Assisted dying won’t work

Well, the pro-choicers have got their way. In two years’ time, if Kim Leadbeater’s reassurances hold good, we’ll have the option, if we tick the boxes, of ending our lives with a handful of ground-up barbiturates or some other undisclosed cocktail of painkillers at the expense of the NHS. We now know what is the guiding principle that animates the MPs that voted this through. It’s not solidarity; it’s not the principle that Danny Kruger articulated, that ‘no man is an island’ and what affects one affects us all. No. Austin Mitchell put it concisely: ‘this is about choice’. Or as Kim Leadbeater said obligingly, if we have the choice to die we have the choice not to die; there is no compulsion. Very obliging, I’m sure. These were two large principles at stake, solidarity with the vulnerable or the autonomy of the individual. And the Commons went for personal autonomy.