Assisted dying bill is a conservative reform

I haven't always been a Conservative, but as far back as I can remember I have always been a conservative. Not fogeyish, certainly not reactionary, but always respectful of tradition and gently resistant to those proposing upheaval.
My conservatism is partly the product of experience, of being part of a family chased across the world by those advancing revolutionary ideologies. We have felt keenly the cost of wild ideas and appreciate the benefits of stability more, perhaps, than others.
But it's also, more prosaically, just how I am. It's an instinct. My failings, professionally and politically, are far more likely to derive from complacency and a surfeit of caution than from a fit of over-enthusiasm.

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Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

It is time to suspend Dominic Grieve's anti-Islamophobia group

There have been too many casualties in the grooming gang scandal. Yet so far, the political consequences have been few. It is far from clear however that Dominic Grieve's Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition Working Group can, or should, survive this week's fall out. What a few weeks ago was dismissed as 'dog-whistle' politics or the agenda of the 'far-Right' – the scandal of mass grooming of girls by mostly Pakistani origin males – is now viewed very differently. This shifting ground greatly impacts attempts to establish a definition of 'Islamophobia ' – controversially signposted by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in February. A new Policy Exchange report How Not to Tackle Grooming Gangs: The National Grooming Gang Inquiry and a Definition of Islamophobia details just how difficult it has been, for over two decades, to describe openly what people could see about grooming gangs with their own eyes. Let four examples suffice here. For her past work on Rotherham, Louise Casey was put forward for an 'Islamophobe of the year award' by one activist group. The late journalist Andrew Norfolk was vilified, as was then Labour MP for Keighley, Ann Cryer. In 2020, when broadcaster Trevor Phillips was suspended by Labour for alleged Islamophobia, the first charge listed was journalism where he had written of 'the exposure of systematic and longstanding abuse by men, mostly of Pakistani Muslim origin in the North of England.' How ridiculous this orthodoxy now looks. On one level, Government appears to accept this new reality. On Monday the Home Secretary declared 'those vile perpetrators who have grown used to the authorities looking the other way must have no place to hide.' As she spoke, she was surrounded by female Labour MPs who appeared chastened by the weight of events. And yet, there are grounds for pessimism. For the national inquiry into grooming gangs to work it cannot be placed in a straitjacket. It will need to shine a torchlight into every Whitehall office, every stalled police inquiry, each Town Hall in England, and every licensing arrangement between a local authority and a taxi firm. Its hands cannot be tied by political, social or religious considerations. As Yvette Cooper spoke in the Commons, others were risking that very scenario. The call for evidence by Grieve's working group is underway, as he seeks to develop a new definition of Islamophobia. While ministers have said this would not be statutory, if accepted by the public and private sector (as activists will demand) it would in practice become binding policy if not law. To that backdrop, how confident would a care worker, teacher or local councillor in Rochdale or Rotherham be, about speaking openly on issues which concern them? Angela Rayner should thank Dominic Grieve and his team for their work, then put the group on ice. If the grooming gang inquiry finds fears of prejudice and Islamophobia have undermined the response to grooming gangs, then the retirement of the Islamophobia Definition Working Group must become permanent.

Telegraph

3 hours ago

• Telegraph

Trump attack on Left-wing bias on TV sparks ‘constitutional crisis'

Elon Musk may have stepped aside, but Donald Trump still has a Doge problem. The US president's plan to run a scythe through up to $425bn (£316bn) of government spending could be gutted or even vetoed in the Senate, where just a few rebel Republicans could scupper the cuts. But Trump and Russell Vought, his budget tsar, have hatched a scheme, called a 'pocket rescission', that might keep the Doge (department of government efficiency) dream on track. And it could even shift the constitutional balance of power between president and Congress towards a testy Trump. It's a high-risk, high-stakes strategy. The outcome will determine whether the Doge spending reductions can go ahead, helping to pay for Trump's 'big, beautiful' tax cuts without blowing out the budget and rattling the bond markets. But the unprecedented procedure takes the White House and Capitol Hill into uncharted legal waters. So it is likely to end up in the courts – joining a raft of litigation that will either reinforce the institutional checks on the president's power or unleash him. 'It's a challenge to Congress,' says Sarah Binder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University. 'I don't like to throw around the term 'constitutional crisis', but it's not a great position for lawmakers and institutions.' Under the constitution, Congress has the so-called power of the purse, meaning that lawmakers, not the president, are the final arbiter of what the government spends or does not spend. If the president wants to cut funding or programmes that Congress has already authorised, his only option is to launch a rescission procedure – a formal request for the cuts, which both houses of Congress must approve. The rescission process was introduced in a law called the Impoundment Control Act, which had the overall aim of making it hard for Richard Nixon, the then-president, and his successors from delaying or withholding funds once Congress had green-lighted them. Rescission has seldom been used. Ronald Reagan used it to secure $15.2bn of spending cuts as president in the early 1980s, but later in the decade, Congress tended to ignore or refuse his rescission messages. Trump tried it on with a $15bn-plus request in his first term, but was stymied in the Senate. The Democrats then got control of Congress in the midterms and pushed back another $27bn salvo. Now Trump is trying again. The initial proposal – Vought says it will be 'the first of many' – is to scuttle $9.4bn of spending on public broadcasters and international aid programmes. This rescission was flagged back in March but formally put to Congress only this month. In an executive order early last month, Trump said he wanted to terminate all public funding of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which accounts for about $1bn of this first rescission package. 'Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens,' Trump said. 'Today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.' The White House has until July 18 to persuade Congress. The rescission scraped through the House of Representatives by 214 votes to 212, but the Senate is the real test. If just four Republicans in the 100-seat upper house swap sides, the spending stays in place. It's not looking promising for Trump. Several Republicans have already voiced concern about at least some of the cuts. The dissenters include Senator Susan Collins, who chairs an influential Senate finance committee that will consider the cuts at a session on June 25. There could be fireworks. Vought will appear before the committee and, in recent weeks, he has started airing the possibility of bypassing Congress altogether through an untested and almost unknown variant of rescission: the so-called pocket rescission. 'It's a provision that has been rarely used, but it is there,' Vought told CNN. 'And we intend to use all of these tools.' The trick with the pocket rescission is to make the request to Congress right before the end of the fiscal year, which runs to Sept 30. The White House reckons that the Impoundment Control Act's wording creates a loophole: if Congress does not act on the request before Sept 30, then even if the window is well short of 45 days the spending approval will lapse automatically on that date. The case for pocket rescissions was made recently by Wade Miller, of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a Right-wing think tank. 'A rescission is a viable tool for carrying out the broader political mandate to curb unnecessary spending,' he wrote in a briefing paper. 'If the executive branch decides to use this process, the deployment of a rescission with fewer than 45 days remaining in the fiscal year is a statutorily and constitutionally valid strategy.' The CRA was set up by Vought himself, after he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the final six months of Trump's first term. He returned to the White House with the president this January, in the same role. But other Washington think tanks trenchantly oppose the CRA's position. 'Calling it a pocket rescission implies that it's like an actual functional tool under the law, in a way that it's actually not. It is a strategy that the person who is running the Office of Management and Budget has articulated to evade the law,' says Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at Protect Democracy. She says the whole purpose of the Impoundment Control Act was to stop any presidential ploy to skirt its strictures. 'One of the reasons why they might want to do this is because they're afraid they don't have the votes to actually make the cuts the legal way.' Binder, from Brookings, says that the Act doesn't explicitly deal with what happens if a president makes the request right before the end of the fiscal year. 'There's certainly room here for an aggressive Office of Management and Budget and an aggressive administration to try to stretch – others might say manipulate – the silence in the budget law,' she says. 'But the logic of the matter suggests that pocket rescissions are not legal under the Act and I would imagine there's a strong argument that they are unconstitutional under Congress's power of the purse.' Binder suspects Vought is looking to get a test case into the courts. Given there could be a constitutional principle at stake, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of judges are Republican appointees. In the meantime, litigants could get restraining orders or injunctions to prevent the Doge cuts. But they can't necessarily get the White House to respect these. The stage is set for a constitutional showdown. The question is whether Trump and Vought will really pull the trigger. And then, whether the weapon will actually work.

Daily Mail​

3 hours ago

• Daily Mail​

Minnesota shooting suspect claims Tim Walz ordered political killing spree in wild letter to the FBI

Vance Boelter wrote a letter to the FBI wildly speculating that Tim Walz wanted to kill Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar so that he could steal her job. Boelter is accused of fatally shooting former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home early Saturday in the northern Minneapolis suburbs. Before that, authorities say, he also shot and wounded another Democrat, Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, who lived a few miles away. He surrendered Sunday night after what authorities have called the largest search in Minnesota history. In addition to the discovery of Boelter's hit list targeting several liberal politicians and celebrities, he also address a letter to the FBI that was described as 'rambling' and 'conspiratorial.' The letter was found in a Buick that Boelter left behind near his home and allegedly contains a confession to the Hortman murders and the attempted killing of the Hoffmans. The one and a half page letter is incoherent and difficult to read, two people who were familiar with told the Minnesota Star-Tribune. Boelter allegedly claims that the military had trained him to kill in secret and Walz asked him to kill Klobuchar, among several others, so that he could replace her in the Senate. Klobuchar's current term in the Senate runs until 2030 and Walz has never stated any intention to run for anything since his failed bid for the vice presidency on Kamala Harris' losing ticket. The junior Senator from Minnesota, fellow Democrat Tina Smith, was also named in the letter. A spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty would only say that 'we have seen no evidence that the allegations regarding Governor Walz are based in fact.' 'Governor Walz is grateful to law enforcement who apprehended the shooter, and he's grateful to the prosecutors who will ensure justice is swiftly served,' spokesperson Teddy Tschann said. Tschann would only say of the later that 'this tragedy continues to be deeply disturbing for all Minnesotans.' Klobuchar, who herself ran for president in 2020, said in a statement: 'Boelter is a very dangerous man and I am deeply grateful that law enforcement got him behind bars before he killed other people.' Later Friday, it was revealed that Boelter is a doomsday prepper Boelter could face something that is a rarity for Minnesota but could become more common under the Trump administration: the death penalty. Minnesota abolished capital punishment in 1911, and the state's last execution was a botched hanging in 1906. But federal prosecutors announced charges against Vance Boelter on Monday that can carry the death penalty. Two of the six federal counts can carry the death penalty, something federal prosecutors have not sought in a Minnesota-based case since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. 'Will we seek the death penalty? It´s too early to tell. That is one of the options,' Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said Monday at a news conference where he revealed new details of what he described as a meticulously planned attack. They included allegations that Boelter also stopped at the homes of two other lawmakers that night and had dozens of other Democrats as potential targets, including officials in other states . Boelter´s federal defenders have declined to comment on the case, and he has not entered a plea. The federal intervention in Boelter's case appeared to irritate Moriarty, the county's former chief public defender, who was elected on a police reform and racial justice platform in 2022 after the police killing of George Floyd . At a news conference Monday to announce the state charges, Moriarty gave only vague answers in response to questions about the interplay between the federal and state investigations. But she acknowledged 'there's a tension' and said federal officials 'can speak for themselves.' Moriarty said she intends to press forward in state court regardless and to seek an indictment for first-degree murder for the killings of the Hortmans, which would carry a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Thompson told reporters that the federal case 'does not nullify the state charges. They remain in place. ... My expectation based on prior cases is the federal case, the federal charges, will be litigated first, but the state charges won´t necessarily go anywhere.' On Wednesday, Moriarty said in an interview with The Associated Press that she told federal prosecutors that she wants her office to try Boelter first. But she said she came away with the impression that the U.S. Attorney´s Office intends to exercise its legal authority to go first. Moriarty said she wants the first chance 'because this horrific crime happened in our community' and the lawmakers represented parts of Hennepin County. And she pointed out that her office tries murder cases all the time, and that it is the largest prosecutors' office in the state. 'We have all the resources and experience to handle these cases because that´s what we do,' she said. 'We feel that we owe it to the community to prosecute this case, and we would like to go first.' Moriarty opposes the death penalty and hopes that the federal prosecutors decide not to seek it against Boelter, noting that she hopes to try him for first-degree murder, which would mean life without parole if he is convicted. 'I certainly hope they respect the fact that Minnesota hasn´t had a death penalty for decades, and that´s because of our values here,' Moriarty said. After his federal court appearance, Boelter was taken to the Sherburne County Jail in suburban Elk River, where federal prisoners are often held. His next federal court appearance is June 27. He does not have any further appearances scheduled in state court. Meanwhile, Boelter's wife has remained in hiding - as the accused assassin's defiant family were tight-lipped concerning her whereabouts, telling a reporter to 'piss off.' Shaken mom-of-five Jenny, 51, rang pals only to say she was in a 'safe' location but wouldn't reveal where she was. She fled the family's bucolic farmhouse home in Green Isle, Minnesota, last Saturday morning after Boelter hinted that he had done something monstrous in a 6.18am text. 'Dad went to war last night,' wrote of her 57-year-old husband. 'There's gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger happy and I don't want you guys around.' As news broke that Boelter had allegedly gunned down two lawmakers and their spouses in Minneapolis, Jenny was pulled over driving through Onamia, 90 miles north. She had their youngest children in the car along with their passports, $10,000 in cash and two handguns, according to federal court filings. Jenny, president of the couple's private security firm, consented to a voluntary search of her electronic devices but wasn't arrested in the 10am traffic stop. There's nothing in her husband's charging documents to suggest she had advance knowledge of his alleged plot to slaughter dozens of Democrat lawmakers and pro-abortion activists. Jenny has not commented publicly since Boelter was captured Sunday evening and charged with multiple counts of murder and stalking. Her brother Jason Doskocil, 54, had a blunt message for when we asked about her whereabouts. 'I'm sorry, we are not going to talk to nobody - so piss off,' he replied. Boelter was captured Sunday evening following the biggest ever manhunt in the state of Minnesota. He had first dressed as a cop and donned a terrifying latex mask to shoot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette shortly before 2am Saturday. The pair were left in critical condition but are expected to survive the shooting on the doorstep of their Champlin, Minnesota home. Boelter then headed to a second lawmaker's residence in Brooklyn Park, pumping multiple bullets into former State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, killing both. The lunatic had drawn up a chilling assassination list of 45 targets including Democrat lawmakers, abortion providers and pro-choice activists, it's alleged. But his murder spree was halted in its tracks when police intercepted him leaving the Hortman's' home and engaged him in a firefight. The gunman fled on foot, leaving behind three AK-47 assault rifles and a 9mm handgun, triggering a massive hunt spanning multiple states and law enforcement agencies. The search narrowed Sunday night to woodland and swampy farmland one mile away from the Boelter residence. Officers first found an abandoned Buick that he had bought off a stranger he met in the street in a madcap scheme to escape. When the fugitive was spotted on a trail cam cops set up a square-mile perimeter deploying drones, dogs and helicopters to flush him out. Neighbor Wendy Thomas eventually spotted Boelter ducking down beside a culvert and flagged SWAT teams who took the alleged shooter alive.