Dominic Lawson looks at how Government Ministers looking to make financial savings may give a green light to euthanasia: Sunday Times May 9th 2021
Sometimes political developments that seem unconnected are deeply intertwined — and you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see it. So, for example, we have learnt that this week’s Queen’s Speech will not contain any proposals to end the situation in which the cost of care for the elderly is largely unmet by the state and instead can hoover up an individual’s savings: according to the Alzheimer’s Society roughly 50,000 people a year sell their homes to cover the bills. But we did hear some news from the health secretary; or, rather, the pro-euthanasia all-party parliamentary group for “choice at the end of life” did.
Matt Hancock told the group, chaired by the former Tory cabinet minister Andrew Mitchell, that he had commissioned the Office for National Statistics to produce figures showing how many people had committed suicide “for medical reasons”. The health secretary said this was to ensure the debate on this matter was “informed by the best statistics”. That seems studiously impartial, but Hancock gave encouragement to the group by saying that while he had been opposed to assisted suicide, he had been “affected by speaking to Sir Paul Cosford, the medical director of Public Health England, who died of cancer [last month]”. Cosford supported a change to the law to follow the lead of the Netherlands, which almost 20 years ago passed the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act.
This battle has flared again, even though in 2015 MPs rejected by 330 votes to 118 a much more restrictive measure (which would have allowed medically assisted suicide for those with a terminal illness whose life expectancy was no more than six months). A Conservative MP, Danny Kruger, has just formed a new all-party parliamentary group “to stand against the campaign for a change in the law”. He declared: “If the option exists for the doctor to prescribe your death, what conversations follow? What whispers between family members, haunted by premonitions of agony for their loved one — or by the prospect of years of providing wearisome and expensive care? What thoughts would it place in the mind of the old person themselves?”
That familial anxiety about “expensive care” would have been greatly eased if Boris Johnson had honoured what he said outside No 10 in July 2019 in his inaugural speech as prime minister: “We will fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared.” He has still not divulged what this “clear plan” is, let alone introduced legislation.
Johnson was thought to be an advocate of the plan notionally supported by the Conservatives a decade ago: the 2011 Dilnot report’s recommendation of a cap of £35,000 on an individual’s privately funded lifetime care costs, with the rest being met by the exchequer. Unsurprisingly, the Treasury has determinedly resisted this, first under George Osborne and now under Rishi Sunak, who apparently told the prime minister that such a measure could shift up to £10 billion a year in costs to taxpayers as a whole.
The only Conservative prime minister who didn’t dodge the issue was Theresa May — with almost cataclysmic consequences for her and the party. In the 2017 election she launched a manifesto that pledged to limit lifetime care costs to £100,000 for any individual — but, in return, the equity in that person’s property would, after death, be available to the state to repay any excess.
This un-Conservative grab at the hoped-for inheritance of countless middle-class families was politically lethal. Labour dubbed it the “dementia tax”, and within days May abandoned the plan (while claiming “nothing has changed”). That debacle cost May her parliamentary majority at the ballot box.
One commentator who at the time joined the dots between that and the apparently unrelated issue of assisted suicide was Matthew Parris, in a Spectator column headlined “A dementia tax would be a euthanasia bonus”. With his always refreshing aversion to humbug, Parris said how much he regretted May’s abandonment of the policy: “Where the state is largely or wholly responsible for the care and cost of an elderly person’s dementia, no individual has an overwhelming interest in their timely passing. If the state pays for care … and upon death the surviving family inherit a legacy that is undiminished by the huge cost of that care, what is it to them that the life has been unnaturally prolonged?”
Parris is highly unusual in being an advocate of euthanasia who doesn’t seek to deny such motivations. But many doctors are aware of them, which may help explain why the groups within the profession most opposed to a change in the law are those at the sharp end. As a professor of palliative care, Baroness Finlay, noted in her recent book Death by Appointment — co-authored with Robert Preston, former clerk to the House of Lords select committee that examined this issue — a Royal College of Physicians internal poll in 2019 showed that “only 5 per cent of palliative medical specialists expressed support for ‘assisted dying’, as did just 23 per cent of those engaged with geriatric medicine”.
The opposite line was powerfully expressed last month by the neurologist and acclaimed author Henry Marsh, recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, who told The Times that the law must be changed to allow him to go to another doctor to get his life terminated on request. Marsh is a long-time patron of My Death, My Decision (formerly the Society for Old Age Rational Suicide).
He argued that inheritance anxiety had nothing to do with this issue: “There are almost no … ghastly relatives who want the family silver.” And he made the standard complaint: “Modern medicine keeps people alive endlessly.”
It is interesting how pro-euthanasia medics never let on that nobody “with capacity” can be given treatment against their wishes. That is why Jehovah’s Witnesses can refuse life-giving blood transfusions. And those who fear they would get dementia and be kept “artificially” alive without consent can make a legally binding advance decision to refuse treatment.
As Lord Sumption, then a Supreme Court judge, wrote in a 2014 judgment related to this matter: “There is a tendency for those who would like the law changed to overstate its difficulties. It would be unfortunate if this were to narrow yet further the options open to those approaching death, by leading them to believe that the current law and practice is less humane and flexible than it really is.”
Still more unfortunate, the government, intentionally or not, is pandering to the powerful forces campaigning to change that law. Those who would be put at greatest risk are the most vulnerable; and their voices are never heard.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its-time-to-connect-the-dots-around-euthanasia-hv5kbkq58
