Matthew Parris

Throughout the short life of the Assisted Dying Bill which failed in the Commons, the ‘faith community’ (a quaint term for that category of human beings who throughout history have been more assiduous than any other in trying to kill each other) have with skill and persistence deployed an argument of great potency. Such is the argument’s intuitive appeal that the pro-assisted-dying brigade never found a way of countering it. They have resorted simply to denying that what the faith squad say would happen, could happen. But it could. The argument is that licensing assisted dying is to smile upon the practice. The legal change would act as a cultural signal that society now approves.

Many years ago, for my Great Lives BBC radio programme, we recorded Jeremy Paxman’s championing of the life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. It was an excellent choice and Mr Paxman persuasively laid out that great campaigner’s achievements in the reform of child-labour legislation and the lunacy laws. ‘As we look back baffled,’ I asked him, ‘by how civilised Victorians could even contemplate chaining the mentally ill to walls, or sending small boys up chimneys, what do you think future ages will lay, with comparable perplexity and horror, to our own age’s account?’ Paxman said he’d need notice of the question. I don’t. With no shadow of doubt it will be our prisons.

For my newspaper I wrote last week about the rocketing numbers (now more than nine million) of our fellow citizens who are ‘economically inactive’ (aged 16-64, unemployed but not seeking work). Within that category, a fast-growing number (nearly three million) are claiming a range of disability or sickness-related benefits, usually a PIP (personal independence payment). Of these, something between half and three quarters are founding their claims partly or wholly on mental health problems. That number has been growing fast since lockdown, particularly among the young. And it was on the mental health component of this growing burden on our economy that I focused. I explained how a PIP can more than double the standard universal credit benefit.

Columnists get unsolicited free copies of new books, it often seems by almost every post. They frequently come as publishers’ ‘uncorrected proofs’, before publication day. Publicists are of course hoping we might mention the book in something we write, and often there’s a friendly note inviting us to provide a quote for the book-cover’s inside sleeve – ‘Profound, moving and richly funny: best thing I’ve read all year’, that kind of thing. As attitudes to homosexuality became more accepting, the British public were always one step ahead You might think these offerings a boon: after all, nobody’s forcing us to respond or even keep the book, meanwhile we have a free book where others would have to pay £20 or more.

‘If I’d known where it would take me I might never have started.’ This need not be an expression of regret. There are journeys where the final destination is best hidden from the traveller, due to the psychological difficulty he may have in embracing the future until we’re nearly there. This column will move on to assisted dying, but I start with a look back at the fight for equal rights for same-sex couples. I played a minor part in this. We played down the idea of noisily assertive gay pride, knowing it would hinder our campaign Ever since the 1950s, brave souls – at first just a few – fought for the repeal of 19th-century laws criminalising male homosexual behaviour. They were joined by others, finally even politicians.

The Covid Inquiry grinds on. The process is ‘too focused on office tittle-tattle’ says one former minister in my newspaper this morning. Possibly – though it may also be that the warped focus consists in the media reports filtering out the worthier but more boring stuff. The inquiry (say others) is too focused on the speed or otherwise with which Britain locked down, rather than whether we should ever have locked down as we did in the first place. Others too complain that the inquisition is overly focused on ‘gotcha’ headlines when better results would flow from a sober review that accepted that everyone was doing their best. There’s truth in each of these complaints but I don’t think they get to the heart of it. I have a different view.

Sorry Santa, but there’s no sugar-coating this: you’re eating too much. And it’s nobody’s fault but your own. Human beings have agency. You have it within your power to cut down. An excellent book written by restaurateur and policy adviser Henry Dimbleby, with his wife Jemima Lewis, sets out the figures. They’re shocking. In Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet into Shape, Dimbleby shows that in some 70 years we’ve regressed from being a nation where almost nobody was obese and less than 4 per cent of people were overweight, to today’s Britain, where some two-thirds are either overweight or obese. The UK is shamefully high on the list of fatties, but the rest of the West faces similar problems. The consequences are dire.

It’s with triple reluctance that one disputes anything said or written by Jonathan Sumption. First, Lord Sumption is among the commentators I most admire, with an intellect against which it must be foolhardyto pit one’s own. Secondly, as a former Supreme Court justice, his legal expertise will be immense, whereas I only read law as an undergraduate, and that more than half a century ago. Thirdly, on the merits of the government’s proposal to declare Rwanda safe for asylum seekers in UK law, and perhaps ‘disapply’ any international convention that says otherwise, I actually agree with him: I, too, doubt the wisdom of the move.

Abraham Lincoln’s ringing declaration echoes down the years. His 1863 Gettysburg Address, delivered 160 years ago this Sunday, gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’: a clear and simple formulation, it has come to be seen as the very definition of democracy. But Lincoln was wrong: wrong then and wrong now. Government of the people? Yes indeed, after a fashion. Government for the people? Of course. But government by the people? The advent of social media and almost hourly opinion polling reduces that argument to absurdity, throwing its flaws into sharp relief. For me, a curious incident in which I was involved at St Pancras station recently illustrated this.

From abroad I’ve returned to a country where, in language to which the word ‘shrill’ hardly does justice, fellow British commentators have been letting fly on both sides of the argument about Gaza and how Israel should or should not respond to Hamas’s unspeakable attacks on 7 October. There’s just one thing both sides – the British Muslim banner-wavers and those who bay for a war of attrition in Gaza – seem to agree upon: that whatever the answer might be, it is, in the most important sense of the word, simple. It is not simple. Things so rarely are. The simple bit is who – in the immediate – is right and who wrong, and few of us need reminding of the answer here. But it’s the hard bit that matters: can a remedy be found by the means proposed?

I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom handed down to us. Proverbs, adages and aphorisms (‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ says my dictionary) are recited to children by grown-ups, often in a singsong, holier-than-thou voice; and I couldn’t help noticing that many were quite evidently untrue, contained thoroughly bad advice, and some nuggets of supposedly sage proverbial wisdom are flatly contradicted by other nuggets of sage proverbial wisdom. I started taking a note whenever my attention was caught by yet another glaringly obvious example of a proverb, sanctimonious or trite, that was just plain wrong.

An Institute for Fiscal Studies paper, published at the end of last month, makes grim reading. Through the prism of the media reports it generated (‘One in 11 workers in England could be NHS staff by 2036,’ said the Guardian; ‘NHS staff will make up 49 per cent of the public sector workforce in 2036,’ said the Times), the most sensational finding was that our health service will be eating up an ever-increasing share of public spending. But, as so often, this particular cuckoo in the nest of public provision is only the most newsworthy of so many indications of Britain’s long, slow slide into insolvency. The gap grows between what we consider ourselves entitled to and what our governments can afford The paper is part of the Institute’s series Green Budget 2023.