Saturday Wrap, from The Week
Drone wars and 'the most consequential legislation this century'

 
controversy of the week

The assisted dying bill

"It is done," said The Times. "In perhaps the most consequential legislation so far this century, the relationship between the state and the individual has now been fundamentally altered." The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which will allow doctors to administer fatal drugs on request to adults with a terminal diagnosis of six months or less, passed the Commons by 314 to 291 votes last Friday. Introduced by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, it is a "flawed and dangerous" bill that is hazy in principle – terminal diagnoses are often proved wrong – and lacks necessary safeguards: an amendment refusing the "service" to those who fear being "a burden" was rejected. Britain is "a less civilised country today", said The Telegraph. When the law takes effect in 2029, doctors will be obliged to offer assisted suicide as if it were just another form of care. "Many people will rightly feel a sense of dread at the prospect of death on the NHS." This private members' bill, cobbled together and passed in haste, will have a "lasting impact on the relationship between the public and the medical profession". "The only hope of mitigating its worst aspects now lies with the House of Lords."

"This is a difficult subject," said The Independent. And as with many steps towards a more liberal society – abolition of the death penalty, decriminalisation of homosexuality – there will be those "who object that the change breaches a fundamental moral principle". But in the final analysis, people should be allowed "to make their own decisions about their lives and how to end them". Terminally ill people who want to die should not be prosecuted, and neither should those who help them. And despite the scaremongering, the bill is careful, and its protections are sound. First, two doctors, then a panel of a lawyer, a social worker and a psychiatrist, will have to approve the decision. "At last," said Melanie Reid in The Observer. "People will now have the right not to suffer needlessly." They will have the option to "choose a good death". The majority has long been shown to be in favour of assisted dying. Parliament, with its "ancient, creaky, slow-grinding wheels", has finally caught up.

Public backing is "tempered by serious concerns", said The Guardian. At present, too many people do not receive adequate end-of-life care. If this is not improved, and funding not increased, then for many, assisted dying "could feel less like a choice and more like a pressure". The bill will also need "further refinement in the Lords" – ensuring, for instance, that vulnerable people are not coerced. "A large number of opponents are lying in wait" in the Lords, said David Maddox in The Independent. It seems unlikely that they will vote it down. But – emboldened by the fact that it passed by a tiny majority of 23, and that, as a private members' bill, it is not covered by the convention which stops peers blocking manifesto policies – the Lords may "delay and prevaricate" enough to "kill the bill".

 
 
BRIEFINg

The drone wars

From Ukraine to Iran, it has become clear that unmanned aircraft are rapidly revolutionising modern warfare

Why is this in the news now?
Primarily because of the astonishing impact that drones are having on the war in Ukraine. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have transformed the conflict. According to Ukrainian commanders, drones have been responsible for 80% of Russian combat casualties this year, and a similar proportion of damage to equipment; Ukraine says that drones destroyed 89,000 Russian targets in May alone. In early June, the Ukrainians used AI-guided "quadcopter" drones to mount a devastating attack on dozens of Russian aircraft at bases deep inside enemy territory. Israel's surprise attack on Iran this month also relied heavily on drones. Increasingly, analysts agree that cheap, easily adaptable drones will revolutionise modern warfare – and could pose a threat to even the world's most advanced militaries.

What type of drones are we talking about?
Unmanned remote-controlled aircraft have been used by US forces for reconnaissance since Vietnam. The first armed drone strike is usually dated to 2001: US fixed-wing UAVs such as Predators and Reapers, which fire missiles, hit hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida targets during the War on Terror. Similar drones have been used in Ukraine, such as the Turkish-built Bayraktar. The Russians have fired thousands of Iranian-designed Shahed drones (known as "mopeds" because of the sound of their petrol engines) into Ukraine, while the Ukrainians have built their own long-range drones, which can attack targets over 1,000km away. But the real revolution is in smaller, battery-powered UAVs, with four to eight rotors, many of which are "FPV" (first-person view), transmitting a video feed to the operator's goggles in real time. These are used for reconnaissance, directing artillery attacks, and resupplying troops. Most importantly, they can be armed with explosives, allowing pilots either to drop bombs, or to fly into a target, kamikaze-style.

How have they changed the conflict?
Firstly, they've made it more dangerous: thanks to drones, the third year of the Ukraine War is estimated to have been deadlier than the first two years combined. Mechanised assaults have become practically impossible: a $400 drone can quickly take out a $2 million tank. The battlefield has become "transparent", making it hard for either side to mass troops and vehicles. Russian assaults are now made in small groups, on foot or on motorbikes. Because UAVs make it harder to get troops to and from front-line positions and to supply them, some Ukrainian infantry spend months in foxholes, surviving on food deliveries made by drone. Drones have "gamified" the war: Ukrainian troops now win "points" if they hit targets with drones, which they can trade in for even more effective weapons – a scheme intended to direct equipment to the most effective units. A comparable transformation has occurred at sea. Successful Ukrainian marine drone attacks have forced Russia's fleet to withdraw from the western Black Sea.

How can you defend against drones?
At the moment, with difficulty. You can shoot them down, but anti-drone missiles are prohibitively expensive. Both sides are testing laser weapons, but it's early days for the technology. On the front line, soldiers carry shotguns, but they require quick reactions at perilously close range. You can also shelter from drones: soldiers erect fishing nets over crucial supply routes, and, less successfully, put steel grids known as "cope cages" on their tanks. The most successful defence so far has been electronic warfare: most UAVs are operated by radio signals, and can be knocked out by jamming those signals. By the end of last year, up to 75% of drone frequencies were being blocked by jamming. In response, fibre-optic drones were created.

What are fibre-optic drones?
They are controlled by a fishing line-style fibre-optic filament, which unspools as it flies and links the UAV to an operator. This confers two major advantages: the drones cannot be knocked out by jamming; and the images they send back are crystal clear. They were used to great effect to destroy Ukraine's supply lines into Russia's Kursk region, from which most Ukrainian forces were ejected in March; videos showed fields strewn with fibre-optic cables. Russia and Ukraine are now both racing to source cable: prospective buyers from both sides are said to have bumped into each other in Chinese factories. The downside is that their range is limited by cable length (up to 20km); they're heavy; and the cables can become tangled in trees or electricity lines.

Which side is winning the drone war? 
For a while, it seemed to be Ukraine. The country claims to have manufactured 2.2 million drones in 2024, and aims to produce 4.5 million in 2025. It is now considered a "drone superpower", and has used the weapons to strike many targets deep inside Russia. But Russia – reportedly with help from China – is catching up. Ukraine produces about 100 long-range drones a day; Russia makes 300. Moscow is thought to be ahead both in electronic warfare and fibre-optics.

What is the long-term outlook? 
Drones – cheap, ubiquitous and disposable – threaten the supremacy of the ultra-expensive "weapon platforms" that have dominated advanced militaries for decades, such as tanks, jets and aircraft carriers. No doubt counter-measures will be developed, as with earlier technological breakthroughs such as the plane and the tank. But with defence departments investing heavily in drone warfare, drones are likely to evolve too. Russians and Ukrainians are already testing swarm AI – of the kind that produces coordinated drone light shows – on the battlefield. A particular area of concern is that China dominates production of all the main components for FPV-type quadcopters, such as lithium-ion batteries, fibre-optics and the rare-earth magnets used in electric motors.

Operation Spiderweb: a wake-up call
Ukraine's "Operation Spiderweb" earlier this month was a stunning success. Drones were smuggled into Russia in "sheds", loaded onto lorry containers. The lorries were parked near five air bases spread across Russia; the containers' roofs retracted simultaneously to release drone swarms, destroying or damaging at least 20 crucial aircraft, some of which were irreplaceable. The operation was also, according to many analysts, a wake-up call for Western armed forces. If the Ukrainians were able to smuggle drones into an authoritarian state like Russia (and Israel was able to mount a similar operation in Iran), wouldn't Nato countries be vulnerable to China or Russia in the same way? In particular, there are worries that drones could be brought into the US aboard Chinese container ships. In The Atlantic magazine, the military analyst Phillips Payson O'Brien noted that Chinese interests have been buying up farmland next to important US military bases for years. "They could be growing soybeans, but they could also be staging grounds for drone swarms that would make the Ukrainian attacks look minuscule." Recent unexplained drone overflights near military bases and airports in Denmark, Germany and the UK, meanwhile, have also caused alarm.

 
 

Spirit of the age

British adults now spend more time on their mobile phones than watching TV. The gap between the two had been steadily decreasing for years, but according to The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, watching telly had retained the edge until this year. Its survey revealed that adults use their phones for three hours and 21 minutes a day, on average, up from 1 hour and 17 minutes 10 years ago. They watch TV for three hours and 16 minutes a day – seven minutes less than in 2015.

 
 
Viewpoint

The real world

"My friends and I increasingly find ourselves reminiscing about our pre-smartphone childhoods, like refugees remembering a country left long ago. We recall the endless waiting and the various means we used to pass the time. We examined paving stones. We peered into cracks and picked satisfying paint flakes from the walls. In the car, we misted the glass with our breath and raced the raindrops. We chewed paper, bit our forearms, spent hours face-down studying lawns. If you'd asked us back then, we would have said we were bored to death. But we lived in constant communion not with a touchscreen but with the real world, and in retrospect it was sort of wonderful."

Mary Wakefield in The Spectator

 
 
talking point

Palestine Action: protesters or terrorists?

In the early hours of last Friday, two activists from Palestine Action climbed over a fence into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. They then filmed themselves riding unimpeded on scooters across the vast airbase – "a critical part of Britain's defence infrastructure" – and vandalising two Voyager air-to-air refuelling tankers. Reportedly, they smashed the aircraft with crowbars and sprayed paint into their engines. Their aim, they said, was to "disrupt British military support for Israel". But their main achievement was to provoke the normally "glacial" Home Office into rapid action. By Friday evening, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, had let it be known that she planned to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act; on Monday, she confirmed that it would be put to a vote in the Commons next week.

In a statement, Cooper said this "disgraceful" attack was just the latest in the long history of Palestine Action's "unacceptable criminal damage". And it's true that the group's tactics have become quite extreme, said Sian Bradley and Charlie Parker in The Times. It was set up in 2020 to take direct action against Elbit Systems, a weapons manufacturer it claims "profits from Israel's war crimes". Back then, its members limited themselves to scaling rooftops and vandalising factories. But since the start of Israel's offensive in Gaza, they have ramped up their actions. Last year, they were accused of assaulting two police officers at Elbit's Bristol site and causing millions of pounds worth of damage. These extremists are not just hurling soup at paintings, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph. They are sabotaging RAF aircraft and potentially undermining Britain's defence capability. If proscribing the group allows police to deal with this menace more effectively, "so much the better".

It's a drastic step, though, said Karl Hansen in Tribune. It would place Palestine Action "in the same legal category as Isis, al-Qaida and neo-Nazi gangs", and criminalise anyone who belongs to the group, funds it, or publicly expresses support for it. Cooper is setting a "dangerous precedent", said The Guardian. If the state can define a non-violent campaign "it disapproves of as terrorism, the boundary between civil disobedience and extremism becomes whatever a minister says it is". Palestine Action has caused a lot of damage, but its tactics do not include "threats to life". The Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti was right to ask: "When did criminal damage become terrorism?"

 
 

It wasn't all bad

Hundreds of turtle doves are being released across the country this summer in an effort to save the species from extinction in England, reports The Guardian. Owing partly to habitat loss, numbers of the birds, which mate for life, have plummeted 98% since the 1970s. In an effort to combat this, the Turtle Dove Trust is breeding the doves in Suffolk, then taking them to wildlife-friendly farms and estates – including Sandringham – where they are kept in aviaries until they are ready to be released. Some have trackers, so that their migrations can be monitored.

 
 
people

Arnold Schwarzenegger: "Why would I complain?"

Arnold Schwarzenegger might well be the happiest person I've ever interviewed, said Decca Aitkenhead in The Times – "or possibly ever met".

The bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician finds "literally nothing" to complain about during our four hours together; he passes the time cheerily feeding cookies to his pet pig Schnelly, and tending to his dogs, including a tiny geriatric Yorkshire terrier and an 11-stone Alaskan malamute. He has a pool and a gym at his mansion in LA, but he usually works out at Gold's Gym, a rough-and-ready public place – and he charms the fans who stop him for selfies.

Many celebrities see their fame as the unwelcome price of success; yet he seems open to these interactions. He nods. People crave attention, he says – the feeling "that someone knows them, is aware of them, that they're somebody. And so they go to a shrink. They lie on the couch and someone is listening to them. But I go out anywhere to a crowd and they all listen. And they love to listen to my shit, right? I'm having 50,000 shrinks sitting out there, and I don't pay a f**king penny. I get paid! So how can I complain about that?" Sure, people sometimes ask him for a selfie while he's having dinner. "But I can walk into this restaurant at any time, I can sit at any table I want, I make no reservation. For that I take a picture with someone. It takes three minutes. So why would I complain?"

 
 

Image credits, from top: Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty Images; Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty Images; Leon Neal / Getty Images ; Noam Galai / Getty Images for SiriusXM