Assisted dying

The Catholic Church has always been remarkably relaxed about sin. It becomes distinctly jumpy, however, when it encounters any challenge to the Church’s designation of what is sinful. Human beings (it suspects) are and always will be sinners. The Church has no problem in dealing with sinners: they should confess. Absolution may be available, dispensed by a priesthood who have privileged access to the Almighty, and can intercede. It isn’t really the commission of a sin that worries the Church. It’s the rejection of a doctrine ‘We will tell you what’s unclean in the eyes of God. We also offer a laundry service to which we hold the monopoly.’ To

One rather hopes the assisted dying bill will be talked out in the House of Lords. We have no say on matters of government policy, sovereignty, international law (and much else). But this bill is far too controversial, and personally significant, for MPs alone to adjudge. We need a touch of democratic Athens, whose citizens determined all political and legal outcomes. Citizen arbitration was used to settle most cases. Take Neaira. Not an Athenian, she had been trafficked from birth, but saving what money she earned, she eventually bought her freedom, with help from a large sum donated by the Athenian Phrynion. But she tired of him touting her around

Every year, thousands of stories of abuse pour into Compassion in Care, a charity that supports whistleblowers in the care sector. Volunteers manning the charity’s helpline hear of old people dismissed as ‘end of life’, deprived of food and water, abandoned in corners with neglected bedsores, needlessly sedated to make them less time-consuming. And now, says the charity’s founder and director Eileen Chubb, a former care whistleblower herself, they are bracing for ‘a massive increase in abusive cases’. That’s if the assisted suicide bill, which begins its journey through the Lords this week, becomes law. ‘We can foresee whistleblowers contacting us,’ Chubb tells me, ‘saying people died who didn’t want

Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill has generated much talk about the ethics of suicide. As far as the ancients were concerned, it was only in life that you could make your mark. The Christian passion for embracing, even rejoicing at, death made no sense to them. Ancient thinkers generally did not fear an afterlife. Although there were no received views on the matter (unless you were a member of a cult of some sort), many ancients reckoned that, if the gods were displeased with you, they would demonstrate their hostility in this life rather than the next. But when death was inevitable, they wanted to be in control, because the

The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out to be a form of legislative euthanasia. MPs, looking at the process, began to resemble a patient who, having first of all declared his wish to end it all, then begins to worry that it will not be as simple or painless as he had been led to expect. It is one thing to express a fervent wish to release people from unbearable suffering and quite another to frame safe procedures which involve the state, the judiciary and the medical profession in helping people kill themselves. It was a bad

Kim Leadbeater has described her assisted suicide bill as ‘potentially one of the most important changes in legislation that we will ever see’. For Leadbeater and her allies, it is an attempt to make the law merciful: to give relief to those who want to control the manner of their death. But there is another, darker way to see the Leadbeater bill, and last week at the bill committee we got a glimpse of it. The committee stage was meant to reassure the doubters. At second reading, MPs were told that if the vote – just 18 days after the bill was published – seemed rushed, there would be plenty

Home The Labour government announced a ‘Plan for Change’ that it refused to call a reset. Sir Chris Wormald was named Cabinet Secretary. In his Guildhall speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that ‘the idea that we must choose between our allies, that somehow we’re with either America or Europe, is plain wrong’. He said ‘we must continue to back Ukraine’ against Vladimir Putin as something ‘deeply in our self-interest’. With the arrival of another 122 people on 1 December, more than 20,000 had crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour entered office. A group of about 60 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers