Why is it that so many in our liberal elite are so keen to make it so easy for the old and ill to die?
The BBC, the liberals’ Vatican, misses no chance to broadcast harrowing cases of people in dreadful pain who wish to leave their lives.
The topic seems to be debated in Parliament every few weeks. There is a plan to usher in legalised self-destruction through a Private Members’ Bill in the Commons.
And any development in Switzerland is given great publicity, such as the new death device used there for the first time last week.
Yet, rather oddly, you need to search to see much coverage of the country that has chosen to take this road most boldly. In Canada, death has become a human right. Medically assisted departures now account for one death in 25 in that country. Critics fear that it will, in time, lead to the deaths of many disabled and poor people who choose to end their lives in this way.
I do not know if they are right. But such fears are often justified. The opponents of freely available abortion, back in the 1960s, predicted that it would lead to abortion on demand on a huge scale. And they were undeniably correct.
Easily available contraception, mass sex education and the ‘morning after pill’ didn’t exist when abortion was liberated in 1967. Yet the number of abortions still rises each year. In 2022, the total for England and Wales was 251,377, the highest ever.
The supporters of free abortion once used to say that the procedure should be ‘safe, legal and rare’. Now, they are dropping the word ‘rare’. Could the same thing happen to assisted death?
Like most people, I can see that there are cases so distressing that it is reasonable for the law to look the other way or stretch a point if someone helps a fellow-creature to die. This was pretty much also the case with abortion before 1967. In 1962, for instance, there were 2,800 legal ‘therapeutic’ abortions in NHS hospitals in Britain, and thousands more in private clinics.
But the law was still rightly free to intervene if it thought it necessary. Once that limit is gone, what was urged as an act of mercy can all too easily become a cheapening of human life.
This is just about the last warning you will get, if the Starmer government has its way and assisted dying is slipped through one Friday afternoon when the country is half asleep. ‘How did that happen?’, you will wonder. This is how it happens.
A memento of the king who flipped history on its head
When I was a child there was a rumour that a tiny number of coins had been minted with the head of Edward VIII on them. We used to check our change in case one of these rarities turned up. Why not? A Post Office near where I lived had the ill-fated Edward’s monogram on it.
A very few pillar boxes do too. But it wasn’t true. The designs and samples for Edward VIII’s coins were about to be approved on the morning he abdicated, and were then stashed in a drab brown box inscribed with the words ‘Not to be opened except in the presence of two senior officials of the Royal Mint’.
Well, that box has now at last been opened and you can see the coins (and the box) at an exhibition, Money Talks, at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (the most interesting things in the show). It is a disturbing reminder of how different our world could have been.
Too many drivers think they can see, but can’t
These days I generally drive a car only to attend the funerals of old friends who have chosen to be buried in remote country churchyards that I can’t get to any other way.
If I had to give up my licence it would be no great loss. But, being over 70, I am now a second-class citizen on the road. My licence has to be renewed every three years, a process requiring an interrogation online.
When I quite properly reported that I have finally developed the eye disease glaucoma (a hereditary complaint for which I have had myself checked twice a year for decades), I was suddenly bombarded with peremptory demands for full access to my doctors and medical records – and threatened with revocation of my licence if I didn’t respond swiftly. I was then ordered to attend a special eye test (at your expense) on top of the others I already undergo.
Again, I was warned that failure to comply swiftly would mean losing my licence. I don’t mind this in principle. People shouldn’t drive if they can’t see properly.
It was the untrusting bossiness of it that annoyed me. Plus my feeling that the roads are full of people who drive as if they can’t see, but nobody tests their sight because they are under 70 or haven’t reported (or don’t have) specific eye complaints.
Compulsory eye tests for all drivers over 60 every three years strikes me as a better plan.
Rumours swirl that the USA is tiring of the Ukraine war and looking for a way out, which will surprise nobody familiar with Washington’s fickleness towards the overseas causes it takes up.
Plenty of Ukrainians, bereft and impoverished, are sick of the conflict too. They reckon that war and ethnic cleansing have done their usual damage, and the country might well be better advised to let go of what it has lost since 2014.
It’s even suggested that President Volodymyr Zelensky, recently seen touring an arms factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is preparing his own exit strategy – which will involve blaming Nato for failing to help him properly. I still long to debate this sad episode with Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, but the blond warmonger seems unwilling to do so.
Lucy Letby has now endured 495 days in prison for a crime she may not have committed. As Dr Philip Hammond argues this week in Private Eye, the jury at her main trial ‘heard only half the evidence’. He thinks that some of her fellow nurses, who believe she is innocent, were ‘deterred’ from testifying. If this is so, it is deeply shocking and needs to be remedied.
Had you noticed that it is getting dark earlier, though it is a month before the clocks go back? Yet there are still people who think that fiddling with the time makes the days longer.
