The U.K. just voted to encourage vulnerable people to kill themselves in the name of some dubious dignity. Coincidentally, the mass die-off will save the state a lot of money. The use of the word 'culling' is dismissed as 'emotive,' even 'suicide' is described as 'inflammatory.' How else to describe it - people who have live in them one moment will be dead the next. Choice?
Anyone who has paid attention to anything I've written this past quarter of a century, and understood even only a tiny part of it, will know that I'm not surprised.
There's a great deal of anger in the UK about this. Over 65% of British people polled said they did not think that the mere 5 hours of Parliamentary debate was anywhere near enough time to consider such a radical and far reaching policy. The medical profession has serious reservations with many doctors saying they will boycott it.Rushed through. Who and what lies behind it?A warning from the Right Rev. James Jones, a man I know as the Chair of the Hillsborough Independent Panel and of the Gosport Independent Pane.l‘
Those wishing parliament to change the law on assisted dying out of compassion assume that the actions of the state are always benign, but the widespread and devastating way that professionals including clinicians have patronised and harmed ordinary citizens undermines such confidence. The infected blood episodes, Hillsborough, the Gosport War Memorial Hospital, the pandemic, the maternity care services, and the Post Office Horizon scandal raise disturbing concerns about the treatment of ordinary people by servants of the state.Changing the law will make us more vulnerable, especially the physically and mentally disabled and the terminally ill when they find themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous beneficiaries of their dying and in the hands of indifferent professionals who will be given greater powers over life and death. The state should value and invest in our humanity right up to a pain-free death instead of encouraging a culture the devalues life’ (The Right Rev. James Jones).We didn't get justice for the Hillsborough victims. It took us decades to get the state to recognise the deaths of 97 football supporters was "unlawful killing." It didn't take decades to uncover the truth, the truth was already known, and we told it often enough. I didn't join the campaign for justice in 1989 because I knew we wouldn't get it. Instead, I devoted my time and energy into searching into the roots of the iniquities and injustices of the world. My pessimistic judgement in 1989 was proven right, which means that if you are serious - and want substances rather than shadows, depths rather than top-soil, solutions rather than short-cuts, you should make the effort to read. "We don't have time." If you don't have time for solutions, then you don't have time - your constant "action" is a neurosis in which you pretend to yourselves, and maybe others, that you have solutions. You are just driving ever deeper into the Megamachine.I didn't join the 'debate' on euthanasia for the reason I have always known this was coming, and known that, for all the reasons and rationalisations, it comes down to power, resources, and class. It's detailed throughout my writings. You don't have to read. I don't have to write. I didn't join the 'debate' for the reason I knew that the political war is substantially lost. The chances of this being repealed are virtually zero. The odds of it being extended, either de facto or de jure (or both), are close to 100%. We hold the line or lose I'm afraid. We lost. We have been losing for decades and, despite 24/7 politics and protest, no one has the first idea how to lay a glove on corporate power. Instrumental in the crises that beset us, the elites are now turning on the victims of their policies, deciding who gets to die first. I say 'now.' I have seen how people - working class people - have been thrown on the scrapheap my entire life, their lives treated as nothing. I saw it firsthand with Hillsborough. It took decades for us to have it ruled as "unlawful killing." But there was still no justice. The barbarians are indeed ruling over us. Once we have broken down the boundary of preserving life and holding it to be precious, once we have said suicide is good, we will have ditched a moral boundary that protects the most vulnerable. That's just a cover for saving the state some cash by encouraging suicide. It's not about choice or compassion; it's about cutting costs on the backs of the most vulnerable. Disgusting move by the same crowd that claims to care. They're not giving dignity; they're pushing despair.There will be no going back. The new “right to die” will be claimed by more and more people until the value of a life is measured by someone’s economic contribution or physical strength & the vulnerable will be causally disposed of. The ‘slippery slope’ is real and inevitable.The ancient taboos have been in the process of being removed for a long time now. Well done 'progressives,' this one is on you.Euthanasia/assisted dying (EAD) is sold in liberal terms with lots of references to individual autonomy. However noble the intentions, in practice EAD will become a form of austerity. Why invest in palliative care or social services when it’s cheaper to offer EAD instead?"Where assisted suicide has been introduced, it tends to have a disproportionate impact on poorer and marginalised communities in society. There's no doubt that would also be the implication here in Wales" - Darren Millar MS.The poor & marginalised will find they have a greater ‘need’ for assisted dying. We are currently not providing acceptable levels of health, social or palliative care in the U.K.A law change would be dangerous, & wide open to abuse, in this context.But they know this. And have no plans to improve anything.The next step: lives unworthy of being lived.Life unworthy of life.And we know who they deem to be unworthy.Take a look around you at the need and the vulnerable whose pleas for help go unheard, unheeded, ignored.That's how eugenics works today. You create incentives to both pressure and "free" people to make the "right choices", that just so happen to cause the "undesirable" to willingly remove themselves due to guilt."You don't HAVE to, but you really SHOULD."Anything to reduce the disability benefit bill. When they take them off people, & make them harder to claim (now removing the physical mobility component & removing incontinence as barriers to work),people will be left with 2 choices; die slowly from starvation & hypothermia or ADThe atheist state sees no major problem with assisted dying being offered to individuals who - for one reason or another - find life tough. If there’s no likelihood your life will improve, you’re better off dead.Many of those vocally in favour of assisted dying are liberal elites wedded to autonomy as the ultimate value. This implies that they regard physical dependence and a need for intimate care as humiliating and degrading. What does that say to disabled and elderly dependent people?There has been no polling specifically of disabled people about their views on assisted suicide. The lobbyists invent claims about our views based on small omnibus surveys of the general population, or deliberately misrepresent data to make false claims. Ask yourself why.I noted the language of people being a "burden." I lived with my dad from 2006 to 2019. He was diagnosed with emphysema among other things in the early 2000s and wasn't expected to live long. I was honoured to share those final years with him. He lived far longer than any of the "experts" thought possible. Because we did it right. But I see the age, the age of selfish interest, scarcity, a psychological scarcity more than a material scarcity - the people with most resources have the most choices, and are the most psychologically mean. I spent a lot of time interacting with folk on the disability and autism pages, people who have spent decades asking for help and support, decades of being ignored. People express sympathy - it helps them maintain their public image - but do nothing. People are terrified. Deep down they know. To them, I affirm the sanctity of life and say every moment you are alive is precious and you are not a burden - you are precious to someone and not a burden. 'Progressives' may argue otherwise. They have shown their face. Again. To God, there is no zero.The law sends a nihilistic message to society. A counsel of despair. And why is anyone suprised? It is the age of nihilism. We don't have politics anymore, we have death-cults. All the time people are identified as problems, burdens, viruses on the planet - overpopulation. I remember well the day when an environmentalist, thinking he was among friends, told me that "it is time to cull the herd." Too many nod in agreement. I thought environmentalism had shed its misanthropy. It hasn't. I took my leave.And to libertarians who stress choice - I am not sure how we honour agency or autonomy by handing over the power of our death to doctors, law courts, and the state.If you trust "experts" under state authority then you are cowardly, complicit, foolish, the lot - you learn nothing because you don't want to. Assisted dying/suicide is not a progressive policy. It places vulnerable people in positions of greater vulnerability, and it fundamentally changes the attitude of society & Govt towards the dying, disabled and elderly.‘Do not kill’ is an ancient boundary stone that has protected the value of human life for centuries. If we concede that this boundary can be moved an inch, we concede it can be moved a mile - and it will be. Life is either sacred or it isn’t.Assisted suicide is a natural next step for a society that neither values life nor genuinely cares about anything but self-interest.
On assisted dying: your desire to have a death at the time and of the type of your choosing does not outweigh the evident risks of ill, elderly and disabled people being bullied & cajoled into agreeing to be killed. Get better palliative care.Given that we know that coercive control is something insidious and manipulative and that people often don’t realise they have been victims until years later, the Assisted Dying Bill is an enormous threat to vulnerable people. There are no adequate safeguards here.It is sinister in the extreme.Assisted Dying will be used to kill those who are not cost effective. The real preppers are the billionaires. They are trying to gain control over as many resources as possible, so they have everything that they need when the apocalypse comes. And they've got you picking yourself off. They've taken over your institutions, your causes, your movements. And you look the other way, for the reason you haven't got a clue how to challenge corporate power. People keep saying socialism and the working class failed. But at least there was a hundred years war. The modern age is spineless. It can't even protect the freedom and democracy past generations won for it, let alone extend and enrich them. Tired, lazy, soft. I don't want to hear the government ever talk about strategies to prevent suicide again. It is obviously absurd for a government to simultaneously promote and attempt to prevent suicide.The supporters of AD are already saying the criteria should be widened beyond terminal illness. Once you let this cat out of the bag, it cannot be put back in. 'Choice' becomes the ruling concept, and then you have no grounds to try to prevent anyone 'choosing' to kill themselvesAssisted dying would be yet another regressive step taken in the pursuit of unbridled liberalism. If adopted, it would habitually be abused. The sanctity of life should be protected.Department of Work and Assisted DyingSocial cleansing.It’s an absolute degradation of the value of human life.Let's call it what it is. Euthanasia. Delegated murder.The NHS Is not a safe organisation. And I wouldn't trust the state with an ounce of power. Legislating for assisted dying before sorting out social care is quite a tell.Like offering to raffle a couple of parachutes on a crashing airbus.‘There’s no dignity in Assisted Dying.’Professor Kathleen Stock reminds us that euthanasia is neither merciful nor dignified. To die with dignity we don’t need doctors to kill us – we do need comprehensive palliative care and protection for the vulnerable. Safeguards are a fiction (and a convenient fiction, a pretense on the part of those who know fine well what they are doing, intended to induce others to pretend that the vulnerable will not be at the mercy of merciless others).We are told that it is the wealthy and educated who access Assisted Dying. But in Canada 58.1% of MAiD requests came from patients classified as low socioeconomic status (SES). Assisted Dying takes more the form of an obligatory and enforced suicide, less a personal choice and more of ‘the system’s’ solution to its many and mounting failures.‘The right to die can quickly become a duty to die, and that is why I urge all Catholics to pray and write to their MPs. Life is a gift from our Creator and when we forget God, we end up belittling the human person.’ (Cardinal Nichols).But the 'progressives' are telling religious people that they are biased, they have a vested interest in suffering and pain, and that religion has no part to play in the debate. Humanists UK are all in favour. Of course. Cold and bloodless the best of times, the only time they come alive is when they are talking about death. I remember their previous campaigns: "there's probably no God, now enjoy life." I loved the presumption that religion and a belief in God were joyless, and the evident shallowness and selfishness of their hedonism. We see what joyless beings they really are. "Atheism is the philosophy of the comfortable," Rousseau observed in the midst of the Enlightenment. And the selfish. People who can take care of themselves. "My life, my death, my choice" as Terry Pratchett stated. And death to those who lack anything like the range of choices available to the comfortable and the selfish - the people who like to cultivate a public image of kindness, decency, and humanity. The cover is blow. The self-image is as self-serving as the rest of this class' identity - their handiwork is all over the contemporary age. It's a rotten age. Basic decencies we took for granted are falling away, and rather than get out of the way, as torpid, morbid beings they are, they insist on getting their own way - hang the consequences. Everything in politics these days makes a viable living impossible, from decent, stable, secure jobs, to raising families, to owning a home, to saving for the future. "Ordinary" "uneducated" people keep telling the "elites" this - but the comfortably selfish classes keep ignoring, maintaining the pretence that they are the enlightened ones, the kind ones. They are anything but. How odd that it is the humanists, who frequently accuse religious people of neglecting life in the here and now, who are rushing people on to an early death that goes nowhere, and it is the religious folk standing strongly in defence of the sanctity of life in the here and now. I have no faith and no trust in politicians with respect to any moral code, let alone one grounded in God the Creator. And we know that the political class have been implicated in and initiating policies that devalue the human person. The solution involves ceasing to appeal to bankrupt ‘authorities’ that are actively working against our life, liberty, and happiness and reclaim our sovereign power – and control over our economic power, our labour, skill, and knowledge. A democratic reorganisation from below to disempower ‘the above’.It is utterly ludicrous to believe that Assisted Dying could be brought into a health system that is in such a state of dysfunction, without putting the vulnerable at significant risk of coercion.Ludicrous, that is, if you believe that ‘the authorities’ are motivated by a concern with those whom they purport to serve. They are not. Hence the dysfunctional condition of the NHS and pretty much every other institution in the land. Hence the decades of failure, hence the decades of ignoring the pleas of those who are victims of a failing system. As pressures and demands mount, those charged with the task of governance and provision are turning on the victims of their failures. It should be the other way round. Stop appealing to government and the political class and the corporate interests they serve, reclaim power and reconstitute the social and moral order. That’s basic socialism and basic conservatism. The supporters of Assisted Dying are already saying that the criteria should be widened beyond terminal illness. Once you let this cat out of the bag, it cannot be put back in. ‘Choice’ becomes the ruling concept, and then you have no grounds to try to prevent anyone ‘choosing’ to kill themselves.‘Mental health matters.’ Right up to the point where it affects a person’s ability to work and make money. Then it’s ‘stop making excuses.’ And you’re an unaffordable burden.Matthew Parris, a columnist for the Times, says the quiet bit out loud, the bit that those who like to proceed stealthily by pretence would rather not be said, only presented as a de facto necessity: the old, the chronically ill, and the disabled ‘should’ be killed prematurely – to save ‘society’ (People Like Us) the cost of caring for them. If that doesn’t cause pause for thought, then nothing will.Except that he openly said it long ago, and still the arguments in favour continue to be made.We are beyond reasoned debate – this is a mentality that is inherent in the nihilism of the age.The precious ‘choice’ of liberal individualists: ‘my life, my choice, my death’ – and those less comfortably off who lack scope for choice can just accept what they are given, which is the way working class people have ever had to live their lives. Your desire to have a death of your choosing at the time of your choosing and the type of your choosing does not outweigh the evident risks of ill, elderly, and disabled people being ‘persuaded’ into and ‘persuading’ themselves (ie cajoled and bullied) into agreeing to be killed. But, of course, the remedy of better palliative care can be filed with better social welfare – solutions that the rich, powerful, comfortably off and selfish have long ago ruled out. Many people already live without choice in the ways their lives are governed precisely because of the way that the powerful minority assert their right to exercise and impose choice. People in need suffer the consequences of those selfish choices already, so why should anyone think appeals to reason would work with respect to Assisted Dying?Assisted Dying – obligatory and enforced suicide is a logical next step for a society that neither values life nor cares about anything greater than self-interest. Assisted Dying will be used to kill those who are not useful, exploitable, and cost effective.Why the surprise? That’s the society we have been living in.People will be denied the support they need to live – and are already been denied that support – and will see that the only assistance available to them is assistance to die. The only choice they will, have in their lives is the choice to die, the only right, the right to die.Assisted Dying is state-sanction and socially coerced policy that places vulnerable people in positions of even greater vulnerability, and fundamentally changes the attitude of society and government towards the elderly, the ill, the disabled, the needy.‘Do not kill’ is an ancient boundary stone that has protected the value of human life for centuries. Once we concede that this boundary can be moved an inch, for whatever reason – and rationalisations are never in short supply – then we concede that it can be moved a mile and more, until there is no boundary left. Life is either sacred, or it isn’t. Once it is negotiable, ‘all that is holy is profaned.’ I quote Marx from 1848 to make clear that this nihilism lies at the rotten heart of capitalist modernity. The poor, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled are not valued anything like enough in this society to trust the state – and especially the continuously failing political class – with the power of life and death. ‘The state’ cannot be trusted with people’s deaths when they care so little for their lives.‘The state’ is a front for the corporate form.Always the ‘debate’ and the rationalisations. Always the social coercion, the starvation of resources that leaves vulnerable people without the range of choices the well-off have. They want the power to kill us, but lack the courage to admit it and own their genocidal intentions. Anyone who thinks that a broken and overwhelmed NHS can be trusted to administer Assisted Dying is either a fool or a knave. There are a lot of cowards in the world, especially in politics. These are the people who pretend not to know, turn a blind eye to problems and flaws, and seize on any seemingly reasonable reason offered to do nasty and even evil things. We’ve seen how politicians claiming consciences will vote for illegal and immoral wars over some pretext or promise. I doubt any of them believe any of it. I studied High Politics at degree level, three years of political history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The trick is not to say the nasty things out loud, but bury intentions and the end-game behind ‘good (enough) reasons.’ And the cowards have their excuse. Scope for abuse is enormous.They know it. They don’t care. For the reason that the ‘abuse’ is the intention.We should be concerned of the cultural impact of eliminating of the great – and last – taboos emphasising the sanctity of life at a time when other traditional restraints are dissolving. Truth be told, the elimination of this taboo lies at the end of this long process of dissolution. Our institutions are as devoid of meaning and purpose as is the objectively valueless universe revealed by a disenchanting science. The only value is one ‘we’ impose. Except that there is no ‘we,’ and the dominant value is the monetary one. As moral restrains are removed, human life becomes a fiscal matter to be treated as a cost. When there is cost with no or too little benefit, that life is deemed to be of no worth. Slowly but surely Britain is becoming some sort of large concentration camp where dictatorship and coercion and constant ‘nudging’ (what we non-obscurantists would identify as bullying) is becoming the norm. The elderly, the poor, the ill – the weakest and most vulnerable – will be targeted first. It doesn’t pay to be any of these things.“I beg people to consider that a better answer for everyone is proper care, resources and support – because with assisted dying, we open a door through which terrible things will come.”Dr.Katie MusgraveSome are expressing surprise that a Labour Government is choosing to hurt the most vulnerable in our society.Some of us knew they would, some of us have seen ugly labour before.. we know their game.. Any number of state socialists were eugenicists - the "educated" ones, the clever people, the university crowd who treated the working class with contempt - having stolen socialism off them and turned it into a vehicle for their own attempts to rule society in accordance with their material interests - the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, just check the early twentieth century, with 'progressives' obsessing over the sex lives of the proletariat, seeking to curtail their numbers whilst lacking the vigor and vitality to boost their. Bertrand Russell was in on it, too. And still we are subject to the routine abuse of "ordinary" people, whilst the "educated," with form as long as their arm, are allowed to carry on pontificating. The 'progressives' have some dirty little secrets - that are not secret, it's all public knowledge, but ignored and excused. These people should be nowhere near power. “I am a medical doctor in the UKWe already have assisted dying: it js called palliative careWhat they are trying to introduce is assisted SUICIDEThis is fundamentally at odds with the medical profession.”(Dr.Callum Millar)There are very good reasons to oppose assisted suicide on purely secular grounds. But I am not going to be ashamed or quiet about the fact that I oppose it on grounds of my Christian faith, which teaches that humans are made in the image of God & are to be cared for, not killedNo one is free from having a viewpoint informed by deep and contentious assumptions about the nature of reality, metaphysics and the basis of morality, atheist 'humanists' as much as anyone. Some of us just face up to it more straightforwardly than others.So don't be cowed or ashamed Christians. Stand up for life in the name of Jesus Christ. Confess your faith without compunctionAnd when people say 'keep your faith out of politics, leave people to do what they want': a society in which the law and public policy is not underpinned by Christian principles will be underpinned by someone else's principles: most probably the secularist culture of deathAtheist 'liberal' humanism is not a neutral default. It is highly unusual and contentious by any standard. It is also wrongYou don't like religion? You think it should stay out of public affairs? You think humanism can affirm all the values that religion affirms, only without a belief in God? Then prove it. It would be a first. Because you blew it again.William Wilberforce should not impose his religious beliefs on others, says peer. Colleague says Independent MP has ‘religious reasons’ for opposing slave trade. The underlying assumption, of course, that his irreligious views have a superior validity.It is impossible for doctors to detect coercion. This law would put vulnerable people at significant risk. The current law is the safeguard.The campaign to bring in assisted dying clearly has hefty financial backing. It’s a shame the same enthusiasm isn’t thrown behind the care of the elderly or supporting the hospice movement. Where is the campaign to reform & make fit for purpose adult social care? Dignity in DyingWho funds it? The culture of death.A sick society with sociopaths at the top.Nihilism. And class war.Lurking behind "compassion" and "choice" is the real economic rationale for assisted dying. Margaret Hodge let the mask slip: “His [Wes Streeting's] argument about costs? We spend most of the NHS money on the last months of life.”Spent on who? Whose money? My dad? Who worked his entire life - and worked a sight harder than political parasites like Hodge - and whose illness came grace of that hard work. NHS money isn't the politicians' money - and the power they wield isn't their power, either.What it really boils down to is that it's easy and cheaper for the state to 'help' them by the one-off act of assisting them to commit suicide than the more messy expensive business of caring for them and providing proper palliative careThe context is key: we have an ageing population which is going to increasingly put pressure on public finances. The incentive for e.g. hospital trusts to push assisted dying to balance their books will be immense. Anybody who doesn't see the issue with this is immensely naïveWhatever the intentions of those pushing it - & I'm sure for some the motivations are not malign - the structural and fiscal forces will come to bear in a very dystopian way. The system will respond to the incentives it is given. Individual good intentions won't change that.The Assisted Dying Bill crosses an ethical red line—with dangerous consequences for patient safety and the moral fabric of society. The real kicker here is our benevolent overlords, otherwise known as the state. You see, our dear healthcare bureaucracy, ever so efficient and altruistic, has a vested interest in emptying those hospital beds quicker than you can say "patient discharged." They say assisted suicide is about choice, but there is no choice when a terminally ill, elderly, or disabled person feels the full weight of the law and the new social norm, and is forced into an early grave.Disability campaigners such as charity Disability Rights UK, have come out against the assisted dying bill with chief executive Kamran Mallick saying "Giving us dignified and equitable lives should come before putting in place ways of assisting us to die"A society’s mission should be to assist the most vulnerable people how to live and not how to die.Imagine the delightful scenario where a touch of pain relief is withheld, nudging you ever so gently towards the “right” decision. It's almost as if the system has its own subtle tap dance of coercion, set to the tune of budget cuts and waiting lists—how profoundly ironic, don’t you think?This appeal to emotion is up there with the 'granny killer' one from recent history. It's manipulative and disgusting and is being used by people as a trojan horse to justify killing of the elderly and disabled on the grounds that some people suffer before death.Until nhs, social care, palliative & hospice care are sorted, it really isn’t the right time. But those things have been allowed to decline for years."Tanni Grey-Thompson: Assisted dying bill will allow families to go ‘doctor shopping’ to end lives of relatives"I don't understand why Dignity in Dying is not being scrutinised by journalists. There's adverts on the Tube, huge numbers of trees used outside Parliament, hundreds of social media adverts and now influencing TV soap storylines. Where's all the money coming from?It's about social approval for the state to assist some people to end their lives & campaign groups use personal stories, polls & PR to try to create this 'inevitable' cultural acceptability.We can't legalise assisted dying until disabled lives are respected and valued. With the need to heavily invest in the NHS, palliative care and social care, this is also not the right time to make such a consequential decision.Jess Phillips says she will vote for the assisted dying despite believing the “woefully neglected” NHS is not in a fit state to deliver it. Jess Phillips, like most MPs, is a cretin.It's an age of technocratic nihilism and inhumanism under the corporate form of the capital system. And an age of cowardice and evasion. Much of the pro-side of the assisted suicide debate seems to take place on the assumption that people are self-sufficient, self-authoring individuals. That's plain wrong. In the real world, people are shaped by an impossible number of contextual factors, varying emotions, self-imposed and external pressures. You can’t legislate for them all. But if there are some you can mitigate, you need to do everything possible to do that. Lives are precious.The vision of personal autonomy assumed by the Bill is reductionist. I reality, personal freedoms are always worked out in community. "No man is an island, entire of itself"Our choices affect others. Our sense of dignity and value depends on others.This Parliament is grotesque. I doubt I could hold these parties and politicians in more contempt. But I have been saying that since the 1980s. I saw it all on Hillsborough, systematic lying in a bare-faced cover up that covered nothing - merely told people in public that they were worthless. Anyone who is shocked hasn't been paying attention. Let me know if you find a backbone. I'm done with intellectualising. People have been struggling daily with basic issues of social survival for a long time now. Ignored. Now it's life and death. And if you read on 'deaths of despair' and the early deaths in light of increasing poverty and inequality, it's been this way for decades. I raise issues of class and am told the notion is "antiquated." It may well be for the comfortably off. And what they choose not to see, doesn't exist. How good it must be to live in a world of choices. And how dreadfully inconvenient it must be to have to share social space with those who are much less blessed / privileged / wealthy.The vote confirms what we should already know, that a liberal culture’s response to all those who don’t conform to the liberal ideal of the autonomous, independent, self-maximising individual is to discard them. That discarding comes in many forms. Liberals prefer that the discarded are out of sight, ‘left behind’ and left to fester in some socio-economic wasteland. It’s worth noting, however, that when the external anonymous coercion of ‘the market’ doesn’t do the job, liberals are more than happy to allow the big state they claim to despise do the job. The weak, the poor, the elderly, the infirm – in fine, the dependent – are just inconvenient burdens standing in the way of hedonism and autonomy. This is a sick culture, dominated by individuals who feign sympathy, virtue, and kindness, but who are singularly lacking in any of those qualities, indifferent at best the vulnerable, and positively hostile should they ever encroach on their own affluence and happiness. It’s a culture that values choice and convenience above all. People are usable and disposable, no more than that.This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with courage. And the age doesn't have it in sufficient supply. It's lost its way. But, of course, I've known that for a long time and have been mapping the moral malaise in the books I have written. And it concerns me greatly that I keep being proven right. Because I know there is much worse to come. This issue is a consequence of several deep cultural crises. Because I look further than surfaces and symptoms.The MPs and those who facilitate these policies are not the only villains. None of this could be done unless there were people requiring it to be done - a critical mass of individuals (not necessarily a majority) in modern liberal democracies approving of it and urging it.You then go deeper than issues of pressure, coercion, and manipulation, which shifts responsibility to (doctors, politicians, media, etc.). Individuals in the modern world have made an idol of pleasure, self-service and self-satisfaction; they have made an idol of material well-being; they have made an idol of individual choice. In the Tolkien book I attach an appendix entitled "The Gift of Creaturely Dependence," criticising the modern fetish of independence as ultimately inhuman. Those who worship these new idols are guilty of a prideful self-worship; they value independence above all things and hence regard restraint, suffering, responsibilities to others, as the greatest of evils. They call themselves "humanists," but the result of their curving inwards on the self is an inhumanism. Those who uphold Christian morality rightly protest the symptoms, but often lack the nerve to go into their causes, lest they be criticised as reactionary and illiberal. But if you only treat the symptoms whilst leaving the underlying spiritual disease untouched, you will keep losing. It is self-defeating to play the liberal game of appeasing the individual, even the democratic game of appealing to the 'masses,' on the assumption that people will finally reject evil policies and practices once they realise they are being manipulated by evil elites. It won't happen: a mass of individuals living only for the self knows only what it wants, not what it needs, and the elites can manipulate it easily.Those who would uphold Christian morality need to avoid verbalisng soft moral concepts which appeal to the modern liberal democratic sensibility.“It always helps to know what you are talking about; furthermore, if it is a matter of legitimacy, it is necessary to know it in a particularly precise way.” (Jürgen Habermas, “Problemas de Legitimação no Estado Moderno”, in J. Habermas, Para a Reconstrução do Materialismo Histórico, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1983 pp. 219-247).English history since the bourgeois revolution of the 1640s – like the history of other nations in the aftermath of their own bourgeois revolutions – is best understood as a long, slow, and very inglorious revolution. This revolution represented the triumph of Whiggish gradgrinds who sold England by the pound by way of self-serving and soulless utilitarianism, making themselves oligarchs in the process.The heirs of the Puritans and Whigs are capitalists and financiers whose money and power is based on the expropriation of the commons – the ethical and political commons as well as the physical commons – ripping up our inherited moral and social ecosystems in the process. They are characterised by a toxic mixture of secularising and disenchanting ‘science’ and selfish self-seeking. The old alliance that has presided over a healthy and happy nation is between the landed aristocracy and the common people, modernised as that between an enlightened elite and popular mass. The specific class compositions, social and cultural forms, and political groupings alter and adapt according to time and place, but the fundamental process is consistent as it continues inexorably on the road to nowhere.“The fundamental fact” of liberal modernity, argued Max Weber, is that its members are “destined to live in a godless and prophetless time.” (Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. p. 153)The political division between Left and Right quickly reduced to a division between different wings of the Whig oligarchy. The dominant forms of socialism and conservatism represent variations of a dominant liberalism, with political conflict determining which variation of the ‘godless and prophetless’ dystopia is to be forced upon the common people. Political alliances and class allegiances could shift, and took different forms in history. The landed gentry always contained a Whiggish segment, integrating in time with the money-men of the new industrial age. In many ways, the idea of the state as promoting ‘Assisted Dying’ is the purest expression of the triumph of the Whig oligarchy, seeing human beings as exploitable resources, possessing no inherent value beyond individual utility. The useless and unexploitable – the poor and the needy – are to be killed off to save money. Presented as ‘radical,’ ‘humanist,’ and ‘compassionate,’ it is a sordid and self-serving utilitarian evil that is contrary to Christian teaching.Imagine no religion …?‘Nothing to kill or die for.’And nothing to live for, either, beyond a self-seeking predicated on power.“The biblical prohibition ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a piece of naïveté compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: ‘thou shalt not procreate’. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no ‘equal rights’, between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be anti-nature itself as morality!” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power).We may speculate as to the motivations behind this provocation. The Will to Power is a gathering of notes and fragments assembled through his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and others and were never approved for publication by Nietzsche. Slave morality or not, the Christian care for ‘the weak and the botched’, the poor and marginalized, is a central tenet of the gospel. In Matthew 25:40, Jesus commands us to care for ‘the least of these’ amongst us.We live in a godless and prophetless time.
A dark day for Britain, and another darkening in the world as a whole.
The assisted dying ‘debate’ has been instructive in sorting out those who know the issues, and are alert to what is at stake, and those who continue along with the relentless drift to dystopia. It is the difference between a life of truth and a life of lies.
It's the ones who choose to look away who tip the balance every time, the people who opt for the thickets of argument and debate, claiming ethics to be an empirical matter, a matter of discrete events, individuals, and happenings. It beats confronting power close hand.
It’s essential to see the Assisted Dying Bill and the DWP’s ‘Get Britain Working’ as two sides of the same coin. We are entering a world in which the elderly and infirm are being seen as ‘unproductive’ and as making exorbitant claims upon the public purse. The fact that these people have worked their entire lives, and are often sick grace of a lifetime’s work, let alone that all human beings possess an inherent worth and are entitled to society’s care and consideration, is not acknowledged. Both pieces of legislation offer capitalism a rationale to carry on exploiting and using human beings as resources, discarding those who are no longer exploitable.
People need to join the dots and make a picture. I suspect most of those who remain silent as the state and capital predate on the poor and powerless can, but don’t want to admit it to themselves and to others, lest it require some seriously radical politics from them, as opposed to the performative garbage backed by big money which is their norm.
Never before in human existence has ‘assisted dying’ being less necessary. Medical science has made great advances. It is remarkable that this ‘debate’ is paying no attention on delivering better care. But care is not the consideration. And there is no mystery. This is not about care – it is about human beings as exploitable resources.
To those with terminal illness it must be an agony to have to watch MPs argue over whether you should already be dead. The same with respect to those with chronic illness. Chronic illness has been described as a slow death sentence. And here are our MPs arguing over the extent to which the process should be speeded up – a callous attitude that lets people know they are an unwanted burden, pressuring them to hasten their own demise. Assisted dying sends a harmful message that lives marked by illness and disability aren’t worth living. And the message is sent deliberately. The result is a two-tier society in which suicide prevention only applies to some.
‘If this goes through, a future government, returning to the first principles of our civilisation, should strike it off the statute book without a free vote. By then in any case its horrific consequences will have become clear’ (John Milbank).
They are already clear, in light of the experience of Canada. That assisted dying is still being pushed indicates a deeper drive at work, first principles and ancient taboos sustaining civilised life be damned. We are living in an age of technocratic nihilism and inhumanism.
We hardly need make a prediction here. This legislation will start off with promises of “checks and balances” and fast become a killing free-for-all. It is state-sanctioned murder. The language will be condemned as hyperbole. Just wait and see.
The much vaunted ‘autonomy’ and ‘choice’ that lies at the heart of such thinking depends on class position and social status. The poor, the vulnerable, the disabled know that their lives hang in the balance and can be deleteriously affected by a change in definition and stroke of the pen. They will not be protected if this bill passes – they know it, and the architects of this bill know it. As to those who remain silent, or who allow themselves to be persuaded by notions of ‘choice,’ I suspect that deep down they know too, and are too gutless to resist. They will stand idly by as the lives of others are written off – the end of an inconvenient problem.
That that is the truth - they know it. They need to be told it in public – and made to own their inhumanism.
All the rationalisers and intellectualisers will dress it up in "carefully weighed arguments." Mais c'est nul. They offer "good enough" reasons knowing people will silence their conscience - and the fact they know better - to vote for and support something they know is unconscionable. It's saves face. It's better than just telling the truth that they don't care.
Bulgakov was right. Cowardice is the worst of all vices. All the other vices start with cowardice.
The supporters of assisted suicide are too squeamish/dishonest/ashamed to even accept a factual description of what they put forward. Expect years of denial, obfuscation, and avoidance of responsibility. That's been the politics of the last half century. They are cowards
They are also calling your bluff. The fact that people don't call it indicates that they, too, are cowards.
And the weak go to the wall. At first. It's already been happening. ("Deaths of despair").
“I say in a hundred years, if Christians are known as a strange group of people who don’t kill their children and don’t kill the elderly, we will have done a great thing. I mean, that may not sound like much, but I think it is the ultimate politic ... If we can just be a disciplined enough community, who through the worship of God has discovered that we are ready to be hospitable to new life and life that is suffering, then, as a matter of fact, that is a political alternative that otherwise the world will not have.” (Stanley Hauerwas, On God, Good and Evil, Religion and Ethics, 31st August 2012).
Christians are going to be spotted easily in this society, as the people who live in families with more than one child, children with disabilities that can be detected in utero, and their elderly and infirm still with them. These are good things. Christians will continue to do this in face of a culture increasingly moving in the other direction.
“There's a lot of talk about brokenness of the modern self. I mean, there is something about being human, at least after we left the Garden of Eden, that is permanently broken because we have a conception both of the way the world is and of the way the world ought to be. You can say this is why we have two eyes and two ears, it's to keep one eye and one ear on each side of that equation and not try to collapse them. Most people do try to collapse them. Because it's much easier to live that way. It's much easier to say eh, ought, you know, childish wish fantasy. The world is the way it is, and it's naive to think that it can be any better. And, you know, or there are of course fanatical ideologues who go in the other direction. But I think to be an honest human being involves recognising brokenness. I absolutely adore the songs of Leonard Cohen. I don't know if he's somebody who means something to you, but you'll recognise his the line, "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" - just, you know, magnificent.” (Susan Neiman, On God, Good and Evil, Religion and Ethics, 31st August 2012).
A civilised society is one in which the strong take care of the weak; where people look beyond their own concerns to demonstrate concern for the needs of the vulnerable. The Assisted Dying bill undermines our own humanity, not just the humanity of the needy. We are all dependent creatures in need of the help – and resources – of others.
Euthanasia is a moral evil. It is that simple. The positive images under the sign of ‘let us choose’ are sick and sinister, indicating late-stage consumer capitalism. The true marker of a decent and civilised society is how committed it is to maximising the safety and security of the most vulnerable, and the degree to which it values human life. This is not a decent and civilised society. We are governed by barbarians, and too many are complicit in this barbarism in the way they put themselves and their own choices and interests over against the needs of others.
My life, my death, my choice – Terry Pratchet. I, me, mine. Nothing but me. Lennon’s God as the deified ‘I.’
The ‘Assisted Dying’ bill comes out just as the government announces a "clampdown" of benefits as a "burden on taxpayers." They like to use that term "burden" a lot.
“As someone who relies on the state for my survival, I have a healthy distrust of giving it any more power over my life than it already has. Though some people want the right to die, many of us are still fighting for the right to exist.” (Dr Frances Ryan).
Who is endangered by this bill?
The terminally ill who are made to feel a burden; or fear poverty and hardship; or who can’t get the treatment, support, or housing they need; or are depressed and confused; people with eating disorders; people with suicidal ideation; victims of malpractice; people who are misdiagnosed; and potentially, people with disabilities or mental illness.
“The few people who are kind and understanding cannot outweigh the fact that I don’t belong on the planet. Allistics systematically don’t care about my existence and don’t want me to exist, and can’t be bothered to understand me.”
This quote from “an autistic girl” expresses the comment lament of autistic people.
The stories on the autistic pages are harrowing.
Autistic people, who already feel isolated and marginalised, and are in need of help and support and encouragement, face a world which not only deprives them of the things they need, but now promotes assisted dying over assisted living. Inhumanism.
Beyond the question of whether you support assisted dying is the question of whether you trust the state and the NHS to get this right 100% of the time.
Because any less than 100% is a death you are going to have to be comfortable with as collateral damage.
The failures of the state and health systems in recent years are clear.
The truth is that those in favour of assisted dying couldn’t care less. We are seeing growing numbers of people bearing the costs and consequences of the liberal order, and those who benefit materially from this order care nothing for these victims, only that they go away in some way. They have ignored the poor and the unemployed for decades, and have said nothing as communities have unravelled and support networks have been destroyed, paid no attention to the ‘deaths of despair’ that have overtaken large swathes of the nation. Such people are indeed comfortable with ‘collatoral damage.’ In fact, they are very happy with presenting intended outcomes as unintended consequences, in that it allows them to evade responsibility. They are responsible.
Kim Leadbeater suggests that fear of being a burden is a ‘legitimate reason’ for dying.
We need to be alert to the subtleties of social and psychic coercion. They are very real, as the poor and the vulnerable well understand.
What separates civilised societies from uncivilised societies is the idea that the lives of the most needy – the young and old, the sick and disabled – are inherently valuable. Such people are not ‘burdens’ but valued members of society. Implying that dependency makes a life worth less – and worthless – is the opposite of a civilised existence.
Euthanasia is in the DNA of modern liberal society, expressed in its soulless utilitarianism.
The delusion that you can retain Christian moral values – or any moral values – whilst adhering to a disenchanting science ought not have survived Nietzsche. “Euthanasia may be with us for a while but the kind of politics that’s giving us euthanasia – a limp secularism, half-despairing while still claiming Progress’ mantle, half-abandoning Christianity while clinging to the rhetoric of ‘compassion’ – is unlikely to survive the century.” (Ross Douthat).
“A society’s mission should be to assist the most vulnerable people how to live and not how to die” (Tanni Grey-Thompson).
Some of the oldest lessons in history are in the process of being (deliberately) forgotten.
These governments have been failing the people since the 1960s, in the context of a failing capitalism - a long and slow 1929 I called it in my economics masters in 1995. And they have been turning on the people rather than money and power. The trade unions were targeted first, and were broken. The crisis continued. Now others are in the firing line.
The vulnerable are being made to pay the price for the failures of those in the world of politics and business to invest, train, and upgrade the economy, opting for low-skill, low-productivity cheap labour economics instead of an industrial strategy and politics. Eventually with that short-term economics resources would start to run out. And rather than change course, the poor and the vulnerable – the victims of this wretched economics – will be made to pay the price.
And we should note the extent to which the ‘progressive left’ are perfectly in tune with capitalist inhumanism.
The secular left began as an explicitly pro-eugenics movement, and reverts to type at the drop of a hat. For them, collectivist heirs of the individualist utilitarians – utilitarianism for the post-liberal order – only ‘healthy’ (useable and exploitable) human beings are worthy of life. What is bred in the bones comes out in the flesh: the legacy of those Fabian state socialist ghouls lives on.
Yes, the state socialists who made socialism toxic.
The middle, upper middle, and upper class individuals who expropriated socialism from the working class and turned it back against them in an alien collectivist force. The "would-be universal reformers" that Marx condemned in the Communist Manifesto, the people who saw themselves as managers of a rational capitalism.
I read a lot. Years ago I went on the Guttenberg press site on here and researched the eugenics movement. I read text after text from around the turn of the nineteenth century. And there they were, 'progressives' of various stripes, liberal and socialist, employing science and Darwin to engage in the favourite middle class pastime of abusing the working class. The mentality is alive and unwell - sexless, joyless neurotics obsessing over the lives of those they think inferior. They were all in on it, Keynes, Russell, all the clever people we are supposed to admire.
There is such a thing as emotional intelligence. And these people lack it.
The eugenicist past of the state socialists should not be forget.
I note the reference to 'the progressive secular left.' There is a left which affirms other values. A genuine left, one that is rooted in working class people and working class culture and experience.
For all of their claims to ‘protect the vulnerable,’ all these utilitarians of the ‘left’ value is a life lived only to the self, with all the messy and complicated bits of actual human dependency that require love, compassion, and solidarity discarded: sickness, fragility, care for the young and old, disability.
The secular humanists are, in truth, inhumanists.
Assisted dying is not an inevitability, it is a choice: euthanizing the weak is not moral, the commodification of death (or death on demand) will never be a good thing. It is an expression of late stage consumer capitalism, what comes after the hedonism.
There is a lot of money being spent to persuade people that it is all a matter of personal choice.
If a society truly cared about the vulnerable, it would prioritise funding for personal assistance, palliative, and end of life care, rather than legalise assisted dying. People deserve equality and assisted living, not a short cut to death.
Having spent the past few years trying to push for autism acceptance - and approaching organisations to see what help and support they offer autistic people - I can tell you that "society" doesn't care. People will feign sympathy - it pays to appear virtuous and kind - but in terms of help, nothing.
“The sick logic of atheism: the outrage is trying to base anything public at all upon the incoherence of atheism that is inherently nihilistic. There can be no just political order outside faith” (John Milbank).
After years of searching for the purely human basis of rational freedom, I drew the conclusion a decade ago that nothing works without God. My writings were at least implicitly atheist up to 2011 or so. Then I started to query the sufficiency of human self-authorship.
The clearest and most consistent opposition comes from religious folk - so religion is attacked and dismissed. It has been an ongling process. 'Imagine no religion ...' all conflict will end and people live as one ...
“Religion has quietly played a dominant role in the debate, distorted the conversation, with few believing MPs being straightforward about why” (Lewis Goodall).
Note the dismissing of religious concern by definition. The idea of intrinsic human worth – a quality that is innate and universal – being dismissed by religious definition. That out of the way, all lives are to be weighed and measured by other standards of worth. How very convenient.
And note, too, the idea that religious people are duplicitous, concealing the religious motives that are deemed illegitimate by definition. The architects of inhumanism know that their principal opponents are those who subscribe to a religious ethic – Christian humanists in particular – and so seek to traduce their motives.
Let’s be clear – religious faith tells us that killing people is wrong and treating human beings as useable and disposable resources is wrong. A secular utilitarianism doesn’t tell us this. I hope that’s not too much of a “distortion.”
“Thank God that disability activism and solidarity are strong,” declares Dr Jay Watts.
On my autism website I emphasise the need for mutual aid societies.Easier said than done.Organising autistic people is like herding cats.If all human beings are "different," autistic people are very different indeed. That's their strength. But in a world of sociopaths, it is also a weakness.
We should be grateful that we have such a competent state, a well-funded health service, and courts whose first concern is with clarity and justice, otherwise we would really be in trouble. (Just to prove that autistic people can do sarcasm very well – ironic living keeps us sane).
I’ve reached the point at which I regard the state as currently constituted as having no meaningful legitimacy or authority, in being no more than a great hideous toad squatting over all that is healthy and vital. I remember when Thatcher described the miners as "the enemy within." I remember crawling home out of the wreckage of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, to be met with establishment lies and cover-up - continued by Blair's Labour government.
Never once has anything I've voted for won."You just want to be on the side that's winning."I'm on the side that's worthy of winning.And that's none of the main parties, nor, frankly, the minor parties.
They are all toadstools on the putrefying flesh of a falling nation.
Every person who has blithely waved away objections to assisted dying, everyone who pompously dismissed the ‘slippery slope’ as a logical fallacy – we have taken notes and will not forget. We will hold you accountable for every easy lie.
And how long a memory do we need?The jury was in on neoliberalism in 1990, when even the Conservatives got rid of the sainted Margaret Thatcher. However much it had broken society, however bankrupt it was, neoliberalism wasn't broken and wasn't rejected. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair accelerated and intensified the neoliberal agenda on a global scale.I kept all the receipts.Who is the "we" holding these characters accountable?They should have been brought to account decades ago.The lesson is this: they are accountable now. Politics takes place in the here and now.Year after year I told people to reject the politics of the "lesser evil." That complicity leads to some very dark places.
The antinomies of liberalism - the assertion of autonomy that always results in strengthening the abstraction of the state.We are governed by liberals who so prize autonomy that they will euthanise any dependent or vulnerable human being."State empowered."The irony is grim.Liberalism and the idol of individual choice leads to the empowered state.Late in his life, 1875, Karl Marx was compelled to write a critique of the newly formed SPD, challenging its understanding of socialism. He challenges the claim that "the German Workers' party strives for the 'free state.'""It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the German Empire, the "state" is almost as "free" as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it; and today, too, the forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the "freedom of the state". (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875).Marx's consistent view was in favour of the restitution of social power alienated to the state (and capital) back to a self-organising society.Utopian?You should try and make it work, because the other political traditions have run their course, leaving a corporate technocracy all but inevitable.Max Weber described capitalist modernity as an "iron cage." The digital cage is being prepared.
The debate over assisted dying bill separates conservatives on the Right from economic libertarians and socialists on the Left from cultural libertarians. Genuine conservatives and genuine socialists hold that human beings are more than discrete, self-seeking, self-maximising individuals and that we have duties towards one another. As against the amoral and anti-social libertarians and progressives, conservatives and socialists hold that community is meaningful, and that its loss in anything but abstract terms in the liberal order is a profound loss that impairs and harms our very humanity.
There are conservatives who persist in describing Labour as socialist. ‘The UK socialist government in its blind folly has rushed through the passage of a devastating euthanasia bill that will radically change our society … A death cult has been pushed through in 5 hours of debate!’ (Joseph Boot). This assessment is too generous with respect to Labour. A folly it may be, and a murderous one to boot, but Labour did not do this blindly – there has always been a eugenicist dimension to that state socialism that stands in line of descent from liberal utilitarianism.
But this isn’t socialism, not the socialism rooted in the common people – this is the socialism appropriated and perverted by the educated, liberal, professional middle and upper middle class.
And some conservatives do understand this:
“It isn’t the socialists: the socialists voted NO. The progressive liberals and their ‘all that matters is that I should be able to pursue happiness at all costs’ are behind this (Katharine Birbalsingh).
It's always encouraging to see that some people who are not socialists understand that socialists are very different from "state socialists" - progressive liberals, collectivists, social liberals, managerialists, "would-be universal reformers" (as Marx called them), Jacobins, bourgeois, technocrats, bureaucrats of knowledge/power, epistocrats as I've been known to call them.Socialists who understand how fragile and vulnerable people are, who understand how much people have to rely on one another, who live close to reality and struggle their entire leaves, even for basics ... understand that "choice" is the privilege of the comfortably off, those who make idols of their egoism and hedonism. Not socialists, not conservatives, not Christians or members of any religion.
Plutocrats are always the worst leaders. A dictatorship of the proletariat couldn’t do any worse than this. But Max Weber warned long ago that Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could only take the form of a ‘dictatorship of the officials’ on the modern organisational terrain. And there you see them, the experts, the enlightened – and they are thoroughly wretched, mediocre, and immoral.
“Perhaps conservatives and socialists share a belief in the importance of objective moral values” (Miriam Cates).
I have been saying for longer I care to remember that the Right today is not truly conservative, but are economic libertarians. They kick-started it all in the late 1970s, in fighting a class war against the rising power of labour. The Left today is not truly socialist, but rose in the ashes of the defeated social Left of the 1980s, and are cultural libertarians.So, as I see pretty much everything I stand for being destroyed, and having seen it decade after decade, allow me the comfort of calling myself "very clever." But you know something, it's not intelligence that counts here, it is courage. I suspect very many people see it, but don't have the courage to break with their group loyalties.And I long ago realised that none of the sides in politics count for anything without objective standards of truth and justice.'Progressive' liberal green 'friends' look upon the work I've done here as misguided, an outmoded viewpoint that can be tolerated as a harmless eccentricity.I've seen the deluge to come and have done all I can do to induce others to change direction.Others will see it too late. And will say it's too late to do anything about it.And all the time the new barbarian "standards" will be normalised. And the new barbarians will feel quite at home with it all.In the late sixties, Lewis Mumford described those involved in the counter-cultural movement as the "new barbarians" responding to the barbarians ruling over us and inflicting war and violence on the planet. He thought the instincts of the new barbarians - the hippies and peace people - to be healthy, honest, and natural, but not enough to turn civilisation around.In 1982, he said that "on balance, I think the ship will sink." His later writings were dismissed as "moralistic." They were pleas and warnings to people who had ignored the lessons he had sought to teach since the 1920s. He was writing of a society that lived "after virtue" decades before Alasdair MacIntyre.And if you still can't see it, then you are a liberal who will never be able to see.
Jeremy Corbyn voted against euthanasia. Rishi Sunak voted for euthanasia. Conservatism and socialism share a common root in the reaction against the individualism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the context of capitalist industrialisation. Both conceive the individual as grounded in relations with others within community. They approach political and moral questions from different angles but reject that libertarian freedom that results in selfishness, loneliness, and abstraction and alien power.
The Conservative Party was taken over by economic liberals. Conservatives let them do it because they were engaged in a class war against the working class, cheering Thatcher on as she destroyed industries and communities, taking out entire social ecosystems, identifying anything collective and solidaristic as socialist. A universal acid, it took out much that was the bedrock of the nation. Sunak, Blair etc. corporate liberals. We have a corporate Left and a corporate Right, economic and cultural liberals.
It is significant that actual conservatives and actual socialists united to oppose the state helping to kill themselves, whilst the mainstream liberalism that pervades the establishment plays fast and loose with matters of life and death (in effect reducing these to choice in the context of asymmetrical power relations).
Observers on both Left and Right take note – and pull clear of liberalism.
And note, too, how liberals and 'progressives' perform the remarkable psychological feat of presenting themselves as plucky outsiders rebelling against the establishment, whilst actually being establishment, dominating every social institution. I've been talking about it for years. Maybe now more people will notice and shift their political allegiances accordingly. The final chapter of my book Revaluing Labour is entitled "Tory Socialism" for a very good reason.
Economic libertarians and cultural libertarians have consumed conservatism and socialism. Without the metaphysical assumptions and supports, this was always going to be the outcome.We may find that the moral bankruptcy is in the DNA of the age. Keep trying some clever calculations or carrying the weight of existential decision.Or see how far "groundless grounds" and "ironic liberalism" can take you. You've managed to limp this far, but the survival of a bankrupt ethics was always a matter of economic expansion. We've entered the age of contraction. The cover is blown.In the words of Leonard Cohen, "it is over, it ain't going any further.""And now the wheels of heaven stopYou feel the devil's riding cropGet ready for the futureIt is murder."
For the vulnerable, the needy, and the dependent (and all human beings are in some way dependent creatures), this bill is a matter of life and death. Those in need now face a prospect of their support being withdrawn. That this support is already much less than is needed for a healthy and functioning social life, and is grudgingly given in the most meagre of terms, tells you of the prevailing order’s priorities.
As for support being withdrawn, these past few years I have been dealing with any number of organisations enquiring what support and help is available for autistic people. I read some ignoramus on social media describe a diagnosis of autism as a "Golden ticket," leading to all manner of benefits. I asked for directions. You can't withdraw what isn't there. A woman with an autistic son told me that even with diagnosis you have to be prepared to fight, fight, and fight again, and keep fighting even in the unlikely event you actually win anything. That people don't know the struggles that disabled and autistic people face is down to the fact they don't care. They sympathise - it's good for public face - but they have their own struggles, struggles which are getting more difficult in the context of increasingly scarce resources. Concern for others is one of those increasingly scarce resources.Because you still haven't managed to develop and sustain a politics that challenges the superrich - corporate capital - ("left wing anti-caplitalism is the new climate denial" as one dimwit Democrat climate campaigner put it to me a decade ago) society is now riven within, with different groups of people turning on one another. My advice to people struggling is this - down look side to side at the people around, look upwards to the people of money and power. Join with those alongside you and reclaim social and sovereign power from those who appropriate it to their own ends. And make the effort to get the "common people" that "clever" people continually ignore (when not disparaging them) onside.I hate to say "I told you so" ... but I told you so. In the very first book I ever wrote I quoted Treveor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook's view, from 1985:"Those who believe that there is no constituency among the majority for any new politics know nothing of the human roots that feed politics; dazed by theory, or obsessed by trivia, those who conduct what passes for political discourse are blind to the hidden injuries, the unexpected suffering, and the deep fears and frustrations and longings that are constantly suppressed, held down below the threshold of public political discussion. Those who can fashion a political language for these private sorrows and unarticulated needs may be amazed by the pent-up feelings that will rush into the new channels that have been opened up."That was 1985. 1985 for crying out loud. People have been reading the writing on the wall for that long. And what has politics come up with? Blair! Cameron and Clegg! The worst government ever - until the next one. There's a reason for that: the system is bust, and your rulers are all but admitting it. They are either calling your bluff now, getting you to accept and acquiesce in a hopeless and subservient state. Or trolling you, maybe hoping to be put out of their misery themselves - they have nothing.I don't know about fighting.But I've been arguing for the restitution of social power from the state and capital since the 1980s, underlining the importance of forming a network of mutual aid societies. Disempower the top and the outside, re-empower and expand the centre.But didn't MacIntyre warn of the new dark ages in 1981? He emphasised the need to cultivate new, virtuous, forms of the common life within the shell of a decaying, and increasingingly degenerate and despotic, order. His view is often dismissed as implausible. I subject it to critique myself. But it contains the germs of a solution. The forms of this social order are dead. They will go from bad to worse. You get the impression that the disastrous policies pursued by successive governments are themselves a suicide wish, challenging the public to finally rise and put them out of their misery. The people who have messed things up so badly will never ever admit their errors, for the reason its simply impossible for them to own them - it's too big a weight to hold.And one of the most galling aspects of it all is that "ordinary" folk, the "common people" who comprise the demos, voted time and again against it all, and were completely overriden.And daily I switch on social media to see the clever people attacking the "uneducated", blaming them for everything that's going wrong.It's the other way round.It reminded me of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, deliberately causing mass unemployment and then blaming the unemployed for their unemployment. It kept the victims on the backfoot, lest they unite and challenge the architects of the ills besetting society.Governments have been this bad for that long.Do you think it's all going to blow over?
The disabled, the vulnerable, the needy are more than a little tired of being treated as a subhuman burden worthy not of life but only of death by the state and – by implication – the members of the great public who choose to look away and let others do their dirty work.
We are expected to believe that the state, which is already failing people in need, denying them the support they need, can be trusted to help people to kill themselves.
Shameful. And selfish.
Just as every person’s death, even a good death, diminishes us all, so we will all be involved and affected if we make this change.
The Bill will not just create a new option for a few and leave everyone else unaffected; it will impose this new reality on every person towards the end of their life, on everyone who could be thought to be near death, and on their families—the option of assisted suicide, the obligation to have a conversation around the bedside or whispered in the corridor, “Is it time?” It will change life and death for everyone.
I am very aware of the terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law. I think we can do better for them than they fear, but we also need to think in real human terms about what the effect will be on the choices of other people, and I do not mean the people who are used to getting their way. I am talking about the people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them by bigwigs in distant offices who speak a language they do not understand—the sort of people Toggle showing location ofColumn 1029who the hon. Member for Spen Valley and I both know from our previous charity work, and who we all know from our constituency work. They are not the people who write to us campaigning for a change in the law, but the people who come to our surgeries with their lives in tatters, or who the police or social workers tell us about—the people with complex needs. What are the safeguards for them?
Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role. The Rubicon was a very small stream, but on the other side lies a very different world—a worse world, with a very different idea of human value. The idea that our individual worth lies in our utility, valuable only for so long as we are useful—not a burden, not a cost, not making a mess. Let us not be the Parliament that authorises that idea.
I mentioned at the start of my speech the voices of those we cannot hear: the frail and elderly and the disabled. As we are surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses, let us do better than this Bill. Let today be not a vote for despair, but the start of a proper debate about dying well, in which we have a better idea than a state suicide service. Let us have a debate in which we remember that we have intrinsic value; that real choice and autonomy means having access to the best care possible and the fullest control over what happens to us while we live; and that true dignity consists in being cared for to the end.” (Danny Kruger MP).
Danny Kruger is one MP who shows signs of intelligent life and moral fibre. He’s clearly a clever man. But he has more. He also has an MBE for working with prisoners and ex-convicts. He knows the outsiders. Kruger, I see, is a Conservative MP. And he's the one speaking up for "the people who lack agency" as against "the people who are used to getting their way." And there is the divide. And the supposed Left of today is dominated by comfortably off people who are used to getting their own way, the people who don't give a damn about those who lack the wealth and material power and hence the range of choices they have. He writes of the people "who come to our surgeries with their lives in tatters." "The people who know what it is to be excluded from power."You may as well add the people who voted Brexit, the people who knew they were getting nothing out of politics and demanded change, and have been vilified and abused ever since. I took a couple of days to write an extended essay on the result of the US presidential election. The New Class War. I note those warning that the Left is losing the working class because it has abandoned the working class. I go further and show that in the new class structrure, the new Left is no Left at all and doesn't give a damn about the working class. They do indeed wish they would go away. They are entrenched in the global corporate form and their material interests are bound up with that. To them, "the people excluded from power," the people "left behind," are an embarrassment, a potential threat, a "burden." They prefer them to be out of sight and out of mind (those living in a deindustrialised town will know this). They didn't listen after Brexit, but carried on. They didn't listen after the Red Walls fell in 2019. And the Conservative government didn't want them, either, doing absolutely nothing for the working class people who voted for them for the first time. You could be forgiven for thinking that there is a uniparty concerned only with the interests of "the people who are used to getting their own way." The people who have made an idol of their own pleasure, their own satisfaction, their own choices. The people who, these past four decades have closed their eyes and their ears when those on the receiving end of a corporate and global neoliberalism have sought to draw attention to their plight. They care for nothing but themselves and their "luxury" causes.
‘In Oregon there are reported cases of people being given “assisted suicide” for anorexia, sciatica, arthritis, complications from a fall and, incredibly, a hernia. Yet this was the system our legislators wanted to replicate.’ (Julie Birchall).
It is astonishing to see that a change of such magnitude as assisted dying – legalised, state-sanctioned killing – was voted on after just five hours of debate. This is not just an insult to parliament but to the British people.
the first time. I remember Blair lying his way through his term in office, constantly being caught out, challenging people to vote him out at the next election. He did it with trade unionists and socialists in the Labour Party. Put up or shut up, he was saying, on the assumption people didn't have the nerve or the nous to call him out. Over to you. Labour should have been finished long ago. They are only back because the Conservatives and Lib Dems are as wretched. % hours to debate life and death. The whole lot should turfed out, never to be seen again. But they are guessing that the people who complain and moan have nothing. I mean, Reform! Tice is a Thatcherite who voted for it too. Reclaim your sovereign power, reclaim your labour, network mutual aid societies, rebuild the forms of the common life - this whole system is corrupt from top to bottom. To say senile would be generous. Others are using the morally charged word "evil." It is appropriate.
Peter Prinsley states ‘we are shortening death, not life.’ This is metaphysically incorrect and Orwellian in its semantics. Death is not a prolonged state – the dying are still living. What we can see is the urge on the part of some to dispose of those in need of assisted living. If the likes of Prinsley get their way, all those with a chronic illness will be written off on account of their dying slowly.
This idiotic hiding behind semantics is the hallmark of this idiotic – and murderously inhuman – age.
To repeat, we are being misgoverned and ill-treated by barbarians.
It's not the country I knew.But I've been charting the decline since the 1980s. It's been rotting within, and even before Margaret Thatcher introduced the universal acid of selfish self-interest into the nation in 1979.The authorities have been failing for a long while.The age of illusion is over. You either reconstitute public life, ensuring the unity of each and all. Or you don't.I have Bryan Gould's autobiography "Goodbye to All That," written in 1995. He had been the key Labour modernizer of the late 1980s, and saw his work rewarded with Tony Blair's New Labour. And left the country and politics for good. The final page contains these words:"The dreams I had harboured since childhood of a rejuvenated Britain ... seemed unlikely to be realised. My own hopes of making a real contribution to that change had been dashed. The British themselves seemed finally to have given up and to have accepted their leaders’ estimation of their worth. They no longer had the energy or self-belief to free themselves of their history." (Gould 1995: 281).I don't know about history, they need to free themselves of their wretched political and media class. I was never fool enough to vote for Blair.Or any of the mainstream parties. I remember the words of the Thatcher cabinet (Howe) blaming Liverpool for its own ills and saying the city should be subject to "managed decline." The political class is now doing it to the entire country, and having the citizens fight between themselves over the remaining resources.We have become a different country, and a different people. We had a neighbour called Mildred who, no matter what was being discussed, managed to get round to blaming everything on Margaret Thatcher. I attended her funeral a decade or so ago. And even then, in the eulogy, old Mildred was quoted having a blast at Margaret Thatcher for ruining the social and moral fabric of the nation. Mildred argued that, despite privatisation appealing to greed and self-interest, people remained basically decent and social democratic. She was right. But Thatcher's neoliberalism had injected poison into the makeup of the people. It was social engineering from above, designed to turn a basically conservative and social democratic nation into a nation of self-seekers. Which is not a nation at all. Such people know no common cause, only their own. We are in dire need of the love that seeketh not its own. And a habitus that allows that love to flourish. We are going in the other direction, closing down under the sign of crisis and necessity. I only work with those who look to expand being outwards now. Necessity is the tyrants plea. Starve people of resources, turn them inwards, have them focus on survival, and watch the meanness eat up the body politic from within.
People are in despair. I would strongly recommend the avoidance of despair. Desperation and demoralisation is all part of the attritional strategy the inhumanists are waging against the people. Rather than giving up in face of the hopelessness inculcated by the authorities, our job is to argue for life. The authorities are attempting to cultivate a sense of inevitability around their inhumanism. None of this is inevitable, all of it is a matter of political choice.
Choose life!
I have spent a lifetime encouraging others to do precisely this, in face of those - lacking any genuine ethical standpoint - have to catastrophize, pathologize, and moralise every crisis. It's emotional manipulation that, in time, not only exhausts people, it petrifies the innate morality. I deliver this message in my Tolkien and Dante studies in particular. Those who do not have your best interests at heart attempt to create a false sense of inevitability, inducing into despair and paralysis. You should always remember that these neurotics are ultimately weak, impotent, without positive solutions. Hence their politics of fear and force - a politics so low as to be an anti-politics. I'm not despairing, for the reason I see how small, mean, and tawdry these characters are. They are beatable. As the Deuternomist says: "choose life!"
This age is choosing death, a choice based in politics and power devoid of morality and humanity.
If the Assisted Dying bill passes its final stage “we will have introduced a chilling new cost-benefit analysis framework for healthcare, and we won’t be able to take it back” (Kathleen Stock). What incentive is there to give people ‘costly’ care when a much cheaper and ‘inevitable’ option exists? Assisted dying makes it easier and more convenient for ‘society’ to give up on living in a state of dependency and dispose of those most in need. And yes – logical fallacies be damned – it is a slippery slope. Human beings are socially and naturally dependent creatures, with the result that dependency is on a continuum. Dispose of the neediest first, and there will always be others to take their place on execution row.
As for the Guardian reading liberal view that the real problem is social media, misinformation, and communication .. (‘the government doesn’t speak human,’ John Harris), spare me. The idea that the problem is language is a denial of the reality of very real problems, yet another excuse for evasion.
The real problem is that the living standards of working class people have been deliberately eroded, and their communities and wealth of connections deliberately destroyed.
Ah yes, the 'clever' people who think that the real problem is "misinformation," the people who want social media and freedom of speech controlled and curtailed, the people who want to carry on ignoring the social roots of the real problem, left they be forced to admit their own culpability, the people whose material interests are being served by present arrangements, and who like to conceal their class interest behind a virtuous public image. They advance principles and policies that cost them nothing and gain them much, and which gain others nothing and cost them everything. The cover has been blown on the new "Left" - it isn't Left at all. I hate to say it, but it needs saying : Marxists like Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, Terry Eagleton, Istvan Meszaros were saying it clearly in the 1980s: it is "the cultural logic of late capitalism" (the title of a book from 1985). The linguistic and cultural turn away from socio-economic issues is a turn away from the working class, but not class: it expresses the class interests of those who have a dominant position in the new class structure. Leftist principles here are ideological, concealing private interest behind a public image.
“My objections to Assisted Dying are on record, but leaving ethics aside and talking only of mood music: I don’t think I’ll ever get over Labour allowing ‘state killing of pensioners and disabled’ to be the national focus for months to come. What a brand. What strategic geniuses” (Kathleen Stock).
As much as I admire Kathleen Stock in some things – her stand on the reality of biological sex in particular – I am bewildered by people who think this an aberration – the state socialists of the Fabian stripe were enthusiastic eugenicists who expressed a deep and murderous loathing of the working class. It always struck me as psychologically significant that eugenicists like Sydney and Beatrice Webb never had any children of their own, and seemed obsessed about the sex lives of the working class. If we reduce life to the survival of the fittest, I would suggest that insipid middle class and upper middle class drips like the Webbs were much less fit than those who were able to produce and raise large families on a pittance. The wrong class of people have been in charge. That remains true to this day.
It never ceases to amaze me how shocked and surprised people are at the Labour Party. Do people not read? Maybe I have an advantage in that my first degree is in history, and studied the early twentieth century in depth. Read up on the first two Labour governments of the 1920s, obsessing over cutting the pitifully low doles paid to the unemployed as - they argued - a condition of the solvency of British finances, even having doctors measure the stumps of First World War veterans to assess exactly how much (how little) their disability was worth. Kathleen stock is an intelligent woman, former professor of philosophy, and yet is shocked and surprised at how bad Labour are. I expected nothing less from them. The only thing I continue to ponder is the extent to which people retain any faith at all in parties that have been abusing them since ever. They are what they are and can be no other - for years these governments have sought to blame others for both their ineptitude and their deliberate choices, the IMF, the "gnomes of Zurich" and always the trade unions (In Place of Strife 1967, "the enemy within"). Capitalism can survive any crisis so long as the working class accept paying the price or - more likely - the middle class accept the working class having to pay the price. We've had decades of this. Did you think such failure could go on forever?
People: can we have good jobs, decent wages, lower cost of living, support for families, stable communities, a better return for our taxes, less crime, a future to look forward to?
Government: have you considered dying?
Many a true word spoken in jest.If you didn't know it before, you should know it now. The government - these governments - are as empty as the economic system they protect and serve. Not bankrupt - take a good look at the income increase for the top 1% this past 40 years. Just empty. They can't deliver the things decent people once took for granted - a decent job, a regular income, support for those raising families, a house, a safe social environment, a future for your children, (the ability to afford having children). Get rid of them, before they get rid of you. They really are hopeless, they have nothing to offer. I remember saying it in the eighties, then the nineties, having to suffer oafs like Polly Toynbee say "hold your nose and vote Labour." How did Blair do, again? And note Toynbee's role in this debacle. Move them all on.What gets me most of all about all the "clever" people wrecking the nation is just how mediocre they all are. To call them midwits is to credit them with more intelligence than they actually have. They are so stupid they probably think A.C.Grayling is a genius.
When the disabled are dehumanised, the elderly eschewed, the suicidal shoved, and the poor pressured, nobody will be able to say they didn’t expect this.
You were warned with every step you took along the way.
It has been said that Christians will become known as the weirdos who refuse to kill their young and their old, their needy and vulnerable.
So be it – it is hard to think of a more fitting witness to Christ.
Those who express perplexity as to the image of Christ on the cross may one day have to learn the lesson the hard way.
Sad to say, I've reached the stage where all I'm saying is "I told you so", and said so many, many years ago. I don't know if people don't get it, or don't want to get it: if you don't have a solution, then you may be inclined to deny the existence of a problem, or obsess over solutions to other problems.But, yes, on issue after issue, the warnings have been issued. People preferred to believe in the Thatcherite "economic miracle" in the 1980s, globalisation in the 1990s, and whatever in the 2000s - the warnings in the previous decades ought to have been enough. MacIntyre was warning in 1981 what was to come, arguing that men and women of good will need to turn away from the centres of barbarian power and set to work on "the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness." "Imagine no religion ..." as that dreary John Lennon song goes... We were warned that things might not turn out as rosy as that My Little Pony of philosophical statements promised. Nietzsche foresaw the coming cruelty in a world that lives after God and virtue. In "The Will to Power" he declares: “The biblical prohibition 'thou shalt not kill' is a piece of naïveté compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate'. Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no 'equal rights,' between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter - or the whole will perish. - Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted - that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!”The statement is so extreme as to seem designed not merely to incite reflection but cause people to return to that which is scorned, only this time with renewed conviction.
Labour MP Cat Eccles made the most grotesque intervention in the assisted-dying debate. On live TV, she said it was "coercion" when families persuade their loved ones "not" to kill themselves. Then she claimed she had not said it / her words had been distorted. When challenged to the effect she had been quoted accurately, she disappeared. These people are not just immoral, they are cowards, they kill by stealth. They are out to create false necessities and inevitabilities, hiding behind a new ‘nature.’
Then we have her defenders, asking what she has got wrong: "How is she wrong? It's the person in question's life, not the families." A perfect statement of a liberalism that has made an idol of choice. A society raised on this basis will soon cease to be a society. Are we there yet? The culture is morally rotten.
Catch them out, call them out, hold them to account, and they claim to have been misrepresented. There has been no misrepresentation. Unless you want to live in a world where telling someone you love that they are not a burden and the fact that you don’t want them to take their own lives is considered ‘coercion.’ That is genuinely psychopathic. Eccles claims she was misrepresented. I listened and I read, and I don’t see where Eccles was misrepresented. She was caught out and realised the indefensible immorality of her claims, and so resorted to the usual defence of misrepresentation out of context. Eccles attacked journalist Madeline Grant to this effect, and Grant hit back robustly: ‘This is “precisely” what you said. You say that the most common form of “coercion” observed is people trying to talk loved-ones out of it. Perhaps you’d like to retract these awful remarks but I haven’t misrepresented you at all.”
Eccles did indeed describe the concern of family members as “coercion,” and did indeed express disapproval of such concern.
Barrister and lawyer Stephen Barrett checked Eccles’ words:
“I listened to the piece, Madeline. The suggestion you have misrepresented anything is wrong and an insult. You remain a highly respected and respectable journalist. I’m getting bored of the fake shame-peddlers.”
These people lie. They do it as a matter of routine now. You have to keep calling them out and holding them to account. They are out to wear you down. They keep returning.
I note that four out of four of the Green MPs voted for Assisted Dying. It’s a low number of MPs, admittedly, but that 100% record was the highest of all parties. The Liberal Democrats were next at 85% Labour were at 58%, the Conservatives at 19%
"It's time to cull the herd," an environmentalist told me in 2016, thinking he was amongst friends. He was. There was general agreement. Apart from me. Speaking for "the herd," as one of "the herd," I asked which government he was prepared to hand that power to. He said that there are "indirect means." You bet there are. I'm unfriendly towards death-cults. I took my leave of Green politics.Friends had warned me over the years that I was being overly generous in ignoring the more obvious flaws in the hope that people who never learn might actually learn. They were right. But at least I got out before their lunacy broke out into the open. I saw they were hopeless and let my membership lapse. I didn't make an issue of it. My own poor judgement in the first place. The environment deserves better.The Greens should rename themselves The Soylent Green Party.OK, it's a small sample. And yet this was precisely what I expected, for some reason ...The worst part is that these moral oafs are making the environment available for appropriatuon by the corporate form. They are either so deficient in political economy as not to know it, or they do know it.I no longer care to work out which, seeing at the end is still the same - the final enclosure of nature under the pretext of saving it.Three or four years ago I challenged a Green "friend" on the political economy behind the large-scale climate programmes - who has the power and resources to drive these programmes through. I'd known him for over ten years. He unfriended and blocked me without a word. I find that evasion deeply suspicious.I remain an ecologist, a protector of nature against commodification and monetisation. I also underline the importance of the social ecology and the moral ecology.It seems the only people with any moral fibre are true socialists and true conservatives.As for the rest ... at least the pagans had some interesting and exciting gods. The gods are just idols made out of our own powers, not nature but its reification via tools and technics. A lot of people still have no idea how deep the crisis we face is, they focus only on the obvious physical manifestations. (E.F.Schumacher said the same thing decades ago. People raved about his "Small is Beautiful," but so missed the point that he had to write "A Guide for the Perplexed" as a follow up. They are still perplexed.)
“My work allows me to study care for 1000s of frail vulnerable disabled poor, mostly women, too many alone and also cognitively challenged. These are the people most at risk for abuse by assisted suicide laws. Abuse by misguided individuals or people with actual bad intentions including healthcare providers.
This UK effort is a suicide path with the trigger and gun provided by the government.
I see no viable controls: doctors and courts are ineffective in stopping abuse as shown by too many countries [the government sees such warning by way of hard experience as potential and promise – this abuse is what they want with regard to the needy and the vulnerable].
And the NHS has many gaps in end of life care … you can read the government data and exposés by respected media on multiple failures to provide support to those in need.” (Deborah Hammond).
The people pushing for and supporting this bill reside in a bubble world, constituting a comfortably-off ‘elite’ class which considers every individual to have autonomy and agency and capable of exercising choice from a range of alternatives. They are describing themselves. By implication, those without such agency and autonomy are considered to be leading lives unworthy of being lived – they have effectively dehumanised and ‘othered’ those who do not fit the liberal identity, in preparation for their disposal.
Cover it all in the warm words of a politically neutral humanism and then listen as the liberal house cats purr in admiration. But, of course, these cats aren't sleepy and cuddly - they are ravenous tigers who will allow people and society to be eaten up, so long as they get their way. They have been doing precisely this for the past half century.
“Canada and the Netherlands aren’t my ideal societies, but I think they’re more dynamic and interesting places than most other societies that don’t have assisted suicide” (Richard Hanania). If we licence the state to eliminate all the uninteresting people I would suggest that these self-absorbed, self-seeking, hedonistic liberals would be top of the death list. This character knows nothing beyond his own pleasure and probably thinks all the biotechnology that culls the weak and honours the strong is ‘dynamic.’
“I said in parliament 25 years ago that the ‘Liverpool Pathway’ would pave the way to hell. Today a huge leap into the Inferno was taken by MPs. ‘The Lord hath set his cannon against self-slaughter’ said Shakespeare in Hamlet. Satan is smiling tonight. The state is now his accomplice” (George Galloway).
Quite. Don't get intimidated into humming and harring, reading everything for clauses and qualifications in order to meet or maintain the pretense of reasonableness - state it plainly.I've seen a number of religious and conservative folk say something like "after reading a million and more peer-reviewed articles on constitutional law and palliative care, I tentatively form the conclusion that maybe, perhaps, the safeguards on this bill might not be sufficient.” State the truth plainly - you will be abused and told your view is illegitimate anyway.I remember the "Liverpool Pathway" well. I can't believe it was that long ago. Imagine being given a quarter of a century to refound and reorient a nation on stable foundations - and then see Blair, Brown, Cameron et al. I didn't vote for any of them and told others what I tell people now. How did you think it was going to end?I remember the constant threats, coming thick and fast as I kept an eye on my dad all through his wretched emphysema. I'd keep his spirits up by sending choice words in the direction of the immoralists, and by doing everything to make him feel like he had all his old power and strength. These characters chip away at people's confidence, make them feel guilty for living, make them feel a burden. The inflict austerity as a price people have to pay for the greed of the rich and the incompetence/impotence of their political servants, then they turn people against one another in a fight for ever more scarce resources.I knew they'd get their way in the end - with all the "good enough" reasons designed for cowardly citizen accomplices to swallow. It's been the story of the past half century. A wretched generation in politics, wrote Tony Judt in his last book in 2015. He thought that generation was passing. Nope. It's raised another generation in its miserable, immoral, selfish, and craven image.I've read everything and everyone. Dante towers over the lot. He knew the Inferno was real. And the cowards who think education and intelligence is the solution to all our ills - the cowards who think their science can avoid politics and ethics - are called out for what they are in Dante. "No man sins wittingly," said Socrates. And the "enlightened" have repeated this throughout the ages. Wrong. The lower one goes in the Inferno, the more you meet highly intelligent, highly educated people who used their knowledge and intellect to sin, knowing fine well the consequences that would befall others. Why the surprise? I see Alastair Campbell is in favour, positively gleeful indeed. I remember my favourite American writer Lewis Mumford accusing modern theologians of being weak and timid, saying he had to go to literature and the great writers - Dostoevsky for one - to find those prepared to recognise the reality of evil.Nearly five years since my dad died. He wasn't expected to live long after his diagnosis in 2000. I was honoured to have spent all those years from 2006 to 2019 with him. You learn something about life and fragility, something the self-seekers can never understand. I shall carry on railing against the inhumanists, knowing fine well the odds are heavily against. The barbarians are indeed ruling over us.[And, no, I don't support George Galloway, I just remember making an issue of the "Liverpool Pathway" at the time.]
I pay no attention to people who use terms like “right side of history” or “history won’t be kind.” My first degree is in history and know that people who argue thus are lying – history is not pre-determined, it is to be made. They don’t know. These statements are a proxy ethics. You can say what is right and what is wrong in the here and now.
We can call it out now.
As for “history won’t be kind,” I wouldn’t be so sure. Read up on the middle class and upper middle class “socialists” (! Don’t make me laugh) who were advocates and enthusiasts for eugenics. Even Bertrand Russell (a man who claimed that Rousseau led to fascism). These people think themselves reasonable and scientific (nearly all of them denouncing religion as a superstition rooted in fear). They keep their high reputations. I’m not so kind, whether we are speaking history or ethics.
“Many MPs, in five- or ten-years’ time, will claim sheepishly that ‘we didn’t know this would happen’, or ‘we didn’t vote for this’ when the disabled and the vulnerable are killed. But MPs cannot be allowed to claim ignorance.
They were warned, they knew exactly what would happen and they will have to assume moral responsibility for every single wrongful death that the Leadbeater bill will cause. History will not be kind to them.”
Catch yourself on! And quick. They know. The advocates know and what the rest of us see as warnings take as the promise. The supporters also know, and pretend not to by latching on “good enough” reasons – all the guff about safeguards.
As for history, I doubt they care. They don’t believe in God and divine judgement and an afterlife, they are all about feeding their oafish selves in the here and now. Job done, they don’t give a damn about how history judges them. Life is meaningless, human beings are just amoral balls of meat whirling in meaningless space. We have an entire civilisation built in their miserable image. And it’s falling apart.
Assisted dying patients could be made to pay to die, suggests Pat McFadden.
This takes more than the biscuit.
If you know me, you will have heard me say many times that this is precisely what will happen. If you have any money, the "authorities" will take it off you - and you die either way. Another revenue stream - death as a money spinner. Who would have thought it... (Anyone paying attention). Taxed to the hilt, nothing in return, bankrupted and bumped off. And they get away with it because - let's be honest - people have lost the fight. They in the routine of campaigns and protests, with slogans and banners. They have no idea how to organise to restructure power - they prefer "telling truth to power." Instead of protesting to power, reclaim and reorganise it!
The moral and intellectual calibre of politicians is not high.But the malaise goes much deeper than parliamentary debates and numbers.The euthanasia fight is far from over. There are enough undecided MPs to protest the old and the sick, protect the soul of the medical profession, and protect life. But I will still underline that this vote expresses a moral malaise deep within modern culture - and has to be attacked at that level. The problem lies in a culture that has made an idol of choice and self-interest and self-service. And that can't be beaten or overturned by any vote.
The problem with the Assisted Dying bill is not simply that people don’t realize that they will quickly lead to the involuntary euthanizing of those who appear to be worthless: the deeper problem is that people know this and – overtly or covertly – support it. Including the people who are very quick to accuse all who deviate from the liberal orthodoxy of being fascist.
Many MPs said they voted in favour of assisted suicide because of concerns about people dying in agonising pain. The Bill makes no mention of pain. As drafted, assisted dying would become legal for someone who is terminally ill but pain free or whose pain is being controlled effectively. The only criteria will be that they ask to be helped to die.
Did they even read the bill? Did they even know what they were voting for? I don't think we are sending the brightest and best to parliament.
The mainstream parties treat voters as fodder.
There is now a tidal wave of people who think that Britain is going fast in the wrong direction: rising crime, declining living standards, rising taxes, failing public services, no housing, invasion-levels of immigration, the destruction of community cohesion.
I gave up on the lot of them in the early 1990s and have been waiting for the penny to drop with most others. It says something about passivity and outsourcing responsibility that so many had to wait until a country was brought to the brink of collapse before threatening to call time. You've been having your bluff called since the 1980s, and maybe even since the 1960s, as the Long Boom came to an end. You have to set the Second World War in the context of the Great Depression and a National Government talking about the "purifying fires of deflation" (that was Philip Snowden, Labour Chancellor, who joined Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in the National Government). War and destruction came, then rebuilding, the Long Boom. And then the system ran dry again. All along, people went along with politicians who were coasting on an expansion that couldn't last. Have you got what it takes to reclaim and reorganise sovereign power? Does anybody know how to build anything, a system of governance that is democratic and works? An economy that is viable and meets the needs of the people? Because it's all but official now - the people you keep electing don't have your best interests at heart at all. I've seen family members constantly switching between parties, as if the things they are seeking are a matter of choice in a political market place. No.
A 95 year old woman who broke her hip was left for five hours in the cold after being told she was not a priority. And yet there are people who claim that Assisted Dying is safe.
I spent nine hours in A&E waiting to be checked, after a two hour wait for the ambulance called by the doctor concerned with heart attack symptoms. I checked myself out vowing never to return. You are better off getting your granny to do you a poultice. Highest tax burden since ever, and nothing works. Oh, and I have been told "you are low priority." "Low priority as in no priority" I stated back - to a confirming silence. You can keep looking away - or keep burying your heads in your causes and crusades. People on the receiving end don't have that luxury.As for the taxes, defund, refund, reclaim sovereign power, reorganise from proximal relations upwards: expand outwards from individual, family, neighbourhood and community. The problem is that Western nations are saddled with post-national leaders who prioritise ‘global welfare’. This is an inversion of proper order: the concept of subsidiarity holds that you love your family, then your neighbour, then your community, up to your fellow citizens in the rest of the nation, and then the rest of the world. The inversion of that principle will lead to the destruction of the nation and its smaller communities and loyalties.
We are saddled with governments who see the taxpayer as a charity. They want to take as much money as possible to give away to international causes it values, regardless of what the voters want.
Lewis Goodall criticises Danny Kruger MP for arguing that the Assisted Dying bill will create a ‘state suicide service.’ He claims that this is ‘inflammatory language.’ We can see why proponents of the bill would seek to conceal its immorality and inhumanism behind neutral language, rendering the whole issue anodyne and bloodless. They want people to silence the inner voice of conscience. And their claim to neutrality is false. Assisted Dying is not a medical term. The Netherlands and Belgium still describe it as euthanasia.
In such claims to be dispassionate and expert we see the trademark cowardice and duplicity of that "enlightened" class of people who like to translate all issues into politically and ethically neutral terms, hiding their political and value preferences behind "science." All issues of class, inequality, power, resources, and control scotomized.
Every single one of the 350+ disability rights groups in the UK united to oppose Assisted Dying. But most members of parliament refused to listen.
I could add the concerns expressed by the National Autistic Society and other autism organisations. The NAS's treasurer, Kathleen Desmond, said that people with autism can be among the most vulnerable members of society, raising concerns with respect to the new legislation. Quite. And I note that the NAS appeals for help and support for autistic people have fallen on deaf ears. Who listens to autistic people? Or any people in need? Who listened to people in working class communities thrown on the scrapheap? So long as people are earning, they neither look nor listen nor learn. The only time some people became aware of people who have been "left behind" was when they had the temerity to vote "leave" in the EU referendum - earning the height of abuse for registering their discontent with a status quo that has condemned them to a miserable existence. Some people don't want the dispossessed - Brel's "Les Désespérés" - to be either seen or heard; they don't want their votes to be counted, they don't want them to have a voice, they don't want them around, period. Many of them think themselves leftist or left liberal. I am here to tell them they are not. And that's the polite version.The vulnerable have enough to cope with. Additional thoughts of being a burden on society or a financial drain on resources due to the ‘Yes’ vote is unconscionable.
At a time when social care is chronically underfunded, and many disabled people are unable to afford essentials, this legislation sends a chilling message: the government prioritises the right to die over the right to live, and is prepared to divert resources from Assisted Living to Assisted Dying.
There are people in this world who really have no idea how lucky they are (you may call it privilege, even entitlement, when it refers to the people who are used to getting their way, and insist on it, regardless of costs to others.) Disability Rights UK's full statement on the passing of the "Assisted Dying" bill.
“There are a lot of very disappointed veteran Labour MPs on the backbenches who don’t recognise this as a particularly Labour government” (Rosie Duffield).
"After 7.5 years in the House, I did not get to speak, on behalf of all those who've written, for even 3 minutes, on one of the most important and contested Private Members' Bills we've had... Proof that this is NOT the way for us to legislate on these matters" (Assisted Dying Bill).Rosie Duffield is one of the few MPs I have any time for. Not only is she on nodding terms with reality, she is courageous enough - or honest enough - to speak out against the myriad lunacies now being inflicted on us. That speaking the simple truth can be described as courageous indicates how far we have fallen.That said, she is old enough - and the veterans older still - to have learned that the problems with Labour go deeper than a "mass hypocrisy" and betrayal. When something is consistent and systematic and continuous, then we are entitled to draw conclusions as to the enduring essence of that something, something more than accident. In history and politics classes, we were taught to examine institutional and structural questions, to go further than surface level claims and accusations. The history of the Left in politics has been accompanied by accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy from the start. Those levelling the accusations need to learn lessons here, and learn them quick. The good, decent, honest, and honourable people need to shed their illusions. I'm not "disappointed" by Labour - I expected precisely this from them. Are people still so soft and simple as to think Blair's minimum wage and Sure Start places were worth PFI, not to mention illegal and immoral wars? Know what you are dealing with. It's no time for wishful thinking and illusion.[I would also note the abuse that Rosie Duffield has received from the nice and kind people over the years].
With the Orwellian world getting worse by the day, leading in the direction of totalitarian regimes, Assisted Dying will not be so much a slippery slope as a helter skelter. The Rubicon was a small stream, but one that crossed over into an entirely different world.
Note how state-funded Channel 4’s Dispatches portrayed the disabled at the same time as this bill.
It was calculated and coordinated and more than an insult.It is well-nigh impossible - without help (a barely existent help, undertaken by overworked and overwhelmed volunteers) - for disabled people to access the support they need to survive. And when they succeed, they still face a pushback.I was told by the mother of an autistic son that after diagnosis prepare to fight, fight, and fight again. The system is engaged in a war of attrition against those in need. Wearing people down and out by exhaustion, engendering hopelessness.As to the question: why is the wealth and power of the supperich never targetted? Is that too difficult for the people who do politics 24/7, who are engaged in constant crusading to demand "government" "action"?I was once advised by a campaigner/crusader of one the causes of the day to cease using the word "revolution" because it would deter the people whose resources were needed to finance ambitious programmes of reform. He meant the rich and powerful, the people whose actions and interests generated the problems we are now charged with solving. Evidently, only the rich and powerful are now allowed to use the words "revolution" and "system change." The result will not be the societal transformation required to resolve the problems we face, more of a palace plot and coup which keeps the pillars of the building standing. And problems will continue to intensify. In the meantime, the most vulnerable and in need of help and support will go to the wall first.But the canaries have been telling you this for the past half century.
The government and the rest of Westminster are getting in the ‘benefits Britain’ narrative in early because they know that unemployment is about to rise big time. The jobs out there aren’t real jobs that pay – agency, part time, and pseudo-self-employment.
As per usual. I got out of "the system" years ago, having seen the utter futility and pretence of it all. It started in the early 1980s with the first Margaret Thatcher government, continued with Blair and then Cameron and A4E and "nudging." I felt that in time people would come to realise they were being had, but now see that too many are content with the fake "help" offered by successive governments, content to believe that something is being done when nothing is being done…
“As psychiatrists, we’re at the frontline of assessing mental state, capacity, and potential coercion in complex assisted dying cases. Our expertise is going to matter for safeguarding vulnerable people. Why exclude the Royal College of Psychiatrists from these vital discussions?” (Sergi Costafreda Gonzalez). Quite simply because they will offer evidence and expert testimony against the bill. Certain people want this bill at any cost – any cost to others.
I don’t for one second believe that Kim Leadbeater wrote the Assisted Dying Bill or that it came from her own personal conviction. She is plainly out of her depth, contradicting herself continually. For some reason we can speculate on, she is being used to push it through. But there is no way that she has masterminded it. She is completely out of her depth and in a hurry.In fact, I seriously doubt any of the labour MPs have the intellect to draft, let alone meaningfully contribute to, their own Bills or Policies. This is why they respond to questions with the same recycled soundbites and no depth.So you are left having to identify what nefarious forces are at work behind the political floorshow.And you are challenged with the task of expositing them and rooting them out.If you are citizens worthy of a democracy.This bill is being driven through.Kim Leadbeater writes – all evidence to the contrary:“Very positive first formal meeting of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill Committee. Another session of oral evidence was timetabled to ensure the committee will hear from a wide range of witnesses, both orally & in writing, for this next stage of scrutiny & debate.”That’s a pack of lies. We are ruled by liars with agendas.What scrutiny?You’re sitting in secret, with no transcript, you’ve clumsily loaded the witnesses to your favour, you’re running scared of any dissenting opinion.Does she actually understand what the word ‘scrutiny’ means?What does a “wide range” of witnesses look like to her?Are her words scripted by someone else?Gaslighting. Why is she so afraid of openness? The bill is poorly drafted and is being railroaded through. Which tells you that somebody somewhere wants it, regardless.She has blocked critics from speaking. And wants committee hearings to be behind closed doors. Only handpicked contributors in a closed environment.Just a one-sided echo chamber. Pointless. Who is funding this, why and how do we stop it? It's a private members bill.Does this all form part of the Labour Government’s commitment to reduce waiting lists and increase bed space? And much else besides.The only positive thing that has come out of your first formal meeting is that any MP with a conscience who voted for the Bill will now hopefully wake up to the reality of your duplicity in trying to hoodwink the public that this is some sort of noble crusade when it is anything but.I suggest your Committee looks at Canada and get a glimpse of the dangerous road you are hellbent on following regardless of the impact to the public. The reality is there are no safeguards in the Bill and if anything the public need safeguarding from you. I further suggest that they know and Canada’s abuses are the plan.Proponents of this momentous change to society and the state are being arrogantly, and deliberately, opaque at every stage of the process. They succeed because society has been divided up and broken down, lost its moral compass, disempowered. If a society can't spot threats to its health, especially among its rulers, and act to check them, it is already in substantial part dead.Tory MP Kit Malthouse-sponsor of the Leadbeater bill - reminds the House that Assisted Dying will save money: "We must remember that the status quo is not cost-free". Hiding behind the mask of compassion and autonomy is utility.Who is he talking about?I would say that the mask slips, but there was never much of a mask in the first place.So where the outrage in an age of 24/7 outrage.This society has its priorities the wrong way round.
Leadbeater has stacked the deck on assisted dying. It seemed clear from the start that she had only one aim in mind. This wasn't a topic to be discussed critically and thoughtfully but a campaign to push through legislation, sweeping aside all opposition.
Offering patients suicide to save money for the NHS. Is that what doctors went into medicine for?
Kim Leadbeater's assisted suicide committee was already a gerrymandering exercise; now she is pretending to be grievously offended when MPs reasonably wonder why it chooses to discuss vital matters in private. Disgraceful behaviour. "How dare you question my decisions or imply I'm acting in bad faith?" says woman who lied and lied, then stacked the committee to exclude practically every experienced MP opponent with relevant professional expertise! There is no way this is her doing, she's fronting and clearly doesn't have the brains. The whole way it has been carried out is a disgrace.
The people who lied over Southport are asking us to trust them with a new legal power to kill us. Know what barbarians are ruling over you. Their every instinct is to lie and cover-up and do things in secret. “When the upper class is willing to sacrifice the poor - it’s indicative of something truly hideous beneath the surface”.
And still people look away, remain silent, or rationalize – it is not their problem, yet. We are beyond failing here. We are not only looking at a falling state but a falling society.
Comments