I Implore You To Vote Against This Bill

Call me an old school hack, but before I head off for a little afternoon’s Thanksgiving that the Puritans left England, and tribute to a man whose fondness for the grain made me as proud a godfather as his prodigious learning did, I have sent this email to my MP:

There are always supposed to be safeguards. Where assisted suicide has been legalised, decriminalised, or effectively permitted, then, with little or no further legislation, it has been extended to conditions such as chronic pain, which I have; limited mobility, which I have; clinical depression, which I have; and material poverty, to which I am not a stranger, as we disabled people disproportionately are not.

The legalisation of assisted suicide would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment. My paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote. My maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why.

There is no argument from bodily autonomy, since anyone who might request assisted suicide would by definition have lost that by then. Life expectancy is notoriously difficult to predict, coercive control is notoriously difficult to identify, elder abuse is only beginning to be recognised as endemic, and it cannot fail to raise suspicion that most so-called mercy killings are of women by their male partners.

Procedurally, a Private Member’s Bill is wholly inadequate to the task of legislation that would require such scrutiny as this would need. Every day, there is more news of the baleful condition in which the previous Government left the public services, especially the NHS and the justice system. The Health Secretary and the Justice Secretary are both opposed to giving the NHS the power to kill people on the authority of a judge. This is not a debating society motion on the principle of assisted suicide. This is a very specific Bill, and a profoundly flawed one. Unless one were absolutely convinced of the case for this specific Bill, then really would have to vote against it. I implore you to do so.