Not The Same Country We Were Yesterday

Tim Stanley writes:

Well, there you have it: the British parliament votes in favour of assisted dying, bringing us up to date with Oregon and the Third Reich. We are not the same country we were; we do not rest on the same moral foundation. Rarely was the obvious question asked, “why did we not do this before?” Because for all the misery, muck and hypocrisy around dying – and, yes, morphine helps it along – we long stuck to the principle that the state does not take innocent life. No longer.

It was a good debate. The argument for assisted dying was largely anecdotal, but those are some damn good anecdotes. Kit Malthouse spoke of a constituent who, unable to take the pain anymore, laid down on a railway line.

It would have been hard to resist such pleas to end suffering; the problem is that the suffering that will follow legalisation, by its nature, cannot be attested to because it hasn’t happened yet. Relatives will push the elderly to die early; money will be made; the wedge will thicken; and the British health service being so poor, this will come to be seen as a patriotic or desperate alternative to substandard care.

As I said on Politics Live this week, my mother lives with long-term pain. Contrary to the image of angels in white coats, we’ve found many doctors to be rude and uncaring; the bureaucracy is hellish. She’s lucky: she has me to fight for her. Were she poor and alone, and were she ever given a terminal diagnosis, who’s to say she wouldn’t take the suicide pill just to avoid the NH-bloody-S?

This point was raised most forcefully by Labour MPs, which was impressive. Had we a Tory majority, the debate would’ve likely been about philosophy; with a Labour majority, it was about poverty and inequality. MPs such as Diane Abbott made the case that the state is so impoverished that we cannot guarantee patients a fair choice between palliative care and dying.

Someone very clever observed to me that the debate divided, on the Right, conservatives from libertarians; on the Left, socialists from progressives. Conservatives and socialists listen to constituencies most worried about legalised suicide – religious voters, the poor and the disabled. But they also share a vision of the human being as rooted in community, whose welfare is all our responsibility. They emphasise security over liberty.

Individualist MPs of the libertarian or progressive kind, favour maximised autonomy – and frequently spoke in terms of choice, almost to the point of separate-from-moral-concern. I quote Alicia Kearns’ warning to religious critics of the Bill: “Supporting the choices of others does not diminish compassion”, i.e., you can be personally against something, but acknowledge or validate the right of others to do it.

But this is nonsense. A rational human being cannot support the rights of others to harm the community, such as murder; to promote bad choices, such as encouraging self-harm; or step back from someone in physical and mental anguish with the blessing that it’s “their body, their choice.” Their body, to lift from St Paul, is part of a whole; the body of mankind.

If you see someone standing on a bridge, thinking about jumping, you don’t just give them a sympathetic smile, do you? Or perhaps some people do. One feels the disagreements with members of one’s own tribe more strongly than with those on the other side – and a kind of fury bubbles up in me whenever I hear libertarians speak, because for every liberal Tory in the House of Commons, that’s one more seat that’s been denied to a philosophical conservative.

I return to the comparison with Nazi Germany, which others will find distasteful, because its crimes were involuntary. But it, too, proclaimed death could be healthcare, and necessary and kind. And it was in revulsion against Nazism that in the decades since the 1940s we got rid of the death penalty, wrote human rights laws, recognised the disabled as full citizens and promoted peace.

It is the postwar consensus, as social democratic as it is Judeo-Christian, that is crumbling – giving way to something consumerist and atomising.