Death as a Human Right

Eugenics is the new black. 

A bill to authorise medically assisted suicide is being introduced in the Scottish Parliament.

The establishment appears fully behind it.

In the Daily Telegraph, Lord Jonathan Sumption, a former member of our supreme court, backs the idea “on balance” as being “morally justified”.

In the Times, Matthew Parris, that weathervane of British bien-pensant orthodoxy, looks forward to the time when “hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – will consider” suicide “when the time comes”.

The Economist, the Benthamite flat-earther weekly, promised, in the words of Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief, an “interesting, thought provoking and persuasive” analysis from Georgia Banjo, her Britain correspondent.

Georgia, however, jumped into the debate with the subtlety of a Just Stop Oil oaf in the National Gallery.

If the paper “had a vote, it would be unequivocally in favour”, she opined, calling suicide, with no hint of irony, a “human right”.

Societal costs were broached. People live longer, fewer children are born, and our public pension liabilities are greater than Britain’s GDP.

This led Matthew Parris into a paroxysm of bombastic theatricality. The reader can visualise the semi-retired and greying columnist shaking his skeletal fists at all and sundry warning of the coming “cosmic struggle between” our decaying economies and “the raw and unbridled energies of an emerging, younger, nimbler and very different world”, before pausing for dramatic effect – and adding with perfect comedic timing, “led by countries like China”.

To which the imaginary crowds, unsure what to do, laughed heartily.

As it happens, the middle kingdom’s population is collapsing as fast as her supposed energies.

Indeed, communist China’s decision to implement their barbarous one child policy in 1979, led to the “prevention” of 400 million births, and the irreversible ageing that followed, crippling the country for generations to come.

But to Matthew Parris, people are less important than systems.

We are “units – in deficit or surplus to the collective”, he wrote, adding that “self-preservation must shine a harsh beam on the balance between input and output.”

His final solution is culling humanity – at both ends of life and, through lavish distribution of puberty blockers, castrating thousands of our young on the road to a unicorn-replete, Trans paradise in the process, no doubt.

Further, all three authors approached the topic of coercion, that is to say forcing the weak, ill, disabled to take their own lives.

Sumption recognises that “indirect social pressure” could mean people being manipulated into giving their consent to commit suicide by covetous relatives looking for an early inheritance pay-out or the state seeking to cut costs.

Banjo thinks such examples “extremely rare”, providing few facts.

Both do add, however, that discerning between freely given approval and compulsion is nigh on impossible.

Sumption writes that “it is hard to distinguish between those who have voluntarily decided to kill themselves” and those who have done so “in response to real or imagined pressures”, an intractable problem that Banjo describes as ‘thorny’.

She does note that suicides currently “make up 4% of all deaths in Canada” from a standing start of zero in 2016.

There were 330 000 deaths in Canada in the 12 months to June 2023, over 13 000 from suicide, with no proper mechanisms to determine who is of sound mind or not.

If only a tenth of all state sanctioned suicides in Canada were a product of coercion, the death toll would be around 1300, within range of the October 7th massacre in Israel, annually.

Applied to the UK, that number would be closer to an even more uncomfortable 3000 victims.

The treatment of a former Paralympian Christine Gauthier should serve as a cautionary tale. She was offered suicide by Veterans Affairs Canada when she asked for a wheelchair ramp leading to her house. 

Lawrence MacAulay, the veterans affairs minister, confirmed that at least four other veterans were offered death too.

Had these five people killed themselves, due to “indirect social pressure”, who would have been held responsible for the crimes?

Such stories do not bother Parris one bit. An anecdote can be moving, he writes, but shouldn’t “clinch an argument”, twisting Stalin’s “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” quip only slightly.

Were it to happen in Britain, it would be “a healthy development”.

He adds “what is criminal today” might be “urged on people” within a decade, ending with the rhetorical question: “what’s wrong with that?”.

Evidently, Banjo, Sumption and Parris all put the collective ahead of the individual.

Banjo thinks that in the current set up, in which it is a criminal offence to help someone kill themselves, it is wrong that the “rights of vulnerable patients take precedence” over the ones who are not.

Sumption, revealingly, agrees:

“The real question is how much risk to vulnerable people are we prepared to accept in order to facilitate suicide by those who are fully informed.”

Overthrowing the idea that laws ought to protect the weak, they propose to throw the most vulnerable under the bus to help the strong kill themselves.

To Parris, humans are units of productivity to be discarded when “our time is up” so frankly, who cares?

The three authors justify the suicide bill through the prism of a deeply utilitarian world view. Through that brutally reductivist lens: a man is worth what he produces.

Ties of mutual obligation, based on family, friendships, communities, all rooted in loyalty and trust, which make our lives on this earth worth living, are simply cast aside.

After costs and coercion, “beliefs” make a short but revealing cameo.

Banjo writes that some opponents of the suicide bill have “deeply held beliefs” but never delves into what these might be.

After all, suicide, ritual or not, has been an accepted act across differing religions and cultures worldwide.

In some, it is a pathway to a heaven filled with rivers of wines, comfortable sofas, grapes, brown-eyed Houries and young boys.

In the Hindu tradition, Sati, the act of ritual suicide of women, following their husband’s death, was widespread.

In Japan, the Samurai warrior practiced Seppuku, a highly ritualised suicide symbolising resolution in the face of death, upgraded to banzai kamikaze pilots in World War II.

The role of suicide and culture are joined to the hip, with religion providing the rationale.

Ignoring these fundamentals is either naпve or deceitful.

As an aside, societies that accept suicides are rarely happier places.

It is, therefore, the metaphysical dimension that must be explored to find a “moral” rationalisation for this dreadful bill.

In this, Sumption does two revealing things to hint at his philosophical positioning, which, it turns out, is fully amoral.

First, he quotes Seneca, a pagan senator, born at around the same time as Jesus, who describes “suicide as the last defence of the free man against intolerable suffering at the end of his life.”

Second, he uses the deeply ambiguous Malthusian concept of a life “worth living”, as judged inevitably by the Gulag prison guard, never by the inmate.

Malthus provides the rope on which the “indirect social pressure” to kill yourself hangs.

Sumption does not quote St Augustin or St Thomas Aquinas or indeed any of the great Christian thinkers, whose findings have provided the bedrock on which all our laws and morals have, successfully, been based for the better part of two millennia.

They explain in depth why suicide and helping someone commit murder are sins in their worlds, and a criminal offence in ours, and ultimately destructive for the “collective” in the longer term.

Indeed, our world would have looked very different if, at the moment of most torment, Jesus, Peter, or any Christian martyrs had asked for a lethal injection as a palliative to avoid earthly suffering.

In short, Sumption eschews the Christian world view.

Matthew Parris goes to the heart of the issue and highlights Sumption’s mealy-mouthed equivocation:

“I could tackle the religious objections, which are irrelevant unless you believe in a divinity who has sanctified all human life.”

Yet in our world, rights and wrongs, are based precisely on what Parris condemns as “irrelevant”.

It is the Christian belief system that gave the West its laws, fundamental beauty, as well as the implicit reciprocity of “love thy neighbour”, which underpins everything.

In short, our establishment has rejected the moral world we inherited from our ancestors.

Having torn the idea of a loving God asunder, they left us with a hateful state, which is in the process of conjuring up an alien tail-chasing “morality”, imposed mercilessly on the recalcitrant.

It is a world in which the mighty are always right and the weak always wrong.

Having sold the idea that an unborn child was just a lump of cells for sixty years, they are now selling the notion that the weak, infirm, and old, are mere units to be cast aside like ragdolls when their time is up.

D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1908:

“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly… then I would go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks.”

Eliminating the vulnerable is not a new concept. It’s just making a comeback. It’s the new black.

And that is the version of compassion Banjo, Parris, Sumption, Minton Beddoes and our progressive establishment have in store for us.

 

Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.

This piece first appeared in Country Squire Magazine, and is reproduced by kind permission.

If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!