DYING HERE, BOMBING THERE

Suicide Assistance Enabled

After receiving 330 votes in favour to 275 opposed at its second reading in November 2024 the committee stages introduced a number of amendments to the original proposal. Perhaps the most notable of these changes was the replacement of judicial oversight by a panel including a lawyer, a psychiatrist and a social worker, which seemed like an improvement driven by necessity (in the form of the lack of High Court judges’ time), but which was opportunistically identified as a reduction of safety constraints by those opposed to the bill anyway.

Those opponents waged a clever campaign to suggest that momentum in favour of the legislation had been waning since the second reading, but following Friday’s vote they must now pin their hopes on convincing he Lords to go beyond their revising rôle to amend the bill until it times out. Nevertheless, the eventual majority of 23, down from 55, was sufficient to bring the legislation through a Commons that worried far more about practicalities than the wider nation. A steady 75% of the population (aged over 18!) continue to agree with the principle of providing assistance for suicide in the terminally ill, a majority almost untouched by the months of debate amongst politicos, as demonstrated by recent YouGov polling.

MPs were unwhipped for this vote as a matter of conscience, but the Prime Minister voted in favour. Wes Streeting, as Health Secretary, was one of the few ministers to oppose the bill and seemed to rather lose the plot by suggesting that budget constraints, particularly around the provision of improved palliative care, rather than moral considerations, should block the change. His argument was made far less effective by his mathematical failure to account for the obvious if unmentionable savings the provision of early suicide would make to NHS costs.

US Bombs Iranian Nukes

President Trump cut short his visit to the G7 meeting in Canada on Monday 17^th June shortly after tweeting (?truthing? whatever) “AMERICA FIRST means many GREAT things, including the fact that, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” Trump stayed just for the photo op and dinner (and signing the UK trade deal, again) before dashing to the airport. Aides confirmed that the President had convened a meeting of his National Security Council for his return to Washington. This looked very much as though the Donald had been given some specific information that accelerated the need to make a decision about whether to greenlight an attack on Iran’s nuclear production facilities. The drumbeat of war seemed to be accelerating.

It should have come as absolutely no surprise whatsoever therefore, that the next day, while carrying out more serious duties (watching a new Trumpian flagpole being erected on The White House lawn) the ever-humorous Strategist-in-Chief should have replied to a journalist’s question about Iran by saying: “I may do it, I may not do it, I mean nobody knows what I’m going to do.” The Pres. then meandered his way to a hardly disguised warning to the Iranian regime: “Very simple. Unconditional Surrender!” adding, just in case he might not be understood: “Maybe you could call it the ultimate, the ultimate ultimatum, right?” He really needs a better scriptwriter.

Then on Thursday, in a late entry for this year’s “Not Really Kidding Anybody” Awards, Trump instructed the human blotting paper that is Karoline Leavitt to brief out  a statement saying: “Based on the fact that there is a substantial chance of negotiation that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go, within the next two weeks.” This, combined with a direct reprimand of Emmanuel Macron for presuming to discern what the President’s strategy on Iran might be, suggested (to hardened cynics at least!) that Fordo was toast. As the President might have said himself “The White House’s gain was surely Hollywood’s loss.” Surely, indeed. In fact, he probably did. Bigly.

The final confirmation (for the Tik-Tok generation at least) that it was “Bombs Away” for the Iranian nuclear facilities came on Saturday when endless Tik-Tok conspiracy theorists flight trackers started sharing details of a squadron (does the USAF have “squadrons”? not sure) of B2 stealth bombers making their way from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Guam in the Pacific. It seemed to be stretching credulity to think that they had “mistakenly” left their flight data beacons “on” after all those billions spent on stealth technology. Your correspondent concluded, before retiring after an evening of torrid revision, that it was “Game On” but did not think to make an emergency blog warning the Ayatollah’s regime that there was trouble on its way. (It really is a bad sign when everyone starts calling your government a “regime.”)

So, in the early hours of the morning of Sunday 22^nd June all the (useless) deception and misdirection came to an end, with a concentrated strike on Fordo by American B2’s which dropped 14 MOP “bunker busters” while submarines fired 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites.

Of course, the (assassination depleted) Iranian leadership announced that they would mount immediate and savage reprisals and take the war to the Americans, but on the basis of preliminary assessments it looks as though America’s bombing run has substantially degraded all three Iranian nuclear facilities and perhaps rendered them inoperable for the foreseeable future. Hegseth popped up to deliver the most obsequious example of public toadying every recorded in a press conference. At an emergency UN Security Council meeting Russia and China both declared America’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities an outrageous assault on Iranian sovereignty. Pretty much everyone else was “Well, we tried!” thanking their lucky stars that Trump finally appears to have achieved what successive Presidents, UN resolutions and E3 negotiations had singularly failed to do for 20 years.

Tehran has difficult decisions to make. Musings about “regime change” are becoming more strident, but there are no signs of demonstrations or other hostility to the Ayatollah’s vicious rule, perhaps because the American bombings have temporarily abated internal opposition to the theocrats’ 46-year campaign against democracy and women’s rights and the subjugation of ancient Persian cultural norms by their depraved version of Islam. With the destruction of Fordo and the effective end of Iran’s race to nukes, Israel has also achieved its strategic aims, so the continuation of the de facto war will depend on whether Israeli and American objectives are now expanded to regime change. Which, frankly, hardly ever works out well. It looks as though we will know which direction this is headed in by the time I write next week’s post.

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