Today the Assisted Suicide Bill returned to the House of Commons. Amid its many flaws and complications, perhaps most important is that it marks a landmark change in the state’s attitude to the sick, the weak and the vulnerable.
Leading the charge for the Bill are many wealthy, privileged liberals in the Esther Rantzen mould who, as they reach the end of lifetimes of total autonomy, cannot countenance the idea that the all-too-human world of pain, inconvenience and constraint might apply to them.
The assisted suicide debate has only highlighted Farron’s distance from this thought-world
This is a problem for one party in particular. Many Liberal Democrats in parliament and elsewhere view themselves as the true champions of the needy or overlooked. Wherever a neglected local library, footbridge or nature reserve stands, there you will find a Lib Dem wanting to bring its plight into the light.
Yet there is a curious blind spot – or rather paradox – when it comes to this, perhaps the most important debate of this parliament. While 100 per cent of charities, advocacy groups and local organisations speaking for the disabled and the vulnerable are against this change, 80 per cent of Lib Dem MPs voted in favour of the Bill. There are some important exceptions, including party leader Ed Davey and Richmond MP Sarah Olney, who provided important scrutiny on the Bill committee – but even these divisions are clearly causing acrimony. While Olney gave a forensic demolition of the Bill’s failings in the Commons this morning, Lib Dem colleague Christine Jardine huffed and rolled her eyes beside her.
Perhaps the person who has been most effective at calling out this wilful hypocrisy has been one of their own number – a former leader no less – Tim Farron. On X he posted:
I can see a libertarian case for the Bill, but not a liberal one. Liberals know that our rights must not be at the expense of others losing theirs.
(As it happens, I can see a strong libertarian argument against assisted suicide too; those concerned about the power, reach and incompetence of the state might not want it to be put in charge of running a suicide service!)
Given his colleagues’ overwhelming support for the Bill at the second reading last November, Farron’s tweet is quite the snub to them. It is also a useful corrective to those citing liberal ideals like ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ in the abstract without apparently considering more insidious forms of societal coercion. Even J.S. Mill, one of the architects of utilitarianism, presciently warned about the ‘tyranny of the majority’.
Tim Farron’s ejection as party leader for his Christian beliefs in 2017 was arguably a watershed moment in his party’s history, and the isolated position of him and other Christians in the party, points to a crisis in modern liberalism more generally. Prior to the last general election, David Campanale, a former BBC journalist, was questioned about his faith and then jettisoned as the party’s parliamentary candidate for Sutton and Cheam.
Farron stands as a reminder of the old-school liberalism which shaped Britain from the 17th century onwards. Informed by non-conformist Christianity, it developed a philosophy of a freedom of conscience but profound social responsibility to the poor and the weak. The Lib Dems owe a key part of their modern identity to the nonconformist support that delivered those Gladstonian landslides in the 19th century – and again for Campbell-Bannerman in 1906. All major parties have been cut off from their political roots over the years; perhaps none more so than the Lib Dems.
Surrounding him on the green benches today are doyennes of the lanyard class: tick-box public servants who are slaves to transatlantic progressivism in its maddest and most privileged forms. The assisted suicide debate has only highlighted Farron’s distance from this thought-world; he is the ghost at the Pride party.
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