by Sebastian Millbank, The Critic
The potential for inhuman cruelty that it contains is vast
On Friday, a rift yawned open in parliament. This divide is not, as the polite fiction has it, a respectful divide between those who support versus those who oppose the principle of assisted dying, but something much darker. This is a black gulf, a river of death and suffering, that separates the weak from the strong, the proudly autonomous from the desperately vulnerable.
The supporters of the assisted dying bill did not merely dismiss or ignore the incredibly cogent and powerful arguments made by its critics, they seemed not even to be able to understand them. Those who support the bill do not live in the same world as those who fear its effects. In the former world, the sun always shines, and tragedy is ever overcome by the assertion of individual freedom. For many establishment liberals, surrounded by privilege and prosperity, the idea of a disabled or dying individual feeling the pressure to take their own life is simply unimaginable. Their lives are defined by ambition and experience, the pursuit of power and pleasure, not the iron laws of duty and survival. Lives like Esther Rantzen’s.
Her role has been one of the strangest in this whole debate. Rantzen, who suffers from a terminal disease, and is a regular media commentator and minor celebrity, has made this debate about her own situation. Indeed, the vote came about due to a “promise” Keir Starmer made to her during the general election. In a bizarre piece of morbid political pantomime, Rantzen and her family have exerted continual pressure on Parliament. In the most recent and most surreal intervention, Rantzen’s daughter appeared to threaten the Prime Minister, saying that he would have to “run for the hills” if the bill didn’t pass.