What the death Bill tells us about life: The British state is happy to kill you

Nov 30, 2024 by Dave Doveton

By Graeme Archer, UnHerd.

In my late twenties, I became clinically depressed and prone to bouts of suicidal ideation — “suicidal”, in un-medical English. From 1993 to 1998 I lived in northern Italy; paradise, apparently, but to me it felt more like a J.G. Ballard novel.

Everyone was partnered, successful and “shiny”. I — an Iris Murdoch-obsessed homosexual statistician — lay on the lakeside beach, dully hungry from the latest pointless attempt to lose weight, surrounded by the mountains about whose majesty everyone insisted. I saw nothing but rocks. No bildungsroman lurked, waiting to be written: just pointlessness mixed with failure.

That sense of being “outside, looking in” at what others took for granted and which they claimed was the obvious key to contentment at times became unbearable.

Or almost so. I moved back to the UK where I had my heart broken one last time, took a few years’ worth of SSRIs, got over the death of my father (the spark that lit the fire of my depressive proclivity), found purpose in work and salvation through exercise, and met Mr Keit h.

I’m a good Conservative, staunchly lower-middle class, the class whose strongest and perhaps most biddable instinct is not to cause a fuss. If someone had said to me at certain points between 1998 and 2002 “Would you like us to help you kill yourself?”, I’m not sure how I would have replied.

“What would I have done?” is the thought I cannot banish since Parliament voted yesterday in favour of Kim Leadbeater’s “Assisted Dying” Bill. To be or not to be; that, it turns out, is not the only question. Of more immediate attention for all of us, thanks to Leadbeater and the 330 MPs who supported her, is a semi-corollary: if the answer is “not to be”, Parliament believes the NHS should be allowed to “assist” you. That is: the British state should be permitted to kill you.

Read here.