An Insidious Inversion

Kevin McKenna writes:

An insidious inversion of what we consider to be “liberal” has occurred across the UK in recent years. This has often been evident in the targeting of groups and cultures - especially religious ones - whose views are deemed to be “problematic”. The orchestrators of this socio-cultural othering come from among a small political and media elite whose liberalism is conducted safely from at an arm’s length … or a continent’s.

An egregious example of this reactionary creep was provided by the Labour peer Charlie Falconer last week when he sought to dismiss and undermine Shabana Mahmood’s opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill. The UK Justice Secretary had voiced her very deep concerns about its consequences ahead of Friday’s Commons vote. Ms Mahmood had said: “Recent scandals such as Hillsborough, infected blood and the Post Office Horizon, have reminded us that the state and those acting on its behalf are not always benign. I have always held the view that, for this reason, the state should serve a clear role. It should protect and preserve life, not take it away. The state should never offer death as a service.

“It cannot be overstated what a profound shift in our culture assisted suicide will herald. In my view, the greatest risk of all is the pressure the elderly, vulnerable, sick or disabled may place upon themselves.”

Ms Mahmood’s concerns are shared by every one of the UK’s major disabled rights charities. They were also eloquently and movingly expressed by Gordon Brown in an article for the Guardian last week. Mr Brown wrote: “The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care.”

Calling for a commission on palliative care, Mr Brown added: “We need to show we can do better at assisted living before deciding whether to legislate on ways to die.” Yet Lord Falconer chose to focus on Shabana Mahmood’s religion in dismissing her very valid concerns about what the proposed legislation would mean for vulnerable people. “I think she’s motivated - and I respect this - by her religious beliefs. They shouldn’t be imposed on everybody else.” Effectively, he was delegitimising those aspects of Ms Mahmood’s Muslim faith he felt didn’t accord with his own values.

Yet, Ms Mahmood was merely expressing a viewpoint shared by many who have no religious beliefs. But if she’d had, then so what? Many of those who oppose nuclear weapons and unfettered capitalism are informed by their religious beliefs. Are they also to be deemed non-legitimate?

The actor, comedian and disabled rights campaigner Liz Carr said that discrediting opposition to Assisted Dying by dismissing it as ‘religious’ was “the oldest trick in the book”. In Scotland, this has also become a scourge. In this country, you’re allowed to practise your faith and to discuss it in public … but only if it accords with a state-approved version of it.

When the overwhelming majority of the UK and Scotland’s disabled rights groups express concerns about assisted dying legislation you might reasonably think this alone would cause its proponents to pause and think again.

Let’s speak frankly here: these organisations’ concerns are rooted in a belief that what’s being proposed will lead to care becoming a costed commodity where value for money will be determined on the basis of what a select few will deem to be “quality of life”. And that many who are affected will be those who are the most vulnerable, lonely and isolated who lack the will or the voice to resist the suggestion that they have become a burden.

We’re just a few days out from the Westminster vote on the Assisted Dying legislation, yet the Bill’s author, Kim Leadbeater MP, still seems confused about the built-in safeguards. Interviewed on the BBC’s Newsagents podcast, she seemed to suggest that those who feel they have become a burden on society would have a valid reason to seek an assisted death. The implications of this are chilling.

Professor Leonie Herx, the globally-renowned palliative care expert, outlined why this is so in an interview with The Herald last year. She reflected on how similar legislation in her native Canada had advanced at “breakneck speed” beyond many of the so-called safeguards. These included the proviso that assisted death would only occur in exceptional circumstances and for physical suffering that couldn’t be controlled, even though investment in palliative care at the end of life can relieve such suffering.

Professor Herx cited the case of a physician who’d been the main organiser of euthanasia provision at a hospital in Calgary. He was now a passionate opponent of euthanasia because he’d been appalled at how it was being used to target the weak and the vulnerable. It had been extended to children deemed capable of consent and those who had made “advanced requests”.

Yet, how can anyone predict how their future self might feel in a future situation where your reality is experienced differently? As a society we risk making death a medical treatment decided upon by a subjective and gaseous set of considerations that might be affected by an individual’s mental health and the finances of a local health authority.

Professor Herx recounted one horrific case from Holland where a patient had to be held down. “She had dementia and her doctor had decided that this was when she’d no longer want to live,” the professor said. “So, the Advanced Directive was enacted, but she was fighting them off and eventually the family was brought in to hold her down while she was given the lethal medication.” As a result of this, those authorities are now permitted to give patients a sedative in their coffee or their food to help calm them if they show signs of resistance.

In Scotland, you wouldn’t trust our authorities one inch. In this country, the political elites despise poor and working-class people. We see this in their solution to those suffering chronic addiction, which is to feed them illegal drugs in “safe” consumption rooms. They don’t think these poor people can ever be cured and, besides, they’re not worth the added cost of doing so. The resistance to funding proper palliative care is rooted in a similar disdain for the poor and the vulnerable.

Nothing in what’s being proposed in Westminster - or in Scotland soon - leads me to believe that the affluent “liberal” elites won’t eventually use it to sort out the wheat from the chaff. The deserving poor and the scum.