What is in Kelvin's Head?

The Winners and the Losers

08/05/2015
Well, the first thing to say to loyal readers who have been with me for a while is that there were no great surprises from last night’s election results, were there?

After all, my New Year predictions relating to the election were not that far wide of the mark. In relation to the election, I said:
- Those who voted YES in the Scottish Referendum will continue to behave as though they won. This may be unhelpful.
- Those who voted NO in the Scottish Referendum will continue to behave as thought he referendum never happened. This may be unhelpful.
- There will, I fear, be a Tory Prime Minister at the end of 2015.
- The Liberal Democrats will retain 10 – 14 seats in the House of Commons.
- Nick Clegg will lose his seat and be Lord Clegg by the end of the year.
- The Labour Party will not be led by a Milliband by the end of the year.
I was a couple of seats out in my prediction of the Lib Dem collapse. However, just about every poll in the five months since I made those predictions has had the Lib Dems winning 30 or 40 seats so I’m claiming that as being as close to a success as makes no odds today.

I was wrong about Nick Clegg losing his seat but the truth is, he’s lost everything else.

I take no particular pleasure in getting these predictions right. As someone who has been a candidate for the Lib Dem party in the past I can’t help but be moved by the losses that they suffered. However, as someone who is no longer a party member I’m also one of those who think that the party has not been acting out of its core values for some time. No-one I know who remains in the party took seriously my prediction at New Year. That failure to listen to those looking for a party capable of articulating and acting on core liberal values rather than simply exercising power at any cost is part of what resulted in electoral disaster last night. I knew this was coming.

But today isn’t really about who got their predictions right.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the winners and the losers of election night.

Winner: John Curtice
Having just said that it isn’t all about who got their predictions right, it is important to focus on someone who did get it right. John’s a strong winner of last night for helping to devise the exit poll that predicted, to many people’s astonishment an election result that few (other than you and me) saw coming. It was a bad night for the polling companies in general whose predictions of the last few months look next to useless. I wonder when we will stop listening to them? Millions of pounds have been spent on generally fairly useless exercises.

Loser: First Past the Post
How long can First Past the Post survive? Surely now there must be some movement in the Labour Party in relation to electoral reform. They’ve been resonsible for much progressive change in the past and need new progressive policies like someone in the desert needs a cool glass of water. Step forward electoral reform.

Oh, I know it would have meant more UKIP MPs. Even though I’m pleased we don’t face a Conservative-UKIP coalition for the next five years (this is my one crumb of comfort today) the basic unfairness of people voting in large numbers for political parties and then find themselves unrepresented is true whether or not one likes the flavour of the unrepresented.

The SNP are on record as saying that they believe in electoral reform. It is to be hoped that they remain so even though they are the recipients of First Past the Post’s largesse.

Winner: Democracy
Whether one likes the results today or one doesn’t like the results, there’s a bigger picture. There’s always a bigger picture. We get to cast votes. If you don’t like the result, take comfort in the truth that we have elections so that things can be changed. Some people don’t.

I’m puzzled that the far reaches of nationalist opinion are not suggesting that MI5 stuffed the ballot boxes with SNP papers to get the Tories back in. (For those reading from furth of Scotland, there’s a persistent insane belief that MI5 operatives rigged the independence referendum).

There were one or two incidents last night of electoral fraud being suspected. These related to a handful, a tiny handful of ballot papers. In other parts of the world it relates to whole countries.

Loser: The Liberal Tradition
Oh, I know it will bounce back. However it will take years and there will be a lot of dog poo politics needed to regain the trust of the electorate. It isn’t that dog poo politics isn’t important – it is. It is just that it doesn’t really fulfil the ambitions of those with progressive hopes and dreams.

Winners: The SNP and the Conservative Party
Both these parties are to be congratulated on their substantial gains. Each MP elected has to represent all their constituents regardless of the way they voted. All people of goodwill need to hope that those elected will hold that trust well. People of faith pray for parliamentarians whichever party they represent. All of that goes on.

I’m full of bitter admiration for David Cameron’s success. You only had to be in London for five minutes last week (I was there for a few hours on my way back from holidays) to realise the genius of his campaign. Making the SNP the focus of everything boosted the Tory vote in England whilst decimating Labour chances in Scotland. It was brilliant, cynical and devastating. Effectively, Cameron invented a new SNP-Tory electoral alliance that the SNP never signed up for and would be horrified to be identified with. It remains to be seen how this will affect what happens in Scotland in the future. One cannot but expect the SNP to do well next year in the Scottish Parliamentary elections. However a reminder that only a few months ago they were mourning a bitter campaign (if not party) defeat, is a reminder that in politics things change. They always change.

Loser: Human Rights
One of the great fears of this result for me is what happens now to the Human Rights legislation that has been so important in establishing a modern Britain fit to live in. The Tory party are free to rewrite our freedoms. And that’s bad news for the weakest, the poorest and most vulnerable.

Winner: Kelvin’s New Year Election Predictions
Did I mention I got pretty close? Did I? Did I?

You’ll listen to what I say next time, right?

8 responses to “Assisted Dying – Why I’ve changed my mind”

BobS

16/03/2026

You lucidly illustrated an example of a family seeking to pressurise someone to influence the process of death. But what was possibly missing was the voice of the person nearing death. Where was their perspective, their reasoning? Assisted Dying starts and driven by the person dying. They are the ones who, with mental capacity, take those steps, if necessary, to expedite death at that final stage. They, together with medical experts, make those decisions.
The examples cited refer to a family desperate for a skiing holiday and your concern of funeral directors making money through direct cremations.
I fully agree with your desire for a better palliative care system. Having witnessed their work it is amazing. But that is another argument. To conflate the two dismisses the voice of those seeking assisted dying.
Your concern over assisted dying seems to be interwoven by a call for improved palliative care and a demise in direct cremations.

Reply
1. Rev Owain Jones
  
  16/03/2026
  
  Respectfully, Bob S, I think you’re overlooking the one thing that struck me very forcefully from this incident. I’ve always felt profoundly uneasy at the likelihood – I’d say ‘moral certainty’ – that the voice of the dying will in some cases be influenced, even swayed, by the dying person’s assumptions, inferences or intuitions (correct or not) about the needs of those closest to them, and even their desires. These desires might not be articulated, or even correctly guessed – but they might, and as soon as the dying person is subject to them, they are, by definition, influenced in their decision. At that point, Assisted Dying can no longer be said “to start and driven by the person dying.” I’ve been there for a long time – but what I suddenly realized reading Kelvin Holdsworth’s post, was that there’s a much darker issue here, and it relates to a fundamental principle to which I’ve always adhered. Please bear with me, and entertain for a moment an analogy which you might consider to be extreme, and which I’d be appalled to hear deployed by the religiously fanatical opponents of Assisted Dying. It’s this. I have always been opposed to the death penalty for a number of reasons, but very prominent among them is that it takes to an extreme the testing of a fundamental principle of justice (which I know I’m modifyng here to make the analogy a better fit, and of course, you’re free to take issue with that): “It is better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent person be punished unjustly.” I’m aware that there’s a very significant separation between that and this, but I don’t believe it amounts to ‘clear blue water’. Let me try and articulate my conviction in a reasonable way, for you to consider, even if you reject it. I think that there’s a huge danger inscribed in legislation which will, of a moral certainty, permit circumstances in which unwilling dying individuals give assent under pressure to the active premature termination of their lives. This holds true even if a hundred times as many individuals assent freely, and even actively seek, such termination. One of the things that always made me uneasy about the Vulcans was the assertion that “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. There seems to me to be no way in any legislation to protect the needs and rights of the few in this issue. At the very least, I think that needs to be acknowledged openly by proponents of Assisted Dying. If we’re about to be taken across a Rubicon, I believe that everyone, on both sides of the decision, need to acknowledge that. (Incidentally, I completely agree with Kevin Holdsworth’s horror (I hope I’m expressing that fairly) at ‘Direct Cremations’ and the way they’re advertised. They seem to me to be open profiteering from the death-phobic culture in which we’re immersed. I fear that the impulses behind Assisted Dying as currently advocated may be a good-faith manifestation of the inability of society to look at the full actuality of human mortality and the relationship between life and death. I may be deluding myself, but I think I’d say that even if I were an atheist.
  
  Reply
  1. BobS
    
    17/03/2026
    
    Rev Owain, thank you for your response. I fear your analogy was stretched to fit your argument, and, apologies if my education lacked in this quarter, where the reference to Vulcans was applicable.
    If we are concerned that a very small percentage will be wronged, then many practices today should be stopped. The statistical error you describe will always be possible, albeit minimised as much as possible.
    The proposed law tries to cater for such concerns. What appears to be the argument against assisted dying is that it is not error proof.
    If a person who is deemed to have mental capacity with less than six months to live, with suitable medical provision, seeks to alleviate their suffering, and is capable of themselves administering the medication to ultimately ease that pain, then their voice has been heard.
    I also would hope that palliative care continues to improve but that is a separate argument, as are direct cremations, and now the cost of the funeral to families. These arguments are all used to conflate the underlying issue of assisted dying.
    
    Reply
2. Val Dobson
  
  16/03/2026
  
  You are wrong to connect funeral companies’ promotion of Direct Cremation with the push for assisted dying. Nowadays, many families simply cannot afford a “proper” funeral / cremation, and funeral grants come nowhere to covering the the costs. The funeral companies are simply responding to customer needs.
  
  Reply
  1. Kelvin
    
    16/03/2026
    
    I’m happy to speak out about funerals being too expensive. However, it is manifestly not the case taht funeral companies are simply responding to customer needs. If they did they would promote these as being about price. They don’t – they promote them as being about not causing a fuss, which is the point I’m making here.
    
    Reply
Nigel Kenny

16/03/2026

Thank you for your wise and persuasive words – may they influence MSPs to vote against the Bill.

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Chriatine McIntosh

16/03/2026

Thanks for this, Kelvin – I’ve been thinking more about this as contemporaries begin to vanish from this life.

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Helen Leslie

16/03/2026

Thank you Kelvin. I am someone who has spent the majority of my working life caring for people at the end of their lives. You said exactly what I would want to.

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