Petition for a referendum on the assisted dying bill and/or proper Parliamentary scrutiny of the bill.

 

This was the state of play on the evening of 14/02/2025

 

Amanda Hunter's Parliamentary Petition may be found here: 

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701838

This is the full text including "more details" as above:

We are petitioning for a National Referendum on Assisted Dying

 We believe that the decision to introduce assisted dying legislation in the UK, is a matter of such fundamental import to the future of our nation and to us as citizens, that it must be decided as a nation, not by Members of Parliament alone.
More details

It is also our view that the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024-25, now before Parliament, requires far more scrutiny and time for deliberation than will be afforded by a Private Member’s Bill, as is the case in this instance. In the interests of reaching a rational and reasoned decision on the matter, we believe it is imperative that time is set aside to discuss and reflect upon the economic, political and cultural contexts in which assisted dying legislation would be exercised.

Since this petition was published and more notably since MPs voted, often expressing grave personal doubts in the process, the most important safeguard (that of judicial scrutiny of all cases) in the bill which the MPs voted to approve, has already been discarded, presumably having served its purpose. This is a government-backed bill, strongly supported by the Prime Minister and many Cabinet colleagues, and yet it is going through Parliament as a private members bill (which normally means the issues are not contentious and not party-political in nature) and so much less Parliamentary time, and rather less evidence-gathering time and  fewer resources, are available to both supporters and critics of the bill in Parliament than would be the case with a government bill introduced by a responsible minister with the power to authorise such evidence-gathering by the civil service. The nature of the bill is such as to largely exclude the expertise of the civil service from the whole process, which may please some people in both camps, but it does tend to remove most of the potential evidence from the strictly-limited amount of debate which we are likely to see. There are also resource issues with the practical drafting process in a private members bill.

Even if the issue of evidence-gathering resources had occurred to the petition author, I know from experience that the strict limit on the number of characters even in the "more details" extension of the petition form is in itself apt to exclude any actual evidence from the details of any petition!

Public information resources cannot properly be excluded from a matter of such great public concern and importance.

Book Review of The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa.

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Nobody is alone when they help somebody else.

 

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

Translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai, this is a welcome sequel to the (pre-teens) novel “The Cat Who Saved Books” and it takes the best of the former story and develops it rather than simply being a continuation.

Tiger, the somewhat awkward Ginger Tabby, has a new heroine in Nanami, a twelve year old girl who spends most of he free time in her local library because other people don’t really want her joining in with their activities in case she has one of her asthma attacks under stress and puts them to bother. Nanami has a lot of heroes on her side in the shape of characters in the books she loves and which are so important, not just to her, but to the whole world. But the hero she needs the most is her father and part of her mission is to help him (and every other adult in the world) remember how to be a hero and not merely an authority figure. And it takes a lot of courage for a loving father to allow his daughter to be brave!

Both books in the series so far are “magic door” stories, where the protagonists travel to another realm where most of the action happens and where they experience real dangers. But in this case the “real” world is also affected by what is going on in the realm (some of the characters call it a “labyrinth”) and there’s a two-way relationship between the realm and the real because the realm reflects, amplifies and accelerates the trends of the real and makes good and bad more distinct (rather than better or worse). It is not the sort of acausal realm which magicians seek, because that’s a place where things happen “because I say so” without repercussions, for the magician, at least. Even the dark and frightening entity which Nanami and Tiger encounter (in both the realm and the real) is in the grip of powerful and negative trends and, frankly, needs help.

This entity manifests itself in three different forms of “The Grey Man”; “The General”, “The Prime Minister” (younger, sits on a sofa rather than a campaign chair or throne) and “The King”, but also as an elderly woman always in some pain. The Grey Man seeks to destroy books, because they stimulate the imagination and that leads in turn to people having a “heart” (that is: empathy and compassion depend on the ability to imagine what someone else’s needs and experience might be) and all of this prevents people from being “successful” and success can only be achieved by focusing on one’s own needs and ambitions to the exclusion of concern for others. The Grey Man sees a narrow definition of success as the only legitimate goal, but knows that it’s something that always grows stronger and people will have to be more and more ruthless and selfish. He sees this as inevitable and confutes inevitable with desirable. Nanami can imagine an “impossible” world where kindness and duty grow instead.

The Grey Man seeks to prove his thesis by creating a situation where Nanami has to choose between looking after herself and letting bad things happen both to books (which she loves) and the Grey Man’s soldiers (who are trying to kill her) and she confounds him by proposing a practical solution where everyone simply works together to minimise the harm done. He doesn’t buy this, and everything builds to an alarming crisis, but the seeds are sown for an eventual reconciliation. Nanami does not “win” because she does not seek to beat anyone, only to help those who need her help, even though in her physical weakness her help may not seem that impressive. She gathers, rather than sacrifices, strength by thinking of others and acting, as best she can, in their interests as well as her own.

Children should read this book to understand the dilemma which adults face and how they might help adults resolve it. Parents and teachers, perhaps, just need to read this book!

 

The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa is published in the UK by Picador (Pan Macmillan) of the 10^th of April 2025.

Book Review of The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera

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(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher.)

This is a competent telling of the life, work and motivations of the former KGB officer and Archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and includes a compelling account of how MI6 exfiltrated the entire Mitrokhin family unit from Russia via Lithuania and Sweden, which is based on new research by the author.

Quite often, the motivations of defectors are peculiar, not very noble, and sometimes of the moment, in that something upsets them and they defect pretty swiftly, or at least at the first opportunity thereafter.

Mitrokhin is interesting because he not only spent decades preparing for his defection whilst still serving in the KGB (which he saw as the “Cheka” unchanged in its essentials since the revolution and in some ways contiguous with the Czarist secret police): he then spent seven further years working on the material he had obtained to make it understandable (or so he hoped) to people who mattered. After his defection, he spent the last years of his life doing further work on the huge volume of highly secret and important material he brought with him. (Not all highly secret material is actually important: the other thing which sets Mitrokhin apart from most other defectors is that he was highly selective, knew what things to take and which to ignore and remained sufficiently disciplined to keep doing that, day after day till years ran into decades. He selected the good stuff, but he appears to have also managed to take a very high proportion of ALL the good stuff and not just one or two choice treasures that he happened across.)

The motivation required for that sort of effort is extraordinary and the study of it is one of the most important things which the author does with this book.

Mitrokhin loved Russia, all his life, in its entirety. He believed that Russia’s natural wealth should be respectfully exploited only for the benefit of all its people, and he believed that the Russian people should be exploited or oppressed by no-one. He was not a Bolshevist and, whilst the author paints him as a Russian nationalist with a vague spiritual angle, Mitrokhin resembles the “Diggers” of 17^th century England as much as anything else. He certainly saw the Orthodox Church as being corrupted by the Cheka (Mr Putin has since corrupted it even more thoroughly) and his horror at the way the cult of informers corrupted (and still corrupts) Russian society is also strongly reminiscent of the dissident Protestants, such as Georg Elser and Sophie Scholl, in NAZI Germany.

There are two other strands to his motivation. One of these, his fury not at what the Cheka did to him (he was one of them, after all!) but what they made him do to innocent people, ties in with his seeing life and freedom as sacred. As does his determination to use his long-planned defection to secure better medical and social care for his handicapped son. The Soviet Utopia, even when mitigated by a “captured” Orthodox Church, would have had no more place for an imperfect child than the Nazi Arcadia. And Putin certainly has not the slightest use for those not strong enough to send into battle!

In his lifetime, Mitrokhin’s dream of using the truth about the Cheka to free the Russian people from its grasp went unrealised, due largely to the unwillingness of the Free World to let go of its pipe-dream of a Cheka-led Russia as a cooperative partner in the new world order. (Whilst the Cheka never actually held total power in the Soviet Union, it does hold total power in Russia today.) But Mitrokhin’s truth still exists: it has been published in the West even as it remains unread in Russia. Time may be short, but there is still time for that truth to slay the Cheka.

The Spy in the Archive by Gordon Corera is published on the 5^th of June 2025 by 4^th Estate/William Collins.