Assisted dying debate – forget about killing patients and focus on quality palliative care

My dying wish is my family won’t see me suffer and I won’t have to,” says one of the posters on the London Underground from the well-funded Dignity in Dying.

You’d seem a bit heartless if you opposed that, so it’s no surprise that at present — with a crusade led for months by the likes of the popular and compelling Esther Rantzen — these days around two-thirds of the British public are favour of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life Bill for England and Wales), which will be debated perfunctorily in the House of Commons tomorrow.

Assistance is a cosy concept, after all. All that is being asked for — in the name of compassion — is the right for caring professionals to be allowed to put an end to suffering.

But what assisted dying should be called is assisted suicide. For surely, if you sit by the bedside of a loved one who is close to death, holding their hand, mopping their brow, giving them sips of water and reading them uplifting poems or prayers, is that not assisting them to die?

So, of course, is the palliative medical care, which assists people with serious illnesses to cope with their symptoms and stress.

Handing them a prescribed lethal pill to see them off, is actually assisted suicide. Or, indeed, assisted killing.

I agree with all those who believe that the state should not be in the business of killing their people. I always hated capital punishment even of terrible people. You don’t have to believe in God to value the message that every human life matters. Or to think that redemption is possible for everyone.

What I don’t accept is that life should be made free of any suffering. A whole generation has been seriously damaged by being taught that if you have any negative feelings you have mental health problems that require medical help.

The educational profession has failed to teach them about the importance of resilience, toughness, being stoical and just getting on with it.

You haven’t lived at all if you’ve never felt grief or pain. It is in learning how to deal with the hard parts of life that you truly appreciate the good.

I sound like a preacher, but it is at times like this, although I don’t believe in God, I deeply prize my Judeo-Christian roots and savour their wisdom.

And I am appalled by the mindlessness of the evangelical secularists. Lord Falconer, once the lord chancellor, complained that Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, had told her constituents that she thought the bill was “a slippery slope towards death on demand,” and that that the state “should never offer death as a service”.

Her religious beliefs should not “be imposed on everybody else”, said his lordship. But it is, apparently, fine to impose one’s secular beliefs.

Her religious beliefs should not “be imposed on everybody else”, said his lordship. But it is, apparently, fine to impose one’s secular beliefs.

I’ve been delighted to see leaders of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths protesting about the bill.

As Shakespeare encapsulated it in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

Our prime minister, who is making me nostalgic for most of his predecessors, seems to have no philosophy other than the small print of domestic legislation and international human rights law.

I am rejoicing that serious lawyers like ex-attorney general Dominic Grieve are pointing out that the proposed law, which Sir Keir Starmer encouraged and which looked fair to pass without much challenge, is now in great trouble. Apparently, it may prove incompatible with Sir Keir’s beloved Conventions on Human Rights.

Full marks to Wes Streeting, the secretary of sate carrying the burden of reforming the National Health Service, for raising a red flag and indicating that the proposed legislation is unaffordable.

Please, could the government do something useful, forget about killing patients, and give them good, traditional, kindly palliative care to ease them through dying?