Further to what I said in this column on 14^th March :Voting on Assisted Dying (desmondswaynemp.com)
The US State of Oregon is often held up as the example of ‘best practice’ for a jurisdiction that has enabled assisted suicide.

It has released its data for 2023. Some of it rather disturbing.

The full report is at Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2023 Data Summary but here are some highlights

Complications: Just under 1 in 10 deaths had complications (9.8%) including 8 regurgitations, 1 seizure, and 1 listed as ‘other’. However, no data was provided for 72.2% of the total 367 deaths in 2023, meaning the form was left blank by the healthcare provider present. 

Reasons for Applying: Since 2017, on average 52.1% of applicants have applied because they felt like a burden. Interestingly, ‘Inadequate pain control’ ranks far lower as a reason for wanting an assisted death. 

Length of Death: Oregon has sadly set a new record for the longest assisted death. In 2023 it now stands at 137 hours – 5 days and 17 hours after ingestion.

Mental Competency: A tiny 0.8% of applicants were referred for psychiatric evaluation. This means only 3 people the whole year were queried for having sound mind to make the decision to end their life. 

 

I don’t think any of this is an advertisement for what is euphemistically now referred to as ‘dignity in dying’. Putting ethics and principles to one side, can the process of ingesting lethal drugs ever be straightforward?

*

As a wild swimmer I have a particular interest in the Environment Agency’s statistics for spills from storm overflows published today. The bald figures are quite disturbing but, having swum 4 times per week throughout the reporting period, I’ve never come across a turd and I’ve never been ill.
There has been a 56% increase in sewage spills in 2023 compared to 2022. How do we know this?
We know it because 100% of storm overflows are now continuously monitored. In 2010 when Conservatives came into government only 7% of them were monitored. Previous administrations weren’t even collecting the data and so had no handle on the size of the problem. Now we know and we can take effective action.
Storm overflows are a legacy of our Victorian sewage system where rainwater drains into the same sewers as our lavatories. But not all storm overflows result in a sewage spill, that only happens either by accident or, when deliberate, to avoid sewage backing-up to our lavatories.
Because the system is shared with rainwater, to be fair, the weather is bound to be a major factor influencing the statistics. 2023 was the 6^th wettest on record, compared to 2022 which was the 8^th driest.
The Government requires the water companies to make the necessary investment to end sewage spills. There has been a fourfold increase in inspections with 500 additional staff to carry them out.
Since 2015 the Environment Agency has concluded 60 prosecutions resulting in £150 million of fines from the water companies.

Sorting this legacy is going to take time, but this is the first government to get the measure of it and address it

The criminal Justice Bill will shortly return to the Commons for its report stage.
The difficulty for any government bill is that, as far as its scope permits, it may become a ‘Trojan Horse’ attracting amendments that it was never the Government’s intention to include when the bill was originally drafted.
The current bill was never intended to be an Abortion bill, but New Clause 1 at report may well make it so.
This clause would make it lawful for a woman to end her own pregnancy at any stage right up until birth. Clinicians, pregnancy services and any healthcare settings  however, would remain bound by our present abortion laws which currently restrict terminations to within 24 weeks of pregnancy (except where specific exceptions apply). Given that 40% of abortions now take place at home with self-administration of what is referred to as ‘telemedicine’, the measure would introduce a two-tier system whereby a woman, acting on her own, can lawfully dispose of her unborn child right up until just before it would actually be born.
Personally, I find the prospect grotesque. I am not alone: Current polling indicates that only 1% of women support abortion up to birth. On the contrary, 70% actually support a reduction in the lawful time limit from the current 24 weeks.
Those who demand absolute rights over their own bodies, neglect the fact that, where abortion is concerned, two bodies, two lives, are involved.

Given that this ‘Pandora’s box’ has been opened in New Clause 1 of this bill, those of us who have deep misgivings about the permissive nature of the current law will make our own attempts at amendments. We will seek to reduce the permitted 24-week window to a more realistic level in line with modern medicine’s ability to sustain life outside the womb, and we will seek to end the discrimination against Downs babies which currently allows them to be aborted up to 40 weeks.

 

I’ve had some angry emails about the National Audit Office report government’s alternative plans for housing asylum seekers, having already evacuated 100 hotels.  The NAO claims it will actually cost the taxpayer £46 million more than the hotels by accommodating those waiting for asylum decisions on barges or former RAF bases

This is a rather shoddy piece of analysis because it includes all the set-up costs rather than just comparing the running costs of hotels against the alternatives. A fair comparison of all the costs would need to be made over the entire lifetime of the usage, or reasonable assumptions about it.

Furthermore, the NAO has missed the political dimension of the policy. The public was scandalised at the use of hotels to accommodate people who had arrived here illegally and there is public demand for a more ‘spartan’ approach to the nature of the accommodation than which is commonly provided by hotels.
It is all very well for citizens of Ringwood and Fordingbridge  emailing me to complain about the policy, when our New Forest towns have not had their hotels requisitioned to accommodate disproportionate concentrations of young male asylum seekers, as have so many less fortunate towns,  with all the pressures on public services which follow.

I am very surprised to have received some indignant representations about the Chancellor’s announcement, during his Budget speech, that £1 Million was being set aside for a memorial to Muslim soldiers who fought for the Imperial Forces of the Crown in two world Wars.
On the contrary, I think it is entirely appropriate to remember them as loyal soldiers of the Empire. As the wartime generation passes, it is important that we remind future generations of out glorious past.
This is particularly important, when so much of our public discourse is dominated by the security threat posed by a radical Islamist minority. We should recall that our people struggled together in great and honourable endeavours against tyranny and injustice. People who are proud to be British, and who happen to be Muslims, must not be tarnished by a tiny minority.
We need to remember that 400,000 Muslim soldiers fought for us in WWI and 1.5 million in WWII.
They shared our defeats and our victories, they were injured, died, and won gallantry awards in our finest hours. We will Remember Them

More on Assisted Death

I’ve written about assisted dying in this column on several occasions over the years:

Esther Rantzen (desmondswaynemp.com)

Assisting Suicide (desmondswaynemp.com)

MAID (desmondswaynemp.com)

Assisted Dying -Again (desmondswaynemp.com)

Bob Marris MP’s Assisted Dying Bill (desmondswaynemp.com)

I’ve also debated the subject in Parliament, in our great universities, and with constituents. I revisit it again for two reasons. First, the Commons Health select Committee, after a thorough inquiry has produced a thoughtful and  very balanced report on the question which can be found at

Assisted Dying/Assisted Suicide (parliament.uk)

Second, because the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, has announced that he will let Parliament vote on the matter.
But Parliament does not need his consent or permission; Both Houses have mechanisms to secure a vote, when they want it.
In the Commons we last voted on it in September 2015, then we rejected the proposal to legalise it by 330 votes to 118.
That opportunity arose on a private member’s bill. Had there been sufficient appetite for a re-match, another private member’s bill could have been presented; Or, alternatively, an amendment could have been tabled to a suitable Government bill. Another option would have been a division under the ‘ten-minute rule’ procedure -often a very useful test of the opinion within the House. Indeed, there is nothing to stop Sir Kier giving one of his Opposition days over to a motion on the subject. Or the back- bench Business Committee could schedule a  motion for decision.
The point is that Parliament does not have to wait on the Government in order to debate and vote on questions that it considers important.
Of course, were a vote supporting a change in the law to be successful, then Government time and co-operation would be required, in spades, in order to get the detailed legislation through. I’m certain that there is no Government enthusiasm for to giving up such time and effort to this complex problem, at an inevitable  cost to its other legislative priorities.
Equally, notwithstanding the apparent public support for changing the law, I suspect that most parliamentary colleagues, recognising the difficulties that such an enormous change would represent, and seeing the experience of those jurisdictions that have embraced it, themselves shrink from it.

Budgets, or as they are increasingly designated in Newspeak. ‘fiscal events’ need to be judged in their historical context. They are, after all, designed to have a lasting effect on our prosperity in the long term. This isn’t always the case, as we discovered with Kwasi Kwarteng’s autumn statement, all which was largely reversed within weeks.

Yesterday’s budget needs to be judged in the context of events dating back to 2010 when the Coalition Government inherited the most disastrous state of the public finances in peacetime, and a recession worse than any since the 1930ies. Incoming Treasury ministers were left a leaving note by their predecessors announcing that ‘there is no money left’.
Of absolute necessity, there followed the most significant cuts in public expenditure in order to ‘fix the roof’ as the  Chancellor, George Osborne put it, and which he accused Gordon Brown of not doing during the much more advantageous economic circumstances that he had inherited in 1997 – when “the sun was shining”.
The Coalition’s financial policy was dubbed ‘Austerity’ by the opposition and it was predicted that it would lead to mass unemployment. On the contrary, as Jeremy Hunt boasted yesterday, it generated 800 new jobs per day, for every day that Conservatives have been in government since 2010.
And It put UK economic growth ahead of the other G7 wealthy economies.

Without the successful delivery of that financial policy, Britain would never have been able to access the billions that were needed to keep employment and the economy stable during the pandemic and to weather the economic impact on energy prices delivered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Without the ‘headroom’ created by the Coalition’s policy we would have faced the most disastrous of outcomes from either of those shocks to the economy.

That we were able to deal with them by hosing them with money, now provides the immediate context for this present budget. The phenomenal costs of business support and furlough, together with the eye-watering bill for subsidising energy bills are the explanation for the level of taxation being at a peacetime record: Record sums spent to get the economy through a pandemic and Russia’s war required record taxation.
The task of the Chancellor yesterday was to use what little room to manoeuvre that he had, to plot a path to lower taxes and reduced debt without spooking the markets.
In my estimate, he made a reasonable fist of it with a second recent reduction in direct taxation.

No doubt, my critics will complain that I have omitted two important factors from the context in which this budget fits: Brexit, and the short-lived Truss premiership.
I addressed the economic outcome of Brexit previously in this column Brexit Freedom Day (desmondswaynemp.com) . In a nutshell, our relatively good performance in growth, inflation and interest rates compared to the EU suggests that Brexit is not part of the problem.

I remember well, that was on a train to Oxford to defend the Government’s record at the University debating Union when I heard the news that Kwasi had been dismissed and that the measures that he had set out were to abandoned. Clearly it was a poor wicket on which to go out to bat.
The spike in interest rates, most unwelcome to those of us with mortgages, were on the way up in any case, and their trajectory has been similar to those experienced internationally.
As I said here at the time Two fingers to Socialist Dogma and Envy (desmondswaynemp.com)
I approved of all the measures individually and I want to see them all implemented as soon as possible. Kwasi’s mistake was to spook the markets by attempting them all at once, and at the same time as announcing the most generous energy subsidy entertained by any jurisdiction.

The modest measures set out yesterday are designed to get us to the same desirable high growth  
destination to which Kwasi aspired, but -this time- by a secure route.

I was an early fan of the straight-talking Lee Anderson. On the 3^rd of February last year I badgered the Prime Minister to make him Chairman of the Conservative Party. In the event he made him Deputy Chairman. I was disappointed when he had to resign in order to vote for an amendment to the Rwanda Bill, I voted for that amendment too.
I regret his suspension for his tirade against the London Mayor Sadiq Khan, but his refusal to apologise left the PM with no alternative. There were plenty of perfectly proper things that Anderson could have taken khan to task over. He has been a dreadful mayor, squandering the legacy left by his predecessor Boris. His record on Housing, transport, police, and almost everything else has been lamentable.
To accuse him of being controlled by Islamists however, is absurd. I know Khan, he is a former parliamentary colleague, he is about as secular a politician as one can get.

Nevertheless, many constituents have registered with me their disgust at Anderson’s treatment.
They believe that he has so often articulated their own thoughts and they are concerned about the way that freedom of expression is being diminished. I understand those concerns, but politicians do need to be cautious about the language that they use. Imagine if a politician had criticised a high-profile holder of public office as being controlled by Zionists, the furore would have been deafening.

Muslims must not be stereotyped. It is quite wrong to conflate ‘Muslims’ with Islamist extremists. We do well to remember current contribution of Muslims to our society as well as their historic contribution to the Empire and, in particular the imperial forces of the Crown.
But there are aspects of Islam which it is perfectly proper to subject to public scrutiny, such as the role of women, attitudes to homosexuality, Sharia councils, and teachings on apostacy.  Just as there has been no shyness in subjecting Christianity to that same scrutiny ever since the Enlightenment.
In a liberal society an important aspect of public life, like Islam, must accommodate itself to the discomforts of public scrutiny and free discussion. Notions of blasphemy are an affront to liberal democracy.

After a long consultation and subsequent deliberation, the Parliamentary Group on British Muslims defines ‘Islamophobia’ as “rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
Whist I can understand what they are getting at, I think this is too broad a definition and has a chilling effect on criticism of aspects of Islam, or indeed of Islam itself. It is far too widely drawn.  We must be very careful  to ensure that criticism and freedom of expression in public discourse is not constrained by inappropriate accusations of ‘hate speech’. The reality is that Islam, like Christianity,  is a religion adhered to by people of all races, and not itself a race.

As a Christian I am used to the criticism of my religion, both fair and unfair, and I’ve been critical of it myself too.
Islam must be subject to the same rigour, and Muslims free to be equally critical of it.

Politicians, however, should endeavour to be accurate and justify their assertions with facts.

I’ve had a few letters from constituents, genuinely solicitous for my own political survival, suggesting that I switch allegiance to the Reform Party -for such is their own preference.
I am not tempted. Though, some of Reform’s programme certainly appeals:: smaller Government, lower taxes, control of immigration, much greater exploitation of our Brexit freedoms:; A programme that definitely chimes with the section of the political spectrum that I occupy.
Nevertheless, political parties in the UK, unlike parties in so much of continental Europe, have to be much more than a manifesto of measures that appeal to a particular segment of the electorate.

Most European jurisdictions use electoral systems that are largely designed to ensure that the outcome of an election delivers representation proportional to the votes cast for each party.
This guarantee of representation enables political parties to be much more ‘picky’ about the narrowness of their ideological purity and agenda.
The constitutional principle in the UK however, is that the candidate with the most votes wins, irrespective of the proportion of the vote achieved. We vote for candidates in whose judgement we place our trust for the duration of a parliamentary term. That is why we do not hold a by-election if an MP switches party: votes were for a named candidate, whose political party allegiance is only secondary. After all, it’s only in my lifetime that we have allowed the names of political parties to be included on the ballot paper at all.

Consequences follow from these different voting systems. Proportional electoral systems deliver a modest measure of success to a relatively large selection of political parties, each having put their manifesto to the vote, but rarely do any of whom command a majority. Coalitions are formed after the election through ‘horse trading’ between the parties to cobble together a numerical majority delivering a programme put together and agreed by the parties after the election, but which was never put to the voters at the election.
To have electoral success in the UK system however, requires much broader support to secure any representation at all. Consequently, UK political parties are ‘broad churches’. We make our coalitions before elections: each of our parties is a coalition that agrees on a set of values and principles but will encompass members with a spectrum of views on different issues.

Unlike the European proportional systems, ours makes it very difficult for a new and ideological party to break through and win any constituency seats at all, even if they secure a proportion of the votes that gets into double figures. Unsurprisingly, part of the Reform offer is to change our system to the continental model.
Whilst, all voting systems have differing advantages and disadvantages, we voted to keep our existing voting system in a referendum in 2011 by a margin of 70% to 30%. I’m satisfied with that decision.

No, I’m not remotely tempted.

last week, in this column, I was somewhat sceptical about imminence of a war with Russia.
Nevertheless, it is a growing danger that we cannot ignore, together with the increasing threats to our vital national interests, including freedom of navigation in the Arabian Gulf and the South China Sea.

But defence is expensive: despite the 6^th highest defence budget in the World we have seen very significant reductions in our armed forces.

The Defence Settlement announced by the Prime Minister during his tenure as Chancellor in 2020 provided an additional £24.1 billion in cash terms over four years, exceeding UK’s NATO pledge and represented the biggest increase to UK defence spending since the Cold War.
More recently, the Chancellor announced in last Spring’s Budget that the Government will invest an extra £5 billion in defence and national security over the next two years, and will be spending another £3 billion across the defence nuclear enterprise, allowing us to improve our nuclear skills programme and support the delivery of our AUKUS partnership for the Indo-Pacific region together with Australia USA.
Defence spending is set to consume 2.25% of GDP by 2025, exceeding the NATO target of 2%.

Most recently the PM has expressed his ambition to reach 2.5%
But is it enough?
During the Cold War, and the ‘temperature’ is no warmer now, we were spending 4% of GDP.
If we take the current threat level seriously, should we be doubling our defence budget?

 

The war in Ukraine has changed everything. Once again, size really matters: Both Russia and Ukraine are struggling to recruit sufficient forces.
Whilst, Ukraine has mobilized in a war of national survival in which reserve units -like the Azov at Mariupol, have played a critical role, we by contrast, have optimised our forces for expeditionary operations much further afield beyond the NATO area, fighting ‘wars of choice’ against adversaries over which we have significantly greater capabilities.
We now need to prepare for war in Europe against a ‘peer adversary’. With that in mind, what can we learn from Ukraine’s experience against that very peer adversary?

I suggest the lessons are:
-The importance of number of manoeuvre formations that can be put into battle
-The quantity of infantry, thickened by anti-armour and anti-air capability, to protect long lines of communication
-Engineers to keep those lines open
-The manpower challenges of protecting civilian populations and infrastructure
-The even greater manpower requirements of urban warfare and the need to rotate exhausted troops.
When we were last able to deliver these sorts of capabilities we relied on Territorials to swiftly reinforce the British Army of The Rhine. The Territorial Army, with an establishment of 86,000 in formed units, providing potent blocking formations equipped with artillery, anti-tank missiles and mortars.

We make much less use of reserve forces that our the USA, Australia and Canada. Whilst our regular forces are among the best in the world, they are increasingly difficult to recruit and expensive to retain. If we are to pose a risk, sufficient to deter any aggressor, without impoverishing the taxpayer, then it has to be by recovering the ‘citizen’s army’ of reservists.