I'm pleased that the Commons have voted in favour of Assisted Dying. The majority was a slim one, 330-275, which reflects the strength of arguments on both sides.
To my mind the strongest argument in favour is that, in both Oregon and Australia, where assisted death has been legal for some years, now 66% of those who ask for and receive the "end it all" package don't actually use it. Clearly it becomes an "insurance." it could actually improve palliative care and the quality of life in the last few days since it empowers the individual with the knowledge that if things get "too much, she or he is in charge and can put an end to agonies and indignities which are no longer tolerable.
The arguments against carry weight, not least the additional demands on the medical and legal services. It is not flippant to point our that it is difficult enough for the "poorly but not actually at death's door" to gain the services of just one doctor, never mind two, and judges are already facing a backlog of cases in which accused and victims experiencing waiting times measured in years rather than months.
I am not too much moved by the argument that greedy relatives might coerce someone into ending their life in order to get their hands on the potential inheritance. Surely they could wait six months? More serious is the possibility that the patients with not long to live might pressure themselves into thinking they are "a burden" and so end their lives prematurely. An Australian contact assures me there is little evidence of either of these situations "Down Under," but how would they know?
These and other issues will be thoroughly thrashed out in the Committee Stage, Report Stage and Third Reading of the bill, and then all over again in the House of Lords
Opponents of the bill express concern around the "slippery slope" argument: that this first step could open up the ;possibility of voluntary euthanasia in vastly extended circumstances. There is little evidence that this has happened in other countries, but one area to which I should like to see it extended is to conditions such as motor neurone disease (MID) where the body degenerates and the mind remains intact. Such a condition could become intolerable well before the last six months of "life" are diagnosed.
Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of this bill, is my MP (no longer for Batley and Spen, but now Spen Valley.) If the bill becomes law she will be remembered in history one of the great social reformers, along with Lloyd George, Sydney Silverman, David Steel and Roy Jenkins. A fitting memorial for her murdered sister Jo cox.
I'm pleased that the Commons have voted in favour of Assisted Dying.
ReplyDeleteI am sickened. How can a government have a 'suicide prevention strategy' and at the same time run a suicide-on-demand service, even for only a few people? How can we try to tell people that they should not take their own lives while at the same time teling others that if they feel they are a burden they should be free to have the state kill them?
I am not too much moved by the argument that greedy relatives might coerce someone into ending their life in order to get their hands on the potential inheritance. Surely they could wait six months?
The issue isn't how long they might have to wait, it's how much of the inheritance might be spent in those six months providing a good standard of care for their dying relative. If your relative is in a nursing home costing £1,500 a week then convincing them to commit suicide six months sooner than they would otherwise have died nets you an extra £36,000.
Plus a large proportion — possibly the majority — of those whom doctors give six months or less to live end up living for longer than six months, in some cases years or even decades longer. Your given-six-months-to-live father might easily hang on for a year: that's £72,000 down the drain. Why not just gently suggest to him that there's no point in him spending any more time in pain?
They won't think of that as what they are doing of course. They'll think that they are just being kind and, after all, hasn't Dad had a good life and isn't it awful to see him suffering?
Sick. Sick. Sick.
These and other issues will be thoroughly thrashed out in the Committee Stage, Report Stage and Third Reading of the bill, and then all over again in the House of Lords
No, they won't. Private members' bills, unlike government bills, get a shortened committee stage and the committees are hand-picked by the bill's proposed, so will be made up entirely of people who support the legislation. There will be no scrutiny there. And by convention the House of Lords doesn't amend private member's bills, so there'll be no scrutiny there either.
There is little evidence that this has happened in other countries,
On the contrary such expansion has happened in every country where it has been introduced. Canada and the Netherlands most famously, but even in Oregon, which is what proponents of the bill like to point to, while the wording of the legislation has not been expanded, the interpretation has been loosened. It will be like the Abortion Act: still in this country, de jure abortion is supposed to only be for cases where the health of the mother is at risk, but de facto we have abortion on demand because it is always possible to find a doctor who will say that this is the case. The same will happen with assisted suicide: a network of doctors who can be relied upon to always sign the forms will spring up, and of course the judicial oversight will be a mere rubber-stamp as judges have neither the time nor the qualifications to look into individual cases.
but one area to which I should like to see it extended is to conditions such as motor neurone disease (MID) where the body degenerates and the mind remains intact. Such a condition could become intolerable well before the last six months of "life" are diagnosed.
Oh, come on. Literally you write 'I see no evidence that this will be a slippery slope but here's how I want go go farther down the slope'. Do you even re-read these?
Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of this bill, is my MP
Oh, you live there? Do you not think her time would have been better spent representing, say, the schoolteacher who is still in hiding after he showed a cartoon of Mohammed during a lesson?
If the bill becomes law she will be remembered in history one of the great social reformers, along with Lloyd George, Sydney Silverman, David Steel and Roy Jenkins.
She will do down in history as having killed more old people than Harold Shipman.
Well, as I said , there is strength in the arguments on both sides. We shall see.
ReplyDeleteWe shall see.
DeleteAnd in the meantime thousands will be killed by the state. A state whose relationship with its citizens will have fundamentally changed.
I think that I am more impressed by these objections to the Bill https://scottish-liberal.blogspot.com/2024/11/some-thoughts-on-assisted-dying-bill.html than by the anonymous commenter above.
ReplyDeleteThank-you Laurence Cox for that suggestion. I have read the article and agree that the author makes some valuable points, in particular with regard to the involvement of coroners and professionals other than medical doctors. I gather that there is a different proposal going through the Scottish parliament. It would be a good idea if both Acts (if they reach that stage) include a provision that their operation and effectiveness should be formally examined after, say, three years, and their outcomes compared.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a good idea if both Acts (if they reach that stage) include a provision that their operation and effectiveness should be formally examined after, say, three years, and their outcomes compared.
DeleteAll new laws should have sunset clauses long enough so that they automatically cease to apply unless the next Parliament actively decides to renew them.
I think that would be going too far, but I'd like to see all new laws reviewed after six months of their operation, just to check whether or not they are achieving what was intended and to spot any unintended side effects.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see all new laws reviewed after six months of their operation
DeleteSix months is not enough time to spot subtle unintended side-effects. It needs to be at least a couple of years.
Five years would be good because it would require either that the government euch introduced the law won another election, thus demonstrating that the people approve of what they have been doing; or that the other party agrees with the law, so it must have broad support.
Of course it would be difficult to introduce as a constitutional convention, because it requires both parties to sign up to it; otherwise the first one to do so will just find all the laws they pass in their final term expiring while the other one doesn’t put in the sunset clauses.
Hopefully the Conservative Party will remember this time that when it next gets into power it is allowed to repeal laws, and doesn’t have to just put up with all the bad laws Labour passed like the Cameron government did.
I would have thought, actually, that with your liking of proportional representation, you would like the idea that any new law should have to have broad support for it to become permanent.
DeleteYou may be right about six months being to short for a meaningful review. A year? It should be tried - maybe variable depending on the law. As to your other suggestion, I think we need to be cautious about too many and too frequent changes in the law and concentrate on getting things right in the first place. for this PR should help in achieving a consensus.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to be cautious about too many and too frequent changes in the law and concentrate on getting things right in the first place
DeleteThat’s my whole point. We have too many laws already: we need to be cautious about adding more, and only do so if they are really necessary, and even then give ourselves an easy way to revert the changes if they turn out to be doing more harm than good.
The main problem with PR is that it makes it very difficult to vote out a government: the same batards tend to keep getting in time after time. Say what you like about our system, but when we want to chuck ’em out — as in ’79, ’97, 2010 and this year — it allows us to do so decisively. That’s not an advantage to be given up lightly.
DeleteTrue, but the alternative is dong-dong extremism. We have to choose the lesser evil, which many on the continental democracies have done, and flourished more than we have
DeleteWe have to choose the lesser evil,
ReplyDeleteAnd the greater evil is definitely ending up with a failing government that you can't vote out, which is where PR almost always ends up.
which many on the continental democracies have done, and flourished more than we have
Really? Which 'continental democracies' are you thinking of?
France is on its fifth Republic; the current one is 66 years old and looking very much like it's not going to make it to 67, let alone 70.
All Germany has only been a democracy since 1990, and any of it since 1949, and it is also in political and economic meltdown.
Italy only became a democracy in 1946, and in the last four years had to abandon democracy entirely and appoint a totally unelected person as Prime Minister.
By contrast, the United Kingdom has been a stable democracy for over three centuries.
I don't think the 'continental democracies' have anything to teach us about democracy, do you? If anything they should learn from us. At the very least I don't think we should consider them mature democracies until they are at least, say, 200 years old. That seems a reasonable time for a country to be democratic before we consider it to have come of age and have the right to lecture others, would you not agree?
I meant to say: the whole point of democracy, after all, the one thing that makes it the worst form of government apart from all the others which have been tried from time to time, is that it provides a way to change the rulers who are in power without having a civil war. That's it. That's the only real benefit of democracy. But it's such a massive, massive benefit when you consider the huge amount of death and devastation that was caused by the lack of such a method of peacefully transferring power before it was properly developed.
ReplyDeleteSo if you take that away, and you make it so that you can't remove those in power by voting (because however you vote the same faces always end up slithering back in just in different coalition mixes), then what is the point of democracy at all? You might as well just abandon the pretence of having votes and instead have rule by a self-perpetuating committee of technical experts, like they have in China (though of course being a Liberal Democrat you'd probably love that, the experts who are smarter than everyone else [ie: Liberal Democrats] could get on with running things without having their carefully laid plans ruined by the stupid people voting the wrong way).
(Although actually of course France doesn’t use PR; they have their mad two-round system instead.)
DeleteTrue, systems of all stripes seem to be going through a bad patch at the moment, most notably the United States with its crude and distorted FPTP system (where the worst of the wrath is still to come.) I continue to put my money on the system which best promotes quiet calm deliberation.
ReplyDeleteTrue, systems of all stripes seem to be going through a bad patch at the moment, most notably the United States with its crude and distorted FPTP system
DeleteWhat do you mean? The United States seems to be doing relatively well: after a prolonged period of instability with both sides casting doubt on the legitimacy of the process, they finally have a decisive result where the same party won their electoral college and the majority popular vote, as well as narrow majorities in both houses of their bicameral system; and, at least for the moment, the losers seem to be accepting the legitimacy of the result, which hasn’t happened in a US election since about 1988.
Yes there are still deep divisions, but it seems the country is no longer split exactly 50-50: it has decided definitively, at least for the next four years, on which direction it wants to go.
I continue to put my money on the system which best promotes quiet calm deliberation.
The point of a democratic system is not to promote ‘quiet calm deliberation’, it is to channel political disagreements that might otherwise lead to violence and civil war into a system which allows for change without violence.
Promoting ‘quiet calm deliberation’ is actually bad because if you only allow ‘quiet calm deliberation’ then the vast pressures in the system have no outlet, so they build up and up and eventually the ‘quiet calm’ system cannot contain them and it suddenly breaks down.
Whereas if the system allows, indeed encourages, loud, robust, rambunctious debate, then it may look messier, but it’s more likely to survive in the long term because the pressure is regularly vented and therefore doesn’t build up unseen to levels that endanger the survival of the system.
South Korea seems to be mainly FPTP
ReplyDeleteSouth Korea seems to be mainly FPTP
DeleteI don’t see the relevance.
Well, their system "allows, indeed encourages, loud, robust, rambunctious debate, then it may look messier, but it’s more likely to survive in the long term because the pressure is regularly vented and therefore doesn’t build up unseen to levels that endanger the survival of the system."
DeleteYes. More likely. Not guaranteed. I never claimed that all FPTP-based systems are successful, just that all PR systems fail, and fail in a predictable way.
DeleteFor instance, as noted, the Fifth Republic is busy falling apart, and their crazy electoral system, while pretty sui generis, is closer to FPTP than it is to PR.
Delete