For reasons of State

Stephen Sedley · A Decent Death · LRB 21 October 2021

A sharp pen from Stephen Sedley, a former appeal court judge, in the LRB.

Absurdly and cruelly, until the 1961 Suicide Act was passed it was a crime to kill yourself. While those who succeeded were beyond the law’s reach, those who tried and failed could be sent to jail. In the 1920s the home secretary had to release a Middlesbrough woman with fourteen children who had been given three months in prison for trying to kill herself. There is a Pythonesque sketch waiting to be written about a judge passing a sentence of imprisonment for attempted suicide: ‘Let this be a lesson to you and to any others who may be thinking of killing themselves.’ In fact, by the mid 19th century the law had got itself into such a tangle that a person injured in a failed attempt at suicide could be indicted for wounding with intent to kill, an offence for which Parliament had thoughtfully provided the death penalty.

But the repeated resort by doctrinal opponents of assisted dying to the need for safeguarding tends to be directed not to resolving any difficulties but to amplifying and complicating them to the point of obstruction – the kind of argument which, as Gore Vidal once put it, gives intellectual dishonesty a bad name.

[emphases added]

Without an economic plan, patriotism is Boris Johnson’s last refuge | Financial Times

Martin Wolff writing in the FT today.

Yet does this really matter? One used to think that economic performance was crucial to political success. Now we know there are alternative political tactics. If economic outcomes and fiscal largesse disappoint, Johnson can return to what has worked so well since 2016: the battle of undaunted Britain against the despotism of Brussels. Indeed, we are already seeing just this in his attempt to rewrite the agreement he reached over Northern Ireland just over two years ago.

In the last resort, blame what is wrong on foreigners. This has worked so far. But the patriotism card surely cannot work its magic forever.

Dr Will Welfare

Covid PCR tests: at least 43,000 in UK may have had false negatives | Coronavirus | The Guardian

What a great name for a public health doc?

Dr Will Welfare, the public health incident director at UKHSA, said: “There is no evidence of any faults with LFD or PCR test kits themselves and the public should remain confident in using them and in other laboratory services currently provided.”

The west is the author of its own weakness

The west is the author of its own weakness | Financial Times

What Trump understood, as did populists elsewhere, is that the voters’ respect for established politics is rooted in a bargain. Public faith in democracy — in the rule of law and the institutions of the state — rests on a perception that the system at least nods towards fairness. There have been reforms to that end since the crash, but little to suggest they are enough.

There was nothing wrong with the ambition of the post cold war optimists. It remains hard to see how the world can work without liberal democracy and a rules-based international system. What the optimists missed then, and the China watchers overlook now, is the hollowing out of trust in democracy at home. Of course, China is a potential threat. A second presidential term for Trump would be a much more dangerous one.

It may be that history will conclude that the excessive optimism of the 1990s is being mirrored today by too much pessimism. That’s a judgment I intend to leave to others. For a political commentator, 25 years in the same slot is long enough. So this is my last column. I will continue to write from time to time as an FT contributing editor, but otherwise intend to go in search of a better understanding of, well, history.

Philip Stephens

Twin miseries

It was not deliberate policy; it simply seemed to be only men who applied, usually refugees from the twin miseries of academia: low salaries and high tables.

The Fear Index. Robert Harris

Line manager

Every time I hear the term line-manager used by or about an academic, retirement gets a day closer.

I once wrote.

Business has always hated competition

Full quote:

Business has always hated competition. The City of London, home to our banking sector, was founded on the trade guilds which policed quality but whose hidden agenda was to fix prices.

Sounds familiar.

Paul Lewis in the FT

From today’s FT online. A moment’s hesitation. Who is this fed guy?

Voting for Turkeys

The Government is telling the world that it is fighting night and day to save Christmas, in September. Don’t you find that the fight to save Christmas starts earlier every year? I know I do. But what message does that send? Things are so bad, putting a turkey on the table in three months time, is now top of the government’s agenda.

Jonty’s jottings, Jonty Bloom

The Lie of Nation Building

The Lie of Nation Building | by Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

Fintan O’Toole in fine form.

The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens.

Critics of the war argued that the US could not create a polity in its own image on the far side of the world. The tragic truth is that in many ways it did exactly that.

The easiest way to cope with the reality that the longest war in US history (longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam put together) has ended in defeat and an ignominious and deadly evacuation is to fall back on the belief that the Afghans were never capable of creating or sustaining a modern nation-state. The US, after all, spent $143 billion on “nation building” in Afghanistan. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than it spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Why did it not achieve similar results? The problem, it is comforting to conclude, must lie with the Afghans themselves: too backward, too poor, too inextricably entangled in medieval tribalism and obscurantist religion. [emphasis added]

Worth reading in full.