Niall Gooch is a writer who has appeared in the Catholic Herald and UnHerd.
Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its Second Reading in the Commons on Friday, which means that it is considerably more likely than not to end up on the statute book. Normally, when momentous legislation is before the House, the media is full of glowing tributes to the quality of the
It is now 20 years since I left university. Two pints in an evening and I feel groggy the next morning. My oldest child is in his last year at primary school, I regularly wake up with mysterious aches and pains, and we still have a very long way to go on our mortgage. All
Since 2010, British police have shot dead 30 people. This works out at an average of around 2.1 people per year. In two consecutive years – 2012-13 and 2013-14 – not a single person was fatally shot by police in the UK. In 2023-24, the last period for which we have full data, it was two; for
Where American left-liberal rhetoric leads, British left-liberal rhetoric invariably follows. Hate speech, reparations, decolonisation, white fragility; there is no intellectual fad so inane that it will not be enthusiastically mimicked, with childlike credulity, by journalists, academics, civil servants and broadcasters, regardless of whether it even makes sense in a British context. The impression you get
There is, reportedly, an official plan in place for the demise of Larry the Downing Street Cat, aka the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Old Larry, originally acquired by the Camerons in the early part of the coalition, has now reached the impressive age of 17, having been born in the dog days of
Barring an extraordinary electoral turnaround, Sir Keir Starmer is about to join an elite club, which is even more pale, male and stale than the Garrick: Labour leaders who have won a majority in a general election. He will be only the fourth since the party first fielded candidates in a general election, after Clement
On British general election nights, I like to watch Dish and Dishonesty, the first episode of the third series of Blackadder. It pokes some gentle fun at the conventions of election night TV, including the tradition of ‘silly’ candidates. In the episode, Ivor ‘Jest Ye Not, Madam’ Biggun of the Standing at the Back Dressed Stupidly and
We are now just nine months out from the latest possible general election, which means that in a year’s time the House of Commons is going to look very different. Absent a remarkable revival in Tory fortunes – which there is no earthly reason to expect – their current seat total will be at least
A common argument against populist politicians such as Nigel Farage or Donald Trump is that their attacks on elites are in some sense inauthentic because they themselves are members of those same elites. Trump is, after all, a billionaire who has been prominent in New York corporate circles for almost half a century. His social
The classic book The Railway Children contains several episodes that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern children. None perhaps are more shocking to the modern mind than the incident where some public schoolboys on a cross country run are directed through a tunnel on a working public railway. Unsurprisingly, this does not end well, with
If some great challenge or difficulty is looming in the near future, it is human nature to want to change the subject, to busy ourselves with displacement activity to avoid the confrontation. This is perhaps even more true of groups than individuals. Everybody might be aware on some level that a crisis is brewing, but
Most law students in the English-speaking world will have come across R v Dudley and Stephens, from 1884, which established the precedent that necessity is not a defence for murder. The case has a particular grisly attraction, as the defendants were sailors who had resorted to cannibalism after being cast adrift on a lifeboat for
A spectre is haunting Westminster – the spectre of the citizens’ assembly. This unkillable bad idea is making the headlines again because of the suggestion that, when Labour comes to power, citizens’ assemblies could be used to develop new policy proposals to put before Parliament. Fittingly, given its essentially anti-political and anti-democratic nature, this idea
In the village where we used to live, the churchyard was just over the road from our cul-de-sac. I often used to potter around on my lunchbreaks, or pass through on walks. The oldest gravestone I managed to find, if I remember correctly, was for a local chap who had died in his seventies around
When I was about 14 or 15, someone sent me a birthday card with the words: ‘Teenagers – tired of being harassed by your stupid parents? Act now! Move out, get a job, pay your own bills, while you still know everything.’ I don’t think it was personal, not least because I was fairly strait-laced,
Britain’s ruling class are currently conducting an enormous experiment – perhaps not consciously or intentionally, but with great enthusiasm – to discover the effects of extremely high levels of immigration on British society. We will not be sure of the result for some time yet. In the meantime, we need to be doing all we
We have in our kitchen a mug purporting to belong to ‘Romney Marsh Mountain Rescue’. There is, of course, no such organisation – the mug is a reference to a long-standing family joke, about how my brothers and I love mountaineering despite having grown up in one of the lowest, flattest parts of England. The
In 1950 the American critic Lionel Trilling suggested, in his book The Liberal Imagination, that there was no meaningful right-wing philosophy in the US. ‘The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not… express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ He was giving voice
From time to time, a would-be edgy Tweeter or columnist will shock us all by stating or suggesting that the boring white people who until the last third of the twentieth century made up almost the entire population of the United Kingdom, have no real culture to speak of. There is a twofold implication to
This week the BBC interviewed the last of the Few. Group Captain John Hemingway, 104, is apparently the only remaining RAF pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain. This brings home how long ago the second world war was. The year the war broke out, 1939, is closer to the battle of Gettysburg than
