of fascism, ignoring the real lesson of Nuremberg: the importance of upholding human rights, and that they apply to all humans — including Palestinians.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: You also write about how the far right has weaponized antisemitism, not only Trump in his attacks on US universities but also Alternative for Germany, which recently won almost 44 percent of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. What does what you term “philosemitic McCarthyism” look like in practice?

Susan Neiman: The AfD provides a perfect example, but it is not alone. In 2022, I cohosted a conference in Berlin, Hijacking Memory, examining the weaponization of antisemitism among right-wing parties in seventeen countries. Predictably, the press accused us of antisemitism. The reception illustrated the problem we were analyzing!

People have been fired from jobs and had projects, exhibits, or appearances canceled. Those hardest hit are Muslims and people of color who support them. Americans will see parallels in the second Trump administration. What’s particularly infuriating for leftist Jews like me is this: Even if they don’t give a damn about Palestinians, why in the world do they think these kinds of repression protect Jews? On the contrary: targeting other groups, allegedly to protect us, only increases antisemitism. If I were paranoid, I’d suspect a conspiracy.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: In your chapter on woke identity politics, you warn that leftists should not replace racial essentialism with class essentialism. While social classes are obviously fluid and we all have multiple allegiances, don’t you think there is a profound difference between those of us who must work for a living versus those who can live off the dividends and capital gains generated by their (often-inherited) wealth? There is a real bifurcation between the owners of capital (and their heirs) and the rest of the population who must sell their time, labor, or attention to survive, the so-called 99 percent. How can any universalism encompass the billionaires?

Susan Neiman: I agree with Mamdani that there’s no good reason for billionaires to exist. Apart from die-hard ascetics, most of us who work for a living can imagine a luxury or two we wish we could afford. But it’s impossible for anyone to buy a billion dollars’ worth of treats; the point of making that much money is to exercise political power, as billionaires are doing with increasing shamelessness. Particularly given how much of their wealth depends on other people’s labor, that’s an injustice that cancels any form of democracy.

The notion of class has changed so much since Marx’s day that it’s unhelpful to depend on it; far better is a universal conception of justice.

There are profound differences between those who live on dividends and those who work for a living, just as there are profound differences between men and women, and between people of different ethnicities. Those are differences in experience, which is why it’s so important for different voices to be heard, but essentializing those differences is a metaphysical mistake with dangerous political consequences. And the notion of class has changed so much since Marx’s day that it’s unhelpful to depend on it; far better is a universal conception of justice, which occasionally moves even members of the ruling class to action. Where would we be without Engels’s dividends?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: You end by claiming that socialism offers a way out of the morass we find ourselves in today. Can you talk about your vision of socialism?

Susan Neiman: In my last book, Left Is Not Woke, I offered a normative definition of what it (should) mean to be left today. There are three principles common to both leftists and liberals:

1. We are universalists, not tribalists, because we believe that genuine connections and obligations do not depend on origins.
2. We believe in a principled distinction between justice and power, even though the distinction is often abused.
3. We believe that progress toward more just and fulfilling societies isn’t inevitable, but it is possible.

In that book, I argued for a popular front between leftists and liberals in a time of rising fascism. But there’s a fourth principle that distinguishes leftists from liberals: Social rights — to health, education, housing, fair labor practices, and leisure — are not “benefits” or “safety nets” but rights as important as political rights to speak, vote, travel, or worship as we please.

Like Bernstein, I think those rights could be achieved through democratic processes. I’m well aware that this can look utopian at this moment. My book is meant as a contribution to the conceptual changes that must happen for a peaceful revolution to take place. In a world that’s armed to the teeth, anything else is too dangerous.

Rage And Sadness Visible

Kevin Yuill writes:

I stood in Parliament Square 10 days ago among a motley group of individuals opposed to assisted dying, waiting for the result of the vote on Labour MP Lauren Edwards’ assisted-dying bill. Whereas those demonstrating in favour of assisted suicide wore signature pink t-shirts, reflecting the campaign’s neat, middle-class support, we included fundamentalist Christians, Muslim doctors, Reform UK supporters, hardened left-wing activists, atheist disabled advocates and a colourful trans person with dwarfism. Other times, many of our side would have been at each other’s throats. But on Friday, we stood together.

As a BBC crew pointed a camera in our faces to record our responses to the vote, I was worried that I might be sick, given my nerves. Not, perhaps, a good look on television. It was a real battle to ensure that all MPs against the bill could vote. Reform’s Suella Braverman, delayed on a train, bolted ahead of her security to get to the vote with 30 seconds to spare.

After the result was announced, the sickness vanished instantly and we cheered, more in relief than triumph. Those who had argued among each other went off to the pub together – including a Muslim doctor who had a Coke.

But now the sense of relief has subsided, it’s worth reflecting on a hugely important result. After the defeat of Liam McArthur’s assisted-dying bill in Scotland, the first rollback of the euthanasia regime in Alberta, Canada, and a referendum vote against assisted dying in Slovenia, we might wonder whether the momentum behind euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) has stalled.

Of course, those in favour of the UK’s assisted-dying bill immediately came forward with their own reasons why it failed. Labour MP Liz Kendall complained that the bill had been ‘scuppered by a tiny minority of unelected members of the House of Lords’. She insisted that the Commons vote against the bill belied ‘widespread and deep public support for assisted dying’.

These assertions are not grounded in fact. After all, the bill was defeated on Friday not in the Lords, but in the elected chamber, where Liz Kendall sits. And while among the public there is widespread support for assisted dying, it’s shallow support. The more people learn about assisted dying, the more they reject it. Palliative care doctors, who know most about the end of life, reject EAS by 82 per cent.

The truth is that EAS thrives when no one pays attention to it. The more light that is shone on the case for assisted dying, the more it falls to pieces. Campaigners assume that spending huge amounts of money on popularising simplistic slogans, or telling horrific end-of-life stories, will convince the public and silence the opposition.

But people’s common sense tends to cut through assisted-suicide campaigners’ rhetoric. It is common sense that ingesting poison with intent to die is suicide, no matter how much money is spent rebranding it as ‘assisted dying’. It is common sense to see that those with Down syndrome can be easily manipulated into assisted suicide if it is legal. It is common sense that killing is not medicine. One of the hallmarks of EAS regimes around the world is that they list the cause of death as the underlying disease rather than poisoning.

This cover-up – from California to Canada – has sinister echoes across history. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany ran a euthanasia programme known as T4. It led to the murder of more than 70,000 people deemed senile, mentally handicapped, mentally ill, epileptic and so on. The Nazis, using a similarly euphemistic phrase to ‘assisted dying’, called these murders ‘mercy deaths’. On 3 August 1941, Clemens August von Galen, the Catholic Bishop of Münster, exposed the T4 programme in a brave speech:

‘The patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was.’

Under pressure from growing protests, Hitler halted the T4 programme on 24 August 1941, though less systematic murder of disabled people continued.

We should seek to emulate Galen’s stand against the T4 programme today. The more the false claims of assisted-dying proponents are questioned, the more the reality of what they want is exposed. The Lords held the assisted-dying bill to the light earlier this year. They showed that the bill’s much-vaunted safeguards were inadequate. They showed that someone with Down syndrome could be pressured into the ‘choice’ of assisted suicide and that women suffering domestic abuse might also be pressured into an early death. The Lords even brought to our attention the fact that companies like G4S might be employed to dispatch British citizens for a profit. The more light that is shone on these dishonest practices, the better.

The last word should be left to Ashley Dalton, the Labour MP suffering terminal breast cancer. As she told the Commons on Friday: ‘The idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false… It’s nothing short of irresponsible to scaremonger people like me into believing our deaths will be horrific.’

Imogen Garfinkel writes:

Two days before her Christian grandmother’s assisted dying procedure in Ontario, Canada, Brigitte Kranendonk sat her down to make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen. ‘I used very frank terms. I said: “Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?”’ The 83-year-old was in visible disbelief and began crying for 45 minutes. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Brigitte Stegemann, known affectionately to her family as ‘GG’ or ‘Oma’, wailed. ‘She was bawling. Inconsolable,’ Kranendonk, a real estate agent who shares the same first name with her late grandmother, tells the Daily Mail. 

In a cognitive test, designed to ascertain whether she was sound of mind enough to consent to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), Stegemann ‘got every question wrong’, believing her two living siblings to be dead, according to Kranendonk. Yet 48 hours after she wept uncontrollably at the notion of MAiD, Stegemann is said to have died with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood due to a botched first attempt at connecting the IV, administered by a nurse allegedly not wearing gloves. 

Kranendonk is currently in the process of desperately appealing to the Chief Coroner’s Office in Ontario, as well as the Patient Ombudsman and Belleville Police, in a bid to ascertain whether what happened the morning of July 10 at The Pearl care home in Cannifton was legal. Bereaved and distraught, she claims MAiD practitioners took advantage of her grandmother’s vulnerability to perform the procedure, which she alleges was carried out without express consent. ‘She was a vulnerable human being, and they saw an opportunity,’ Kranendonk says, her rage and sadness visible. She suspects the MAiD practitioners were inappropriately ideologically motivated, and believes the chain of events leading up to the procedure should be investigated. 

It is understood that the practitioners and care home, who have not commented publicly, maintain that Stegemann had legally consented to proceed. ‘No one had ever done MAiD at this residential home before: this was their very first MAiD procedure. So I don’t know if they just dropped the ball, because they didn’t know what they were doing.’ The moment of Stegemann’s death was anything but peaceful, as she had once wished. Recalling those nightmarish minutes, a traumatised Kranendonk speaks in the present tense, as if the procedure was still happening in slow motion. ‘There was a phenomenal amount of blood,’ she says, describing the way that the nurse failed to find the correct vein in the right arm to insert the IV, before switching to the left – but only after having ‘poked her about three or four times with the needle. It is all over my Oma’s arm, it is all over her nightie, soaking through her pillow, all over the sheets, there is so much blood. And throughout all this time, mind you, the nurse is not wearing gloves.’

Another episode that still haunts Kranendonk is from February: she says she had to convince her grandmother to accept a medical port, a small device placed under the skin to provide a direct way for medicine to reach a vein. After it was fitted, the 83-year-old repeatedly ripped it off, screaming: ‘I don’t want the death shot!’ Prior to Stegemann’s death that summer, Kranendonk had been her caregiver for 12 years, and her medical power of attorney for the past six. A year and a half before her death, the family made the decision to house Stegemann in The Pearl as her physical and cognitive health began to deteriorate. In February, she was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. But doctors were not certain about whether the diagnosis meant she had six months to live, or as much time as two years. 

For the past decade, Kranendonk had been carefully monitoring what her grandmother ate to keep her healthy, including limiting her sugar intake. Following the cancer diagnosis, she changed tack and allowed her to eat whatever she craved, deciding she just wanted her grandmother to feel as ‘joyful’ as possible in her final stage of life. She spoke to Stegemann about all options, and even brought up MAiD, explaining what the procedure would entail. She remembers her grandmother saying clearly: 'No, I don’t want that.’ Kranendonk says her religiosity, and the notion of displeasing God, was a large factor in why her German-born grandmother instinctively opposed assisted dying. 

Then came June, when Kranendonk and her husband went on a 10-day road trip. In the past, every time she was away, she received frequent phone calls from the residential home regarding her grandmother’s health. Everything seemed normal. She picked up numerous phone calls, and the doctors didn’t discuss a dramatic decline in Stegemann’s health – only that she had fallen over and would need a wheelchair. But towards the end of the trip, on July 3, Kranendonk received a different kind of call. It was from the home, saying they were going to book a MAiD assessment for her grandmother. Her health had apparently seriously deteriorated.

The news hit like a ton of bricks. Back in Cannifton, Kranendonk anxiously questioned a nurse at the residential home about who had initiated the MAiD conversation. ‘The nurse became very abrasive, very defensive,’ Kranendonk recalls. ‘She was like, “Well, I’m just trying to advocate for her. I’m just trying to do what’s right for her.”’ Soon after Kranendonk returned from her trip away, she discovered her grandmother had actually already had her first MAiD consultation. ‘No one called me,’ she says, explaining how she feels she was isolated from the whole process from the beginning. While her grandmother was certainly sick, Kranendonk found it difficult to believe that she had rapidly declined in health during her trip away, and privately questioned whether what the nurses told her was true.

‘I noticed that she had lost weight when I saw her after returning, but she had slowly been losing weight for a while. Regarding her rapid decline, I am not a doctor, but when I came back she was still eating, walking to the bathroom, very talkative and full of jokes. She never complained about pain in front of me, except when her stomach was being relentlessly pressed.’ Kranendonk maintains that Stegemann did not at any point make a formal MAiD application herself. But every time she tried to question whether MAiD was the right pathway for her grandmother, she feels she was made to feel crazy or burdensome by the medical professionals at the home.

‘I truly believe that one nurse really saw us as an obstacle,’ she says. ‘We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother. I think she really, truly believes that MAiD is the best for people, and shame on me for trying to stop that.’ Kranendonk made sure she was in the room for the second MAiD assessment, and it was there where she noticed the doctor speak in ‘really loose terms, never using the words death or dying’. ‘She explains MAiD to my grandmother by saying: “We’re going to give you medicine, you’re going to feel at peace. And I just want you to know that you won’t have a bowel movement.”’

‘She’s saying it in these strange terms, that aren’t literal,’ Kranendonk says, adding: ‘My Oma’s just kind of nodding. Her first language is not English, she is 83-years old and severely hearing-impaired.’ Kranendonk looked at the doctor, and said: ‘She doesn’t understand what you’re saying.’ That’s when the doctor allegedly turned to the grandmother, and offered: ‘We’re going to make sure you won’t have any more pain.’ During the cognitive assessment, which she also sat in on, Kranendonk claims that the questions were curiously designed, in that the doctor couldn’t immediately verify the answers. As opposed to questions such as who the prime minister was, or that day's date, the grandmother was asked personal questions, like how many siblings she had. ‘But none of that is in her records. They would not know if the information was correct, or not,’ Kranendonk says.

Even so, Stegemann got the answers wrong. She said she had no siblings, despite having 13. The doctor asked how many were still alive, and Stegemann answered, saying none. But two are still alive, and the grandmother had seen one only a month and a half before. ‘So we’re going through this assessment. None of the answers could be proven, unless I was there. There was nothing concrete. They’re supposed to be doing a cognitive assessment, and yet they picked questions that they can’t verify,’ Kranendonk says. According to government guidelines, a patient must be sound of mind and have a ‘grievous and irremediable medical condition’ to be eligible for MAiD in Canada.

Eventually, much to her discomfort, Kranendonk was asked to leave the room by the doctor, who continued the test. Waiting outside anxiously, Kranendonk was sure her grandmother would fail. But four minutes after the cognitive test was complete, the doctor announced that Stegemann was ‘deemed fit for MAiD, and we’re going to proceed’. Later on the same day, Stegemann confused the names of her daughter and her granddaughter. ‘I was astonished that she was given the okay,’ Kranendonk says, following the assessment on Tuesday, July 7. The doctor assured her that her grandmother would still be able to ‘deny’ MAiD on the day of the procedure, which was scheduled for Friday at 11am.

Then began an impossible balance. Kranendonk was determined to try and ascertain whether Stegemann had actually consented to MAiD – but she didn’t want to cause undue stress for the 83-year-old. Most of all, she just wanted to enjoy whatever time she had left with her beloved Oma, who she grew up living with as a child. Every summer and long weekend throughout her upbringing was spent with her grandparents – and the thought of losing Stegemann was heartbreaking. ‘Like, I’m already on limited time with her. So there's this balance, of wanting to get her to understand, and also still wanting to protect her – to not make her upset.’

On Wednesday, Kranendonk woke up after barely sleeping and prepared to visit her grandmother. But before she had a chance to enter the home, she got a call from the nurse, who said they planned to fast-track her grandmother's death to Thursday – simply because the doctor had an early opening. ‘I was like: “I’m not talking about this right now, I’m on my way to visit my Oma.”’ The nurse replied: ‘Oh, well, I already spoke to your Oma, and she agreed.’ But Thursday wouldn’t have allowed enough time for Stegemann’s pastor to arrive, or her son – depriving her of her dying wishes to be surrounded by her loved ones and prayer.

Kranendonk said Thursday wasn’t an option, so Friday was kept as the death date. She felt cornered. She was trying to protect her grandmother, but says the nurses were making her feel like an obstacle, standing in everyone’s way. The stress became overwhelming, and she felt like she had no control. That day, she says she marched up to residential home’s manager, to complain about how everything had been handled – how the process felt sped up, and lacked transparency. She demanded to see the MAiD paperwork, and to find out who was filling it in. The manager said everything had already been filled out the day prior, and her grandmother had signed it.

To this day, Kranendonk has not seen the paperwork allegedly signed by her grandmother, agreeing to the procedure – all of which was completed without any family members present. ‘I don't know who the witness was. I don’t know how they explained the paperwork to her. I don't know what they said to her. I have no idea,’ Kranendonk says, now horrified by what she views as lapses in proper MAiD procedure. ‘I’m sorry. How can we make this better for you?’ the manager asked Kranendonk. In a fit of rage and disbelief, she replied: ‘You guys have taken this whole MAiD thing and have just rammed it down our throats.’ Following the altercation with the manager, Kranendonk confronted her grandmother and explained what would be happening on Friday in vivid terms.

The conversation caused her to breakdown in tears and admit that she had made a mistake. ‘I just kept saying there's no mistake, there's no mistake. You don’t have to do this. The doctors are coming on Friday, and you just say no,’ Kranendonk recalls pleading. But it got to a point where Kranendonk didn't want to ‘keep fighting MAiD, and lose sight of who I’m fighting for’. Her grandmother was unwell, and confused, so she made the decision to just try and experience all the precious quality time she could have with Stegemann – while she still had a chance. And crucially, she trusted the nurses to not take advantage of the ailing woman.

‘My Oma wasn’t the only vulnerable one in that situation – I was. I was vulnerable in the loss and love of my grandmother, being her care provider, and I was vulnerable in trusting that they were making the right decisions. It all felt so sped up and in slow motion at the same time,’ Kranendonk says. On Thursday, the pair danced together to traditional German Polka music and ate ice-cream in her room. ‘We had the best day,’ Kranendonk recalls, tearfully. ‘I felt great leaving on Thursday.’ But she went home utterly confused. On the one hand, she was elated she had such a fantastic day with her grandmother. But on the other hand, she couldn't bear the possibility of what might happen the next day. ‘I was so split. Part of me was like, maybe it’s not going to happen. And then there was this underlying feeling of, oh God, what if it does?’

Since her grandmother’s death, many people have asked Kranendonk why she didn’t try harder to stop the lethal injection from taking place. In hindsight, she felt like she was in an unworkable situation. She at once wanted the best for her grandmother and wanted to respect her autonomy, but was terribly concerned that she had never once heard her say, out loud and clearly: ‘I want MAiD.’ ‘All I saw was her not understanding the process,’ Kranendonk recalls. When Friday, July 10 arrived, everything felt rushed again. The family took Stegemann out into the residential home's garden to share strawberry ice-cream – her favourite – and the pastor arrived, who started a round of prayers. ‘She’s very confused at this point,’ Kranendonk remembers.

At 9.30am – after 10 minutes of being outside – the MAiD nurse asked for the family to return indoors, despite the fact that they were told the doctor would not arrive until 11am. The nurse said that she needed time to get the IV started, and Kranendonk remembers telling her forcefully that they were not finished having time together as a family. ‘Well, how long do you need?’ she claims the nurse said, rather dismissively, in response. Once back inside the home, the nurse started the IV, Kranendonk alleges. According to Kranendonk, the doctor hadn’t even arrived, and her grandmother was not asked if she gave consent for the procedure to begin. The nurse struggled to insert the IV into Stegemann’s right arm, and ended up piercing her repeatedly with the needle before attempting her left arm. Kranendonk remembers in graphic detail the copious amount of blood, which made the whole procedure feel strangely unprofessional.

‘She’s asking us to hand her things, to flush out the needle. So we’re now a part of this. She’s asking us to grab things for her, and to hold things for her. This nurse is not wearing gloves. There’s blood all over her hands, there’s blood all over the place,’ she says, horrified by the memory. The doctor then entered the room and told Stegemann she was there to give her ‘medicine’, and asked if that was okay with her. ‘My Oma is not moving. She doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t say anything, and the doctor just said: “Okay, well, I’m going to proceed.”’ Within 10 minutes, Stegemann was pronounced dead. Due to how unresponsive she was, Kranendonk doesn’t know if her grandmother died shortly before the MAiD, because of the MAiD, or whether she was just in deep prayer.

She says that no heartbeat was taken, before or after the procedure. ‘What was concerning, though, is that that morning, I was crying. My grandmother looked at me and said, “If you don’t stop crying, I’m not going to sleep tonight.” She said that to me on Friday morning.’ It was only in the aftermath of Stegemann’s death that Kranendonk – overwhelmed with grief – began to believe that something went awfully wrong. She has subsequently learnt that nurses are strictly prohibited from pressuring a patient to pursue MAiD, and that all the correct paperwork for MAiD to take place must be submitted before a death date can be determined.

Stegemann’s paperwork was completed after her death, her granddaughter claims. ‘She did not consent the morning of the procedure,’ Kranendonk says, steadfast in her conclusion that her grandmother was euthanised against her will. She has consistently asked The Pearl to hand over her grandmother’s medical records, but all of her requests have been refused, she says. She regrets not applying for a legal injunction to prevent the MAiD from occurring, but she also didn't realise she had the right to ask for one at the time. ‘I was flying blind,’ she says. And crucially, her grandmother still needed medical attention in those final weeks. ‘We live in Canada, where medical care is not always easy to get. She still needed medical care. I could not just scoop her up and bring her home,’ she says. She trusted the government, and the medical establishment, not to take advantage of her grandmother. In the months since July, that trust has completely shattered. She says she has ‘settled a lot into prayer’, and is sharing her story as a way to give more education to care providers who may find themselves in similar scenarios.

A spokesman for Belleville Police told the Daily Mail: ‘This incident is currently open and under investigation with our Criminal Investigations Division. We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.’ Canada has one of the highest rates of euthanasia in the world, with MAiD accounting for 4.7 per cent of the deaths in 2023. The Daily Mail contacted The Pearl for comment.

The Law Is The Law

Paul Knaggs writes:

Seventeen months ago the Supreme Court told the country what the Equality Act means. Since then a Government, the largest unions in Britain and now an entire political party have decided that the ruling is a suggestion. On Monday night the Liberal Democrats made it official, and the woman who stood up to tell them what they were doing was answered from the chair with “that motion is clearly carried”.

Start where the law is supposed to bite: a hospital changing room. Last week two of the Darlington nurses who beat their NHS trust at tribunal sat down with Health Minister Karin Smyth. Bethany Hutchison and Annice Grundy asked for a date for national NHS guidance on single-sex facilities, and whether it would bind trusts or merely advise them. According to the Express, Smyth gave no date when asked twice, questioned what difference guidance would make, and told them “the law is the law”. The Department denies she said anything inconsistent with her line to MPs, which is that guidance is drafted and coming “imminently”. It has been imminent since Wes Streeting promised it “within weeks” in April 2025.

Take the minister at her word. The law is the law. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on 16 April 2025 that “sex”, “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act mean biological sex. Smyth herself told Parliament on 30 April 2025, in a written answer quoted in the Lords: “This is the law, and we expect all public service bodies to comply.” Seventeen months on, the NHS’s own guidance from 2019, which tells trusts to accommodate people by their presentation rather than their sex, still sits under review with no publication date. The Government agrees with the law, states the law, and will not write it down for the 1.5 million people who work in the NHS.

That is how Darlington happened. The nurses raised concerns in July 2023. Twenty-six signed a letter in March 2024. The Trust told them to change elsewhere. In January a tribunal found it had created a hostile, humiliating and degrading environment for them: not through any conduct by their transgender colleague, who was cleared of personal wrongdoing, but through the Trust’s policy and its contempt for women who complained. It paid seven nurses £187,000 and spent a reported £603,000 of public money losing. Hutchison’s verdict on the meeting with Smyth was blunt: “It shouldn’t be our responsibility or fight. We don’t get paid enough to do that, and nobody is taking any responsibility for it.” Nobody is. And this week we learned why.

REPEAL BY MOTION

On Monday evening in Brighton, Liberal Democrat conference passed motion F33a, “Restoring Trans Rights”, submitted by LGBT+ Lib Dems, moved by Artie Khovanov and summed up by Jennie Rigg. It is now party policy. Read what it says. Conference “believes” that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. It declares the EHRC’s statutory code of practice, in force since 5 August, to be “discriminatory and unworkable”. It calls for a cross-party committee to propose “amendments to legislation where necessary”, a new code that is “inclusive”, and a veto for the Women and Equalities Committee over who chairs the regulator, whose current chair the motion complains was appointed against that committee’s advice.

Start with the title, because the sleight of hand begins there. “Restoring” implies that something was taken. Nothing was. The Supreme Court did not change the Equality Act; it ruled on what the Act had meant since 2010. In the same judgment it said, in terms, that trans people keep their full protection from discrimination and harassment under the characteristic of gender reassignment. No trans person lost a legal right on 16 April 2025. The only rights the ruling touched were women’s, and it upheld them. Hollowood put it in five words from the floor: “They have lost none.” A motion to “restore” trans rights is therefore a motion to take women’s rights back, under a title chosen so that nobody has to say so.

Sir Ed Davey told Radio 4 he wanted the motion to pass and would vote for it. A year ago he accepted the Supreme Court judgment. Now he says it “created something that we didn’t expect”. Zoe Hollowood, who chairs Liberal Voice for Women inside his own party, stood up in the hall and told delegates what they were about to do. “This motion is a Trojan horse,” she said. “It is not about restoring trans rights. They have lost none. It is about ripping out rights from women and destroying the clarity of the Supreme Court ruling. Taking aim at the guidance that supports the ruling is just smoke and mirrors, a pretext to amend the law.” Earlier, on GB News, she had said of her leader: “He’s dragging us backwards and I’m not clear who has been at him.”

Then she told them about Karen Danson. Danson was one of the Darlington nurses, a survivor of child sexual abuse. She told the tribunal that Rose Henderson, the male colleague who identified as a woman, repeatedly asked her why she was not getting changed, and that when she complained she was told to broaden her mindset. When she later needed a hysterectomy and found Henderson was due to assist, she explained her history and asked for a woman. The theatre manager, she said, replied: “You are not my concern. My concern is Rose.” Hollowood let it land. “Let that sink in. You are not my concern, to a victim of child sexual abuse asking for female intimate care.” Then she set out the choice: “On the one hand, you have women’s rights, including victims of sexual abuse. Our privacy, dignity, our safety, our right to say no. And on the other hand, you have the feelings of some men and maybe an awkward conversation at the gym. If we pass this motion, we are telling women we think they are second-class citizens.” The chair checked the online vote. “That motion is clearly carried.”

Hollowood also saw the politics. Twenty years ago, she said, Europe was nobody’s priority, “and then along came a man called Nigel”. Reform, she noted, has been handed £72 million and a leaflet that writes itself: nurses who could not get undressed without a man in the room, and a party that voted to make it harder to stop. The people who will pay for that are not in the conference hall.

But the clearest takeaway from the day was Hollowood herself. She stood in her own party’s conference, faced down its leadership and put the case in plain English when it would have been far easier to stay quiet. She spoke about women’s privacy, dignity and safety, tied the argument to the Darlington nurses and challenged her own leader directly. Whatever anyone thinks of the wider politics, that takes courage. In an age when too many politicians wait to see which way the room is leaning before deciding what they believe, it matters that there are still women prepared to stand up, say no, and refuse to be bullied into silence. “He’s dragging the party backwards. I’m not sure who has been at him.” 

NOT ONLY THE LIB DEMS 

The Lib Dems are not the loudest, nor are they the only ones. The Greens are beating this drum louder than the Clarion call for the environment. Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, then Green co-leaders, demanded last year that the EHRC withdraw its interim guidance. On 14 September, delegates at the TUC carried Motion 17 opposing the code without, as The Tribune noted, once using the word “woman”. Unison’s Andrea Egan has pledged to “take the fight to every workplace” against employers who comply. And the Royal College of Nursing, whose members are overwhelmingly women, is in a Dundee tribunal this week facing Sandie Peggie, suspended by NHS Fife for objecting to a male doctor in the women’s changing room. She won her central claim, has been off sick for eighteen months, and says of the union she paid for nearly thirty years: “They’re blinded by trans activists just now.” The Darlington nurses formed their own union because the ones they belonged to would not fight for them.

Here is the question none of them will answer. Since when did political parties, trade unions and government departments get to pick which laws apply? The EHRC did not invent the code. Its statutory job is to describe the Act as the courts read it, and the courts have read it. The High Court threw out the Good Law Project’s challenge to the interim guidance in February. The code was laid before Parliament for forty days; more than 160 MPs backed a motion to reject it, and it went nowhere. Every legitimate route has been tried and lost. What remains is refusal dressed as principle: a minister who recites the law and will not enforce it, unions that pledge to fight employers for obeying it, and a party that resolves to rewrite the regulator until it says something else.

So here is the position of the British state and the parties that claim to be its progressive conscience. The court has ruled. The regulator has codified. Ministers agree in principle and act on nothing. And the Lib Dems, the Greens and the largest unions in the country are campaigning to have the ruling reversed, while the women who enforced it through the courts, alone and at their own expense, are told the matter is unclear. It is not unclear. A man who declares himself a woman does not stop being a man, and no policy built on pretending otherwise can protect women, because the pretence is exactly what a predator needs. Anyone who doubts that should read what happened in a McDonald’s toilet in Bavaria in August 2025. A 55-year-old German federal police officer, a biological male identifying as a woman, befriended a teenage girl through her mother, took her on a motorcycle ride, followed her into a cubicle and locked the door. The officer has now confessed at Traunstein Regional Court under a plea arrangement, after child abuse material and a Kalashnikov were found at home and at the police station. On arrest, that officer was placed in the women’s section of a prison. Nobody is arguing that this is typical. The point is simpler and worse: a system that takes self-declaration at face value has no way to tell the difference until it is too late, and the people who pay for the experiment are girls and women.

That is what the Darlington nurses meant when they said they were fighting for every woman and girl in the country. That is why Peggie says she is fighting an ideology, not a person. And it is why the metropolitan left’s continuing deference to the loudest activist voices is not kindness. It is a betrayal of the working women who clean the wards, lift the patients and change at the end of a twelve-hour shift, and whose goodwill has been spent, in their name, on their own dignity. It is a betrayal of every woman and feminist who fought for what this generation inherited: equality, safety, dignity, and the right to gather as women, for women, without asking anyone’s permission. Hollowood opened her speech in Brighton with the question every delegate who voted the other way should have to answer: “In 2026, are women allowed rights? Rights to dignity. Rights to safety. The right to say no.” Of her own leader she said that his support showed “Ed does not care about our rights and is wholly unwilling to fight for them.” The last time a Liberal leadership decided that women’s objections could wait, it was Asquith’s, and the women were in Holloway.

WHERE THE TRIBUNE STANDS

The Tribune’s position is not complicated and never has been. Women have a right to single-sex spaces. The law says so. The court says so. The regulator says so. A right that women must sue to enforce, one hospital at a time, at their own expense, while ministers say “imminently” and parties vote to repeal it by motion, is not a right. It is a privilege extended to those who can find a KC. Publish the NHS guidance, date it and make it binding. Tell every trust that a policy allowing access by self-identification cannot survive the Supreme Court judgment, because Darlington has already shown what happens when one tries. Tell the unions that their duty is to their female members, not to a campaign against a ruling.

The Greens, Sir Ed Davey and the Liberal Democrats remain perfectly entitled to argue that Parliament should change the Equality Act. Trade unions are entitled to campaign for the same thing. That is democracy. Until Parliament changes the statute, however, organisations governed by it do not acquire an exemption because they dislike the judgment interpreting it. You may campaign to change the law. You may not pretend it is not there. The law is the law. Women had to win it in the highest court in the land. They should not have to win it again in every changing room in Britain.

Priority

Today is Saint Matthew's Day. That erstwhile tax-collector is the Patron Saint of Bankers, while that strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, Biblical criticism, purports to read the Bible "as if it were any other ancient text", yet in fact subjects it to a series of methods that would be laughed out in any other literary or historical discipline. Those methods are carefully constructed to "prove" the presuppositions of that strange and increasingly unfashionable thing, liberal theology.

Thus, if two Biblical books are word for word alike, as Matthew, Mark and Luke certainly are in parts, then they must have been copied from each other, since there is no way that God could have inspired them all and, funnily enough, done so in such a way that they confirmed each others' accounts. Hence the theory of Markan Priority, that Saint Mark's Gospel was the first to be written, and that Saint Matthew and Saint Luke copied out great chunks of it word for word. And hence the theory of Q, the compendium of the material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark; no copy of Q exists anywhere. Jesus simply did not claim divinity for Himself, so that rules out John at a stroke. Miracles simply do not happen, a position not even compatible with agnosticism. Style simply does not develop (seriously), so Saint Paul cannot have written several of the Epistles beginning with the words, "From Paul". And so on, and on, and on.

Perhaps a gentle fillip from the wider culture might be in order? Although they differ in length, the different structures of the Gospels mean that they could each be dramatised in 12 episodes of one hour apiece, perhaps running from January to March, i.e., more or less from Christmas to Easter. The order ought to be as in the Bible – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John – exactly as if any other ancient text were the subject. That might even provide an opportunity to do some taking apart of the ridiculous theories of Markan Priority, of the interpolation of Mark 16, of "the Gospel of Thomas" and other such Dan Brown drivel, and of the historical unreliability of Saint John's Gospel on the grounds that Jesus "never claimed to be divine", the "proof" of which is held to be the historical unreliability of Saint John's Gospel.

All of these pieces of nonsense continue to be peddled by half-formed schoolteachers, and by clergy too old to have been part of the traditionalist revival among Catholics or the Evangelical revival among Protestants. Markan Priority was disproved a very long time ago by the Holy Father's spiritual father, Saint Augustine, whose Wikipedia pages in Portuguese and Slovene are significant source of traffic to this site, as is the page on U and non-U English. Make of those facts what you will. Acts could also be dramatised in this way, and it has some great stories in it. But it looks as if they would do the Ramayana first, and stick to the text if they did. That is not treating the Bible as a work of world literature, which is what they would claim that it was, and which, among other things, it is. Why not dramatise the Ramayana, exactly as it is? Why not dramatise the Odyssey, exactly as it is? And why not dramatise the Four Canonical Gospels and Acts, exactly as they are? Of what are the television companies afraid? Of what, in practice even though not in principle, would anyone be afraid?

Forgotten Soon Enough?

The Liberal Democrats are the third largest party in the House of Commons, and they lead more councils than the Conservatives, so they obviously do not need the publicity. Rather, the media blackout of them is a failure to subject them to proper scrutiny. It continued even during the five years of the Coalition. All in all, a dereliction of responsibility.

Country Whigs, Patriot Whigs, Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alderman Alfred Roberts's daughter, the founders and funders of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Orange Bookers, and Liz Truss, have successively taken over the largely bovine Tory machine so completely that almost all Conservatives now assume "free" market economics and a foreign policy of military interventionism to be "traditional Tory values" that their party had always held. Nothing could be further from the case. More indirectly, the strands of Liberalism that accrued to the Labour Party and then seceded to the SDP have provided key, if mostly unseen, players around every Conservative Leader since John Major. Not for nothing do the ostensibly Tory papers call the King "Charles" but Earl Spencer, whose name is also Charles and who publishes under it, "Earl Spencer".

Only one Earl Spencer, the seventh, sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative. Both of his successors sat as Crossbenchers, and all of his predecessors were Liberals and before that Whigs. The first Earl Spencer was created only in 1765, but he was a member of the Whig oligarchy, of which the Spencer dynasty was a pillar. The first Baron Spencer was created in 1603, when he was already the richest man in England. He had been born in 1570 at Althorp, which the Spencers had owned since 1508 and where they had lived since 1486.

The old aristocratic families do look down on the Royals as jumped up, but they are really only nouveaux to this country, sufficient though that is for the purpose. They can call themselves whatever they please, but in point of fact the late Queen Elizabeth was the last British monarch of Prince Albert's House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. That House still occupies the Throne of Belgium, making it the last reigning branch of the House of Wettin, of which the earliest traceable member, Theodoric I, died in 976. Queen Victoria's House of Hanover, its accession in Britain five generations earlier having been largely engineered by the Spencers, was a branch of the House of Welf, and Welf I died around 825, having been, in 819, of such standing that his daughter Judith had married the Frankish Emperor Louis the Pious. Stick that in your 1486.

But these things are patrilineal, so the King is an Oldenburg. Prince Philip's House was, and therefore his son's is, the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, the senior surviving branch of the 925-year-old House of Oldenburg. Charles III can hold his own with any of them, even if he does still have to call himself Windsor for a reason that it is within his power to change. "Mountbatten" is his paternal grandmother's maiden name anglicised to a form that she herself never bore. There has never been a Principality of Battenberg, and the name indicates descent from a morganatic marriage. Leave the former Prince Andrew in that Hessian gap and move on. "The House of Windsor and Edinburgh" could be useful in this reign or the next. Meanwhile, the last great battle with Whiggery demands to be fought, with every member of the Privy Council and of either House of Parliament invited to declare which Charles he or she believed.

Into That Hollow

Paul Knaggs writes:

On 18 September, as voting opened in Russia’s parliamentary election, Vladimir Putin told his Military-Industrial Commission that some European leaders were “openly stating that they are preparing for war with Russia”. Of European drills in the Baltic that include practising the seizure of civilian ships, he said Russia would rather be friends, “or we will have to respond”. In a clip carried by RT, he added that, in his opinion, “rising military tensions are being used to distract from falling approval ratings and domestic economic failures.” Weigh the source. The man making the accusation was addressing a body whose business is arms production, while his army fights in Ukraine. Putin’s charge is self-serving, and it was Russia’s invasion in 2022 that sent European budgets climbing. Nothing that follows excuses it.

But ledgers do not explain how nations march to war. Fear does, and pride, and memory, and the mistakes of men who believe they are acting in self-defence. Consider who is now sounding the alarm. Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has told the Bundestag that Germany must be war-ready by 2029, and warns that Russia could be capable of striking NATO by 2029 or 2030. In June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and by the Soviet reckoning some 27 million of its people died. In 1955, days after West Germany joined NATO, Moscow answered with the Warsaw Pact.

Germany’s defence budget has since climbed from about €32 billion in 2014 to more than €108 billion this year, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants the strongest conventional army in Europe. Putin knows exactly which history he is invoking when he says of that ambition: “Good. We listen carefully, understanding what is meant.” It is hard not to hear in all this a prelude to something worse. History does not point one way. Poland and the Baltic states remember Soviet tanks, and that memory drives their fear as surely as any spreadsheet. None of this begins in 2022. In February 1990, Secretary of State James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev three times that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if a united Germany stayed in the alliance. It was never written into a treaty, and historians dispute how far it was meant to reach, but the declassified record shows the words were spoken.

In 2008 the American ambassador in Moscow, William Burns, later head of the CIA, warned Washington that Ukrainian membership was “the brightest of all redlines” for the Russian elite. Two months later, at Bucharest, NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members, with no date and no path. Add Kosovo in 1999, the first time NATO used force without the Security Council’s endorsement, and Libya in 2011, a mandate Moscow says was stretched into regime change, and it is not hard to see why Moscow stopped believing the alliance was only defensive. None of that made the invasion lawful. Europe’s human rights court has found that Russia controlled the separatist areas from May 2014, and Ukrainian support for NATO, 18 per cent in 2013, reached 62 per cent by 2022 because of what Russia did.

The West built the tinder. Russia struck the match

Each side has its own version of the last twelve years. In February 2023 NATO’s then Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said “The war started in 2014”, and that since then NATO Allies had given Ukraine training and equipment, so that its forces were much stronger in 2022. He meant it as a defence of Ukraine, and he dated the start to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its move into the Donbas. Read from Moscow, the same words describe eight years of an alliance it already regarded as hostile preparing its neighbour’s army. Britain alone trained 22,000 Ukrainian troops. Washington’s steps were incremental: Barack Obama declined to send lethal weapons in 2014 for fear of escalation, and Donald Trump approved Javelin missiles in 2018.

Read from Kyiv and Warsaw, the same years look like a country whose territory had been seized, with Russian-backed forces in the Donbas that Europe’s human rights court has since found were under Russia’s effective control from May 2014. Moscow calls the change of government in Kyiv that February a coup, and Ukraine calls it the Revolution of Dignity. A leaked call in which a senior American diplomat weighed who should lead the next government gave Moscow’s version its best evidence. But the Ukrainian parliament voted 328 to nil to remove a president who had fled the capital, and I have seen nothing to show that Washington organised the uprising. Both accounts are sincerely held. Each is fed by events the other cannot forget.

That is the action and reaction I mean. Every defensive step is read by the other side as an aggressive one. In August Putin threatened to seize European ships in retaliation for boardings of Russian “shadow fleet” tankers, and this week Finland practised boarding a suspicious vessel near undersea infrastructure. Each side describes itself as responding to the other. That is how it always sounds.

And we are not at war. Before the invasion, Russia’s military spending sat just below Britain’s in SIPRI’s rankings. Last year NATO’s members spent $1.58 trillion, 55 per cent of the world’s total. Yet the Chancellor’s statement announcing the extra £15 billion for the Defence Investment Plan speaks of moving Britain towards “warfighting readiness”. A country that says it wants peace, and prepares in the language of war, should not be surprised when the language becomes the plan.

In January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to say that America had been compelled to create “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”. He was no pacifist. He had commanded the Allied armies in Europe, and he insisted that arms must be mighty enough that no aggressor is tempted to risk his own destruction. His fear was “unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex, sought or unsought. The danger was never that defence is unnecessary. It was what happens when permanent military spending becomes embedded in the economy itself.

Now look at what Britain still makes. Manufacturing accounted for 8.5 per cent of UK economic output between April and June, while services make up about four-fifths of the whole. In 2025 the country ran a £221 billion deficit on trade in goods, offset in part by a £203 billion surplus in services. Trade is not the enemy. But there is a difference between trading with the world and surrendering the capacity to make things.

GDP disguises the loss. It still counts the lorry, the warehouse, the loan and the till, while the making happened somewhere else. But an economy that works for the few is a closed circuit, and it goes stale. A wage earned making something is largely spent back into the economy that paid it. A wage lost when the factory shut is spent nowhere, and every job we export takes a customer with it. Cheap imports lower the price for people who no longer earn the money to meet it. The saving is shared between the shopper and the retailer, and the cost lands on the worker. We have called this efficiency. Sooner or later the buyers have no jobs, and the shelves are full of things nobody can afford.

Into that hollow comes the one order book the state will fill without argument. On 30 June the Government published its Defence Investment Plan: £298 billion over four years, including an additional £15 billion. The then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said it would deliver a “defence dividend” and almost 60,000 jobs. His successor has gone further. Andy Burnham has pledged half a million defence and aerospace jobs by 2030.

I will not sneer at those jobs. But the dividend is not paid from nowhere. The Government’s own explainer says the extra money is funded primarily by reallocating budgets from across government departments, with £10.3 billion identified now and £4.7 billion still to be confirmed at the Budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says around half of the increase comes from cuts to other departments’ capital budgets, with larger cuts to transport and energy. The state is taking investment in trains and the grid, which also employ people, to pay for missiles. When an economy has been stripped of so much of its productive base, war itself begins to look dangerously like industrial policy.

Nor is defence the only sector that profits from a world on edge. After US and Israeli strikes on Iran, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil, came to a near halt. In the second quarter Exxon made $14.5 billion and Chevron $12.1 billion. The Bank of England projects that a little over five million households will see mortgage repayments rise by the end of 2028, up from nearly four million in December, after markets repriced following the war. Barclays, meanwhile, reported first-half pre-tax profit of £6.1 billion, up 17 per cent, on trading revenue from volatile markets.

None of this proves that anyone manufactures wars to enrich arms makers, oil producers or banks. That claim goes beyond the evidence. The problem is structural: a system in which crisis has profitable constituencies. There is always a balance in geopolitics, and history shows how quickly it can tip the wrong way. Governments can convince themselves that military spending is deterrence, that escalation is controlled and that every new weapons programme simply buys security. Sometimes they are right. The lesson of the 1930s is that weakness invites aggression. The lesson of 1914 is the opposite one, that mobilisation timetables, once running, can leave diplomacy with nothing to negotiate with. That is A.J.P. Taylor’s case in War by Timetable, and historians still argue over it. A serious country holds both lessons at once. 

What it cannot afford is an economy that holds only one. The constant beat of the war drum has consequences. Sooner or later, rhetoric becomes mobilisation, mobilisation becomes confrontation, and the drumbeat is drowned out by something far more real: the crunch of boots on the battlefield. When ministers promise defence jobs in every region, when capital is taken from energy and transport to pay for them, and when oil companies and trading floors profit from the tension, those with an interest in it continuing are organised and well placed. Those with an interest in it ending are scattered across the country, paying the bill. I am not claiming anyone orders a war. I am saying that an economy built on the drum has no natural brake.

The test is coming. Chancellor John Healey, who resigned as defence secretary over funding before returning under Burnham, delivers his first Budget on 28 October, where the plan’s remaining gap must be closed. Do not pay for missiles by cutting the capital budgets that also build things. Tax the war profits of the oil majors, as European lawmakers and Democrats in Congress are already demanding. Attach conditions to every defence pound: British production on British payrolls, recognised unions, public equity where the public pays for the plant. And keep talking. To arm for deterrence is prudent. To treat every attempt to de-escalate as betrayal is how drums become boots. 

There is a better precedent than a bigger arms budget. In January 1976, workers at Lucas Aerospace published an alternative plan in response to the company’s announcement that thousands of jobs were to be cut, and it included over 150 designs for alternative products such as wind turbines, hybrid cars and heat pumps. Nearly half of the company’s business was related to military matters. Management rejected the plan, but it was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Tony Benn called it “one of the most remarkable exercises that has ever occurred in British industrial history”. Its logic was simple: put the working people of this country to work on what the country needs. A state that can order missiles by the thousand can order heat pumps, turbines, trains and steel, and pay the people who make them. We must produce more than arms. Eisenhower warned where that road could lead. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is not that his warning failed. It is that we built the economy he warned us about.

Growing Up

For a decade, I have been telling you that we all knew what colour a snowflake was, and that “cancel culture” was only given a name at all when it started happening to the people who had been practising it since time immemorial. As Kenan Malik now writes:

For many on the right, “cancel culture” is a terrible thing – unless it becomes necessary to cancel views they deem unfit for public consumption. Step forward Macklemore, the US rapper brusquely evicted from Ed Sheeran’s US tour.

Macklemore is well known for his political songs. In 2012, his hit Same Love celebrated gay marriage and took aim at hip-hop’s homophobia. Two years ago, he released Hind’s Hall, in support of Columbia University students who organised pro-Palestinian protests and renamed the hall they occupied in honour of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in distressing circumstances.

The opening act for Sheeran at New Jersey’s MetLife stadium, Macklemore introduced Hind’s Hall with a two-minute speech demanding a “Free Palestine”. It was greeted with applause in the stadium but generated outrage outside. Robert Kraft, owner of the Gillette stadium near Boston, where Sheeran and Macklemore were due to play, and a close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, fronted a campaign for venues to cancel the rapper.

The Israeli American Council organised a petition insisting that “Macklemore has the right to hold political views” but “the line should be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one-sided political agenda”. The idea that Macklemore has the right to express his views to a small audience but not to a large one, and only if he carefully delineates all sides of a debate, is, frankly, absurd. The right to free speech is predicated neither on the size of one’s audience nor on the nuance of one’s take.

Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, IAC’s chief executive Elan Carr claimed the phrase “Free Palestine” was a call “for the extermination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. There are certainly antisemites within the pro-Palestinian movement, and some who would like to exterminate Jews. What Carr is seeking to do, though, in common with many supporters of Israel, is delegitimise any call for Palestinian freedom or a Palestinian state, or even for full rights for Palestinians in an Israeli state whose Basic Law reserves the “right of self-determination” solely for Jews.

Carr claimed also that Macklemore had “hijacked” the stage. Macklemore and Sheeran are friends, the two having collaborated on Growing Up, a song about the rapper’s newborn daughter. Macklemore’s views and repertoire would have been well known to Sheeran and to promoters. He was not engaged to sing My Favourite Things.

Others argue that the issue is not what Macklemore said on stage but his previous antisemitism. This refers largely to a performance in 2014 in which Macklemore sported a black wig, beard and a huge fake hooked nose – the classic antisemitic caricature of a Jew. The Anti-Defamation League accepted his subsequent apology and his claim that the costume was not intentionally antisemitic, a claim which, in truth, was not very convincing.

Many have pointed out that Macklemore’s outfit was no more acceptable than if he had worn a blackface costume, which is true. Yet, celebrities from David Baddiel to Jimmy Fallon have worn blackface and not been cancelled. We should not ignore Macklemore’s grotesquely antisemitic costume, or what it might say about his views, but neither should we wield it as reason for cancellation, especially a decade later.

At least two stadia that have banned Macklemore – the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the Raymond James stadium in Tampa, Florida – have been willing to host Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who last year released a song called Heil Hitler, promoting it with $20 T-shirts emblazoned with a black swastika. The objection to Macklemore seems less about antisemitism than about his criticism of Israel.

Critics point out also that owners of stadia (like publishers of books) have the legal right to exclude people they don’t wish to platform. Few would deny that. The issue, rather, is that such cancelling has become today a major means of policing speech – as the Macklemore case reveals.

Spectator columnist Stephen Daisley mocked the left for being “suddenly, and unusually, vocal about freedom of speech” in the wake of Macklemore’s cancellation. Equally, though, many on the right have been unusually silent about it (Daisley himself, to be fair, opposed Macklemore’s ousting).

The Free Speech Union, normally thunderously supportive of free expression, could not bring itself to oppose Macklemore’s cancellation, but only feebly ask how far owners or promoters should “dictate what an artist can or cannot say on stage?” It was, however, “alarmed” by the “cancellation” of Sheeran for not holding “the ‘correct’ opinions strongly enough”. Gad Saad, a Canadian academic popular on the reactionary right for his acerbic hostility to immigrants and Muslims, and who coined the term “suicidal empathy”, defended Ye’s right “to be an idiot” but appeared to endorse Macklemore’s cancellation. Some have even likened Macklemore’s performance to a “neo-Nuremberg rally”.

Rightwing cancel culture is not new. Two decades ago, the country band Dixie Chicks faced a furious backlash for opposing the Iraq War and telling an audience, “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Thousands of radio stations banned them and DJs were suspended for playing their songs. For conservatives, this was not censorship but patriotism. The policing of speech always comes armed with its own excuses.

Cancel culture is usually seen as the product of “woke” activists wielding power in the culture industries. What the Macklemore case exposes is that those with economic power are even more able to police speech. They should be fiercely resisted.