Assisted Suicide and the Politics of Fear

How can Britain’s assisted suicide bill, which comes before the House of Commons on Friday, possibly fail? Although it is not an official government bill, the prime minister is known to be supportive. So are the mainstream media. TV celebrities have lined up behind it; various respectable figures have announced that it is “a rare chance to enrich people’s fundamental liberties” (The Economist) and “the biggest piece of liberalising social policy change in a generation, up there with the abolition of capital punishment and the allowing of abortion” (Labour grandee Harriet Harman).

But the vote is likely to be close, with some Westminster observers predicting that it will fall at the first hurdle. The health secretary and justice secretary—the two ministers who would have to implement the suicide program—have said they will vote “No.” The two longest-serving MPs—a Conservative from the right of his party, and a Labour MP from the left of hers—have written a joint article against the bill. Labour is so divided that the party’s master strategist, the Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, reportedly hopes the bill will fail, just to make the subject go away.

That partly reflects the weakness of the assisted suicide campaign, which has looked evasive and amateurish. It took ages for the bill to be published; when it was, the much-vaunted safeguards came under unforgiving scrutiny. One of Britain’s most senior judges, in a lengthy and devastating analysis, declared that they fell “lamentably short.”

But the main reason the vote is likely to be close is that many MPs, even the most secular and progressive of them, are afraid of what will come next. When a nation adopts assisted suicide, it is as a neat procedure to tidy up some sad, messy cases. Later on they discover it is not a procedure but a living thing, a sea-monster devouring the shipwrecked—the disabled, the mentally ill, the guilt-ridden, the poor. Britain, while of course being the greatest country in the world, is also a land characterized by ambulances and trains that fail to turn up, two-year court delays, bottomless waiting lists and canceled infrastructure projects. When you visit a country where the big systems work smoothly—Switzerland, say—it feels like stepping into a sci-fi movie. So the idea of asking our hospitals and courts to handle the safe rollout of lethal drugs for the miserable comes across as, well, suicidal.

Pass or fail, this bill has already revealed two things. One is that the distinction between individualists and communitarians remains fundamental. The no-such-thing-as-society right is sympathetic to the bill: One senior Tory says, in an example of self-contradiction that could be used in logic textbooks, that it would be a crime against liberty for politicians to “stop somebody else exercising a choice, in certain very restricted circumstances.” The deputy leader of the populist Thatcherite party Reform supports it too. On the hard left, meanwhile, the remnants of the Corbynite faction lean against, citing the unintended consequences for the vulnerable.

The other revelation is that the politics of hope is on the way out, and the politics of fear is the next big thing. Both sides, in the end, have appealed to competing terrors: the fear of a painful death (which palliative care doctors say has been irresponsibly exaggerated) versus the fear of mass killing of the marginalized (which assisted-suicide advocates say won’t happen if you really don’t want it to).

And, very strikingly, among politicians it is not the younger generation who are most enthusiastic for the change, but the boomers and Gen Xers. All six cabinet ministers who have publicly opposed the bill—and none of the seven who support it—are under the age of forty-five. The younger ones know viscerally, as older generations cannot, what it is to live in a country of dwindling social capital and diminishing resources, where the vulnerable must fend for themselves or go under.

It is, in short, no longer 1959. In that year one of the giants of the post-war Labour party, Roy Jenkins, wrote in his manifesto for social liberalism:

Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide, in an adult way and provided they do not infringe the rights of others, the code by which they wish to live; and on the side of experiment and brightness, of better buildings and better food, of better music (jazz as well as Bach) and better books, of fuller lives and greater freedom. 

As that paragraph goes on, it begins to sound as dated as a Restoration comedy. All that stuff about “experiment and brightness,” you have to suspect, depended on sources that progressivism cannot itself sustain. It depended on a background of Christianity, which gave life—political life included—a sense of purpose, meaning, and noble ambition. And, more prosaically, it depended on the rising prosperity that can paper over so many illusions.

Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things. 

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Image ©House of Commons/Roger Harris, provided by Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.