Left, Right and Centre

From Skwawkbox:

DWP Secretary Liz Kendall’s comments on the private members’ ‘Assisted Dying Bill’ brought by right-wing Labour MP Kim Leadbetter are very revealing. It’s a toss-up whether she revealed more than she intended about the attitude of the Starmeroids to the long-term sick and disabled, or whether she doesn’t care.

The bill may be ‘just’ a private members’ bill, but Starmer has told ministers they must ‘remain neutral’ on it – such bills rarely get further than the first stage if a government is against them – but a number of ministers, including Kendall and the equally cold-hearted Bridget Phillipson, who once said that really changing anything the Tories had done would not be a priority for a Starmer government – have publicly indicated that they will vote in favour of the ‘kill them off’ bill.

Even the mere fact that Starmer – the habitual and reflexive control freak – has allowed a free vote on the bill speaks volumes. But Kendall’s comments to the BBC’s Chris Mason have given away even more: 

Arch-Blairite (and therefore arch-Starmeroid) Kendall said that the aim of the bill is to avoid families having to look after frail family members. Whatever protections are supposed to be in the legislation, no amount of supposed (and in reality inadequate) safeguards is going to protect sick people from feeling pressured to just die and get out of the way.

Kendall and the Starmer regime, which has already declared war on disabled people, have made perfectly clear that they expect everyone to work and that if you don’t, you’re a burden on the system and to be punished financially at the very least, whether that’s through physical illness or poor mental health. She is even fighting to keep data on the number of people killed by Tory austerity hidden.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, long before she ever got the keys to 11 Downing Street, made clear that her and her boss’s plan was to drive sick and disabled people into work – and did not conduct even an assessment of the impact this would have on them, their health and their survival, despite the Tories’ cruel austerity systems pushing around half of disability benefit claimants to attempt suicide.

Reeves once said that her party would be ‘tougher on benefit claimants than the Tories’. It’s clear from her and her colleagues’ actions and comments in government so far that human beings are only worthy if they work – and sickness, disability and mental health are not allowed to get in the way of that.

The comments by Kendall, the archetype of Starmerism, the eagerness of right-wing MPs to vote for it and the readiness of Starmer not to prescribe which way MPs cast their ballot for once, suggest that this attitude applies equally to sick relatives who might need people off work to look after them, or take up a bed in one of the few hospitals Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting plan to leave open.

Via (if it matters, the staunchly atheistic) Dominic Lawson:

Members of Parliament tell me they have never experienced such aggressive and incessant lobbying, on any issue, as they have over the past few weeks from Dignity In Dying.

This is the organisation, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, behind the 'Assisted Dying' Bill that was introduced in the name of Kim Leadbeater.

The Labour MP had never previously expressed any interest in the matter, but when she came top of the ballot for private members' Bills, Dignity In Dying swooped and persuaded her to turn their decades-long campaign into proposed legislation (which will be put to a vote a week on Friday).

However, in becoming the instrument of this movement, Leadbeater has revealed her naivety (to put it politely).

Last month, on BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, she declared: 'The current situation, for people who are terminally ill, is you've got three options. You can suffer and have a very difficult, very painful death; you can go to Switzerland with Dignitas; and the other option is you can take your own life. So there are three options: suffering, Switzerland or suicide.'

Frustrated

I hadn't known this until my wife Rosa heard about it from Rachel Street, the chief executive of the Heart Of Kent Hospice (which Rosa's family has supported for many years). She told Rosa that she had 'shouted at the radio' when listening to Leadbeater.

Later Rachel emailed: 'Speaking personally, I was so frustrated at the lack of awareness that there is such a thing as a comfortable death, and that she hadn't referred to palliative and end of life care, or hospices at all, and was dramatising death and dying – probably terrifying people who are facing a terminal illness even more.'

At that time, it was considered very likely that Parliament would pass the Leadbeater Bill. There is a massive Labour majority, subjected to what has been described as a 'soft whipping operation' – principally based on the fact that Sir Keir Starmer had voted for such a measure when it was last put to MPs, and had 'promised' Esther Rantzen (no less) that he would assist the process of such a measure on to the statute book.

But to Rantzen's fury, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who formerly supported legalisation of so-called 'assisted dying', has said he no longer thinks it can be safely legislated, and had become increasingly aware of the way vulnerable people could feel under insidious social pressure to end their lives prematurely.

Rantzen, who has stage 4 lung cancer, wrote in an open letter: 'What kind of Health Minister are you if you have no respect or understanding for the views of terminally ill patients?' She accused Streeting of wanting to 'force me to fly to Dignitas in Zurich to die alone'.

Earlier, she had said that even if the law is changed, 'I will probably not get the chance to die in my favourite place, my New Forest cottage'.

Yet, as the law stands, no one can prevent Esther from dying in her New Forest cottage, if that is what she most desires. No one, despite what her lobby constantly says, is forced to have any medical treatment they don't want. And no one can be made to go to a hospital, if they prefer to end their days in their own home.

Rantzen has already lived (happily, as far as one can tell) for longer than she expected. This is relevant to the phrasing of Leadbeater's Bill, which talks of making a medically 'assisted' death (being given poison) available for those with a terminal illness and a prognosis of being within six months of dying.

Professor Mark Glaser, the former head of cancer services at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, told The Mail on Sunday: 'I can recall several patients who came to me with a prognosis of months, and they are still being cared for many years later.'

Sceptical

One of his patients was the former Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam: 'Mo didn't live the six months, the 12 months or the 15 which her prognosis… said about her case. Dr Mowlam lived for eight years – and, after her exit from politics, she had a productive and useful life.'

It is, in fact, an overwhelming sense of being 'useless', or of their life having no value, which typically assails people when they receive a terminal diagnosis.

This was explained to me by Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary of the Association of Palliative Medicine for Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He added that this makes patients 'intensely vulnerable' to the sense that whatever remained of their life was merely a burden to their families, or society.

And Dr Doré is deeply sceptical of the notion that doctors or judges could detect if a patient's demand for 'assisted dying' had been subtly, or not so subtly, suggested by others (family, for example).

In fact, Leadbeater's Bill explicitly permits medics to introduce the idea to patients.

Leadbeater claims her Bill has the 'world's strictest safeguards': it requires the 'assisted death' to be approved by two doctors and a High Court judge. But how much would these doctors know of the personal circumstances?

Dr Phil Whitaker, who has long supported the principle of 'assisted dying', wrote in the New Statesman: 'Leadbeater's Bill is the right legislation at exactly the wrong time… A doctor who knows their patient well – not just their medical case but also their character, opinions, relationships, belief and circumstances – is best placed to ensure any decision to request assisted dying is well-founded. [But] that kind of doctor-patient relationship… is now the exception.'

Actually, the Bill doesn't even specify that the doctors have any previous acquaintance with the patient.

As for the judges, that aspect of Leadbeater's 'world's strictest safeguards' has been torpedoed by Sir James Munby, former head of the Family Division of the High Court.

Secret

Last week, he said the architects of her Bill had 'chosen to promote a highly unsatisfactory scheme… a scheme which does not provide an open and transparent process, but, on the contrary, permits a secret process which can give us no confidence that it will enable the court to identify and prevent possible abuses'.

A similar point is made by Thomas Teague KC, who this year retired as the Chief Coroner of England and Wales. One of numerous distinguished legal experts endorsing a report by the Policy Exchange think-tank exposing the Bill's inadequacies, Teague observed: 'Many of the safeguards promised by its supporters amount to nothing more than arbitrary restrictions, with no rational foundation.'

But that, actually, is the point: these safeguards are designed to be a box-ticking exercise, not an investigatory process. This is reminiscent of the debate over the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act, itself the outcome of a private member's Bill introduced by the then 28-year-old Liberal MP David Steel.

That Bill's supporters insisted the requirement that two doctors approve a termination would ensure this would not become 'abortion on demand'.

But it rapidly became just that. And Leadbeater's Bill, which affects the living rather than the unborn, would introduce death on demand.

For a number of powerful and strong-minded individuals, such as Esther Rantzen, that would come as an unmitigated benefit. But for the more vulnerable, it could become a terrible added affliction.

To Byline Times in the person of Penny Pepper:

In 1972, I was 11 years old, and having a gloomy day in hospital. I was waiting to see my mum by the entrance to the children’s ward. There was always a feeling of hope and dread. Life had battered me so much already.

I had pain and was often frustrated. But worse was the confusion and abuse inflicted by adults, some of whom were in charge of me. The abuse was sly, unexpected – the slow chipping away of confidence and a burgeoning self-belief as I paused on the troubling threshold of adolescence.

Back then, I was told, at least once a week, that it would have been a blessing for my family – and for me – if I had not been born. Less suffering all round. After all, everything in my life was doomed with suffering.

So I am familiar with the doubting stabs of where do I belong? and why am I alive? Those words are thorns that I have felt pierce my life ever since.

I feel them again now, as we find ourselves at the precipice of another private members’ bill – the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – due to be debated in Parliament on 29 November, which states that a person requesting assisted dying must be expected to die within six months.

If it wasn’t so threatening it would be farcical.

Legalising assisted suicide (as I term it) is so yesterday. So before disability rights and activism. So much the outdated ‘medical model’ of disability.

When you dig deeper, those behind the headlines on ‘compassion’ are often the privileged few, determined to set out an argument that represents the height of individualism. An argument that is perhaps not quite what is claimed – in this case that the campaign to change the law is only for the terminally ill.

So much evidence I have seen demonstrates that this is not the case.

When I was critically ill last year, it was suggested that a ‘do not resuscitate’ (DNR) notice should be put in place for me. Since that time, my life has been a yo-yo of new pain and depths of frustration. But do I think I’d be better off dead? Of course not. Through friends, networks of support, and love, I kept hope. And I still do.

I worry that allowing the slightest relaxation on assisted suicide could lead to the likes of Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme for those with a “serious illness, disease, or disability”, including those in a “state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable”.

As actress and disability rights activist Liz Carr’s BBC documentary Better Off Dead? demonstrated earlier this year, under programmes such as this, there can be an emphasis on people choosing assisted suicide rather than asking for support through social care – with subtle encouragement leading you to believe that you are a burden.

This slippery slope is my big concern as such laws can lead to the literal ending of someone’s life, in my view, in a way that is harmful and horrific – because it devalues all human beings (outside of the most narrowly-defined exceptions).

I am so tired. Do I have to say again that I am a specialist in pain and suffering? I do not want to live with an ultimate threat of coercion hanging over me – coercion that many of us already live with on multiple levels.

Like the arguments against capital punishment, how many innocent people are we okay with dying through coercion supposedly for a greater good? Except this is not for a ‘greater good’ – it is for a minority of individuals who, ironically, disabled people have a shared understanding with through what we battle, whether this be the effects of our broken NHS or facing the endless and excruciating barriers to everyday life from under-funded services including hospice care and ongoing pain management.

I will always believe in life! And believe in the right to decent end-of-life care in a manner we choose that does not create a hierarchy of who lives and dies and which life is given value.

As activists like me prepare for another bout of battle, to ensure we have genuine choice and assistance to live (not be coerced to die), I ask again: who will guarantee our safeguarding to protect the most vulnerable among us?

The battleground is tough.

Considering the other opponents of the Bill, we do not all rest easy together and never have – from the deeply religious to feminist radicals and more. Many disabled activists feel a need to distance themselves from such groups, yet somewhere in division, we clutch the few threads of agreement. Because we must. This is about life and death.

We hear a lot, especially from politicians, about the ill-defined individuals with ‘unbearable suffering’, who are ‘forced to die without dignity’. About ‘the cruelty and suffering inflicted by the blanket ban’ which is ‘cruel and unjust’, with those in favour of the proposed changes ‘on the side of compassion and humanity’.

But you cannot, I beg you, legislate the permission to die on such abstract, and often contradictory, concepts.

Who has agency better than us disabled people in this debate – numbers of whom fall within the demographic of the terminally ill?

Fifteen months ago, doctors suggested that my life was not one to save; that it would be ‘kind’ to not further my own ‘unbearable suffering’. These doctors were genuinely compassionate people – people we should and do trust. These were doctors who, ultimately, through the fierce insistence of my loved ones, saved my life. And yet, here is the shadow place where coercion can, does, and always will, exist.

I also believe this is about the notion of a ‘clean and perfect death’, based on class-ridden structures of sanitised, productive lives. When it comes to disability and illness, there is the urge for the true suffering of human existence to be wiped away and hidden from broader human experience.

Now in my 60s, I reflect on all those hours waiting in the hospital to see my mum’s face; to see her love in the hope that I was healing. I have to hope, as this fight comes back again.

We will not, when it comes to it, any of us, to quote Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night”. I for one will always “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.