Polly's pop at a "pitiless God" distorts my argument

There’s more than one argument for opposing assisted dying.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A hand rest gently on another outstretched hand.

Alexander Grey on Unsplash.

I hesitate to have a pop at the venerable Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, partly because I like and admire her work. And partly, in this new media environment in which my enemy’s friend is my troll, I fear aligning myself with foam-flecked righties who use words like “Guardianista” and “wokerati”.

But she wrote a column late last week about assisted suicide that was just plain wrong. And, actually, I think she’s being profoundly illiberal on the subject, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

Assisted suicide – voluntary euthanasia, assisted dying, call it what you will – was a hobby horse of mine some 15 years ago when I wrote a book against it. Slightly more recently, Toynbee and I were on a broadcast interview together on an entirely unrelated subject when, to the bemusement of the presenter, she suddenly raised assisted dying to have a go at me. It was quite flattering.

Anyway, last week’s Toynbee column was of a kind, dismissing the anti-euthanasia case as the province of religious nutcases (presumably like me). Consider this massive straw man of a sentence: “Only God can decide how long we should suffer before death comes at a time of his pitiless whim, they say.”

I’m used to this, though not from Toynbee. Debating assisted suicide, it’s only a matter of minutes before someone will say that I shouldn’t impose my “sanctity of life” beliefs on other people. Eh? I’ve never used that phrase in this context (whatever it may mean). In fact, my views on assisted suicide are entirely secular, though informed by a faith that respects the primacy of compassion for and defence of the most vulnerable in our society.

I believe that a jurisdiction that enshrines in its legislature the principle that some lives are more worth living than others takes us into very dangerous moral territory. Related to that, a two-tier structure for the value of human life in the medical professions is abhorrent. That’s why I say that to despatch the weakest and most vulnerable among us is unacceptably illiberal.

The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way.

A bill will come back to parliament to change the law to allow assisted suicide this autumn. With new PM Keir Starmer in favour and a very different configuration of the House of Commons post-election, its chances of passing are said to be high.

But even Lord Falconer, the parliamentary poster-boy for assisted suicide, who convened a ludicrous “independent” commission in 2012 stuffed with euthanasia enthusiasts and useful idiots, has accepted that no so-called safeguards can entirely ensure that no lives will be lost to malfeasance or malpractice.

So, my question to Falconer and Toynbee is this: How many unnecessary lives lost to assisted suicide is enough to have what you want? 100? 50? One? Another number?

It’s commonplace for deeply distressing accounts of agonising deaths to be rehearsed in support of assisted suicide. Toynbee did so last week. But as Falconer must (or should) know, hard cases make bad law. The only focus here should be on how best to ensure that no one need die a bad death.

For Falconer and his supporters the solution is to legislate so that terminally ill patients can be helped to kill themselves. But speaking to end-of-life medical professionals, such as Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, many of whom claim that advances now mean that bad deaths are vanishingly few, it’s clear that the UK’s world-leading palliative care has in sight the day when no one need die a bad death.

That’s no comfort to someone who is suffering at the end of their life right now. But assisted suicide puts that palliative care target in jeopardy, when it makes death a form of medical treatment. Look at the record – the Netherlands now allows assisted suicide for those who are simply “tired of life”. That’s not where end-of-life care should go.

The burden of proof under the Suicide Act (1961) lies with the defendant, who currently faces a maximum jail sentence of 14 years for assisting or encouraging a suicide. Those who have demonstrated that they have acted with compassion and consent have in turn been treated with compassion and leniency in the application of the law. Invert that burden of proof, with the Crown needing to prove that an unscrupulous relative or friend coerced a victim into suicide, and we’re into a fresh hell of moral jeopardy.

The law works as it stands. The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way. Again, as we might expect Toynbee to know, that is wholly illiberal.

It looks like the assisted suicide lobby will get what they want this year. It will be hailed as a great liberal social reform. Doubtless they will find it in their hearts to forgive me if I continue to demur.

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Leading

Politics

12 September 2024

4 min read

From Blair and Britpop to Starmer and the Oasis comeback: why character, not personality, matters

We get both the leaders and entertainers we deserve.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tony Blair talks to a member of Oasis at a reception.

Number 10.

Last time we had a new Labour prime minister, there were no Partygate fears in Number 10. Quite the opposite. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia project threw its front door open to the likes of Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher of Oasis at a bash in 1997. Inheriting a rising economy, things for New Labour, as well as for Oasis, could only get better.

This time around, Sir Keir Starmer has “tough decisions” to make, such as trying to deny a universal winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Blair arguably never had a really tough decision to make, until his Iraq war nemesis. Since then, Oasis has turned into an unacceptable face of capitalism, as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next year turns into a Ticketmaster greed-fest of “dynamic pricing”. Diabolical pricing, more like.

Starmer and Blair both aspired to usher in an era of change and renewal. The similarity of their circumstances ends there. Nearly 30 years on, Starmer is in a different world. And the transformation of Oasis is totemic of that – from the joys of Britpop to the horrors of rip-off.

That times change is axiomatic. The nineties had busts and booms; the UK’s Black Wednesday currency crisis was of the former, the snarky underclass anthems of Oasis a paradigm of the latter. Now, in the 2020s, there are only busts. Like the note left in the Treasury drawer in 2010 joked, there really is no money left now. Except, apparently, for Oasis.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him.

An engaging question arises as to how the two Labour PMs were and are equipped spiritually for the times in which they lead. The spiritual state of Oasis is a linked matter, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Blair’s government famously didn’t “do God”, though it turned out he did privately, converting to his wife’s Roman Catholicism almost immediately after leaving office in 2007. Perhaps he had a priest hole in the family flat above Number 11. He consistently denied claims that he prayed with American president George W. Bush before or during the Iraq war.

Starmer doesn’t do God rather more formally, as a self-declared atheist. We can conclude that prayer is not a resource that he needs as he faces a more challenging immediate political future than Blair’s early days as PM. I only wish Starmer would appear in a T-shirt with the slogan “No Prayer, Like Blair”.

Arguably the spiritual life doesn’t matter for any leader. The job of PM is all about simple competence, mostly in money management. To paraphrase the pithy quip from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (on which Blair’s so strategically relied), it’s all about the economy, stupid.

So the worship is of mammon rather than God. Here the current and former PMs might care to track the career trajectory of the two Lords Gallagher of Oasis from Blair to Starmer. In 1997, they were in their pomp as authentic Mancunian working-class heroes. Today, the brothers have to make up and go back on the road to subsidise Noel’s £20million divorce settlement. A rather different demographic.

There’s perhaps no great political lesson there for political leaders, but it’s almost Faustian in its scope. See what happens when you bank only with mammon.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. It doesn’t matter, to his core vote, what he’s done or what he’s incapable of doing, Only who he is. He’s an idol, a cult image, a golden calf. Trump’s bull is sacred, whatever he does.

The UK thankfully hasn’t had one of those yet (though there were warning tremors in Boris Johnson). But it’s telling that Blair is said to have developed a messianic tendency after his premiership’s early intervention in Kosovo during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the termination of hostilities, crowds there sought to touch his clothes as he passed.

Strange that being touched should make him feel untouchable. But that’s the way of messianics. It can be the same with rock & roll stars. Live music, at its best, can offer a transcendent sense of communion. At its worst, it’s the adoration of stage idols that sends them a little mad. Or mad for it.

Oasis’s Liam Gallagher isn’t in this together with his fans anymore. He’s turned into a Marie Antoinette figure online in response to the ludicrous prices charged to watch him from Ticketmaster. He substitutes “Shut up” and “£100,000 kneeling tickets” for “Let them eat cake”.

He and his brother are warnings of what can happen in so short a period between the ascendancy of Blair and that of Starmer. True, pop stars aren’t as dangerous as someone such as Trump. But they do show us that we get both the entertainers and the leaders we deserve.