Assisted dying is not about ‘love’, it’s about not punishing doctors who kill
by Simon Caldwell, TCW:
IT WAS difficult to read the reaction of Conservative MP Kit Malthouse to the news that yet another assisted dying Bill will be introduced into Parliament without thinking of Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock.
Malthouse assured voters on X that he stood foursquare behind the obsequious Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who next week will bring forward a Private Member’s Bill at the wishes of Sir Keir Starmer. The law that presently forbids doctors to kill their patients, Malthouse pontificated, ‘must change in the name of love’.
Suddenly, there in my mind was Pinkie Brown handing a loaded revolver to Rose – grooming, reassuring, and misleading, always intent on death.
Misinformation is par for the course when it comes to empowering doctors to kill their patients. Even ‘assisted dying’, the euphemism du jour for assisted suicide or euthanasia, covers up and sanitises a horrible truth.
Occasionally the truth comes out, however. One such moment arrived on Sunday when it emerged that 54 MPs are conspiring to demand a Bill far broader in its eligibility criteria for doctor-assisted death than anything Parliament has ever seen.
Campaigners for ‘assisted dying’ have hitherto sought to push the door open by a few inches by presenting Bills with a soupçon of medical killing in the hope that it wouldn’t scare off too many waverers.
Not this lot. Emboldened by Sir Keir’s slavering rush to ‘assisted dying’, this cohort sees the time as sufficiently ripe to demand far more than the usual promised ‘safeguards’. Why start at the top of the slippery slope when it is possible to get much nearer to the foot of the precipice straight from the off?