It's getting to the point where some might contemplate emigration so as not to be murdered by a doctor.
If it can happen to the Monarch it can happen to anyone. In January 1936 the dying King George V was given a hurry-up kill shot of morphine and cocaine; allegedly the moment was chosen to let The Times break the news, instead of the evening papers. The King's last words to his physician were 'God damn you.'
Now The Prime Minister is reportedly planning to rush an 'assisted dying' Bill through Parliament by Christmas. According to Quentin Letts there was even a 'euthanasia trade-stand' at this month's Labour Party Conference.
Today grave issues are emotified by celebs; in this case a prominent activist is Esther Rantzen, now terminally ill. She has joined Dignitas, a euthanasia outfit based in Switzerland, where she plans to go if the law is not liberalised in time here. She says she wants to 'look forward in confidence to a death which is pain-free.'
There's the rub: medically induced death is not necessarily swift or pain-free, as a doctor writing under the name Jack King explains. There are instances of people waking up hours after the supposedly lethal injection and having to be finished off, in one case with a pillow. Some post-mortems revealed lungs full of fluid, so that the victim effectively drowned.
Only the subjects can know whether they are in pain. When they are immobilised by midazolam, a powerful sedative, we cannot be sure the morphine in the 'm+m' cocktail - a favourite combination to destroy the elderly - blots out their consciousness of dying of thirst ('withdrawal of fluids') and collapsing organs.
Nor is the procedure always voluntary. 'King' cites a case where the patient changed her mind and had to be held down by medics and relatives as the needle went in.
There is also the 'Do Not Resuscitate' (DNR) system for determining who may be rescued from death to have a second chance at life. An anonymous hospital cardiologist noted the great increase in DNRs during the Covid pandemic, in many cases put in place without the subject's consent or even knowledge. The 2020 Coronavirus Bill abolished bodily autonomy, putting the doctors in charge so that 'I've seen notes stating that the patient and family do not want a DNR and the notes are scored out with the words 'overridden by consultant' across them.' I still think of a friend of mine, subjected to 'end of life' (EOL) 'care' without, I think, his or his family's permission; the white-coated staff seemed quite matter-of-fact and contented in the silent, orderly EOL ward they ran.
The 'right to die' segues easily into a duty to die, to save others money and fuss; or a temptation to die. In Canada 'Medical Assistance In Dying' (MAID) is seen as having the potential to save millions of dollars - and not just in medical interventions: one disabled Army veteran was offered euthanasia as an alternative to having a wheelchair ramp installed. According to 'King' in the Netherlands it is an option for autistic adults; in Australia they are contemplating assisted suicide as an option for children as young as fourteen.
Underlying all this is a profound disrespect for life and it is not difficult to see how the death cult may spread. We can get some idea from the way abortion has been liberalised: since the 1967 Abortion Act there have been over ten million 'terminations' in the UK. Surely the majority were merely because the child was inconvenient to the parent/s - yet what would Britain's demographics and economy be like if they had been born and were contributing to society, all of them well under State Retirement Age? We have come so far from the time when a pregnant woman could delay or escape judicial execution by 'pleading her belly,' since the State could not allow an innocent to be slaughtered.
At the other end of life it is well known that poor people are more likely to have poor health, and possibly they may know less about, or have less access to, options such as palliative care, hospices and so on. The 'working people' that Sir Keir Starmer claims to champion, if he is thinking of working class people, are the ones who are most dependent on the State's resources when they cease to work. It must be a great temptation to view them as 'useless eaters' and, as Canada is doing already, to figure out ruthless ways to save on the Government budget.
This is where philosophy and religion have definitely practical implications. Dame Elizabeth Rantzen may be agnostic but the belief system of her Jewish roots is firmly against deliberately ending a human life; so is that of Muslims - no 'kill shots' for them.
As for Christianity, it is not always clear what the Church of England stands for, but where the Roman Catholic Church is strong it is a bulwark against what, we fear, will soon become a cold and lethal contempt for humanity, valuing its members in terms of money or public utility.
Those who wish to continue being a nuisance and escape being culled by the white-coated might look for example at Poland or Malta.
So as well as the rich and those in private schools, there are other classes of people who may want to flee Starmer's Britain: the old, the poor, the sick, the disabled.
