The defeat of the assisted dying bill was a calamity. How did it happen? It was an accident – not, as opponents claim, a sudden conversion by MPs to the Christian lobby. Andy Burnham’s letter to Labour MPs saying he would abstain may have had a deterrent effect on toadies, some campaigners believe. A number of MPs claimed they had vital constituency meetings to attend instead of voting – no excuse. Some were on a Ukraine delegation. One was getting married. Petty arguments between campaigns as to who should get the credit (ha!) prevented them sharing information so they could count the MPs in favour. Some went to great lengths to be there, including changing flights, but others didn’t: the vote was lost by only 16, with (as far as I can tell) a majority still in favour, but not enough to turn up.
As Andrew Copson of Humanists UK says, there never should have been a second vote: the small group of filibusterers in the Lords got away with a constitutional disgrace. The government should have adopted this bill.
Thanks in part to no-show MPs, anyone near death must endure, despite the bill’s strong public support. The Commons after the next election may move rightwards, even if the left bloc stays in power, so the outlook for progressive reform is grim. This goes down as a dark day for Labour.
How unlike the heroic Wilson government that reformed abortion, capital punishment, gay rights, divorce, equal pay and more, all between 1964 and 1970. Labour has three years left now, so what could the party still achieve? Electoral reform, capping donations, abolishing the House of Lords?
The
prospect of
AI wiping out humanity by 2030 is so petrifying that you look away and think of something else. AI owners warn us – but Trump says carry on regardless. I think of my four children and seven grandchildren, and I can’t breathe. This week, OpenAI revealed that its model had given itself “
jailbreak-like instructions”, setting itself free from safety restrictions. How to understand it? How to take action? What do we do?
I’ve been escaping to the movies to try to forget about it all. De Gaulle: Résistance is terrific, and it’s great to see the second world war through French eyes, rather than British or American ones. Nor is it unduly French-triumphalist. The awkward, proud, brave, gawky hero, both noble and comic, is abandoned by his unvaliant officers and diplomats in London. They don’t share his belief in the free French platoons (where my mother worked serving them beer).
Death comes this way too with the likelihood of a
“super” El Niño’s severe storms cutting off emergency services and knocking out energy, water and internet.
Prep, advises the environment secretary, Angela Eagle. Take
survivalist action, save tanks of water, torches, batteries, food for a week. So, half-heartedly, I add some more tins and a flagon, in case.
It’s nothing new. All my childhood and teenage years I expected nuclear apocalypse. My father kept a tall jar of suicide pills to kill us all before the strontium-90 did. “Protect and survive,” said the civil defence leaflet. Hide under the stairs. We knew every word of the CND song: “Don’t you hear the H-bombs thunder, echo like the crack of doom / While it tears the world asunder, fallout make the Earth a tomb.” Now, madmen in the Kremlin or White House look safer than nuclear weapons controlled by unimaginably clever AI turned hostile.
MPs in the House of Commons during the debate on the assisted dying bill, London, 11 September 2026. Photograph: UK Parliament TV
