Britain's new National Death Service?

When killing is rebranded as dying, a culture commits moral suicide

If Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) bill ends up on the statute book, it could well be that the principal (perhaps only) achievement of Sir Keir Starmer’s government in Britain will have been the introduction of a National Death Service.

It will also signal the assisted suicide of Britain as a moral society. Indeed, Friday’s Commons debate on the issue revealed that Leadbeater herself clearly doesn’t understand what she has done because she doesn’t understand the moral distinction between killing and dying. Nor do some other MPs.

The bill, which passed its second reading by 330 votes to 275 on a free “conscience” vote and now goes into committee, would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to receive assistance to end their own life. In an outstanding speech leading opposition to the measure in the debate, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger referred to the measure as “assisted suicide”.

This provoked an objection from Labour MP Cat Eccles, who said Kruger had used “incorrect language” because what was being proposed “is not suicide. That is offensive”.

To which Kruger replied:

What the bill would do is amend the Suicide Act 1961. It would allow people to assist with a suicide for the first time. I respect the hon. Lady’s concern, but I am afraid we do need to use the proper language here.

On Compact (£) Dan Hitchens wrote that Leadbeater repeatedly insisted after the debate:

“It’s not about shortening their life. It’s about shortening their death.” When a BBC interviewer said that under the plan “the state gets involved in killing people,” Leadbeater let out a little cry of pain, as though she had just bruised her shin. After winning Friday’s vote — a major, though by no means final, step towards a state suicide service in Britain — she told the media that she was dismayed by people using the term “state suicide service”. People “should be careful” about their use of language, Leadbeater said.

Indeed they should; and “assisted dying” is an abuse of language. As I said on Times Radio on Wednesday, taking an action deliberately to procure someone else’s death — the Leadbeater proposal— is to kill someone. In these circumstances, it would be assisted suicide — helping someone to kill him or herself. Dying, by contrast, is a process that occurs naturally. “Assisted dying” suggests all that would involve is someone helping a natural process occur with less pain and distress. Who could object to that?

Helping someone commit suicide, by contrast, achieves far less public support. People recoil — for very good reason — from legalising the intentional taking of life; and when it comes to suicide, people tend to believe that the potential suicidist should be talked down from the window-ledge and given help and support rather than be pushed off to their death.

That’s why the Voluntary Euthanasia Society changed its name to Dignity in Dying — in order to bamboozle the public and manipulate their fears.

This deliberate and cynical hijack of language by the euthanasia lobby has taken full advantage of the collapse of moral distinctions in wider society. In this post-religious, post-moral universe, the absolute centrality to a person’s moral actions of what that individual intends has gone out of the window. To this mindset, all that matters are the consequences of an action.

So according to this thinking, if the end result is the death of someone who wants to die the intention of the health professional taking measures intended to kill them isn’t held to mean that the health professional is committing an act of killing. The patient’s fate is instead termed “dying” — even though if this intervention didn’t happen, the patient would remain alive.

In addition, questions over when someone is actually dying, the point at which their terminal illness is likely to kill them or whether they are mentally competent to express an uncompromised wish to die are all matters of subjective and contested definition. There is no agreement over them.

In other words, “assisted dying” is a manipulative lie. And yesterday, in the Commons, it worked. Those 330 MPs voted to cross the red line against killing — the prerequisite for a civilised society — while disguising what they were doing. No wonder Leadbeater was so discomfited when this was properly called out.

Undoubtedly, those 330 MPs were motivated by compassion for people in pain or unmanageable distress at the end of their lives. However, their moral confusion prevented them from showing the same compassion towards those who might well feel either internal or external pressure to end their lives if this bill becomes law. They displayed zero compassion for some of the most vulnerable people in society, the disabled, the old and the very sick, who are now terrified for their safety.

We are being told that the bill’s legislative processes will now allow for further safeguards to be introduced. This is further baloney. The experience of the Abortion Act in Britain and assisted suicide measures in Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere shows that “safeguards” are no protection against rapid mission creep. The only safeguard against abuse of the most vulnerable and turning the “right to die” into the “duty to die” is the law against the intentional taking of life — the law that those 330 MPs, including the former “human rights” lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, now intend to bulldoze their way through.

As Danny Kruger told the Commons, the concerns about the bill are too comprehensive to be dealt with in committee. He cited the grotesque Canadian example of a whole new branch of medicine springing up to deal with helping patients kill themselves. He said:

These medics I met in Canada are specialists in assisted death and personally kill hundreds of patients a year in their special clinics…the conversation does not need to be started by the patient, according to the bill. It could be started by the medic — any medic — perhaps in hospital, who could make the suggestion of an assisted death to a patient who has never raised the issue themselves, whose family have never suggested it and whose own doctor does not think it is the right thing to do. And so the idea is planted.

Then, for whatever reason — and, by the way, there is no need ever to give a reason — the patient says that they want to proceed with an assisted death. They sign a declaration, or rather somebody else can sign it for them. It could be any professional, someone they do not know — maybe a new medical practitioner. A total stranger can do all the paperwork on their behalf. That is what the clause about the proxy entails. Then these two medical practitioners make their assessment…

The question of whether someone is terminally ill. I am afraid that it is a term of great elasticity, almost to the point of meaninglessness. It is well known, as the right hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) said earlier, that it is impossible for doctors to predict with any accuracy that somebody will die within six months. It is a purely subjective judgment, made in this case by a doctor whose job will be approving assisted deaths. They simply have to determine not whether it is reasonably certain that death will occur, but that it can be reasonably expected — in other words, that it is possible… Almost anybody with a serious illness or disability could fit the definition… pretty much anybody with a serious illness or disability could work out how to qualify for an assisted death under the bill.

And as some Canadian experts have said, a state health service that’s on its uppers has every interest in having fewer patents to care for. Britain’s NHS is itself in the terminal ward. Might the Starmer government be remembered for having finally destroyed the NHS core mission of providing health care that saves people’s lives while enabling the NHS to help patients kill themselves instead?

Two birds might thus be killed with one stone — now presumably to be reworded as assisting both birds to die.

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