In the UK, we associate the surname “Leadbetter” with one of our most beloved situation comedies: The Good Life. Striking just the right balance between barbed and treacly, The Good Life's Leadbetters were the snobbish but deeply loving neighbours of the eccentric Goods, the latter having tired of the rat-race, leading to them turning their (stereotypically bourgeois) Surbiton garden into a farm. Inoffensive, though occasionally poignant, it’s the kind of comedy that the BBC would put on in times of crisis, such as if a much-loved royal died.
Hopefully, when they broadcast it again, the royal in question will have died of natural causes. You see, the wholesomeness and fun of the surname “Leadbetter” has been ruined forever by the rise to prominence of a very similar surname “Leadbeater.” The haunted holder of this surname has led the campaign for humans to be able to put themselves to sleep as though they were sickly animals on that Surbiton farm. She is back in the news this week because MPs are scrutinising her Bill and she has refused to say whether those seeking assistance to end their lives in order to ease financial pressures on their relatives would have their applications approved.
On Danish gravestones, it is often written, “Thank you for everything” – God is thanked for the gift of life. For this sinister woman, life is not a gift from God for which we should be grateful; we should not struggle through, determined to live a long life for the sake of those who’d miss us when we’re gone, and in gratitude to our ancestors for their fight to live.
For Kim Leadbeater, as in the mind of a petulant teenager, life is a predicament into which we’ve been plunged against our will. We are the centre of the universe, we are miniature gods, and if life isn’t going well – if we’re suffering from some illness or other – we should have the right to end our lives. We should be able to have ourselves euthanised as though we are cows with foot and mouth or dray horses that can no longer pull the cart to the brewery or, indeed, can no longer be bothered to.
Leadbeater, a Labour Member of Parliament, has managed to get her euthanasia bill through the early stages of becoming law. It is obvious to anyone that this bill is the ultimate slippery slope, because it has been elsewhere, such as in the Netherlands. Eventually, teenagers with mental health problems will be able to kill themselves and, of course, decrepit elderly ladies who are a burden on the families will feel pressured to end their lives.
Why is Kim Leadbeater so obsessed with this dangerous, unholy law? Speaking of holy, perhaps the Bible provides an answer. In fact, perhaps fairy tales provide an answer. She is the younger sister, she is the less accomplished sister; she is the ugly sister.
In the Bible, younger brothers are often a problem. Jacob betrayed his older and physically stronger brother Esau, a highly skilled huntsman. The Prodigal Son frittered away his inheritance while his dutiful older brother remained on the farm. In other words, first-borns are physically and psychologically superior. The evidence we’ve accrued since is consistent with this summary.
On average, according to the study “Explaining the Relation Between Birth Order and Intelligence,” first-borns are more intelligent, possibly because the parents invest more time in them. Accordingly, they attain higher socioeconomic status, as noted in the paper “Birth Order, Socioeconomic Background and Educational Attainment,” partly because they have higher Conscientiousness; they are not so impulsive. First-borns are taller, as reported in the study “Birth Order Progressively Affects Childhood Height,” presumably because mutational load increases with parental age (which might also explain second-born lower IQ), second-borns are sicklier and they are less able to reach their phenotypic maximum height. Consistent with this, the study “Search for Mechanisms of Exceptional Human Longevity” found that first-borns live longer. In addition, the study “Concentrations of sex hormones in umbilical-cord blood” reported that female sex hormones are higher in older sisters, which would lead to their being more physically attractive than younger sisters.
Kim Leadbeater is a textbook example of the consequences of all of these studies. Her older sister, born in 1974, was the tragic Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen who was murdered by a "far right" mentalist during the Brexit Referendum Campaign on 16th June 2016. Jo Cox was 5 feet tall. She was petite and reasonably pretty. She obtained a social science degree from Cambridge University (later being a postgraduate at the London School of Economics) and then immediately got a job as an adviser to an MP. She got married in 2009, had 2 children, and became an MP herself in 2015 before her life was cut short by an insane knifeman.
The life of her younger sister Kim has been conspicuously different; less successful to a pronounced extent. Leadbeater is not only manifestly much less good-looking than Jo, but she must have done nowhere near as well at school, attending Leeds University (relatively close to her home town) to study Philosophy and Politics. She then dropped out of her degree – a sign of low Conscientiousness, possibly of failing her exams and perhaps of some kind of mental breakdown – and worked in a furniture shop, before returning to education at the age of 25. Rather than finish her (academic) degree, she gained qualifications in exercise and fitness at her local Further Education College and then, in 2005, obtained a degree in this non-academic area from Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Polytechnic). Gaining a teaching qualification, she then lectured on this subject at local colleges. A spinster and a lesbian with no political experience, and having only just joined the Labour Party, she was selected as the Labour candidate for her late sister’s old seat in a by-election in 2021, mainly on the basis that she was Jo Cox’s sister.
So, we have, then, in Kim Leadbeater a woman who is less attractive, less intelligent, less conscientious, likely less mentally stable and generally less successful than her older sister, and we have a woman whose only serious achievement in life occurred because of who her older sister was. One can expect this to result in resentment, bitterness, and, deep down, low self-worth.
We can imagine this might lead to the teenager-like perception that life is really just meaningless suffering over which we have no control and, hence, we should have the right to have ourselves killed if we wish. In a sense, we should have the right to say “Fuck you!” to the world, to the Other, which seems to treat us so unfairly but give others all the gifts: intelligence, good looks; the lot. Such a person might well become cynical, believing life to be a curse from which we should be allowed to escape. Supporting euthanasia might even be seen as a way of expressing disdain for humanity and the world, as it has treated her so unfairly. Kim is the Edmund-like misanthrope. Where King Lear's Edmund declared war on God and humanity because he'd been mistreated as a “bastard,” Kim will do so as the “ugly sister,” as the far less successful younger sister.
For Leadbeater, the world of her childhood was traditional and Christian, so a particularly aggressive “Fuck you!” must be said to people like that; people for whom life seems to have eternal meaning, people who are humble and content . . . people who, like her sister, have children, something which tends to give you a reason to live. A country with euthanasia is a country saying to its people, “There’s nothing eternal. Life has no meaning. There’s no point fighting to the very end. Go gentle into that oblivion of a night.” If her bill passes, it's another marker of civilisation's winter; but, hopefully, it will wake up more people than it puts to sleep to the need to rescue civilisation from the malcontents who are busily euthanising it.
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There is something deeply sinister about this "woman".
Besides it being sibling rivalry, the description of Leadbeater also resembles that of a witch I think. Ed has done at least one video on witches in the past. Witches prevent other women from having children.