the brilliantly leaping gazelle

All of the chatter last week about the assisted dying bill was concerned with MP’s voting for an amendment to give health workers an ‘opt out’, and a slew of measures that had been added ostensibly as ‘safeguarding’ vulnerable persons, to protect them from coercion. 

Because of this, one might be forgiven for thinking that this was a fine example of MP’s putting ‘country before party’ and voting on principle, that the grubby business of party politics had been temporarily suspended in pursuit of some notion of a  higher moral obligation. 

You’d be wrong though.  

To understand why, first of all you need to question who exactly it is those MP’s were so keen to safeguard and then to ask yourself who are the vulnerable people at risk from coercion? It is never fully explained what safeguarding is, or what a vulnerable person is, is it? Not really. ‘Safeguarding’ and ‘vulnerable people’ have, in regard to having any meaning within the whole assisted dying debate are as meaningful as calling a trans-woman a woman.

Where is any there notion of safeguarding the public purse in all this, of putting economic probity first, of safeguarding all the other public services that would face ever more drastic cuts to help pay for an increasingly ageing population? According to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. It gets worse because whilst 26% of people will be over 65, an additional 15% of them will be under 16. Thats nearly half of all the UK’s population not paying tax, but still expecting the state to provide for them. Granted, eventually the young might become taxpayers, but by then quite a lot of them them will be working in the kind of low-wage job that requires government bailouts – working tax credits, housing benefit and the like – to avoid even more government help.

It’s all a vicious circle, and part of the blame lies with the NHS. Yes the NHS, so beloved by, well everyone, being as it is an institution that occupies such a unique place in our collective psyche that a segment extolling it was included in the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Because all of its various health initiatives – to help people to stop smoking, improved detection leading to better survival rates for heart disease, cancers and other previously life ending conditions for example – have been too successful. 

So successful in fact, that of the 26% of the population that will be aged over 65 by 2065, the that the Office for National Statistics estimates that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population will be older than 85. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

To misquote Mr Kobayashi in ‘The Usual Suspects’, the fact that they were unaware that they were committing fraud is no excuse.  When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions, that when they were of working age, the they tax paid then paid for pensioners pensions then?

The pension bill is only going to increase, whilst at the same time the umber of people paying that bill is decreasing. It is a state of affairs that is as unaffordable as it is unconscionable. Adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – more than we spend on defence, transport and education combined. And those numbers are only going to get bigger.

Thats why the Assisted Dying Bill is hopefully a much needed first step towards state sponsored euthanasia. And just because people find something distasteful to even to contemplate, doesn’t make any the less urgent. If anything, the fact that people do find the subject of euthanasia, or assisted dying a topic they’d much rather avoid altogether is precisely the reason why it has become so urgent.

The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them. 

And of course the financial benefits to society would be worth it. In addition to the savings garnered from a reduced welfare budget, the savings to the NHS, and local authorities, if people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. There’d also be a societal benefit. In the housing sector, as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities

We urgently need our politicians to do the leading part of leadership, as opposed to them being constantly fixated on what the media or the public think and constantly aware of their ow career. Of course MP’s have a idea of themselves as being all kinds of wonderful to everyone – after all being an MP means they have to take part in a popularity contest every five years – but unfortunately for them, economic reality makes their ideals unaffordable. Its those ideals that are actually coercing millions into hardship, creating the vulnerable they seem so concerned with protecting and plunging the country state ever closer to civil unrest. Generational inequality is not something that can be ignored for much longer.

Tough choices should mean exactly that, because otherwise they’ll only get tougher.