Happy Christmas from Inside The Lords!

Claire Fox gives a final report from parliament on assisted dying, puberty blockers and protests outside parliament.

Parliament has finished for the year on an undemocratic tone - asking people to take the Christmas period to consider whether they want to cancel council elections in May. This last Inside The Lords of 2025 is a bit of a fed-up one – but I’m not the only one feeling this way.

The government is compensating for its inability to lead – to be subtle or organised or inspiring – by introducing ever more laws. By being hyperactively busy, they want to look like they’re achieving something, but this is dangerous. Everywhere you look, more behaviour is being criminalised, more speech being censored.

How to respond to these laws? There has been a fair amount of controversy relating to Lords activity when it comes to the Assisted Dying Bill – with accusations that the Lords are thwarting the will of the people by introducing huge numbers of amendments. The nature of this Bill – introduced as a private members’ bill – means that the Lords can constitutionally take as long as it needs to scrutinise it. It is a shoddy Bill, with too many loopholes in which the state is granting itself permission to poison its own citizens. Even if you’re in favour of assisted dying in principle, it’s so obvious that there are dangerous areas of this Bill. Yet advocates like Charlie Faulkner argue that everyone needs equal access to this wonderful new service, even those who we might consider vulnerable.

For example: what about people who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and live under lock and key? The idea that the state is both responsible for their care, food and accommodation – and at the same time offering them the option of death – is deeply worrying. Should doctors be allowed to raise the issue of the right to die if one of these people suddenly find out that they have cancer, for example?

I know this isn’t the cheeriest subject to finish my Inside The Lords on for Christmas, but this is one of the most important and dangerous pieces of legislation we’ve dealt with in a long time. What should have been treated with the utmost care, and gone through with a fine-toothed comb, has been rushed through and protected from scrutiny.

We had a different health-related protest outside parliament this week, against the secretary of state for health, Wes Streeting, giving the go-ahead for a clinical trial into puberty blockers, which by its nature will need to involve children with no lower age limit. It’s extremely rare to complete clinical trials with drugs on children who cannot consent. But Streeting could have taken a different path to find out information on puberty blockers: he could have unlocked the data from people who have already taken them, detransitioners and others, and find out what has happened with them.

On a more positive note, it was brilliant to compare an event organised by Venice Allan and other campaigners with the mess that’s taking place in the Lords. The protest was a cross-party event; we had Rupert Lowe on the same platform as Rosie Duffield with the Lib Dems, Conservatives, Reform, Independents and even Labour (well, a Blue Labour MP) as well as lots of grassroots organisations like Sex Matters, Transgender Trend, the LGB Alliance and others. It had both a sense of anger and solidarity. There needs to be more public pressure on the government and all parliamentarians to listen to what people think outside of the palaces of Westminster. You can watch a video report on the protest from Stephen Knight’s Substack here.

Picture from the protest courtesy of the LGB Alliance

My last observation for this year relates to the Victim and Courts Bill, the debate on which was intensely grouchy and snappy when we discussed it this week. People have come to the end of their tether, and after some frosty exchanges in the chamber we apologised to each other and agreed we all needed a break. In the new year, it’s relentless – bill after bill after bill. Sectarianism won’t get us anywhere, we need to work together to make sure that the government is both held to account and that the liberties and responsibilities of a free society are protected and fought for.

So have a great Christmas and I’ll see you in 2026. If you want to catch up with my work in parliament, you can follow my YouTube channel with all my speeches here. And if you’ve got a few spare bob this Christmas, the Academy of Ideas needs your help to continue our work for freedom. Anything helps, no matter how big or small - sign up to our Substack with a paid subscription or just give what you can. We really appreciate it. Join our fight for free speech.