The benefit of the Lords

Tiberius

I should be interested to hear her views on abortion on demand.

Sir Graphus

"I don't want to be a burden" said the aging grandfather with various chronic ailments in the £500k house.

"I can get you some pills, father", said his loving daughter, Goneril, while his other daughter, Regan, held his hand.

Helena Kennedy makes a crucial point.

Bluebottle

"It is a reminder of the benefit of having a chamber which contains so much expertise"

And then they go and spoil it all by sending a third rater there like Gorbals Mick. What's he an expert on? Pocketing expenses, that's what.

Anonymous

Her argument doesn't stand up. The anti-discrimination laws said people were no longer to act in a particular way. (Helena Kennedy might be correct to suggest that this has had a role in changing attitudes over time, though not as universally as the Baroness might like to think).

This law would simply say that people have the right - SHOULD THEY WISH - to end their lives. There is no compulsion or coercion on the part of the law for individuals to act in a certain way.

As a conservative, with a strong belief in the power of family and community, I take the view that families would support sick relatives until the very end, no matter how difficult that proves to be.

The pessimistic notion that a human being would be so malevolent as to pressurise a beloved relative to end their life so as to protect themselves from the burden of caring for them, and that the state therefore needs to step in to protect them, is a socialist concept.

bill

One of the reasons I studied and trained as a lawyer was because I wanted to gain a greater undstanding of what I could see had happened whilst I was growing up. Namely, that those with their hands on the legal tiller (politicians and lawyers) had wrought great legal, moral and cultural changes in our society, many of which had had a deleterious effect.

salieri

Well, expertise if you like, but you could more accurately say intelligence or independence of mind - the more so in comparison with a largely supine and thick lower house.

What interests me more is the view that 'changes in attitude' can and should follow changes in the law. Of course they do, in the sense that 'correct' attitudes become compulsory, and 'incorrect' attitudes are then visited with criminal sanctions. A libertarian would say, rather, that changes in the law ought to reflect changes in attitude - not dictate them. But that would be anathema to our ruling elite, whose perceived function is to foist their personal convictions on the rest of us. Gay adoption rights are one of many egregious examples.

Although personally opposed to the creeping introduction of euthanasia, I recognise that there is another legitimate (and sincere) point of view. But the law's function is NOT to send out 'powerful messages'. It is to uphold those principles that the majority in a genuine democracy wish to be upheld.

Mike, Brighton

Sir Graphus....and also

"These elderly are blocking NHS beds" said the Doctor

"Yes we need to take into account the cost/benefit of keeping them in the hospital versus ahem end-of-life assistance" said the NHS administrator checking boxes on his clipboard...

Sophia Pangloss

Baroness Kennedy is, as usual, spot-on with her defence of our individual rights, here the right to continued treatment and support at the end of life.

However, my abiding fear is to end my days in pain, fear and indignity, and my fears are not assuaged. Why can't we find a way to meet half-way, providing the right to control our deaths, alongside stringent safeguards against the coercion she and others believe the terminally ill shall suffer.

Make it 3 doctors, make it 4, let one of them be a psychiatrist. Insist on a pre-written declaration, give it a 5-year cool-off period.

Let there be obstacles to assisted suicide, but please don't let the financial power to travel to Switzerland be the one that stops some people and not others.

C Powell

You don't need "expertise" to say what she said; after all the ineffable Lady Warnock has lots of expertise and degrees and she's come out with plenty of rubbishy and morally incoherent and repulsive statements. And Lord Falconer himself is probably very clever but still proposed this ill-conceived measure. Intelligence and expertise do not automatically mean that you have a moral sense.

Interesting though that Helena Kennedy says that "Legal changes made for benign reasons can have unforeseen and negative consequences". The same might be said of a whole raft of Labour legislation which she has supported. It's about time we nailed the wrong-headed belief that because something was done with the best of motives/intentions it is necessarily A Good Thing. For instance, the Human Rights Act. No doubt it was done for the best of motives but the fact is that Britons had a freer society, more rights vis-a-vis the State before this wretched legislation than now. The passing of this legislation has been followed by the biggest assault on our freedoms and civil liberties that we've ever seen and now we have lost, for instance, the right to privacy, to use our phone or email without being spied on, the right to walk down city streets without being recorded on some database somewhere despite all the "rights" we've apparently been given. Sometimes it's best to live with our untidy /imperfect world than to try and tidy it up / rationalise it / improve it, which often makes things worse. Intelligent people are often the stupidest in understanding this.

Publius

The problem, it seems to me, is that in the past, those who now choose to take themselves off to Switzerland to drink a lethal barbiturate would have been able to obtain, and quietly unobtrusively take, the same kind of thing at home. The family doctor would have written an anodyne death certificate, and no questions would have been asked.

Now, however, in the interests of supposedly protecting people from themselves, these quiet and "unnoticed" options are no longer available.

The best way out of this would be if the appropriate drugs were quietly, privately obtainable. But the obsessive control of everything has gone too far for that.

Jeremy

"The consequence that concerns me...is that with this legal amendment we create a climate in which the terminally ill, the disabled and the elderly who are sick feel even more profoundly vulnerable or feel that there is an expectation that they should take steps to end their lives."

Conversely, might it not also be the case that amongst "the terminally ill, the disabled and the elderly who are sick" will be numbered those who have decided for themselves that they have suffered enough in life? And might they not feel a sense of gratitude that they live in a society which allows them to end their lives at the time and in the manner of their own choosing?

And would it not reflect creditably upon the society which allows them the means to deliver themselves from suffering further what they have already decided they have suffered enough?

Stephen

So Helena Kennedy is in favour of the continuation of pain and anguish for as long as possible? (So are church leaders, by the way.)

CCTV

Like so much else Germany has blazed this trail before us. It is worth reading up on the "T4 Programme" and the use of places like Hadamar, Sonnenstein, Hartheim, to make possible Hitler's 1924 commentary in Mein Kampf p. 282

"if there is no more power to fight for the own health, the right to live comes to an end."

Chris

>As a conservative, with a strong belief in the power of family and community, I take the view that families would support sick relatives until the very end, no matter how difficult that proves to be.

Alas, 'conservative' is sometimes spelled 'n-a-i-v-e f-o-o-l.'

Ben Gladstone

"... we create a climate in which the terminally ill, the disabled and the elderly who are sick feel..."

it's not for you to anticipate and control what they feel. let them have their own feelings and act on them - if you value liberty

JohnAnt

The point is that the elderly will be MADE to feel that they should die, by the subtle promptings of their greedy children and grandchildren, who believe that their own lives, fortunes, holidays and futures are so much more important than everyone else's.
A country in which mass hysteria persuades millions that they need never work or save for their old age, but absolutely must have a large property at any price, is quite capable of callous and selfish behaviour towards the elderly and sick.

Publius

I posted on this thread yesterday. It did not appear. Am I being censored?

Sir Graphus

JohnAnt is completely correct. At present, the expectation is that we'll do (that is doctors and families) everything we can to keep people alive, even in through the dubious end of life when quality of life is poor.

When people are allowed to die, the expectation will shift (slowly and subtly), so that old people who require an awful lot of help will be considered quite selfish for wanting to stay alive.

The steps along this way may seem compassionate and correct, but this is where we are headed, if Falconer's Bill is approved.

It's the equivalent of Scottish devolution.

In this case you end up with "Logan's Run", but without Jenny Agutter.

Pete Hoskin

Publius: sometimes comments don't get through to us, or don't show up on the site, for technical reasons. Will take a look in our system for yours now.

Pete Hoskin

Publius: it appears your comment got stuck in our system - apologies. I have now approved it, so it should be showing above.

If any comment fails to show in future, you can always email me on phoskin @ spectator.co.uk and I'll do my best to look into it.

Publius

@Sir Graphus and others
As I tried to say yesterday, in a post that seems not to have made it, the problem seems to me to step from an extension of control into too many aspects of one's life.

There was a time when one could quietly obtain suitably potent sleeping pills or similar barbiturates in sufficient numbers and quietly do away with oneself. But successive governments, seeking to protect us from ourselves, have cut off these avenues of relief and escape. The kind of drugs one needs are now pretty much impossible to obtain.

So, instead, people are reduced to the depressing expedient of taking themselves off to places like Switzerland, with all the difficulties it entails.

And the same big-state regulators and moralists who have so successfully saved us from ourselves, with the aid of more and more regulation and control, now have to face this question as a matter of public policy, whereas before it was a quiet and unobtrusive matter between oneself and one's maker.

So now we are left with all the tedious blather about slippery slopes and sending out messages that you refer to.

It is yet another consequence of the hyper-controlling state intruding into matters best left in the shadows.

Sir Graphus

Indeed Publius; soon, they say, everything will be either forbidden or compulsory.