The assisted suicide Bill is an ethical Rubicon. Let’s not cross it

29/11/2024, 09:18:22 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Tellingly, the House of Commons website carries a warning about the research briefing on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, due to receive its Second Reading in the House of Commons today.

‘This briefing discusses issues around suicide which some readers may find distressing,’ it intones in bold writing. It’s grim subject matter to be sure, but there is still a need for candour. We are talking about ending human life, courtesy of the state’s healthcare professionals. What could be more distressing?

The proposed legislation would ensure that two doctors assess each request for an assisted death, ensuring the candidate had a ‘clear, settled and informed wish to end their own life’ and that they have reached this decision voluntarily, without pressure. If both doctors agree, the person may apply to the High Court for approval.

Kim Leadbeater the Labour backbencher promoting the Bill, is merely the latest campaigner seeking to alter the law in this area, following previous failed attempts by former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, in 2014 and former Labour MP, Rob Marris, in 2015.

Nothing about this issue is new.

‘Assisted dying’ – euthanasia in old money – remains an ethical Rubicon for our society, and one with ramifications beyond whether we allow a small number of patients in extremis and bound to expire the option of doing so earlier than nature intended.

For once we redefine the relationship between physician and patient in such a profound way, the door is opened to deeper questions and wider applications.

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Trump’s win points up just how fragile Labour’s position is

08/11/2024, 07:39:27 PM

by Rob Marchant

When Labour folk woke up on Wednesday morning, almost all of us surely felt a sharp pang of disappointment, accompanied perhaps by a much deeper uneasiness about the state of the world. Of course, we hate it in when “our team” loses but this was an election with potentially far-reaching consequences for us in Europe.

Ukraine is surely lost in its current form and Putin emboldened. And we are a facing an isolationist – and possibly even NATO-withdrawing America as our partner, run by a man whose brain is clearly not wired up like most of the rest of humanity, whatever their politics, and could care less for the law of the land, let alone the rules of constitutional democracy.

It is quite probably a truly historic moment, when the world’s tectonic plates shift. Our own country’s security is surely less than it was a few days ago. The only question is by how much.

What the Trump victory also shows is there is a tidal wave of the populist and authoritarian right washing over the Western world, one which Starmer’s government is vigorously swimming against and which is not going away. We can no longer pass it off as some blip of the late 2010s.

While we can be thankful for small mercies – we in Britain have already passed through a half-decade of disastrous populism and reacted against it – we should also recognise the precariousness of the privileged position we have found ourselves in since July.

If, after a very uneasy start, there were still any doubt how much of Labour’s vote were composed of true love for the party’s policy platform and how much simply of being utterly fed up of the Tories, there shouldn’t be after Tuesday’s Democrat meltdown.

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Will Hutton’s big ideas for remaking Britain

27/10/2024, 10:14:48 PM

by Jonathan Todd

“Ideas matter; they are the indispensable precondition for action,” writes Will Hutton in This Time No Mistakes (2024). Hutton is well-known for advancing the ideas that animated early phases of the last Labour government. The State We’re In (1996) argued for stakeholder capitalism. This idea achieved insufficient purchase to avoid Britain now needing to be remade.

“It was a duck-and-weave administration,” laments of New Labour in his latest book, “looking for points of least resistance and choosing not to boast about achievements for fear of upsetting the centre-right ideological consensus, which in fact was in disarray.” This book’s title might be understood as meaning, “listen more carefully to me, incoming Labour government, than your predecessors and avoid their mistakes”.

It is much more ambitious than that. It is not simply proposing that the Starmer government learn the lessons of the Blair/Brown years. It wants the Starmer to absorb “the elusive formula of and for success” that Hutton deduces from the past 100 or so years.

“There needs to be a feasible progressivism that effectively combines an ethic of socialism with progressive liberalism … and is unapologetically optimistic about the possibility of universal progress and justice in the best traditions of the European enlightenment.”

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Badenoch’s maternity pay row signals a trap for the Tories

05/10/2024, 08:43:36 PM

by David Ward

It’s a well-known finding from psychology that people care more about losing a pound they already have than they do about gaining a new one. There’s a reason that relatively well-off pensioners are still upset about losing their Winter Fuel Allowance, and it’s the same reason pensioners still receive the Christmas bonus every year that Edward Heath introduced as a one-off gift in 1972.

Kemi Badenoch’s recent travails suggest that the opposition may soon face a similar dilemma.

The leadership candidate is quite reasonably trying boost her credentials in the contest by taking the fight to her Labour opposite number in the Commons, Angela Rayner.

So it might seem almost a gift to Ms Badenoch that Angela Rayner is closely associated with Labour’s proposed workplace reforms which aim make parental leave, sick pay and other protections available from day 1, strengthen statutory sick pay, and make flexible working the default option from day 1. Badenoch can attack them as ‘anti-business’ with support from the right-leaning press, and make broader points about her values.

Yet as Ms Badenoch found ahead of her party conference, if you make the argument that supporting workers to have flexible hours and conditions is a problem you will be asked what the right level should be, or if there any other workplace entitlements you would change.

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Uncut Review: An Uneasy Inheritance, My Family and Other Radicals by Polly Toynbee

02/09/2024, 09:25:25 PM

By Jonathan Todd

“These days I keep coming across traces of vanished Labour social programmes,” writes Polly Toynbee in her 2023 memoir, “where some academics have kept measuring the results, holding onto proof of what succeeds in improving lives for the future day, if it ever comes, when another government as keen on social programmes revives these attempts.”

I was lucky to interview Polly on stage as part of the Political Therapy series that we run at 1000 Trades on the day that Rishi Sunak called the general election that ended with such a government. It was a great evening – but I wish I had read the memoir more closely beforehand.

We might have spoken more about her family’s connections to the city in which we were speaking. Her father edited, “a small left-wing newspaper … called the Birmingham Town Crier … One of its purposes was to rally the people against the Munich appeasement and to bar the city to its most famous son, Neville Chamberlain.”

A generation later, Polly’s sister was running, “one of the local neighbourhood housing and social assistance hubs the council was opening … She found herself at war with the council, because although they built the hubs they never let go, never devolving power let alone funds to neighbourhood control.” Plus ça change.

We might have discussed Polly’s touchpoints with Labour giants. “That family holiday in Yugoslavia when aged thirteen I stood on the quay and yelled for help and saved the lives of A. J. Ayer and Hugo Gaitskell who very nearly drowned.” There are, too, entertaining reflections on knowing Roy Jenkins, details of Harold Wilson’s role in Polly’s youthful, African adventures, and Peter Mandelson’s interactions when Polly worked, for journalist purposes, as a nursery assistant.

Or even the many salacious vignettes: “eye-popping tales of the unlikeliest ladies of the house screwing a tradesman on the kitchen table”; “the lavish, extravagant, exotic wastrel beloved of the gossip columns for nearly marrying Princess Margaret”; “sitting on the art roof hurling down tiles before she was expelled (from boarding school): she’s now a splendid radical doctor.”

It is, as ever, the narrative tension that keeps the pages turning.

There are tensions between civic and family roles. Of her great grandfather Polly writes: “Paragons of virtue are hard to live up to. Vegetarian, teetotal, donors of a large slice of their income to good causes, unmaterialistic, high-minded with relatively humble tastes, vigorous anti-imperialists, campaigners for all the great liberal causes – yet all but one of their children went to the bad in one way or another.” Generations of her family alternate between alcoholism and teetotalism.

Tensions between faith and science. The Pope asked a celebrated archaeologist and practising Catholic relative to investigate whether some bones should be ascribed to St Peter. Based on her findings, he proclaimed that they should in his 1950 Christmas message. “Great-Aunt Jocelyn was not quite so unequivocal in her verdict on the holy bones, but nor did she refute the Pope’s more or less infallible assertion.” Jocelyn’s religiosity is unusual among Polly’s family – with a turn to Christianity by her father becoming a tension between him and her.

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It is all down to Kamala Harris

21/07/2024, 11:17:20 PM

by Jonathan Todd

We are living a year of destiny. Lives of Armageddon or awesome await today’s children. With their fates determined by 2024’s decisions, as I wrote at the end of last year.

There have been positives so far. Narendra Modi denied an outright majority in India. Jordan Bardella not being France’s prime minister. Keir Starmer becoming our prime minister.

There have also been successes away from the ballot box. Months of congressional gridlock were broken in April to unlock a foreign aid package from the United States government that included over $60bn to replenish Ukraine’s military.

“If [Vladimir] Putin triumphs in Ukraine, the next move of Russian forces could very well be a direct attack on a NATO ally,” President Biden said when signing this legislation. “We’d have no choice but to come to their aid.”

President Biden has enjoyed many other successes. For example, during his presidency, the build out of utility-scale solar in Texas (famous for Big Oil) has overtaken the installed capacity in California (famous for climate concern). Biden’s IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) has put America on a trajectory to achieve a low carbon share of electricity generation of 70-80 percent by 2035 – compared to 50-55 percent without the IRA.

These encouraging statistics come from Adam Tooze. Who concludes, however, “a key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side”.

Biden deserves immense credit for winning the presidency in 2020 and for what he has achieved from the White House, including NATO’s resourcing of Ukraine and an acceleration of America’s green energy revolution.

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Starmer crushed the Labour Left. That is why he won.

09/07/2024, 10:50:39 PM

by Sam Dale

You may think it would provoke a moment of introspection. A shred of humility, perhaps? Maybe, even, a half-hearted congratulations to the new prime minister.

But no. The far-left, who left Labour on the brink of extinction just five years ago, are doing their most ungracious best to dismiss the most astonishing electoral turnaround in British history.

Jeremy Corbyn won in Islington North. A few independent wins. The Greens are second in a few dozen seats to Labour. Something about vote share. And just you wait for next time in….. 2029!

It’s always next time, isn’t it?

Such are the scraps the Left are left to feed off in the wake of Starmer’s swaggering, all conquering win.

So, let us stop and take a moment to savour this delicious victory.

In December 2019, just four and a half years ago, Trots and Marxists were running the Labour party.

Inevitably and predictably, it was handed its worst general election result in 100 years with 191 seats.

Keir Starmer took over a party on its knees. He had to be Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair rolled into one.

He made two big, necessary changes.

Firstly, he has crushed the Labour Left. Corbyn was booted out, Owen Jones left the party and a series of candidates ruthlessly dismissed.

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A pretty good Cabinet, with caveats

08/07/2024, 09:39:35 PM

by Rob Marchant

A Labour government. Let’s first just take a moment to savour those words.

Having sat in the Strangers Gallery just over a year ago and somewhat despaired as to the overall quality of the front bench, it looks to me that Starmer seems to have made a pretty good fist of delivering his first Cabinet.

The four Great Offices of State are unchanged from their Shadow incarnation: Starmer, Reeves, Lammy and Cooper. Reeves was brought in as a welcome safe pair of hands, with genuinely relevant career experience, to the Shadow Chancellor role after Anneliese Dodds’s unremarkable year in it, and has been well received since then. Cooper is a seasoned and respected politician, with Cabinet experience and five years of Home Affairs exposure chairing the Select Committee. Lammy we’ll come back to.

At the next level, Reynolds, Kendall, Healey, Phillipson, Kyle are all solid appointments. And Rayner’s appointment to Levelling Up, Housing and Communities seems to play to her strengths and interests. As expected, previous Cabinet experience has been pulled in wherever possible, to shore up a top table of many faces new to government; Hilary Benn has been brought back into the fold from committee-chairing, and a pleasant surprise has been the immediate deployment of “New Labour old lags” Douglas Alexander and Jacqui Smith as Ministers of State, alongside Ed Miliband, Pat McFadden and Yvette Cooper as full Cabinet members.

The less-good news: after a whole weekend of dithering, Anneliese Dodds has been given the Women and Equalities portfolio, despite having managed to anger numerous pro-women campaigners, including J K Rowling, with her clearly Stonewall-influenced views on gender recognition and conversion therapy, and will now be attending Cabinet, although not as a Secretary of State. One wonders whether no-one else wanted it, as a poison chalice; either way – in light of the new Prime Minister’s recently being forced into uncomfortable declarations regarding women’s toilets, contradicting Bridget Phillipson’s own the previous week – it is a tone-deaf appointment.

Meanwhile, women’s affairs being subsumed into Phillipson’s Education portfolio, breaking a manifesto promise that it would have its own department, presents less than ideal optics to women’s organisations on their importance to the new government. Monday’s Twitter has been aflame with the burns of disappointed women on Starmer and Dodds, and not without good reason.

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Nigel Farage and Reform were the Cleggmania of the 2024 campaign

06/07/2024, 09:11:57 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Earthquake? What earthquake. Nigel Farage might be talking up the result Reform secured but the facts tell a different story.

In 2015, Nigel Farage’s Ukip secured 3.9 million votes, 13% of the total and 1 MP. In 2024, Nigel Farage’s Reform won 4.1 million votes, 14% of the total and 5 MPs.

Yes, 2024 was an improvement over 2015 for Farage and his party’s vote was better distributed but remember who they, and all of the other parties, were running against: a tired, divided government in its 14th year that had presided over a parliamentary session where, for the first time, the country was worse off at the end compared to the start. Nothing works, public services are on their knees and even Nigel Farage has said that this version of Brexit has been a disaster.

The real question to be asked is why didn’t they do much better?

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Northern Ireland’s results might have longer-term ramifications for the province and the UK

03/07/2024, 09:38:48 AM

by Kevin Meagher

We’ve heard about the Red Wall, the Blue Wall, Scotland and Wales throughout this election campaign, but not so much about Northern Ireland.

Easy to overlook perhaps, but there are 18 parliamentary seats up for grabs and on three occasions over the past 45 years unionists have held the balance of power at Westminster.

Granted, with a Labour landslide incoming we probably don’t need to worry too much about the prospect of Keir Starmer being propped-up by the DUP (although there was a strong possibility of that happening if the numbers had been slightly better for Gordon Brown in 2010).

Still, there are a few interesting twists and turns to watch out for and the result might well have big ramifications for the new government further down the road.

First, there’s the DUP.

Northern Ireland’s preeminent unionist party goes into the election holding eight seats in the House of Commons (one ahead of Sinn Fein). But it’s a record that’s unlikely to be matched this time around.

The latest poll has them 10 points down on their 2019 share of the vote. There is also the elephant in the room in the shape of their former leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who is facing 18 charges in relation to historical sexual offences.

The party’s interim leader, Gavin Robinson, is the current MP for East Belfast. He faces a stiff challenge from Alliance. Their candidate, Naomi Long, formerly held the seat beating the DUP’s then-leader, Peter Robinson, back in 2010. Is history going to repeat itself?

Like the Tories, the DUP faces a challenger to their right splitting their vote in the shape of Traditional Unionist Voice. An undiluted, full-fat Paisleyite rump that makes the DUP sound like the Liberal Democrats. They are part of an alliance with Reform UK, (although Nigel Farage has personally endorsed the DUP’s Ian Paisley and Sammy Wilson).

But the DUP’s real threat comes from the resurgent Ulster Unionists and Alliance.  Both parties may take seats from the DUP. A worst-case scenario has them losing half their current tally.

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