Abortion overreach will backfire on women
One of the many, many reasons I prefer living in the UK to the US is the former's more clement weather, which reflects the country's calmer politics. By contrast, America's storms and wildfires feel like a metaphor for its political debates, not least on abortion. So it's apt that, just as a heatwave arrives in this country, the British left loses its mind over abortion.
Last week MPs voted to support an amendment, proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, which argues that women who obtain an abortion should never be prosecuted, even if it's after the legal 24-week limit. This sounds good in theory (abortion should not be criminalised, yes, agreed) but is in fact completely nuts. The law already allows late-term abortions in extreme circumstances, but now a woman could have an abortion the day before her due date for any reason she fancied. Now, very few women will do this, and in fact very few ever have, and the harrowing stories that have been used to justify this vote largely took place during the Covid lockdown, when women were buying abortion pills in the post and couldn't see doctors to find out how far along they were in their pregnancy. So: not a widespread problem, and one that could be resolved by re-examining how the Crown Prosecution Service deals with these sad cases.
• `Read more: MPs vote to decriminalise abortion
Instead, MPs have decided to chuck out the UK's heretofore liberal but pragmatic approach in favour of something far more radical that most people don't want: 87 per cent of the British public are in favour of legalised abortion, but more than half draw the line at the abortion of a healthy baby over the six-month limit. Antoniazzi's amendment upends the delicate compromise that existed until now.
Sensing their moment has come, politicians on the right are already arguing that the time limit here should be cut, in line with most of Europe. Meanwhile, some on the left are arguing the amendment doesn't go far enough. Stella Creasy proposed a further amendment, which was written by the part-time tax barrister, occasional fox murderer and full-time tweeter Jolyon Maugham, that would have made it impossible even to prosecute those who coerced women into late-term abortions. This was considered so extreme it was rejected by every abortion provider in the country, and also, wisely, by MPs. Undaunted, Creasy, who seems to believe she represents Washington DC rather than Walthamstow, implied that rejecting her amendment was on a par with the overturning of Roe v Wade. By way of evidence, she reeled off voguish American clichés ('the Donald Trump playbook', 'women's bodies as battlefields') which always suggest the speaker is so high on progressive platitudes they have turned off their brain.
If Creasy and her ilk want to take lessons from America, they should look at what happened last week to what is euphemistically called 'paediatric gender healthcare'. On Wednesday the Supreme Court allowed red states like Tennessee to ban doctors from giving hormone treatments and body-altering surgery to gender-confused children. It is the latest blow for the gender movement in the US, and it was entirely caused by overreach by activists. Until about a decade ago, people who wanted to live as the opposite sex were seen as a niche adult demographic who should be treated with kindness. But activist groups destroyed that moderate status quo with their ludicrous arguments, such as that male rapists could be sent to women's prisons and there should be no age limit on body-altering surgery for children. The Biden administration blindly supported them until belatedly realising it was following the wilfully blind, and American politicians are now, at last, trying to undo some of the damage. None of this worked out well for trans people or the left.
Progressive overreach and reality denial will always cause a backlash, something Maugham should know, given his own flailing gender activism. Creasy, too, has argued that 'some women are born with penises', suggesting a strong disconnect between her beliefs and actual biology. I'm not sure when Labour politicians decided to follow their Democrat counterparts in defending the most extreme version of a social shift, but they need to get a grip. One reason US feminists lost the abortion argument is they insisted abortion was no big deal and derided Hillary Clinton for describing it as something that should be 'safe, legal and rare', saying that last word was 'stigmatising'. It turned out that it's a lot more stigmatising to pretend getting an abortion is just a jolly lark that should come with a loyalty card.
When I was 23 and 11 weeks pregnant, I had an abortion, an experience neither jolly nor terrible but necessary. Afterwards, I felt pure gratitude, which is how I still feel about it now. Since then I've sampled many experiences on the fertility menu: given birth to twins, miscarried, had a baby. You don't need to be a wet-eyed sentimentalist to know a baby becomes a baby well before it's born; I could feel when it happened to all of my babies at about the six-month mark.
The legal limit exists for good reasons, including the mother's mental health, and maintaining public support for abortion. Arguing that a woman has the right to terminate a fully gestated healthy baby is the most self-defeating version of the pro-choice movement, because it will reinvigorate the anti-abortion argument in this country, just as arguing for the most extreme version of trans rights destroyed the moderate accommodations that existed before. Labour has kicked a hornets' nest with this vote. And it's women who are going to be stung.
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Telegraph
27 minutes ago
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One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence.' That seems a pretty low bar – the fact that the UK hasn't suffered a bloody revolution or a fascist or communist takeover. Following the Southport riots and the more recent events in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, I ask if the risks of widespread disorder are increasing – some have even spoken of civil war, a brutal revolution. 'Ummm,' Cummings pauses. '[Violence] is definitely a risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future. 'And countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. I think that the long term cultural capital that's built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see [elsewhere] of just spreading mayhem all over the world.' It's hot sitting overlooking the garden and Cummings, 53 and 'fit-skinny', provides water in glasses better suited for a fine Burgundy. I point out that he is wearing Berghaus foot warmers despite the temperature nudging 30C. 'I don't get hot,' he replies. My colleague Cleo Watson, with me to record an edition of The Daily T podcast, says that he was known as the Vampire when they worked together in No 10, given his appearance of living in a body five degrees colder than everyone else's. Like Prince Andrew, he doesn't seem to sweat. When the production team's cameras overheat, Cummings is immediately up offering solutions of a fan jammed messily down the back of a sofa. Cummings is what management consultants would describe as 'a solutions-focused, completer, finisher'. Where there is a problem, he believes there is a fix. Whether it's overheating hardware or the dinghies bringing ever more people to the shores of England, all sensible (and clever) people need to do is prioritise it, work out the remedy and implement without fear. 'Stopping the boats is simple – but we need to leave the ECHR' 'Stopping the boats' – Rishi Sunak's promise to the voters which even he now admits was a three-word slogan too far – is now a lead weight around Keir Starmer's Government. The Prime Minister's 'smash the gangs' has been as hollow a claim as what went before. Both are metaphors for the deep malaise across politics, the visible manifestation of an inability to 'do anything'. 'Starmer has literally done exactly what Sunak did,' Cummings says, pointing out that the Labour election pledges of 'putting the grown ups in charge' and 'change from the chaos' has not stopped the forces of political and economic failure and decline. 'He stood up and said: 'This is a complete disaster. 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'They're there to make money. So as soon as they realise, oh, an island nation is actually just going to stop these stupid boats, they're obviously going to send the people somewhere else.' 'Whitehall is fundamentally broken' He has a question for Starmer, for our MPs, for the Civil Service. 'Do you actually want to get to grips with the fundamental legal problems and security problems we have in this country or not? The consensus amongst MPs has been for 30 years – no. 'The country doesn't agree with them. Both parties have tried to keep going with the old way and tried to persuade people that it can be done differently. They failed, they've lost the country. The country wants these problems solved. It's going to happen. The ECHR is toast and we'll be out of it.' Starmer's U-turn on the need for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal is another case of system failure. Cummings points out that child sexual assault and rape perpetrated by predominantly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men was being raised by people like Tommy Robinson years ago but being ignored by the state. 'The whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken and the people don't know what they're doing,' he says. 'I think in principle it's obviously correct that the country gets to grips with this absolutely horrific nightmare [which] the old system has essentially tried to ignore for many years, decades. 'However, the kind of inquiry is very important […] I think that any kind of normal inquiry led by a judge will be mostly a farce. It'll be easily played by Whitehall. They'll destroy documents. They'll delay and evade – the normal Whitehall approach will be applied.' Cummings says politics now is about priorities – what do you want to solve first and how do you solve it. Starmer's premiership 'vaporised on contact with Whitehall' because he does not understand the need for fundamental change in the whole system. 'There will be a lot of talk about how Starmer can reset, but at the heart of it, I simply think that – like Sunak – Starmer's fundamental core software patch ['tech lingo' for a computer update] is optimised for pats on the head from permanent secretaries [senior civil servants]. That's what he will keep tuning to, because he can't do anything else.' The Conservatives are holed, probably below the water line. 'The Tories are obviously going to get rid of Kemi [Badenoch]. The only question is whether they do it in the autumn or whether they wait until they're smashed up in the May elections. 'So she'll go, after which they'll either put in James Cleverly [the former Home Secretary], in which case, shut the party down – definitively game over. 'Or there will be one last attempt at 'are we over the cliff or are we not?' Can we somehow reboot ourselves?' I ask him if Robert Jenrick, the noisy, TikTok-friendly, shadow justice secretary who films himself apprehending fare dodgers on the Tube, could execute such a reboot. 'He's obviously the person who everyone's talking about for a simple reason – the rest of the shadow cabinet are literally invisible. No one even knows who any of them are. Even people who are interested in politics don't know who they are.' And so to the big question, Nigel Farage and the plausible route to No 10. The two famously fell out (Farage called Cummings 'a horrible, nasty little man') over the referendum campaign, but more recently a rapprochement of sorts has happened, with Cummings having dinner with Farage before Christmas and backing Reform in the recent local elections. 'I thought it was interesting that he wanted to talk about the Cabinet Office and how power really works,' Cummings said of the December meeting. 'He said: 'I've never been in government myself. I've never been a minister. I don't know how it works. I'm now an MP though, and I talk to other MPs and it's clear they don't understand how it works and they still seem very curious about it and it's odd that they don't seem to know how power actually works inside the Cabinet Office.' 'The fundamental question is, does Nigel want to be Prime Minister in 2029? And if he does, is he prepared to build the thing that you need to build to do that? Which intrinsically involves turning Reform into an entity that can go out and engage with the country and bring in all these wonderful people and get some fraction of them involved with politics at the senior level. 'That's the core question. If he does that, then the whole system will undergo profound shock and it'll be a big deal and I'll be irrelevant to it. And if he doesn't do it, he will just be signalling this is the same old shambles and something else will grow.' Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, Cummings understands the need for deep policy work, deep management and delivery reform that means the end of a 'permanent' Civil Service and attention to how you communicate in a way that is truthful and that voters understand. Can Farage find the equivalent of the Centre for Policy Studies? Who is Reform's Sir Keith Joseph? Who is the Maurice Saatchi? I sense Cummings is not convinced Farage has the ability to move beyond 'the guy with an iPhone' and a provocative soundbite. I ask if he would help Reform and, though open, it seems, to any conversation, Cummings knows that Farage has his loyalists and many of them do not like the high-intellect of the guy with a first in Ancient and Modern History from Exeter College, Oxford University. Being a Reform Spartan brooks little room for compromise. 'Change means tearing down the old and building something new' So far, 2025 has been the year Cummings, who now runs his own consultancy, becomes a little more visible – a gentle public relaunch. The interviews are coming more regularly and two weeks ago he gave the Pharos Lecture at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre. He has attached himself to the Looking for Growth group, a grassroots movement of entrepreneurs led by the academic, Lawrence Newport, who has also put his name to the Crush Crime initiative to radically rethink law and order failings. 'If, in a year from now, it's obvious things have just sunk even further and can't actually change, then I think you'll see a burst of energy from a whole bunch of people saying, OK, right, let's start something new,' Cummings, who is wearing a Looking for Growth cap throughout our interview, says. 'And I think you'll see people from Labour defecting to join it. I think you'll see Tories and Reform people – but, crucially, a whole set of people who are now not involved with politics. We can't go on like this in 2029, in the election, and then have another four years with a bunch of these bozos in charge.' Cummings has spoken of his own start-up party, which remains a possibility, though he gently side-steps whether it might happen any time soon. 'It will certainly not be led by me. And certainly not chaired by me,' is all he will say. I would wager a £5 note that he will be involved if and when the old parties irrevocably fail. Cummings' analysis has clarity. Close the Treasury and the Cabinet Office; rip out the stultifying conformity of the Civil Service and end the job for life culture; make presently 'fake' ministers responsible for the decisions they take; encourage in the young, new talent that presently sees 'tech, maths and money' as more appealing than running the country; bring immigration down 'to the thousands'; embrace AI ('Westminister is always the last place to see anything'); overthrow the stale old media, including the BBC; understand that the public see traditional politics as peopled by incompetents, liars and cheats, and build a new, liberal, libertarian world where the market of good ideas is all that matters. Maybe Dominic Cummings should be prime minister? 'That's a laughable suggestion,' he replies. But all the Labour, Conservative and Reform MPs who regularly contact Cummings 'for a chat' are sure he will have a role. Because the World of Soup is coming to an end. And we're going to need some people with forks to work our way to a new future.
Telegraph
28 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Britain's new breed of drone-racing soldiers will be more than ready to take on Putin
The Chief of the General Staff – the head of the British Army – General Sir Roly Walker has a plan to defeat the Russians. In a speech this week he made it clear that our Army is laser focused on the enemy, the Russian Army, and is not only learning from Ukraine but re-equipping and re-training itself at pace. The European Nato allies are also focusing East. Collectively, European Nato will soon over-match Putin's men, even without the traditional assumption of massive help from the US. Though the whole world seems currently focused on Iran in its struggle with Israel, Vladimir Putin remains the main threat here and we should not forget it. He is committing war crimes every week in his evil campaign against Ukraine's civilian population: the latest is the reported use of cluster munitions against residential areas of Kyiv. Not only are cluster bomblets devastating across wide areas against unprotected civilians, their use leaves unexploded bomblets scattered across the target area: effectively a field of landmines, and one that is difficult and dangerous to clear up. Against this background, the move of US air defence assets from Europe to the Middle East is dispiriting, and seems to indicate that President Trump has given up on European peace. He will probably seek instead to disable the Iranian nuclear programme, with most of the hard work done for him by the Israelis. But this is no help to us in Europe and most especially not to the brave Ukrainians who are keeping Putin's war machine tied up and so protecting us all. Bold Ukrainian secret-service operations have taken the fight to Russia and shown the world that Zelensky and his indomitable compatriots are a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile here in Britain there is scepticism among journalists and commentators regarding the British Army's ability to stand up to Russia, and the willingness of our young people to fight for their country. But in fact there is no shortage of young Brits wanting to join – over a million have tried over the last ten years, but sadly some 75 per cent of them were defeated by the absurdly clunky recruitment mechanism. This is now being sorted out, and people are making it through: among them my own son, following in my footsteps at Sandhurst and probably doing it better! General Walker reminded us this week of Field Marshal Montgomery's memoirs in which he wrote: 'I shall take away many impressions into the evening of life. But the one I shall treasure above all is the picture of the British soldier – staunch and tenacious in adversity, kind and gentle in victory – the figure to whom the nation has again and again, in the hour of adversity, owed its safety and its honour'. Never a better word said on the British soldier and it is as true today as it was then, in my opinion. When it comes to lethality, General Walker explained how this will double in two years and treble by the end of the decade. The traditional heavy end, tanks, artillery and attack helicopters, will account for 20 per cent with the remaining 80 per cent expected to come from drones. Anybody who has dipped even the smallest toe into the Ukraine war would agree this is a good mix. Mass, still the main currency that ensures victory, can come from drones: thousands of them, AI enabled, with the tanks providing the direct 'thunder' when appropriate. There is also a realisation in Strategic Defence Review that he who controls the Electromagnetic Spectrum nowadays controls the battlefield. Electronic warfare capabilities are now a priority. The third element which guarantees success in battle is training, and British soldiers have been training like dervishes in this contemporary battlespace. Despite the Russians having a few 'islands of excellence' the rank-and-file conscripts of Putin's army are in the main untrained and used as cannon fodder. The meat grinder has now consumed over one million Russian souls. The British Army for its part is now a 'world of excellence', well trained, with excellent kit coming onboard, and still pound for pound the best fighters on the planet. In the past the British Army concentrated on a few very expensive drones, but we have now well and truly grasped the mass drone idea, so critical for success against the Russians. General Walker tells us that 3,000 drone pilots have been trained in the last 12 months, and we will have another 6,000 in the next 12 months. These will fly mainly the basic FPV drones, $500 a pop-ish, that will create the mass we need. The Army's newest sport is drone racing, which teaches FPV pilots the skills they need to manoeuvre on the modern battlefield. At the beginning of the war, we were teaching Ukraine how to fight, but we are now learning from them how to be very much more lethal in the battle space, and most especially against a Russian looking threat. Sir Keir Starmer may be Trump's buddy today, but I'm sure he realises his genuine friends are in Europe and this absolutely includes Ukraine. It is now up to us to enable Ukraine to get into a position to get a just ceasefire out of the Kremlin. I'd argue that the RAF jets stationed at eastern airbases on Nato missions and our troops forward deployed in Estonia are doing more for our national interests than the planes we recently deployed to Cyprus. President Trump does not need our help to defeat Iran's nuclear weapons programme, but President Zelensky does to stop the Russians and force them to seek peace. I believe that General Walker is on the right track and is delivering the Army the nation needs and that Nato needs. When war in Ukraine ends and Putin looks further westwards, he will see a very different picture to that of 2022. The British Army will once again be ready to take the advice of the great General Slim: 'Hit the other fellow as quickly as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he is not looking'.
