Britain has fallen to the technocratic death cult

Politicians twist words and abuse language to ‘make lies sound truthful and murder respectable’, said George Orwell. That has never rang more true than it does today. In the House of Commons this afternoon, MPs spoke in deceitful tongues to make suicide sound attractive and death sound liberal. They voted to legalise what they call ‘assisted dying’, but which I think we should call state-sanctioned suicide. For strip away all the linguistic trickery about a ‘right to die’ and what we are left with is a new regime of state-appointed death merchants who will have the power not only to propose self-destruction to the ill, but to facilitate it, too.

Make no mistake, this is a dark day for Britain. MPs voted by 314 to 291 to pass the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This is the private members’ bill, spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, that will empower the state to aid and abet the destruction of lives judged to be less good or less happy than others. It applies to England and Wales. It will permit sick people who are expected to die within six months to get ‘medical assistance’ to end their lives. To be eligible for this state-sanctioned suicide, you must be over 18, have mental capacity and get the agreement of two doctors, seven days apart. Then the state will give you poison to bring about your death.

Ms Leadbeater and her supporters big up the bill’s ‘safeguards’. They insist the law will not be a slippery slope to a culture of death, to self-obliteration as a consumer choice for the merely sad or dejected. It’s about ‘assisting’ the terminally ill only, they say. Yet even on this front, its flaws are glaring. Doctors are often wrong when they estimate how long the sick have left. You might be given six months but get two years. What’s more, people often feel suicidal upon receiving a terminal diagnosis, but then reflect and change and come to cherish the time they have left. This law, unquestionably, would lead to the state-faciliated deaths of people who had so much more living to do.

All the technical blather about ‘safeguards’ distracts us from the profound moral questions thrown up by the bill. Let’s be clear: this law would represent one of the most dramatic and destructive overhauls of the relationship between the state and the individual that we have ever seen. Overnight we would transform from a society that seeks to prevent suicide into one that facilitates it. The health service, once proudly devoted to saving life, would now be charged with ending life in certain circumstances. The Hippocratic cry of ‘First do no harm’ would lie in tatters, replaced by a new deathly creed: ‘Do no harm, unless they’re very sick, in which case maybe kill them?’

This law would empower officialdom to sanction death in certain circumstances. It would be lethally naive to overlook what a deathly revolution this would represent. The state would go from being a machine charged with defending the life of its citizens to one that sometimes dangles the prospect of death before its citizens. The law would turn certain officials into little emperors of death, with the power to give a Nero-style thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the life of the individual. You’re well and healthy? You must not die. You’re very ill or profoundly disabled? Maybe you should die. And maybe we should help you.

To permit the state to make such sweeping judgements about the worth of a life is to step into a technocratic hell where human life is stripped of its inherent virtue and reduced instead to a list of tick-box traits that some apparatchik might then peruse before deciding: Worth Living or Not Worth Living. This law would reorientate the institutions of society around death-giving rather than life-giving. It proposes ‘education campaigns’ to raise awareness about ‘assisted death’ among both officials and ordinary citizens. It would make it difficult for hospices to opt out of ‘educating’ their residents about ‘assisted death’. It will allow private contractors to bring about the deaths of those who opt for it. Suicide as a profit-making enterprise? This is Ballardian-level grimness.

I feel certain that any new system of state-sanctioned suicide would become bound up with today’s fashionable view of human beings as a ‘burden’. We’re called a ‘plague’ on the planet. The longevity of the old, courtesy of the wonders of medicine, is feverishly talked about as an ‘ageing timebomb’. People worry about nasty family members possibly pressuring their sick parents to opt for ‘assisted death’. I’m more worried about the cultural pressure, on older people especially, to stop being such a drain on the health service, the housing market and poor old Mother Nature. This suicide-abetting bill both reflects and will further entrench the dispiriting view of human life as sometimes unbearable or even pestilent, and thus possibly requiring extinguishment.

Under Canada’s regime of state-sanctioned suicide, some poor people have opted for death because they feel they have no future prospects. What makes us think we can guard against such fascistic horrors just because we have some ‘safety mechanisms’ in place? This cursed bill will go to the Lords now but it looks certain it will become law. It is incumbent on us all to resist its glib and deathly writ and make the case for the virtue of life against the macabre book-keepers of the technocratic elite. I spent much of the past five years seeing a loved one through the end of life. It is sad and unpleasant and hard but there is joy and bliss, too. All the stuff of life, even in death.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy