‘Miscalculation’ over government’s handling of assisted dying issue
It’s a mess, they know it, some regret it and it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s fault.
That’s the view of some at the top of government watching, dismayed, as the red-on-red conflict drags on over the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, aggravating a sore which crosses party lines, dominates the airwaves for the foreseeable and creates problems which bear some of the characteristics of the Brexit days.
Whatever way you look at it, there’s a feeling there’s been a miscalculation over their handling of the assisted dying issue, and some at the top of government are quite open about this to me.
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As some now acknowledge, the politics were always going to be fraught but they failed to spot this early enough, with the consequence the issue is now taking up more bandwidth than was assumed.
It has become a distraction from the main priorities of the Labour government – improving people’s living standards and securing the borders.
As a result, there will be few tears shed in influential parts of Downing Street, including by chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, if a week on Friday the assisted dying bill fails its first Commons test and ends its journey there.
If MPs do not kill it then, the issue will hang over the government for at least the whole first half of next year, and quite possibly to the point of implementation in early 2026.
The sheer amount of parliamentary time it will take up has unnerved the whips’ office. The public don’t distinguish between government and parliamentary priorities.
The Labour leader’s ‘mistake’
The mistake was made in March. Sir Keir promised broadcaster and campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen to “make time” “…early in the next parliament”.
At that point they thought they were being smart – not to commit a possible future Labour government on the issue one way or another ahead of an election and leave it to MPs’ consciences – and inside Labour HQ this must have sounded like a pain-free promise ahead of polling day by a party not wanting to annoy any section of the electorate.
But they appear not to have gamed the consequences.
Social liberals v Blue Labour social conservatives
This issue pits social liberals against Blue Labour social conservatives, with each side digging in and Sir Keir (previously on record in favour) now set to vote in the opposite side of the chamber to his deputy Angela Rayner.
Wes Streeting will be set against his own fellow health ministers, and symbolically – a Labour prime minister against a Tory leader of the opposition.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting
That there are two sides to this isn’t a surprise, even if the volume of complaining is now unnerving them.
Ministers can’t sidestep debate
A bigger issue for the government is they underestimated how ministers are being dragged into the centre of the debate, even though they are meant to be remaining neutral.
Ministers are finding they cannot simply sidestep this debate, as happened in previous votes of conscience such as gay marriage and abortion.
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This is because of the active and complex involvement of the government legal and health systems if the legislation passes and assisted dying is permitted in law.
This may be a private members’ bill, but it will be for the government to determine which doctors perform the assessments, and who carries out the end-of-life service for those that qualify.
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What is assisted dying?
Take one question that has been left hanging: whether a newly formed part of the NHS provides the end of life drugs, or whether it is something that can be done by the private sector.
According to allies of Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP fronting the legislation, it is up to the secretary of state for health to decide whether this is done publicly or privately.
I’m told there’s a presumption this is done in the public sector, yet other countries have private services like Dignitas carrying out the procedure for a fee, and in an era of constrained resources, could this be an option?
Read more:
Assisted dying opponents believe they have the momentum
Cabinet minister reveals she will vote against assisted dying
This part of the debate seems largely to have been passed over – yet there are huge cost benefits should the government allow the private, not public sector, to carry out the service.
Overall I’m told there will be no impact assessment – which sets out the costs of assisted dying legislation – until and unless the legislation passes second reading.
At that point it will be done by government, not parliament. This means MPs will be engaging in one of their most totemic votes of this parliament without access to all the facts – and being asked to commit on partial information. This has left some unhappy, unsurprisingly.
This was an easy promise – but it’s proving much harder to deliver than expected.
Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk tuah girl,” says the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefly probed her after her “memecoin disaster” — the failed launch of a token in her image that she promoted.
Welch said in a May 21 episode of her “Talk Tuah” podcast that the FBI showed up at her grandmother’s house looking to speak to her over the Hawk Tuah (HAWK) crypto token, which many crypto commentators have called an exit scam.
“After the coin launch, the feds came to granny’s house and knocked on her door, and she called me, having a heart attack, saying: ‘The FBI is here after you, what have you done?’”
Welch said she handed over her phone to the FBI and met with agents who “interrogated me, asking me questions and everything else related to crypto.”
“They cleared me, I was good to go,” Welch said.
Welch went viral for her response about an oral sex technique in a vox pop interview posted to YouTube in June.
The HAWK memecoin, based on her viral catchphrase, launched in early December and almost immediately lost 90% of its value and blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps’ alleged insider wallets and snipers bought up and dumped massive quantities of the token at launch.
Welch said on her podcast that the Securities and Exchange Commission also asked for her phone, and she sent it off “for two or three days” before she was cleared.
Welch’s lawyer James Sallah told TMZ in March that the SEC “closed the investigation without making any findings against, or seeking any monetary sanctions from, Haliey.”
“I trusted the wrong people”
Welch admitted knowing very little about crypto before the HAWK memecoin and said she “trusted the wrong people” for the launch.
She claimed a company, which she said she couldn’t name for legal reasons, was in full control of her X account, which posted videos of her promoting the memecoin.
Welch said she was sent lines to record on video, which were then posted on her X account by someone she trusted but could also not legally name.
She added that on the day of HAWK’s launch, she “kind of knew something was up” and was pulled into a room where a team of people told her to talk on a livestream with YouTuber Stephen Findeisen, better known as Coffeezilla.
“Coffeezilla got on there and they’re like ‘Mute it, mute it,’” Welch said. “Nobody warned me about this guy at all, like nobody at all, they didn’t tell me he was like a crypto wizard, that’s exactly what he is — he ate me the fuck up.”
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Welch said she was only paid a marketing fee and “did not make a dime from the coin itself,” which she said had been totally spent on legal and public relations fees.
Despite being cleared of any legal wrongdoing, Welch took some accountability, admitting that she let many of her fans down who invested in the coin:
“It makes me feel really bad that they trusted me, and I led them to something that I did not have enough knowledge about. I did not have enough knowledge about crypto to be getting involved with it. And I knew that, but I got talked into it, and I trusted the wrong people.”
A group of HAWK buyers sued the alleged creators of the token in December, claiming Alex Schultz, the token’s backing Tuah the Moon Foundation, the token launchpad overHere Limited, and its founder Clinton So promoted and sold HAWK as an unregistered security.
Welch wasn’t named as a defendant.
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Has Labour got the right strategy to tackle Reform UK?
Nigel Farage’s party cost the Tories dozens, maybe 100-plus seats at the general election. Now it looks like the party is hitting Labour too. But has Sir Keir Starmer got the right answers?
Last year, Labour won a landslide because the Tory vote collapsed, in part because Reform UK took chunks of their supporters in constituencies across the UK.
And here is the situation on 1 May this year – the national equivalent vote share at the council elections put Reform well ahead in first place. Success – this time at the expense of Labour too.
How big a threat is this to MPs? As a very crude experiment, Sky News has looked at what would happen if this result was replicated evenly across parliamentary constituencies.
Within the areas where there were county council elections are 77 complete Westminster seats with sitting Labour MPs.
This includes places like Wycombe, where Treasury minister Emma Reynolds holds. Or Lincoln, won by Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer.
Now if – for fun – we mapped the country council results from 1 May evenly across these general election constituencies, almost all those Labour seats are gone. All lost, apart from five. That’s 72 out of 77 Labour MPs losing their seats and mostly to Reform UK.
What if we took that swing an applied across the whole country, places where there weren’t local elections?
Angela Rayner in Greater Manchester and Jess Phillips in Birmingham would lose their seats.
Yes this is a crude measure – it assumes a uniform swing can be drawn from the 1 May polls – and local and national elections are very different.
But importantly, YouGov’s latest national opinion polls paint a similar picture to the council elections. Meanwhile, 89 out of 98 constituencies where Reform came second place have Labour in first. Labour MPs are feeling the heat from Farage.
The Reform threat is real. Sir Keir Starmer knows it – and this year has started chasing Reform votes. Slashing aid spending. Abandoning green promises. Hard talk about immigration and living on an “Island of Strangers”.
Sensible given the clear and evident Reform UK threat? Actually – maybe not. Look at the data in detail:
This block here is all the people who voted Labour in last year’s general election. Now thanks to YouGov polling, we know what people in this block would do with their vote now.
It shows Labour has lost more than half of last year’s voters. Just 46% still say they’d still vote for Sir Keir’s party. But – despite the PM’s strategy – they’re not actually going to Reform in large numbers.
Just 6% of Labour’s voters at last year’s general election – six out of every 100 – said they would vote Reform now. That’s all. So where have they gone?
Well, they’ve been lost much more to liberal and left-wing parties – 12% to the Lib Dems, 9% to the Greens.
So just pause there. That means the number of Labour voters who have switched to the Lib Dems and Greens, arguably on the left of the political spectrum, is three times the number going to Reform to the right.
Just 2% go to the Tories.
And much more seriously for Labour, 22% aren’t going to vote, don’t know or won’t say.
The bottom line is people who voted Reform have never backed Labour in large numbers.
This shows how Reform supporters last year voted in each election since 2005. You can see – Reform voters are former UKIP voters. They’re Boris Johnson’s Tories.
Let’s put it another way. While 11% of Labour voters may one day be open to voting Reform, 70% are at risk of going to the Lib Dems or Greens – seven times the threat from Reform.
And typically, these voters don’t like the hard line, Reform-leaning policies of Sir Keir Starmer recently.
The local elections show there is a threat to Labour from Reform. But our data suggests Keir Starmer trying to be Nigel Farage lite isn’t the answer.
Is Labour’s strategy really working?
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged crypto platform Unicoin and three of its executives, alleging they made false and misleading statements about its crypto assets that raised $100 million from investors.
The SEC said on May 20 that it charged Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Silvina Moschini, and former investment chief Alex Dominguez with misleading investors about certificates that conveyed rights to receive Unicoin tokens and stock.
Mark Cave, associate director in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, claimed the trio “exploited thousands of investors with fictitious promises that its tokens, when issued, would be backed by real-world assets including an international portfolio of valuable real estate holdings.”
Related: SEC crypto task force to release first report ‘in the next few months’
“The real estate assets were worth a mere fraction of what the company claimed, and the majority of the company’s sales of rights certificates were illusory,” Cave added.
The SEC’s complaint, filed in a Manhattan federal court, charged Unicoin and the three executives with various securities laws violations and asks for permanent injunctive relief, along with paying back the allegedly ill-gotten gains.
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