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The case against assisted suicide
Those in favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill insist they’ve addressed critics’ principal concerns and that ‘stringent safeguards’ are in place. But it is impossible to see how this could be the case. If suicide is institutionalised as a form of medical treatment it is inevitable that vulnerable people will feel under pressure to opt for it, and inevitable that the bill will in time be amended and extended.
In Canada, denying assisted suicide to people who are not terminally ill has been ruled to be discrimination
Under the terms of the existing bill, a terminally ill person given less than six months to live will legally be able to take their own life if sanctioned by two independent doctors and a High Court judge. Doctors are not under any duty to raise assisted suicide – or ‘assisted dying’ as its advocates prefer to call it – with a patient, but the bill does allow for them to ‘discuss the matter with a person’ when it is in line with their professional judgment. The bill promises that those opting for assisted suicide would have to make two separate declarations, at different times, of a desire to die, and that the decision would have to be confirmed by a judge.
The involvement of the courts might sound reassuring, but we know from the scandal of the single justice procedure – under which thousands of people have been prosecuted for TV licence evasion without their knowledge – how easily a judicial decision becomes in practice a rubber-stamping procedure.
The experience of Canada and the Netherlands, which have (among others) already legalised assisted suicide, indicates how the practice would develop in Britain if this bill passes. In Canada, assisted suicide was introduced on the understanding that it should only be available to terminally ill people whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. Then the Superior Court of Quebec ruled that this discriminated against people who are not terminally ill and from 2027 assisted suicide will be available across Canada for those suffering from psychiatric illness. The fact that the judgment of these people is by definition impaired has done nothing to prevent the state offering to help them die.
Wherever it has been introduced, a law legalising assisted dying for the terminally ill has, in short order, evolved into routine euthanasia. In the Netherlands, assisted suicide has been tolerated since 1985, and became formally legalised in 2002. By 2019, it accounted for 4 per cent of deaths and was carried out in many cases by family doctors. In 2018 a physically healthy 29-year-old woman, Aurelia Brouwers, was granted the right to kill herself with a doctor’s help on the grounds that she suffered from a personality disorder and had had suicidal feelings. Rather than treat her for those feelings, the Dutch state chose to help her act on them.
In Belgium, too, euthanasia was legalised in 2002. By 2014 the country had amended the law to allow children to choose to be killed. Within three years, a nine-year-old and an 11-year-old became the first young children to have their lives ended with state approval. Between 2002 and 2021, 370 people suffering from mental illness were approved for assisted suicide in Belgium.
Critics of assisted suicide have consistently warned about a slippery slope and it has proven to be just that. Anyone who votes for Kim Leadbeater’s bill should do so in the knowledge that it is almost certain Britain would end up following the same route, and that the killing of children and the mentally ill would eventually be sanctioned by the state. If our domestic courts did not see to it, the European Court of Human Rights would. As in Canada, to deny assisted suicide to people who are not terminally ill would be ruled to be discrimination.
There has been an attempt in Leadbeater’s bill to guard against people being pressured into dying and a proposal to introduce a criminal offence, punishable with up to 14 years in prison, for anyone who persuaded someone to agree to assisted suicide. But pressure can be put on a person to agree to die without it being explicit. It could come from what family, doctors or nurses fail to say, just as much as what they suggest. Every mention of an ‘overloaded NHS’ or ‘bed-blockers’ can become a subliminal message to patients that they really ought to consider relieving society of the burden of keeping them alive.
In one sense the debate over assisted suicide has been refreshing. For once MPs are having to make up their own minds, with no whips to tell them how to vote. The issue has cut across party lines, with the cabinet heavily divided. For our legislators, it is a case of having to listen carefully to both sides and assess the evidence. But the evidence is clear.
No legal jurisdiction, of course, will ever succeed in eliminating unassisted suicide. The days when it was treated as a criminal offence are thankfully over. But when a state starts to sanction suicide by providing assistance, it leads to a devaluation of human life to the detriment of us all.
Europe’s blind spot over anti-Semitism
You would think that we Europeans might have learned a thing or two about anti-Semitism over the past century or so – and perhaps come to understand pragmatically, if nothing else, that what begins with the vicious persecution of Jews usually moves on to murdering lots of other people, too. But no. Or if we did, then it has conveniently slipped our minds, as things tend to do in these complicated times. Or perhaps we think that the persecution of the Jews we are seeing right now in Europe is of a different marque to that which began in the early 1930s in Germany. Yes, it’s sort of anti-Semitism – but it’s of a nicer kind than that instigated by that psychotic little Austrian with the performative moustache. A little more excusable.
The politicians say ‘It must never happen again’, and then it happens again the following week
That may be the answer as to why we don’t do anything about it, apart from spout platitudinous drivel, when Jews are attacked on our streets. Drivel about how awful it all is and how we must stand together – but never telling the whole truth, and never making sure it will not happen again even if the politicians always say: ‘It must never happen again.’ It happens again the following week, somewhere in Europe. And it is not a different brand of anti-Semitism, either. It is the tried and trusted old brand, based on lies, stupidity, doublethink and racial hatred. Exactly the same kind that Goebbels et al subscribed to, using exactly the same tropes, the same false allegations, the same inchoate loathing.
If only our TV news programmes and politicians could bring themselves to call it all ‘Far-Right Terrorism’, then something might get done – because we all know that Far-Right Terrorism is the biggest threat to our democracy. But they don’t. Even though it is, of course, far-right terrorism, lower case – the real far-right terrorism which our politicians do not want to think about and indeed lock people up when they complain a little vociferously about it.
A week or so back the Dutch football club Ajax of Amsterdam played a cup tie against the Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv and as a consequence what the media carefully call ‘pro-Palestinian’ thugs attacked the visiting Jewish supporters, with five hospitalised and 20 to 30 more injured. Many of the attacks were carried out by young men on mopeds – according to one Dutch politician, Moroccan young men on mopeds, which is about as close to actually identifying who these perpetrators might have been as you will get. The Israeli government reacted with shock, booking two planes to bring the football fans home from the fetid ghetto that parts of the decent, liberal Netherlands has become. Dutch politicians lined up to do the platitude stuff. The reliably witless Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, was among the first out of the blocks: ‘I strongly condemn these unacceptable acts. Anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe. And we are determined to fight all forms of hatred.’
Just read that vacuous bilge again – the bloodless and vague ‘unacceptable acts’ and ending with a commitment she does not remotely mean to keep. Oh, and anti-Semitism has absolutely no place in Europe? Au contraire, Ursula. It has many, many places, largely as a consequence of policies enacted by people like you. So, in that crescent (fittingly) of Europe from north-west France, through Belgium to Rotterdam and the Hague – and now arcing further north, to Malmo – these are the places where a large diaspora of Muslims from the Maghreb and the Levant have settled. Hey, it’s just occurred to me – gee, could there perhaps be some connection? If there is you can bank on the mainstream politicians and the mainstream media not to make it.
But there is plenty of anti-Semitism in London (and indeed Manchester), of course, and we have done nothing about it. Every time the Hamas groupies and their useful idiots from the white liberal left chant about rivers and seas they are too ignorant to identify, London’s Jews are targeted and feel afraid. There are fewer than 150,000 Jews in London, but over the past year there have been more than 2,000 attacks upon them. The woman who was dragged to the ground and punched in the face for putting up a poster demanding the return of the hostages. Or just the sort of thing this young Jewish bloke had to put up with on a Tube train last November: ‘I was talking to my friend and then next to me I hear someone say “pigs”. The guy next to me was on FaceTime and says, “I’m on the train with a bunch of dirty Jewish pigs, scumbags and baby killers”.’ If that had happened to someone from any other race, imagine the furore and the demands for retribution.
Please don’t believe this is all about Israel’s actions in Gaza, even if it is used as an excuse. It is a deep-seated problem located at the very centre of Islam and it was in evidence well before 7 October 2023. It has been a recurrent theme. Whenever I have interviewed Palestinian activists they almost always say, ‘off the record’: ‘Well, there’s a reason everyone hates them, my fren’.’ And then the lies come out, the incredibly familiar lies, the lies that take us right back to Treblinka and Sobibor. Islamism bought into Hitler and cannot yet bring itself to renounce him. The ideology of Hamas is drawn directly from Mein Kampf and the Third Reich, in which the Jews are to blame for everything – communism, capitalism, all warfare, the enslavement of other races, controlling the media etc, ad infinitum – and must therefore be exterminated. Genocide, then: explicit and very clear. And yet we are weirdly afraid to articulate this obvious point.
If we really believe that anti-Semitism has no place in Europe, then can we point the finger a little more? And mean it when we say ‘never again’.
Portrait of the week: Justin Welby resigns, interest rates cut and Trump announces appointments
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Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, after not reporting to the authorities what he knew in 2013 of the abuse perpetrated by John Smyth QC (who ran Christian summer camps in the 1970s and 1980s and died in 2018). An independent review by Keith Makin found last week that Smyth abused more than 100 young men and boys sexually and by beating. ‘When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow,’ Mr Welby said. Gary Lineker, who had presented Match of the Day since 1999, agreed to stand down at the end of the season.
Sue Gray turned down the job as the Prime Minister’s envoy to the nations; the mysterious role was said to be hers after she was dropped in October as his chief of staff. Sir Keir Starmer appointed Jonathan Powell, 68, Tony Blair’s old chief of staff, as his national security adviser. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, said his description of Donald Trump as a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’ was ‘old news’. At the Cop29 climate change summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, Sir Keir promised to reduce the United Kingdom’s emissions by 81 per cent of 1990 levels by 2035. In Holland, Shell won an appeal against a judgment requiring it to cut its carbon emissions by 45 per cent.
The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was published, sponsored by Kim Leadbeater, a Labour MP. June Spencer, who first played Peggy in The Archers in 1950, died aged 105. Frank Auerbach, the painter, died aged 93. The Bank of England cut interest rates from 5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. Unemployment rose to 4.3 per cent in the three months to September, from 4 per cent in the previous quarter. Pay in the three months to September grew at an annual rate of 4.8 per cent – the lowest in more than two years. Seven million workers in Britain, one in five, were found to have been born overseas. In the seven days to 11 November, 1,628 migrants arrived in small boats. A report into the administration of Tower Hamlets in London and its ‘culture of patronage’ opened the way to the government appointing ‘envoys’ to monitor its workings.
Abroad
Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, reposted an Instagram picture of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine captioned: ‘You’re 38 days from losing your allowance.’ President Emmanuel Macron of France and Sir Keir Starmer, in Paris on Armistice Day, expressed ‘their determination to support Ukraine unfailingly’. Ukraine said that on 9 November Russia launched 145 drones towards the country. Russia said it had intercepted 84 Ukrainian drones, including some approaching Moscow. Russia suffered its worst month for casualties in the war, according to Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of the defence staff, who put Russia’s dead and wounded at about 1,500 a day in October, bringing its casualties to 700,000 since February 2022.
The final tally in the US presidential election was 312 electoral college votes for Donald Trump and 226 for his Democrat opponent, Kamala Harris. He also decisively won the popular vote. The Republicans, having secured a majority in the Senate, edged towards one in the House of Representatives. Elon Musk, 53, was appointed to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge, a name echoing his favoured cryptocurrency, Dogecoin); he was to be joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, 39. Pete Hegseth, 44, a Fox News Channel host, was to be secretary of defence. Senator Marco Rubio, 53, was expected to be secretary of state. Susie Wiles, 67, was to be the White House chief of staff, the first woman in the role. Tom Homan, 62, was to be the ‘border tsar’. The New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, 40, becomes ambassador to the UN. The US government charged Farhad Shakeri, 51, believed to be in Iran, over an alleged plot in September to assassinate Donald Trump.
Qatar suspended its mediation between Israel and Hamas until ‘the parties show their willingness and seriousness to end the brutal war’. After a 30-day period for improving access, America said Israel had not breached US laws on blocking aid. Israel put on rescue flights after youths on scooters criss-crossed Amsterdam hunting down supporters of the visiting Maccabi Tel Aviv football team. The International Criminal Court announced an investigation into claims of sexual misconduct against its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Germany will hold elections on 23 February, after the collapse of its governing coalition. CSH
Foreign Office flogs off £1bn of buildings
It was Norman Tebbit who joked that the Ministry of Agriculture looked after farmers while ‘the job of the Foreign Office is to look after foreigners.’ So Mr S has done some digging and it turns out that the men and women who run FCDO have ensured HM’s government are making a pretty penny or two. Let’s hope it’s not a case of ‘selling the family silver’, to borrow Harold Macmillan’s words…
A Freedom of Information request by The Spectator says that the FCDO has sold off more than £1.1 billion of embassy buildings since 2010. Among them include the surroundings of the Bangkok estate, the Yervan embassy, the partial sale of Guatemala’s office and Tokyo’s famed compound. Among those who complained include Liz Truss – a famed fan of the small state – who warned earlier this year about ‘our historic embassies’ being ‘sold off to fund a bloated domestic budget.
Foreign Affairs Committee Emily Thornberry has her concerns too, counselling that:
There may be times when it makes sense to sell off parts of the estate. But to do so to routinely fund our diplomatic and consular services is not sustainable. Having a presence in almost every country in the world, in a prestigious building, is an important part of Britain’s soft power.
Over to you David Lammy…
Fact check: How much will Trump’s tariffs hurt the UK?
Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said Britain ‘would be one of the countries most affected’ by Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, with growth cut by 0.7 percentage points in year one, 0.5 percentage points in year two, and inflation 3-4 points higher. But research from Oxford Economics today suggests the impact would be ‘limited’, even in the worst-case scenario.
During the election campaign, Trump suggested putting tariffs of 10 or 20 per cent on all imported goods – except those from China and Mexico, which would be stung with 60 or even 100 per cent rates. At the moment, average UK tariffs on goods from the US are 2.2 per cent and US tariffs on goods from the UK are 3.3 per cent. But legal difficulties mean the US is likely to prioritise tariffs on countries with which it has big trade deficits – and the UK is a relatively small trading partner that imports more goods from the US than it exports to it.
If Trump does put tariffs of 10 per cent on goods imports from all countries and retaliatory tariffs are imposed too – a ‘full-blown Trump scenario’ – Oxford Economics expects a hit to certain sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and car manufacturers, which send a large share of their exports to the US. But at worst, the effect would reduce economic growth by just 0.2 percentage points. Inflation would be 0.3 percentage points higher, something the UK could largely avoid by not imposing retaliatory tariffs.
During the election campaign, Trump said tariff is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. Today’s report suggests they won’t be so ugly for Britain.
PMQs has become as bland as a Bible study class
PMQs under Sir Keir’s premiership is less entertaining and volatile than before. Blame the landslide. A huge government majority fills the backbenches with half-witted placemen and wonks who have no experience of public speaking. They can’t command the attention of a large crowd. They don’t look the audience in the eye. And they fail to use their voices at full volume. Instead, they hunch like scared beginners over scripted crib-sheets handed to them by the whips. Can none of these talentless hacks memorise a few short sentences? It’s embarrassing.
Sir Keir was in control. Kemi was at sea
And Labour’s inept gang of newcomers will never hold Sir Keir to account because they lack any spark of individuality. PMQs is like a church-hall Bible class. Each planted question prompts a robotic reply from Sir Keir followed by surge of orchestrated uproar from the honking donkeys.
Kemi Badenoch tried to cut a path through the blandness. Sir Keir pre-empted her by answering a backbench question about the £600 million offered to local authorities to cover social care. He also raised the subject of the minimum wage, which Labour has increased.
‘He can plant as many question as he likes,’ Badenoch countered. ‘I’m the one he has to face at the despatch box.’ She attacked Rachel Reeves, ‘the cut-and-paste Chancellor,’ and predicted that the employers’ National Insurance hike will lead to council tax rises. Sir Keir denied it.
Kemi had a figure of £2.4 billion in missing funds up her sleeve but by failing to mention it early she allowed Sir Keir to wrong-foot her. He suggested that she was asking about the £600 million which he’d just quoted. Did she not hear? Was she not listening? ‘A fundamental error,’ he called it. And that’s how it looked. Sir Keir was in control. Kemi was at sea. And she misspoke by accident, saying ‘experience’ when she meant ‘expensive’. By the time she got to the £2.4 billion it was too late.
Sir Keir then put her on the spot by asking her if she supports more spending on schools, housing and healthcare. ‘I’m not against any of those things,’ said Kemi. ‘None of us are against any of those things.’
Starmer pretended to be baffled. ‘She doesn’t want the measures in the budget but she wants all the benefits. The magic money tree is back.’ Bad move by Kemi. She’s handed a box of ammo to her enemies that may never run out.
Sir Ed Davey faces a terrible dilemma. Labour’s victory has rendered the Liberal Democrat leader and his party irrelevant. And irrelevant people often gravitate towards international wars to give them a sense of purpose. Sir Ed’s hawk-like gaze has turned on Ukraine and the threat by Donald Trump to ‘withdraw the allowance’ from Zelensky.
In the chamber, Sir Ed urged Sir Keir to ‘step up and fill the gap’ left by the US, either by mobilising the UK alone or by asking for assistance from the EU. His specific plan is to ‘freeze the assets’ of the Russians and to use ‘the underlying investment’ to curb Putin’s aggression.
It’s all very out of character. The Lib Dems usually oppose foreign wars but Sir Ed is swinging his cutlass around like a drunken conquistador. Where does his blood lust come from? Perhaps his Surbiton voters are pressurising him to enact their dreams of conquest and world domination. Or perhaps it’s Sir Ed himself who wants to make the Kremlin tremble and terminate Putin’s infamous career. We’ll have to wait till next week. If Sir Ed shows up in a military tunic, dark glasses and a holstered pistol, we’ll know.
What the Boots Christmas advert backlash is really about
Christmas television adverts are meant to be comforting, homely, and traditional. While some find these offerings, especially John Lewis’s, overly twee and sentimental, most would agree that festive adverts should be kept clear of politics – overt or otherwise.
This unspoken consensus, however, appears to have been lost on those behind the new Boots Christmas TV commercial, an advert stamped with hallmarks of the hyper-liberal politics that, all year round, bring so little joy and cheer to the nation.
The advert stars Adjoa Andoh, the actress best known for describing the King’s Coronation as ‘terribly white’, in the role of Mrs Claus, tending to her fat, lazy, white husband while referring to one present for ‘Robin’ as ‘very them’ – rather than ‘very her’ or ‘very him’. Unsurprisingly, it has sparked a backlash online, with ‘boycott Boots’ trending on X (formerly Twitter). In predictable fashion, some have already dismissed the response as a cry from ‘far-right bigots’ (Pink News) or evidence of a nostalgic, racist desire to return to the 1950s (Independent). The only surprise, perhaps, is that no one has yet called it a ‘moral panic’.
This reaction to Boots is hardly unexpected. The retailer, which this year received a ‘gold award’ in Stonewall’s UK Workplace Equality Index, has pledged ‘to focus on LGBT+ acceptance through our marketing and brands’. It is conspicuous among brands keen to showcase hyper-progressive values. Boots has provided 3,000 Pride pins to staff, and in 2022, its Christmas advert featured a drag queen. Its adverts, especially in print and on television, are often notable for a hyper-tokenism, even in a medium already infamous for its apparent aversion to white males.
Yet the backlash against Boots’s advert isn’t about shock but frustration at a relentless narrative, especially on gender issues. In these culture wars, it seems that not even Christmas offers a truce from what many see as corporate virtue-signalling. But will the Boots advert work?
The advert stars Adjoa Andoh, the actress best known for describing the King’s Coronation as ‘terribly white’
While the phrase ‘go woke, go broke’ is disputed as an absolute rule, some corporations have been badly burnt in recent years by flaunting their progressive credentials. Last May, Bud Light faced a fierce backlash after featuring a transgender influencer in a promotion. A coordinated boycott saw its sales fall by more than ten per cent in the United States.
Disney, too, has faced setbacks since deciding to position itself as the moral compass of America’s moneyed elites. Its recent releases have featured a Muslim female superhero and a non-binary character, but audiences seem tired of moralising. Several of Disney’s recent films have bombed at the box office.
American retailer Target saw a 10 per cent drop in digital sales after launching a Pride collection last year. Then there’s Benetton, the trailblazer of socially conscious advertising. Its ‘United Colors of Benetton’ campaign, launched in 1982, used controversial imagery to raise awareness on issues such as racism, AIDS, and the environment. While it boosted sales in the short term, it ultimately failed to sustain the brand. Benetton is now a shadow of its former self, largely invisible in today’s market.
The Benetton story is a cautionary one: appropriating fashionable causes or feigning liberal beliefs may not necessarily bring financial ruin, but it can lead to a loss of focus. No brand is too big to fail. Companies that grow lazy or arrogant risk peril, no matter how established they might be – just look at Atari, Pan Am, Kodak, Nokia, and Blockbuster.
Antagonising people at Christmas seems unlikely to prove a bright idea for Boots.
Why did China censor reports of a deadly hit-and-run?
In many respects, the Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) response to one of the deadliest mass killings in recent Chinese history is drearily familiar. The authorities now say that at least 35 people were killed and dozens injured on Monday evening when the 62-year-old driver of an SUV rammed his vehicle into crowds at a local sports stadium. But it took the authorities more than a day to release details and initial online searches were heavily censored. Videos from the scene in the southern city of Zhuhai posted to social media were deleted – even state media reports were removed from the internet. BBC journalists were told to stop filming when they tried to report from the area.
The track where the incident took place was popular with families, who crowded the area to dance, run and walk on most weekday evenings. Videos show the vehicle ploughing through one walking group before making a sharp turn and ramming into another group, leaving bodies scattered on the ground. Many elderly people, as well as teenagers and children, were among the injured, state media is now reporting. Hundreds of rescue personnel were despatched to the area to provide emergency treatment for the injured at the scene. Police said the driver, whose surname is Fan, has been captured and was hospitalised for stab wounds believed to have been self-inflicted
The CCP is deeply concerned about social stability amid a worsening economy
The attack took place on the eve of the Zhuhai air show, China’s biggest, where the military has been putting some of its latest kit on display – including for the first time a new stealth fighter. There was no suggestion the the attack was related to the airshow, though it is the second such incident: during the 2008 show, at least four people were killed and 20 injured when a man drove a truck into a crowded schoolyard. Police said that attacker had been seeking revenge over a traffic dispute.
Initial reports on this week’s attack said Fan was angry about the financial settlement in his divorce and the failure of a court to uphold his appeal. However, that detail was removed from later reports.
This is only the latest of several recent cases of apparent vehicle attacks. Earlier this year, a bus rammed into a crowd near a middle school in Taian in East China’s Shandong province, killing 11 people. In March, a car careered into a group of schoolchildren in Dezhou, Shandong, killing two and injuring six. Few details of these attacks were provided.
The slow release of information about the Zhuhai attack was criticised on Chinese social media (though much of that criticism too was deleted). ‘This happened yesterday, but we only found out about it today. If it happened in other places, our media might have been following the news all day long,” said one user of the Weibo platform.
The CCP simply does not do transparency. A plane crash in March 2022, when a Chinese Eastern Boeing 737 ploughed into the ground in Guangxi province killing all 132 people onboard, is still officially under investigation, since it is ‘very complicated’. Outside experts and investigators believe it was a case of mass murder, the pilot deliberately crashing his plane into the ground. The flight controls were pushed to put the plane into a dive, there was no evidence of forced entry to cockpit or technical malfunction. The only obstacle to reaching that conclusion is CCP obduracy.
Yet, it would be wrong to treat the CCP’s response to the Zhuhai tragedy as just another case of the the party exercising its traditional reflexes. There is growing evidence that the CCP is deeply concerned about social stability amid a worsening economy. They fear that a lack of any meaningful social safety net and a sense of social injustice might drive people to desperate measures. They do not want violent incidents depicted (or justified) as a response to dire social circumstances or to grievances – hence the removal of the divorce details. ‘Social stability’ has become a significant theme of recent party meetings, which have included calls to set up ‘comprehensive social security governance centres, improving mechanisms for properly handling internal contradictions among the people under new circumstances’ – party speak for the stresses and strains of a faltering economy.
Once the CCP got its story about Monday’s attack relatively straight, Premier Li Qiang called for a swift investigation and severe punishment of the perpetrator, while saying the government must ‘investigate hidden risks and social conflicts’. President Xi Jinping called for ‘making every effort to safeguard the security of people’s lives and social stability’. The punishment bit is second nature for the CCP, social stability is becoming an increasing challenge.
Keir Starmer has a problem answering questions
Kemi Badenoch didn’t have the best start at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions: she asked a question that had apparently already been answered, allowing Keir Starmer to mock her early on. But the Prime Minister ultimately had the tougher session.
That repeated question first came from Lib Dem Christine Jardine at the very start of the session. She reported GPs and charities worrying that the rise in employers’ national insurance contributions meant they would not be able to keep offering patients the service they deserved. Starmer started replying that ‘because of the tough decisions we took’, before he was interrupted by theatrical groans from opposition MPs.
He then continued:
We have put forward a Budget with an extra £25.6 billion for the NHS and for social care. That includes an increase to carers’ allowance and £600 million available to deal with the pressures of adult social care. We will ensure that GP practices have the resources that they need and the funding arrangements between the NHS and contractors will be set out in the usual way.
After a planted question from a Labour backbencher about Badenoch’s views on maternity pay and other matters, Starmer had to face the leader of the opposition. She told the chamber: ‘The Prime Minister can plant as many questions as he likes with his backbenchers, but in the end I’m the one he has to face at the despatch box.’ She then accused Starmer of ‘unilaterally’ making a commitment on reducing emissions that would make life more expensive for people. Then she asked whether he would keep the cap on council tax. Starmer replied that he was ‘very proud of the fact that we’re restoring leadership on climate’. Badenoch said he had dodged the question, and then asked:
How much extra does he expect local authorities will have to raise to cover the social care funding gap created by the Chancellor’s budget and increases in employers’ NI? He told the member for Edinburgh West just now that he was covering social care, how much extra does he expect local authorities to raise?
Starmer replied:
It’s all very well, this knockabout, but not actually listening to what I said three minutes ago is a bit of a fundamental failure of the leader of the opposition. I just said £600 million. I repeat it, £600 million.
Badenoch then quoted the Local Government Association saying this figure would not cover the cost, and said that ‘it is clear that they have not thought through the impact of the Budget and this is the problem with having a copy and paste chancellor’. She then added that on Monday the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government revealed that councils will need to find an additional £2.4 billion on council tax. He asked whether Angela Rayner had made him ‘aware’ of the black hole for councils. Starmer’s retort was that the Conservatives had learnt nothing and that his party’s Budget was taking the difficult decisions. ‘They say they want all of that, but they don’t know how they’re going to pay for it. Same old Tories!’
The exchanges then went into whether the government was approving a four-day week for councils, allowing the same pay for less work. Starmer accused Badenoch of ‘fantasy’ questions and then went back to the Conservatives’ record.
Badenoch’s questions could have been clearer. But Starmer was not able to answer them. He did not acknowledge how councils would meet the shortfall on social care. He hadn’t really answered Jardine’s question on GPs and charities. So when Ed Davey then popped up for his two questions, he ended up struggling again with the warnings about the NI increase. The Liberal Democrat leader said: ‘I listened very carefully to what he said to my honourable friend, but I have to say I hope he can think again. Will he at least exempt GPs, community pharmacies and other health and care providers from this tax rise?’ Starmer argued that the government had made a ‘huge’ investment in the NHS and that people in the health service were ‘very pleased’. He added that the government would ‘ensure’ that GPs would get the resources they need, something Davey said wasn’t enough of an answer.
Straight after the Budget, the row about national insurance was focused on whether the government had broken the Labour manifesto promise not to raise taxes on working people. Starmer reiterated his insistence that he had kept that promise in the session today. But the trouble that this rise is causing the health sector is not going to go away, and Badenoch’s questions did contribute to that. Other notable moments in the session included Starmer joking that Nigel Farage was making a ‘rare appearance back here’ and had ‘spent so much time in America recently I was half expecting to see him on the immigration statistics’. He also refused to say that the assisted dying bill would get more time for MPs to debate it than the current five hours for second reading. But many of the other questions were just dreadful exercises in toadying from Labour backbenchers, who have fallen into the bad habit of accepting planted questions to give the Prime Minister a breather and praise him, rather than doing their job.
Farage rated most favourable of Britain’s politicians
As Sir Keir Starmer’s fortunes go from bad to worse, things only seem to be improving for Nigel Farage. While Reform eye up a possible by-election in Runcorn and Helsby with hopes of getting a sixth MP into parliament, the party will have been given a boost today after new YouGov polling has revealed Farage has received the highest ‘favourable’ score in a poll of Britain’s most senior politicians. How very interesting.
In the latest survey, carried out between 8-10 November, 30 per cent of Brits logged a positive opinion of Nige – the highest ‘favourable’ score of any senior politician on the list. The Reform leader came two points ahead of Keir Starmer – who received a favourable rating of 28 per cent – and had a nine-point lead on new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who was rated positively by just over a fifth of Brits. Badenoch does rank higher than her former Conservative leadership contesters, however, with Priti Patel receiving a favourability rating of 15 per cent, Robert Jenrick on 14 per cent and Mel Stride on a measly 6 per cent. Silver linings…
Of Sir Keir's Cabinet, Angela Rayner comes out top, with just under a quarter of Brits registering a positive opinion of the Deputy Prime Minister. And perhaps surprisingly, given the Budget fallout, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is next, neck-and-neck with Badenoch, while Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood all trail behind.
However when the 'unfavourable' scores are taken into account things aren't quite as, er, rosy for Farage – with over 60 per cent of Brits rating the Reform leader negatively. Curiously Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and Green co-leader Carla Denyer fare particularly well on net ratings, both on a relatively positive -7. Yet, despite his overall score of -31, Nige is still beating Conservative MP Priti Patel's -49 and Labour's unpopular PM on -33. It's more bad news for Sir Keir, who last month also suffered the worst approval rating plunge of any new prime minister. Talk about a honeymoon cut short, eh?
The Guardian announces it’s leaving Twitter – on Twitter
The absurdity of the Guardian never fails to amuse. Now the lefty newspaper has decided it is too good for one of the world’s most used social media platforms and today announced it will no longer use Twitter – by posting on, er, Twitter. You couldn’t make it up…
Sharing a link to an article explaining ‘why the Guardian is no longer posting on X’ on the site itself, the Grauniad editorial states rather pompously that:
We think that the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives and that resources could be better used promoting our journalism elsewhere. This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including the far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.
Golly. Don’t hold back! The article signs off with a rather unsubtle dig at those less noble competitors choosing to remain on the platform, with the editorial concluding: ‘Thankfully, we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms.’ Pew pew!
It’s tough talk – but will the lefty lot really manage to stay away? Watch this space…
MSPs in winter fuel payment hypocrisy
Back to Scotland, where parliamentarians are under scrutiny over questionable expenses claims – this time on heating their second homes. It transpires that between 2023-24 Scottish politicians claimed a whopping £36,000 in energy bills for their rented homes in Edinburgh, with the Nats and Labour lot making up £26,000 of the total cost. Alright for some!
John Swinney’s separatists were the biggest beneficiaries, as pointed out by the Scottish Daily Express, with almost half of the Holyrood group expensing energy costs. The Nats claimed over £25,000 from the public purse, while over £1,000 of taxpayer funds are covering Labour MSP Colin Smyth’s utility bill. Scottish parliamentarians are currently entitled to rent a second home in Edinburgh to allow them to be in Holyrood – but energy claims are creeping up. In 2021-22, MSPs claimed £19,000 in utilities. Last year, the figure almost doubled. Talk about living the high life, eh?
The revelation comes amid uproar over cuts to winter fuel payments – by both Sir Keir Starmer’s lefty lot and the SNP. The Labour government announced this year it would means test the benefit, meaning that a staggering nine million pensioners will miss out on additional help with their heating bills. And while the Nats have been busy blasting Starmer’s army over the decision, Mr S would point out that the separatists could still choose to keep the payment universal north of the border if they really wanted to. Not that politicians have to worry much about that with their expense entitlement, eh? Rules for thee, but not for me…
What can we expect from Trump’s defence pick?
As President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations to executive positions gradually emerge, it is difficult to know what to expect next. Elon Musk is set to run the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who organised a drugs awareness campaign under the slogan, ‘Meth. We’re on it’ and wrote in her autobiography of shooting dead her badly behaved wire-haired pointer puppy, is tapped for Secretary of Homeland Security.
Trump’s choice for the critical role of Secretary of Defence is typically atypical. Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Minnesotan educated at Princeton and Harvard, is a presenter and commentator for Fox News. He has also worked for two conservative political advocacy groups, Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, and began his professional career with a fleeting stint as an equity capital markets analyst at Bear Stearns in the early 2000s. In Washington terms, however, he has no executive or legislative experience.
His supporters point to the fact that Hegseth is a decorated veteran with a distinguished service record in the National Guard. He was deployed to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as an infantry platoon leader in 2004, saw active duty in Iraq and was a senior instructor at the Counterinsurgency Training Center in Kabul. During his tour of Baghdad and Samarra, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, for ‘heroic or meritorious achievement or service’, and the Combat Infantryman Badge, and left the army as a major in 2021.
No one should dispute or diminish Hegseth’s creditable 18-year career as a reservist. It cannot be compared, though, to the military experience of recent secretaries of defense like James Mattis, a Marine Corps general who had headed Central Command and led a combat division in the invasion of Iraq, or the incumbent, Lloyd Austin, a four-star general in the US Army who succeeded Mattis at Central Command and was previously Vice-Chief of Staff.
The Secretary of Defense is not chosen on the basis of military leadership or combat experience: his role is to provide civilian direction of the Pentagon, a sprawling department with a budget of $850 billion and 750,000 civilian employees as well as the two million active and reserve military personnel. Indeed, the National Security Act of 1947 stipulates that no one may serve as Secretary of Defense within seven years of active military service in order to reinforce the principle of civilian control of the armed forces. Both Mattis and Lloyd required congressional waivers.
The announcement from Trump of Hegseth’s nomination, couched in the usual heavily capitalised machismo of the President-elect’s social media presence, hinted at the reasoning behind his selection.
‘Pete has spent his entire life as a Warrior for the Troops, and for the Country. Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First. With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice – Our Military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.’
Hegseth fulfils two essential criteria for Trump. Firstly, he is an enthusiastic and loyal supporter of the President-elect, backing him in 2016 after initially championing first Marco Rubio then Ted Cruz, and becoming a more stalwart follower in the years that have followed. By 2020, the New Republic had dubbed him ‘Trump’s War Whisperer’.
Second, Hegseth is a brash, blunt, unapologetic opponent of anything which has a whiff of ‘woke’. On a recent podcast, he criticised the integration of women into all parts of the armed forces.
‘I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.’
He also promoted the suspicion that progressive liberal views have seeped into every part of American life with corrosive effect.
‘Woke shit has got to go. Either you’re in for warfighting and that’s it, that’s the only litmus test we care about. You’ve got to get DEI and CRT out of military academies so you’re not training young officers to be baptized in this type of thinking.’
Hegseth’s nomination has taken many by surprise, even Republicans in Congress. Senator Todd Young of Indiana said carefully ‘I just don’t know much about his background and his vision. I look forward to learning more.’ Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina was more guarded still – ‘Interesting’ – while Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska managed ‘Wow’.
It is hard to assess Hegseth’s views on relations with China, the posture and footprint of America’s armed forces, security partnerships with other countries or the size and breakdown of the Pentagon’s budget. In a sense, though, they do not really matter. Trump has selected a loyalist with verbal swagger and a polished media presence. According to one source quoted by CNN, the President-elect also ‘thinks he has the look’.
That may be the most eloquent summation of Trump’s thought process. Hegseth is his chosen mannequin for military matters. We should not look for a deeper rationale than that. But it is a dangerous way to assemble an administration.
The humiliating emptiness of David Cameron’s legacy
The humiliating post-premiership of David Cameron is the gift that keeps on giving. He might have been gone from No. 10 for more than eight years, but pretty much everything involving him that’s happened in British national life since his departure has been a reminder of the awful emptiness of his time in office.
At most, the Big Society was a woolly phrase – and the NCS
The list of Cameron embarrassments is as long as the list of his accomplishments is short. There was Dave’s time as a spiv lobbyist, failing to charm former colleagues in government for Lex Greensill. There was a cameo appearance as foreign secretary, a spell distinguished by precisely zero foreign policy successes. He’s even failed at being idle: fellow members of his posh golf club are annoyed at his charmless conduct on the links.
Now we learn that the National Citizens’ Service (NCS) is being abolished, as the government – sensibly – rethinks wider support for young people who face dreadful rates of mental health problems and related economic inactivity. This has made poor Lord Cameron sad. Not, apparently, because of the impact on other people, but because of what it means for him.
It’s important to understand how important the NCS is to Cameron. Insofar as anything can matter to a politician whose defining feature was not caring about things, NCS mattered to DC because it was supposed to help prove that he mattered, that his time in office meant something.
I am deeply saddened and disappointed that the new Labour Government has decided to close down National Citizen Service, @NCS.
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) November 12, 2024
I began pilots for NCS in opposition, to help build bridges across social divides. Young people from different backgrounds, different areas of the…
The vital bit of Cameron’s whiny comment on the end of NCS is this: ‘It was the Big Society in action.’ To Dave, this is self-explanatory, but if they ever knew about it at all, most people have now forgotten the Big Society.
The ‘Big Society’ was one of Cameron’s pre-government slogans, but it was meant to be a lot more than that. Cameron sometimes like to think of himself as an intellectual radical re-thinking the relationship between the state and the population.
On a wall in his Downing Street flat he had a copy of an 2010 Economist cover showing him with a Union flag mohawk under the headline ‘Radical Britain’. That summed him up rather well, a very conventional establishment chap who fancied himself daring and bold – because other establishment chaps said so.
But what did that ‘radicalism’ mean? Sure, there was austerity, but if there was an intellectual strategy informing cuts to public spending, it didn’t extend beyond ‘only cut stuff our voters don’t use or care about’. That’s routine politics, not a big idea.
So the Big Society (naturally reduced by many to ‘BS’) was Dave’s attempt at such a big idea, some intellectual heft to support the shiny-faced spin of his leadership. Unfortunately, Cameron never really worked out what it meant – that would have meant doing some hard work and hard thinking, after all. At most, the Big Society was a woolly phrase – and the NCS.
And now that is gone too. Cameron’s legacy is now even thinner: underfunded services; some school reforms that someone else came up with; and the accidental end of Britain’s EU membership. Whatever you think of Brexit and whatever its eventual consequences, it can never be counted to Cameron’s credit because he didn’t want it. It sprang from his errors and his weaknesses, not his decisions and his strengths.
Almost exactly 200 years before Cameron left office, Shelley completed Ozymandias, a poem that could have been written for him:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
That sneer of cold command is still here, but the NCS, the Big Society and Cameron’s vain dreams of domestic reform are gone. Now nothing remains, Dave, beside Brexit – and the hand that mocked.
Who are the longest-serving Archbishops of Canterbury?
Arch rivals
Justin Welby served longer as Archbishop of Canterbury than any of his four immediate predecessors, but others have served far longer. The longest since the Reformation was Randall Davidson, who held the position between 1903 and 1928, when he retired aged 80 – becoming the first not to die in post. Before the reformation, several Archbishops served stints of nearly three decades, but none so long as Thomas Bourchier, who was Archbishop between 1454 and 1486. Another long-serving Archbishop was St Dunstan, who held the post between 959 and 988, surviving to the age of around 80 in spite of having been beaten, bound and thrown into a cesspit in his youth.
Digital divide
How buoyant is the market for jobs in the digital sector?
— In 2022/23 the number of jobs grew by 0.3% (compared with 0.8% in the economy as a whole).
— Jobs in telecommunications, a subset of the digital sector, actually fell by 2.7%.
— The digital sector accounts for 5.6% of all employment.
— 29% of workers are female, compared with 48% of the overall workforce.
— 64% of workers have a degree, compared with 44% across the economy.
Source: Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Mother countries
Last year, 187,975 babies were born to mothers who themselves were born outside the UK. Where were the mothers born?
India 21,513
Pakistan 17,715
Romania 13,717
Nigeria 12,312
Poland 9,420
Bangladesh 7,889
Albania 3,891
Afghanistan 3,388
Ghana 3,363
US 3,229
Source: Office for National Statistics
Doctored figures
How easy is it to contact a GP (according to an NHS satisfaction survey)?
— 70% said it was easy, 12% said it was difficult.
— 45% said they got help ‘there and then’, while 27% said they got an appointment later the same day and 23% said they were seen the next day or later.
— 44% of these appointments were face-to-face, 15% by phone and 21% online.
Source: ONS Health Insight Team
The world isn’t listening to Keir Starmer’s climate preaching
Keir Starmer said he was travelling to Cop 29 in Baku intending to “lead the world on climate change”. But it must surely be obvious that he is, instead, barking at a world that is heading in the opposite direction. Last year’s grand talk about “phasing down” fossil fuels at Cop 28 notwithstanding, today’s Global Carbon Budget Report forecasts that global carbon emissions will hit another record high in 2024, reaching 41.6 billion tonnes, up from 40.6 billion tonnes in 2023. The report calls this “marginal”, but it’s actually a 2.5 per cent increase, including all carbon emissions from industry and land use, as well as fossil fuel burning.
How much longer can Starmer claim that he’s setting an example?
Europe may be doing its bit – emissions are estimated to have dropped by 3.8 per cent over the year – but the rest of the world isn’t following suit. US emissions are down by a mere 0.6 per cent, despite some hailing Joe Biden as a climate hero. In China, emissions are up by 0.2 per cent, and in India by a notable 4.6 per cent. Emissions from international aviation and shipping, which don’t count toward any country’s total, are expected to rise by 7.8 per cent. Any sign of the world phasing down fossil fuel use? Sadly not. Emissions from coal are up 0.2 per cent, oil by 0.9 per cent, and gas by 2.4 per cent.
While global emissions have largely plateaued over the past decade, and even declined in three years – 2013, 2016, and during the Covid-hit year of 2020 – there remains an enormous gulf between what world leaders say they’ll do at Cop summits and what they actually go home and implement.
This year, many have chosen not even to attend, including Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, and Xi Jinping – making Starmer’s claim of “leading the world” appear even more preposterous. No other country seems willing to follow Britain’s example of committing to net zero targets at any economic cost. While China and others invest heavily in electric vehicles, wind, and solar energy, they are unwilling to compromise the affordability or reliability of their energy supplies. China still generates 60 per cent of its electricity – yes, the power used to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels for export to Britain – from coal. Given the choice between meeting arbitrary international targets and growing their economies, most world leaders opt for the latter. Even developed countries with emissions reduction plans are not all winding down their fossil fuel industries as Britain is. The US, Canada, and Norway appear committed to expanding output.
The question remains: how much longer can Starmer – and other Western European leaders – sustain the claim that they’re setting an example for the rest of the world by racing towards net zero targets? It seems fitting that Cop takes place annually around Remembrance Sunday. Britain’s industry-destroying net zero commitment has the air of a supreme sacrifice – although, unlike the Allied effort in the Second World War, this sacrifice may sadly be in vain.
Keir Starmer’s choice of Attorney General should concern conservatives
Of all Keir Starmer’s appointments to government, none have been so personal or politically significant as his choice of Attorney General. The Prime Minister’s politics have been shaped, refined and hardened by his time as a human-rights barrister. The role of Attorney General – the government’s chief legal adviser and the minister responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service, which Starmer ran as director of public prosecutions – is of critical importance to him.
While the PM may or may not take a close interest in who is minister for planning, veterans or food security, he will have thought very carefully about who should be his AG. The choice of Richard Hermer is deeply revealing – and should be profoundly worrying. Hermer’s approach to politics marks a sharp departure from Britain’s traditional political constitution and the approach taken by his recent predecessors in this ancient office.
Hermer’s relationship with Starmer is more than personal: it is also intellectual, even ideological
Lord Hermer, as he is now, is the first incumbent since 1922 not to have served in parliament before his appointment and the fact that he was chosen over the heads of other progressive lawyers reinforces how very personal Starmer’s choice is.
The two men have long been friends, ever since Hermer joined the progressive Doughty Street Chambers, of which Starmer was a founding member, in 1993. As a young barrister, Hermer appeared in several cases as Starmer’s junior. When he took silk in 2009, Starmer gave the toast at the celebration, and when Sir Keir ran for the Labour party leadership in 2020, Hermer, who by then had moved to the equally progressive Matrix Chambers, donated £5,000 to his campaign. But Hermer’s relationship with Starmer is more than personal: it is also intellectual, even ideological.
At the bar, both men were among the first generation of barristers to specialise in human-rights law, to which Hermer added international law as a specialism, making him highly unusual among his recent predecessors. Among Hermer’s clients have been Kenyan Mau Mau detainees suing the British government and Gerry Adams, who was defending himself against lawsuits brought by victims of Provisional IRA bombings.
What Hermer and Starmer share above all else is an uncompromising commitment to a particular version of the rule of law, which Hermer has described as ‘the lodestar for this government’, a point he has emphasised in his public remarks, not least by amending his ancient oath of office to add a reference to it.
Hermer’s conception of the rule of law is a particular one. To most people, the rule of law means a society in which no one, including the state, is above the law, properly enacted, and in which disputes about what the law requires are settled by independent courts. But Hermer has argued that this ‘thin’ account of the rule of law is inadequate, nothing more than a device which ‘populists and authoritarians’ use as a ‘cloak of legitimacy’. By contrast, both Hermer and Starmer are proponents of the ‘thick’ conception of the rule of law. As he expounded in his recent Bingham lecture, this ‘thick’ conception of the rule of law stands for an expansive set of liberal political values, practical limits on parliament’s legislative powers and a judicially enforced human-rights framework like the European Convention on Human Rights.
The impact of Hermer’s approach to the rule of law has already been seen across the government, especially in foreign policy, not the traditional preserve of the Attorney General’s Office. One of his first official acts was to withdraw Britain’s objections to the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli officials by the International Criminal Court.
Likewise, it was Hermer who announced the government’s support for the expansion of the UN Security Council in order to give a veto to more countries, an unusual brief for a law officer to take on, but a sign of Hermer’s evident influence on British foreign policy.
When the government decided to suspend export permits for weapons to Israel, Hermer was at the centre of the decision-making process and last year, he signed a letter which suggested that Israel’s policies in the West Bank might amount to apartheid. Similarly, when the government decided to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius on the basis of what Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project has shown to be a legally dubious and non-binding advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (an opinion secured for Mauritius by Philippe Sands KC, a former colleague of Hermer and a friend of Starmer’s), Hermer defended it as ‘honouring our obligations under international law’.
The same impulse led to the government’s acceptance of the European Court of Human Rights’s interim measures blocking the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda as legally binding even though the Strasbourg court lacked the legal authority to do so.
Hermer’s influence within government is growing. He recently issued new guidance to government lawyers ‘to raise the standards for calibrating legality’ across government and allow them to ‘give their full and frank advice to me and others in government and to stand up for the rule of law’. In other words, the Attorney General’s Office becomes the arbiter of whether individual policies can be pursued by ministers, and government lawyers direct elected politicians rather than the other way around.
Four months into his time in office, Hermer has shown himself to be one of the most prominent law officers in recent decades. His vision of a government whose decisions are driven by civil service lawyers at home and international courts abroad, a vision that runs counter to the daily realities and responsibilities of democratic governance, is a worrying sign of things to come.
The appalling truth about London’s ambulance service
‘An old lady’s fallen down – quick! She’s bleeding. Come help.’ An elderly woman lay on the entrance steps of the block of mansion flats, food from a Tesco bag spilled around her, blood spreading on the stone. It was clear she’d tripped and banged her forehead, opening a large gash over her right eye. The courier had already tried to call an ambulance, but been put on hold. He had to continue his delivery run, so he’d begun ringing doorbells to summon assistance.
The lady was groggy but awake. I asked her name – Daphne. I helped her sit up, slowly, and propped her against the doorway’s cold brickwork. Checking she wouldn’t keel over, I ran inside for a box of tissues. We wadded up handfuls and pressed them on the wound to staunch the bleeding.
I dialled 999 and asked for the ambulance service. Like a fool, I believed that London actually still had one.
I dialled 999 and asked for the ambulance service. Like a fool, I believed London still had one
The operator came on the line in seconds – a hopeful sign. Or so I thought. Her questions were quick-fire and efficient: was the patient conscious? Yes; was she still bleeding? Yes; could she walk? No. Instructions on stopping the bleeding followed – clean tissues, pressure. So far, so good.
Then, our location. The operator wouldn’t log the address until she had the correct postcode. Though my mother lives in the block, I did not know it by heart and had to look through post in the hall. Next, the bureaucratic phase. The patient’s full name and date of birth (never an easy question to ask an elderly female stranger, least of all when she is close to fainting with pain and covered in blood). NHS number? By the time we got to this stage, I had been on the phone for 15 minutes, talking to the operator rather than tending to Daphne, who had begun to shiver.
‘When is the ambulance arriving?’ I asked several times in the course of this form-filling. ‘Is it on its way, at least?’ No response, except that the operator was going to ‘check with the dispatcher’. I was put on hold for five more minutes. Then, finally, an answer.
‘A paramedic will call you back within an hour,’ said the operator. I was incredulous.
‘She will have bled or frozen to death by then. We need an ambulance. Now!’
The operator repeated, word for word, her statement about the paramedic calling back. I repeated my response. We did this three times.
‘She’s welcome to make her own way to A&E,’ the operator finally offered.
‘But you told her not to try to move or stand?’
‘She’s welcome to make her own way to A&E,’ the operator repeated.
‘Perhaps you didn’t understand – there’s an elderly lady lying on the cold street bleeding and needs an ambulance urgently…’
‘A paramedic will call you back within an hour,’ repeated the operator, quickly, and then actually cut me off. We had been talking for 27 minutes.
At this point a young couple, passers-by, had stopped to help. I told them that there would be no ambulance, only a phone call. In an hour. The three of them looked at me, incredulous.
I’ve been a foreign correspondent all my life. I have not spent my career in a world of niceness and convenience. I’m usually good at getting stuff done in dysfunctional, chaotic, disaster-wrecked places – which more often than not consists of successfully persuading strangers to help. London Ambulance had defeated me. I felt embarrassed and at a loss. ‘Let me try again.’
When I dislocated my shoulder in Istanbul help arrived in 15 minutes. In London? It’s two-and-a-half hours
I called 999 once more. This time round I added urgency, drama, lurid details. We went through the same lengthy rigmarole identifying the patient, finding the address where she was (for the record – in Dolphin Square in Pimlico, a four-minute drive from St Thomas’ hospital). This time my histrionics – plus repeated and more insistent mentions of blood loss, danger of hypothermia, etc – seemed to do the trick. After a ten-minute wait on hold, the happy news came.
‘An ambulance is on its way,’ announced the operator – news that I relayed immediately to Daphne and our new young friends. ‘It will be with you within two-and-a-half hours.’
‘She could be dead in two-and-a-half hours!’
‘Your call has been assigned one of the highest priority classifications,’ responded the operator. ‘The ambulance may be with you sooner, but I must advise you that the call-out time for this type of emergency in central London is currently two-and-a-half hours.’
Over the next ten minutes I experienced one of the most Orwellian conversations of my life. Could Daphne be escalated to a higher priority?
‘An ambulance is on its way,’ answered the operator, repeating her spiel. I said that I’d heard and understood her clearly, no need to repeat. But an old lady was in a serious condition and needed to get to a hospital urgently. ‘An ambulance is on its way.’ The exact same words, again and in full. If this is high priority, how long do low-priority people have to wait? ‘An ambulance is on its way…’ And so on.
Nearly an hour had passed since I first called 999, 49 minutes of which I had spent on the line with London Ambulance. The young couple, shaking their heads in incredulity, summoned an Uber and volunteered to take Daphne to hospital themselves. I had a plane to catch and was running late. We parted in the dark as London drizzle began to wash Daphne’s blood from the doorstep.
I was just getting off the Gatwick Express when a call finally came through. It was 7.30 p.m., some two-and-a-half hours after the emergency had been called in. It was a paramedic. ‘Is the patient still in need of assistance?’ she asked. The ambulance had not yet arrived. Indeed, it had not in fact yet been dispatched. I checked the Twitter feed of London Ambulance to see if some mass medical emergency had befallen the capital. No. Only a long series of self-congratulatory tweets depicting heroic ambulance service people receiving awards and participating in charity fundraising events.
Do you find it shocking that London no longer appears to have a functional ambulance service? I do. I was born and raised in the City of Westminster. On the (mercifully) few occasions I was ever present at a medical emergency before I left the country in 1993, an ambulance arrived pretty much immediately in response to friends’ childhood fractures, epileptic fits, concussions. On more recent occasions – in Rome last year, for instance, where my son broke his arm – an ambulance came in 18 minutes. A friend with heart pains in Moscow in 2020 had an ambulance with a doctor in at his door within 20 minutes. When I dislocated my shoulder in Istanbul in 2019 help arrived in 15 minutes. But in London? Apparently, it’s two-and-a-half hours.
Rudyard Kipling asked: ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ I have spent a quarter of a century, almost half my life, abroad. And I know this: Keir Starmer is correct. Britain’s NHS does need to be ‘re-imagined’ as a basically functional health service of the kind that citizens of every developed country (with the single exception of America) enjoy for free.
And the most shocking thing about Daphne’s ordeal? The poor lady’s resignation. The shrug from the two young Samaritans who called her a taxi. Rather than be outraged and ashamed that we are so appallingly served by the NHS, many Brits seem inexplicably proud of it. Have you not noticed that despite spending just as much money as all other Europeans on our national health service, it has ceased to function? Awake, and be angry. Very angry. Your life could depend on it.
We’ve got Francis Bacon all wrong
You have to hand it to the curators of this excellent survey of Francis Bacon’s portraits. Not only have they alighted at an obvious but under-explored vantage point from which to reconsider this most mythologised of postwar painters, securing some serious loans to make their point, they have also dared to open their show with what might be the single worst picture it contains. ‘Self Portrait’ (1987) speaks of everything that Bacon got wrong in his final decades: it’s recognisably the 78-year-old artist, dressing up as a younger version of himself. His lips are pursed, his face pockmarked with a spray of tiny red dots, his pate capped with a page-boy fringe, features delivered in the borderline cartoonish idiom he seemed to lean on whenever a picture demanded something faithful to life.
If this show gets something right it is in refuting the hackneyed vision of Bacon-as-apocalyptic-magus
The artist’s powers were on the wane and he knew it. Self-parodic though the picture might be, it still carries the weight of pathos. Some years before, he had complained about being forced towards self-portraiture because his friends were ‘dropping like flies’. ‘I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself,’ he told David Sylvester. ‘I loathe my own face but I go on painting it only because I haven’t got any other people to do.’ He was exaggerating, but not by much. Of the recurring models pictured here, many were no longer: Muriel Belcher, the founder of the Colony Room, died in 1979; his abusive boyfriend Peter Lacy, captured here as some kind of demented jungle beast, in 1962; another lover, George Dyer – a Kray twins associate – the subject of this show’s big, climactic moment, ‘Triptych May-June 1973’, in 1971.
The work is Bacon’s delayed response to Dyer’s suicide in a Paris hotel room, when the pair were in France for the opening of the artist’s retrospective at the Grand Palais. ‘Trust George to fuck it up!’ Bacon had yelled on receiving the news – but the painting is as bleak as any in the canon. Across its three panels, Dyer is variously glimpsed shitting himself dry, vomiting blood and staring into we-know-not-what. Any veneer of civilisation has been stripped away from this wretched figure, recognisable as human from his distinctive aquiline profile alone.
Dyer’s silhouette haunts proceedings. We variously see him in half-melted outline riding a bike; moulded to a mangled, clownish version of himself, gazing into a rectangular mirror; and as an ageing mod in three-buttoned jacket, his legs spilling out onto a flight of stairs in 1972’s ‘Portrait of Man Walking Down Steps’.
We tend not to think of Bacon as a portraitist. His exercises in the genre are understood as extensions of his alarming wider aesthetic. He certainly wasn’t a traditional portraitist. He never painted to order, only once accepting a commission: the result, a 1955 portrait of his patron Robert Sainsbury, is a borderline risible attempt to force a convincing likeness on to the artist’s favoured style of the time when he had taken to painting anonymous businessmen emerging from spectral darkness.
He obviously liked the supermarket magnate, and the fondness didn’t make for a harmonious composition. With his sheepish expression, Sainsbury has the air of a beloved elder statesman rumbled after accidentally walking into a brothel. Rather better is Bacon’s portrayal of Lisa Sainsbury, her features imprisoned behind shuttered, vertical brushstrokes that lend the image a weirdly votive quality.
Bacon never went in for Warhol-style celebrity portraiture. Instead he favoured returning to a tight circle of friends. From the 1960s, however, he did base these portraits – like Warhol – almost exclusively on photographs. The regulars are all present, at times giving the show the feel of a Thursday night on Dean Street. Lucian Freud appears from various angles in a spooky 1964 triptych (a format Bacon likened to police ID shots), and in a thrilling double portrait with Frank Auerbach, the two painters lounging on comfy chairs in white T-shirts and jeans. Henrietta Moraes is here, too, her profile distinct despite being mangled across another triptych. And there’s Isabel Rawsthorne, distorted to the point at which she begins to resemble a fur-clad toad. The elements don’t entirely come together in many, if not most of these paintings: flourishes aspiring to drama frequently fall far short of the desired effect, sometimes almost risibly so. Yet such weaknesses only serve to throw the passages of originality and bravado into focus. Bacon may never have made a genuinely faultless portrait, but his flaws are instructive.
If this exhibition really gets something right, it is in refuting the hackneyed vision of Bacon-as-apocalyptic-magus. Captions are clear, informative and unsensational, leading you to conclude that everything we hear about him as the great painter of the post-Holocaust era was in fact a misreading of the artist’s theatricality and intense scrutiny of Christian imagery. There’s darkness in his work, to be sure – one self-portrait derives from images of mutilated bomb victims – but it’s always offset by a healthy appreciation of the absurd and a touching dose of sadness. For all his talk of man-as-meat, Bacon was a deeply humanistic painter.
I listened to a solid week of Woman’s Hour…
I was a weird kid, and though I harboured the usual innocent girlish ambitions of being a drug fiend and having sex with pop stars, I also nursed a desire to appear on Woman’s Hour. As a shy, provincial virgin, the programme opened up a world of women’s troubles from anorexia to zuigerphobia – and I was keen to have A Complicated Life.
Here was the wet hand of today’s lily-livered sensibilities I had anticipated
From my twenties to my fifties I appeared on it several times; my last outing was in 2016, as – like most other institutions – it was captured by the trans cult, leading to the show’s best presenter, Jenni Murray, leaving in 2020. Since then, the programme might more accurately be named What Is A Woman’s Hour. As Mumsnet noted, around 43 trans activists have been invited on to the programme over the years, compared with just 13 from the gender-sceptical side.
After half a century of listening – in which my emotions have run the gamut from longing to contempt – I decided to listen to a solid week of it and give the show an MOT. The lead item on Monday was about what Kemi Badenoch’s appointment might mean for women. I was pleasantly surprised that the presenter, Clare McDonnell, didn’t nag; she mentioned ‘structural racism’ but that’s practically mandatory on Radio 4 programmes – I fully expect the Shipping Forecast to slip it in soon.
The next guest was Julien Alfred, the St Lucian Olympic-champion sprinter. It was lovely to hear ‘race’ only being used to mean a thing that one aims to win; lovely to hear a story of female triumph without any moaning. It was like being back in the 1980s. Next up was the young writer Eliza Clark speaking up in favour of putting content warnings on books, including her own; here was the wet hand of today’s lily-livered sensibilities that I had anticipated, chucking a bucket of cold water over any idea of female resilience.
On Tuesday, we were asked what gendered words annoyed us. Mine would be ‘cervix-haver’, but of course we’re only allowed to get upset by the old, dying, sexist terms rather than the new, thriving, non-binary kind. Pointless mention of trans rights complicated a discussion about the wisdom of holding a women’s tennis championship in Saudi Arabia (which is full of men in dresses anyway), as did the attempt of a female contributor to align the USA with a land where women practically need a guardian’s permission to breathe.
Wednesday’s show aired as it was becoming obvious that the Blessed Kamala was heading for an early bath. There was a lot of predictable blather about Roe vs Wade but a resolute refusal to engage with the simple fact that Donald Trump had won the US election because he talks to ordinary people whereas Kamala Harris – like Hillary Clinton before her – talks at them. That the Democrats have facilitated male cheats in women’s sport and rapists in women’s prisons was completely ignored.
The alleged comedian Hannah Gadsby talked about anxiety, grief, the trauma of fame and her dog dying. The presenter tittered like a smitten schoolgirl. Gadsby is a they/them, which seemed accurate, as she did strike me as a composite of a dozen really dull people. So smug were Gadsby and her fangirl that it made me wish I were a US citizen so I could have voted for Trump.
There was masses more Trump Derangement Syndrome on Thursday, and an attempt to inject some ‘laughs’ by asking the question: ‘Do you have a first date red-flag question?’ Personally mine would be: ‘Do you think women can have penises?’ Friday brought yet more Trump, as the programme dealt with the inconvenient fact that the President-elect had just appointed the first ever female White House chief of staff, 67-year-old grandmother Susie Wiles. Hang about, I thought he only valued women for their youth and beauty?
What a week of woe it was. Woman’s Hour has become a circle-jerk of miseries licking their wounds and picking their scabs. Do weird teenage girls still dream of appearing on it when they grow up? No – no one’s that weird.