Liz Carr

Red Maria says exactly what I wanted to say:

Last night Sky TV screened the assisted suicide of Craig Ewert, 59, a motor neurone disease sufferer. Millions of viewers saw Ewart sitting in the blandly domestic surroundings of the Swiss Dignitas clinic and being handed a cocktail of lethal drugs. He gently guided the straw into his mouth and sucking purposefully on it, surrendered himself to the night. He chose to depart accompanied by the sombre strains of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Ewert may have considered the manner of his death tranquil and dignified but to this viewer it seemed, with all the cold certainty of its outcome, as terrifying as an execution.

Ewart's very public suicide was not just a personal choice. By agreeing to its being televised he wanted it to make it a public event, even after the fact, to accelerate the campaign to legalise assisted suicide in the UK. He may or may not have succeeded in that aim; many politicians, including Gordon Brown, it emerged today, remain profoundly uneasy with assisted suicide. But inevitably he succeeded in making his death the subject of the national conversation. It led front pages and news bulletins and commentators have proffered their opinions thoughout the day.

Easily the most impressive of them was disability rights activist and stand up comedian, Liz Carr, who appeared on Newsnight and cutting through all the emotional hooplah, fearlessly declared that, yes, assisted suicide is wrong, threatens the disabled and should be prosecuted.

Liz Carr is a tiny woman who looks physically fragile but she spoke with a passionate conviction which animated her diminutive frame. If terminally ill people want to commit suicide that tells her something's wrong with society, not their lives, she insisted.

Liz Carr grasped the fundamental point about this debate; that there is no such thing as a life not worth living. She was urgent, compelling and in all her liberated vigour, the perfect counterpoint to poor, imprisoned Craig Ewart. Tonight British television deliberately screened a man's death but it also showcased a star. She's alive, radical and thrustingly optimistic. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future. I give you Liz Carr.