Another poor decision

Justice secretary's assisted dying intervention is explosive - and potentially embarrassing for PM

Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood joins former prime minister Gordon Brown in condemning the assisted dying bill ahead of a historic vote on Friday.

With six days to go before Friday's historic Commons showdown on assisted dying, it's the opponents who are turning up the heat.


Another example of Starmer making a poor political decision. Not so much that the assisted dying measure is wrong, but this is an unusual political issue with good arguments on both sides, not one for a Prime Minister in severe political difficulties.

Starmer's political outlook was never suited to this kind of battle anyway. He is neither persuasive nor sufficiently pragmatic and this difficult, two-sided moral problem is way beyond his ideologically obtuse and weirdly amoral political outlook.

As a psychological aside, some arguments about winter fuel payments also raised the spectre of death. Starmer gone by Christmas begins to seem more likely.