by Kevin Yuill, spiked
The ‘assisted dying’ bill will make it as easy as possible for disabled, ethnic-minority and poor people to kill themselves.
Presumably, the UK government had hoped it could quietly slip out the impact assessments for the assisted-dying bill without anyone noticing. Two reports were published on the Friday just before the bank-holiday weekend, and just after the results of the Runcorn by-election and other local elections. Clearly, no one was supposed to read them.
The prospect of Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passing and making assisted suicide legal in England and Wales is already horrific enough. Now we have a better idea of what the government expects a state-run suicide service to look like in practice.
The first report callously sets out the financial savings that might be made when terminally ill patients can opt to kill themselves. It estimates that the NHS could save up to £10million in ‘unutilised healthcare’ within the first year of the law coming into effect. After a decade, it could apparently save up to £59million.
The second report is the Equality Impact Assessment (EQIA), which makes for bizarre and chilling reading. The civil servants who wrote this were not, as you might have hoped, concerned with protecting the disabled or mentally ill from wrongful deaths, nor with preventing a disproportionate number of suicides among those from a lower socioeconomic status or ethnic-minority background. Instead, they were worried about the barriers that might prevent people from these disadvantaged groups from accessing an assisted-dying service.
No one believes you, Keir by Fraser Myers, spiked