DARK DAYS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

By Dr. Judith Sture

Special to Virtueonline.org

www.virtueonline.org

June 22, 2025

I am writing this post for a few reasons. Firstly, to express my horror about recent votes in the UK Houses of Parliament; and secondly, to state that the outcomes of these do not, in my experience, represent the opinions of the majority of British people.  Thirdly, I want to say to non-UK readers, that our country is not going to hell in a handbasket, but rather, is currently led by a morally-bankrupt group of people who are abandoning the rights and needs of the very people whom they represent, in favour of international interests and their own preferred ideologies.

Never in my lifetime have I felt ashamed of our House of Commons as much as I do today. Never did I even think that our MPs would vote in the way that they have in the past week. The interests of democracy have been under strain since the General Election in July 2024, with a government in place that has consistently failed to protect the neediest among our population. The wider social issues are for another post, but for today, I am addressing the right-to-life issues that have been potentially obliterated in the UK in recent days.

On Tuesday 17 June 2025, the House of Commons voted on an amendment to the government's crime and policing bill, to allow abortion outside the legal framework without fear of prosecution. It is now possible for a woman to ‘terminate’ her baby (sorry, ‘foetus’ – better still, ‘clump of cells’) up to the day before the due date. Yes, you read that right – a woman in the UK can now choose to ‘abort’ a 9-months gestation baby and not face prosecution. The government won the vote with a majority of 242 votes. You read that right as well.

The Guardian, our major left-leaning newspaper, called this ‘the biggest step forward in reproductive rights in almost 60 years’. The British Medical Association – the biggest union for UK doctors and medical students – ‘welcomes the move…as “long overdue”’ while claiming that abortion is not a matter for the police.

Right to Life UK said it well on X:

‘Jerome Mayhew MP [Conservative] sums up today’s debate: We’ve made major changes to the abortion law, on the basis of no evidence session, no committee stage scrutiny, just 46 minutes of backbench debate [in the chamber] and a government minister wind-up who refused to take any interventions’.

In contrast, in 2004, MPs spent 700 hours debating the hunting of foxes, hares, deer and mink, following a major government inquiry into animal welfare issues around hunting.

We now live in a country where praying silently near an abortion clinic is illegal, but you can legally kill your baby the day before it is ‘due’. If this is not intentional evil, I do not know what is.  Even a lot of feminists are complaining that this is not abortion, but murder.

Just days later, on Friday 20 June, the Commons voted on a private member’s bill (brought forward by an MP, rather than the government) - the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This proposes what is euphemistically known as ‘assisted dying’. For which read ‘death on demand’. MPs voted to support the bill by a majority of 23 votes (314 for, 291 against). Like the abortion amendment, the bill now passes to the House of Lords for further scrutiny and debate. Needless to say, the proponents of euthanasia, in spite of any and all evidence or opinion that contradicts their viewpoint, are celebrating wildly.

As usual, those in favour of euthanasia claim that significant safeguards are in place to prevent misuse of the law – but in every country where such law has been enacted, safeguards arguably melt away and we see numbers of mentally-ill people and other vulnerable individuals who ‘choose’ death this way, rising steadily. In Canada for example, euthanasia accounted for 4.7% of all deaths in 2023, with 15, 343 people dying by this route. This is now the fifth most common cause of death in Canada. Belgium saw a 17% increase in euthanasia cases in 2024, including individuals under 40 and even including children. In the Netherlands, 5.4% of deaths (169,363 people) were by euthanasia in 2023.

What makes the UK any different to these countries? What is being put forward as a last resort issue is highly likely, if not unavoidably, going to become a significant cause of death here. Just who is going to ensure that granny or grandpa are not being pressured into ‘doing the right thing’?  Who is going to speak up for the mentally-ill person who says they don’t want to live any longer? Who is going to speak up for the young person under 18 who claims their life is a misery and they want to die?

Neither of these subjects (abortion and end-of-life amendments) featured in the government’s manifesto at the July 2024 election.  Neither have been the subject of public inquiries or consultation. The voice of the man and woman in the street has, in effect, been silenced.

The current Labour government in the UK is, in my opinion, the worst government of my lifetime, and that’s saying something. All I can say to readers outside the UK is, please don’t think that the average Brit agrees with this stuff. I don’t know anyone who is not horrified, and I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances with many diverse views and beliefs. If you don’t believe me, look online at X – it’s far more representative of opinion here than the mainstream media.

After the October 7 attacks in Israel in 2023, the British commentator Douglas Murray said: ‘Sometimes a flare goes up, and you see exactly where everyone is.’  Few comments could be more apt in relation to where we are in the UK today. A flare has indeed gone up, and we can surely see clearly where everyone is. Evil is among us. There’s no other way to put it.

Has anyone even considered the unintended consequences of these votes? Let’s see.

END OF LIFE

What about those doctors and nurses who do not wish to engage in assisted dying?

What view will medical and nursing unions take on their members who do not wish to toe the line?

What about the employers of those medical professionals?

Will these professionals be subject to disciplinary processes?

How long will they keep their jobs?

Will agreement to euthanasia become a requirement for all medical and nursing students?

What effect is the law, if finally passed, going to have on the funding of palliative care? If it’s cheaper to just bump you off instead of seeing out your days in a hospice, who is going to pay? 

How long before it is you, because the NHS can’t afford it and charitable donations can’t keep up with demand once NHS beds won’t do palliative care?

Are we about to see the end of the hospice movement if government funding is stopped or reduced further?

How long will it be before hospitals need to save money on pain relieving drugs for terminally ill patients?

How long will it be before we see algorithms for identifying value-for-money patients (i.e. likelihood of successful treatment) controlling the uptake of hospital beds?

Think I am going over the top? Come back and ask me in five years!

ABORTION

Who is going to get involved to prevent vulnerable women being pressured to end their pregnancy by family or a partner who don’t want the baby?

Given that legal abortion pills can be acquired by post, who is going to assess the gestational age of the baby before they are taken?

What cast-iron processes are in place to prevent women taking legal abortion pills well past the allowed gestational dates?

How are we going to prevent sex-selective abortions?

What are the chances that certain cultural groups will now provide their own ‘reproductive healthcare services’ to ensure that fewer girls are born, or that unwanted pregnancies are ‘resolved’?

What assurances do we have that some medical professionals will not choose to quietly offer ‘services’ to end late-term pregnancies, with or without the consent of the woman?

What whistleblower processes are in place for such activities to be reported?

There are far more questions to ask than these on both abortion and euthanasia, but you get the picture.

We are in this position in the UK for a number of reasons, not least of which is the decline in religious and other moral objections to ending life among the elite leadership groups of our nation. The man and woman in the street tend to hold to more conservative, cautious views in my experience.

We are also suffering (I use the term advisedly) from the nature of our first-past-the-post electoral system. The current government was elected with only 9.7 million votes out of an eligible 48.2 million voters in the UK. Bear in mind that the turnout at the 2024 General Election was only 50.7%, the lowest since 2001. Yes, we have had governments elected like this in previous years, but none have enacted such massive and unwelcome changes as this current government. We are being subjected to arguably unprecedented social and political changes in the way that the state relates to the individual and to the rights of the man and woman in the street. Not to mention the rights of every unborn child in the country at any given time.

What now? We can only pray that the House of Lords will vote these two issues down. The relationship between the individual and the state will be fundamentally changed by these votes should they receive approval in the Lords and go on to be enacted as law in the UK. Put simply, no baby in utero will be legally fully protected until he or she has exited the birth canal on or after the due date (which is often subject to confusion anyway). And no individual who is terminally ill, or who unreasonably (and possibly temporarily) feels that their life is unbearable, can rely on cast-iron legal safeguards to ensure that they won’t be hurried along the end-of-life route.

As a clergyman said this week on X:

‘This is shaping up to be the most barbaric, depraved parliament in the history of the UK.’

It is hard to argue with that sentiment. Along with all the other social upheavals we are seeing here, you could almost say that this is the deliberate application of an evil ideology. Did anyone ever think that our great nation would one day elect a parliament that would vote to kill the most vulnerable members of our population? This is utterly beyond the pale. Let’s hope and pray that sufficient pressure is brought to bear on MPs and Lords so that these appalling outcomes can be reversed or amended, to protect the legal protections that we have enjoyed (even if flawed) hitherto.

Readers – please pray for the UK – we need it.

Dr Judith Sture is a former academic and researcher based in Yorkshire, England. She is a regular contributor to VOL.