Sir Keir Starmer will hold a vote on assisted suicide if, as is widely expected, Labour wins the next general election.
Alistair Thompson, a long-time campaigner for improved palliative care, told The European Conservative that if the change is passed by what is likely to be an even more socially liberal Parliament than the current one, the “so-called right to die” will for many soon become “the duty to die.”
This latest debate was triggered by former television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen, who has stage four cancer and believes MPs should have a vote on what supporters and the press prefer to call ‘assisted dying.’ Sir Keir told the activist in a televised phone call that he would “make time” for such a vote because “delay just prolongs the agony.”
Responding to the call for ‘assisted dying,’ Charles Moore, a columnist at The Daily Telegraph, wrote:
Most (though sadly by no means all) people in modern Britain have assisted dying: they are assisted in their mortal illness by family, friends and the NHS; rightly so.
What is being spoken of here is something else—the decision to kill yourself, a decision whose execution, because of incapacity or lack of the relevant skills, you delegate to another or ask another to help with.
As well as the sympathetic wording of the debate, many commentators have also questioned the timing. Indeed, Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee just last month produced a report in which it highlighted the need for major improvements in services for people at the end of their lives.
Care Not Killing, a non-profit organisation which has spent years campaigning for improved palliative care and against assisted suicide, said that “against the backdrop of the Committee’s recommendations ordinary voters will rightly be surprised and alarmed that the Labour leader has decided to make this intervention.”
Alistair Thompson, who is a spokesman for the group, also told this publication that the inconvenient truth about assisted suicide is it puts pressure on people to end their lives prematurely if they feel they are a “burden” on their families, or even on the state. And he pointed to the “growing evidence” that such legislation appears to normalise suicide in the general population.
Legislative changes are also underway in France to authorise euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Proponents in Britain say that the measure is “compassionate” and is gaining support across the country for this reason. But Thompson told The European Conservative that “when MPs look at the real dangers” of assisted suicide, and “once you scratch the veneer off the simple questions” in detailed polling sessions, support soon crumbles.
According to The Times, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government simply “said it would be up to Parliament whether or not to debate the matter,” effectively refusing to take any responsibility on the issue.
