Avote on assisted dying was supposed to be one of the easiest reforms for Keir Starmer’s government. To many, including the Prime Minister himself, a law allowing terminally ill patients to choose to die would be a self-evidently progressive and historically significant change. It would mean Britain could transcend the objections of a religious minority
Next week, parliament will have its first opportunity to vote on assisted dying in almost a decade. This is a matter of conscience; it supersedes party politics and each MP is rightly given the freedom to make up their own mind. I sympathise with many of the views expressed on both sides of this debate,
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… in Dulwich Wood – a charming fragment of the medieval Great North Wood in south London – the self-dubbed ‘Penis Gang’ have been at work. The gang have been daubing huge penises, in red, black and green, on ancient tree trunks
What will this government be most remembered for? Ed Miliband’s wind turbines? Assisted dying? Farm bankruptcies? No: rather, I suggest it will be football. There were some 34 million attendances at football matches in England’s top four divisions in the 2022/23 season. I bet that most of those fans have no idea what’s about to
With just over 60 days left in office, Joe Biden’s White House has significantly escalated the Ukraine war it had tried so hard to contain by authorising the use of US-supplied medium-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) and antipersonnel mines against targets inside Russia. Biden’s U-turn breaks a long-standing convention on US presidential transitions that
The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business,
When the Taoiseach Simon Harris called a snap election for 29 November, Ireland’s electricity board asked political parties not to put election posters on telegraph poles. They might as well have asked them to take the time off on holiday. As I drive through the Irish countryside on my way to County Cork, I notice
On Sunday morning, a communications cable between Sweden and Lithuania was damaged, almost certainly deliberately. Just hours later, the C-Lion cable, the only data link between Finland and central Europe, was severed by what authorities have diplomatically called an ‘external impact’. Most would call it sabotage. In a week where the Biden administration finally gave
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the jukebox, is coming back. Launched in 1953 by Francis Showering of the Somerset cider family, it was aimed at giving women something to drink in the pub other than a port and lemon. Demand for
