Listen To Disabled People

The Canary editorialises:

Dignity in Dying has ramped up its campaigning ahead of the second reading of Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill on Friday 29 November. Little wonder, really – as The Canary can reveal that in 2023 it got one donation of £700,000 from a right-wing trust.

However, it begs the question, how on earth are chronically ill and disabled people supposed to fight back in the face of money, power, and influence – like Dignity in Dying has?

Dignity in Dying: rolling in funds

As someone shared on X on Monday 25 November, Dignity in Dying has effectively taken over one of the London Underground passenger walkways at Westminster station.

This is unsurprising. Previously, The Canary pointed out that in recent months the organisation has thrown enormous sums at Facebook ads. This has made it among the top spenders in the UK.

Specifically, between 22 September to 21 October it forked out £68,926 of this for 190 ads. Then, the week of Kim Leadbeater’s bill’s first reading it forked out another £30,000.

We now know that for the last 30 days (24 October- 22 November) it spent £106,122 for 602 ads. This made it Facebook’s second-biggest UK spender.

In one week – 2 to 8 November – Dignity in Dying even surpassed the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Gaza fund. It was number one in ad spend. This was down to the fact it had forked out £30,707 for 134 ads in just that seven day period alone.

Evidently, it’s doubling down with its tried-and-tested campaign strategy. This is, of course, something it’s been doing for decades. But for the first time it seems like Dignity in Dying has found the right MP to nobble – in the shape of Kim Leadbeater.

Leadbeater: hardly a beacon of disability advocacy

Leadbeater’s motivation for pushing the Assisted Dying Bill is not wholly clear. She admitted she has no personal experience of this. But she says she has been moved by people’s stories around terminal illness.

Before becoming an MP, Leadbeater was a college lecturer in physical health and a personal trainer. Since becoming an MP, one of the biggest pieces of work she has done was a report for the Fabian Society (a Labour-affiliated think tank that in the last century supported eugenics). It was called Healthy Britain: a New Approach to Health and Wellbeing Policy. Yet throughout the entire 30-page report she only mentioned disabled people once. She used the ableist term “the disabled”. Leadbeater also failed to mention chronically ill people at all.

Leadbeater claims she has listened to disabled people. Yet every single Deaf and Disabled People-led Organisation (DDPO) in the UK (350 of them) has come out against her Assisted Dying Bill. Every single one. As far as they, and we, can tell, not one professional body representing doctors, consultants, nurses, etc have come out in favour of the bill. Their positions are either against it or neutral.

So no, Leadbeater is not listening to disabled people. She is listening to the voices of some terminally ill people – and those who have been campaigning on the issue for decades.

Assisted Dying Bill MKIII

Dignity in Dying is supported now by exactly the same people who a) were pushing assisted dying last time, in 2015, and b) funded the supposedly ‘neutral’ Assisted Dying Commission that came before that in 2010 – that medical bodies refused to take part in due to it bias. The majority of the commission’s committee were openly in favour of assisted dying.

That is, Bernard Lewis (of River Island fame) and his ‘charitable’ trust are one of Dignity in Dying’s main backers.

The Canary’s Hannah Sharland has documented how Dignity in Dying has:

• Direct links to the Eugenicist movement.
• More direct links to the Labour government.
• Funding directly from the Bernard Lewis Trust that also fund Tufton Street think tanks and ethnic cleansing projects and the IDF in Israel.
• More funding from anonymous trusts based in tax havens. 

The Bernard Lewis Trust’s slush money (because that’s really what it is) is some of the most questionable, as Sharland has documented. However, that still hasn’t stopped Dignity in Dying take a huge £700,000 from it in 2023 – as accounts published in the last few weeks reveal.

The trust also gave £400,000 to Dignity in Dying’s sister charity, Compassion in Dying. As Sharland previously documented, essentially the latter is little more than a legal laundromat for the former – with Lewis’s slush funds flowing fairly freely between the two.

There are no guarantees

Of course, the tired and insipid arguments for Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill are that:

• It’s only for terminally ill people with six months to live.
• There are adequate safeguards in place.

However, for chronically ill and disabled people – and for that matter those living with mental health issues, and anyone else the state and system consider an economic burden – this is cold comfort.

Keir Starmer’s middle-management style of centrist government is hardly the norm in the Global North, now. What Dignity in Dying et al cannot guarantee is that ‘mission creep’ won’t set in.

There is nothing to say that in 2029, a hard-right libertarian government won’t use Henry VIII powers to introduce secondary legislation to amend the Assisted Dying Act. This was a widely-condemned tactic of Boris Johnson’s government when it came to post-Brexit laws. That is, a minister can change an Act without parliament having to properly scrutinise it.

Moreover, there are dozens of MPs who already believe that the Assisted Dying Bill should go further.

The point being, Leadbeater, Dignity in Dying, and everyone else can claim the bill is safe. But they have absolutely no way of proving it.

Yet still, every single DDPO and medical professional body in the country is being ignored. This is all thanks to the funding and influence of right-wing millionaire’s Bernard Lewis’s trust and a handful of well-connected people.

Disabled people are being ignored (or smeared by Dignity in Dying and the Guardian) as fundamentalist Christians) when it’s their lives that are literally on the line.

Listen to disabled people over the Assisted Dying Bill

In places like Canada and the Netherlands euthanasia accounts for 5% of all deaths. Therefore, when (not if) the Assisted Dying Bill’s scope is extended (if it becomes law), potentially around 30,000 people a year in the UK could be euthanised with the state’s consent. That’s 29,000 more than Leadbeater et al’s 1,000 a year estimate.

If this was a risk-benefit analysis, serious questions would be asked.

No one is arguing that people should suffer in immeasurable pain. However, due to our failing healthcare systems, the Western societal attitude of measuring everyone’s value in economic terms, an inhumane welfare state, and appalling social care system, the debate around the Assisted Dying Bill is left as being between the least worse of two options.

Of course people should be allowed agency over when, where, and how their lives end. But the UK state, and society, cannot be trusted to endorse and carry it out on their behalf.

Risk tens of thousands of people’s lives every year in the future? Or alleviate at most a thousand people’s suffering in the immediacy? This is a choice we shouldn’t have to debate, and a choice MPs shouldn’t have to make.

But those are the positions the Assisted Dying bill has forced us into. If the choice has to be made, then sadly we cannot sacrifice countless chronically ill and disabled people’s lives every year for the sake of a few people’s suffering. We should collectively be pushing for better palliative care, better social care – but crucially, better research into illnesses in the first place.

So, listen to disabled people. The bill is an abomination against them – and should not be allowed to pass.