My young friend Dr Cajetan Skowkronski has helped me resolve a question that has been worrying me. Why do supporters of ‘assisted dying’ insist that the best method is a cocktail of pills (or intravenous injection)? Their prescription has an air of medical respectability, but this is not a medical process. The sole aim in assisting suicide is to achieve the quickest, least painful death. In a Twitter thread of Swiftian brilliance, Dr Skowkronski has the answer: ‘At the height of the French Revolution,’ he writes, ‘when large volumes of Assisted Deaths were taking place for the sake of noble aims, a compassionate physician, Dr Guillotin, felt that many of the prevailing methods were cruel. [He] therefore proposed the use of an accurate and immediate method which spares the “patients” so many of the regrettable sufferings associated with other therapeutic options such as hanging, shooting, axing, burning or dismemberment.’ After ‘extensive trials’ in France, this ‘was adopted in many progressive countries’. Dr S feels that ‘As a 21st-century physician motivated by the same compassion… I see that prevailing “best practice” in jurisdictions where euthanasia is legal [is] inhumane, slow, and carries unacceptable complication rates’. He therefore urges that advocates of assisted dying be trained in ‘operating portable, modern guillotines to give their patients the very best care with instant effect’. Obviously, ‘Guillotine stigma is a hurdle we must overcome…But think about the stigma we have already overcome by reframing Doctors Killing Patients as an act of compassion which we now call Assisted Dying. Let’s execute change, together.’
Even if it were established that the net effect of the British Empire on people of African origin was negative, because of slavery, and even if the reparatory sums involved could be computed, and even if the living victims could be correctly identified, and even if the British taxpayer could afford reparations – hypotheses which pile Pelion on Ossa – a further question would remain. Do reparations work? Their most famous effect came after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. There was little doubt that Germany’s aggressive war had caused appalling death, damage and expense to the victorious allies, so the cause of reparatory justice seemed strong. (‘Make Germany pay!’) Unlike in the case of slavery, the German case was current, with evidence available from the living. But people soon realised that reparations were crushing German recovery, making payback impossible and producing a grievance on which extremist politicians fed. After the second world war, therefore, the victorious allies (well, the western ones) saw the recovery of a prosperous, democratic Germany as their task. If Germany was not collectively punished for its murderous Nazi oppression of a continent immediately after it happened, what possible case could there be for trying to gouge money out of Britain now for a trade that was stopped the year after the death of Pitt the Younger?
From this week, there will be legally enforced ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics to prevent anti-abortion protestors distressing their customers. It certainly is unpleasant that demonstrators try to intimidate people of whom they disapprove, but few anti-abortion protestors use such tactics. Besides, the police should prevent all intimidation without special legal protection for one particular group. Last week, a pro-Palestinian mob set itself up right outside JW3, a north London Jewish community centre at which I have spoken in the past. Jewish people visiting their centre had to run the gauntlet of people screaming ‘Turn another Zionist around’, just like Arthur Scargill’s pickets in the 1980s shouting ‘Scab, scab, scab’ at miners trying to enter their pits. Why does the government want to protect abortion more than Jews?
In the 1980s, a new era in the life of museums began when the V&A decided to advertise itself as ‘an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’. It was a sort of joke; but, then again, it wasn’t. Something in the zeitgeist decided that cafés reign supreme. Ever since, attempts to emphasise the primary functions of cultural institutions have been made to look dowdy compared with the provision of skinny lattes. In this column in July, I wrote about the management of the London Library, which is determined to build a café on its top floor without ascertaining what its 8,000 members, of whom I am one, really want. Coffee mania goes with a certain politics, so it is perhaps superfluous to add that the library’s bust of Thomas Carlyle has been removed from display. Carlyle had undeniably unpleasant racial views, but he equally undeniably founded this amazing institution with the noble motive of accumulating thousands of books for serious study. For that he should still be honoured. There is now a movement among members who feel the café is being imposed upon them without it being clear how the money will be found, whether it will damage the budget for books and/or hike up the already very high membership fees. They do not want the library turned into a club, but to stick to its rule that it is a library for research. Its AGM is on 26 November. It seems that members will not be allowed to debate the café project in full on that occasion. If that proves the case, the critics want to call an extraordinary general meeting, and for that they need signatures. Any member who wants to help should contact Nicholas Pickwoad on librarymatters2024@gmail.com.
Hedgehogs have been redefined as a ‘near-threatened species’. The published reasons for their decline include habitat loss, depleted soil and pesticides. I wonder if another factor has been considered: where badgers multiply unculled, hedgehogs have a way of disappearing. Our neighbour, the great conservationist Philip Merricks, says he has ‘live trapped’ and redistributed more than 1,000 hedgehogs since erecting a badger-proof fence round his reserve.
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