assisted-dying | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 23, 2025

34:63 presents “Mr. Kobayashi.”

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.

November 30, 2024

34:63 presents “Simplifying parliamentary procedure using ‘Life of Brian'”

The juvenile in me can’t resist stating the obvious that House of Commons, in having voted to progress the assisted dying bill onto its next parliamentary stage really put the black into Black Friday. You know, because black is the colour most people associate with death, wear when mourning and at funerals. No other reason. I just felt the need to point that out, because of times we live in. I’m not sure what’s worse; either feeling that you have to explain it in case deliberately people misconstrue it for reasons of their own, or going ahead and doing it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

Anyway, the theme of this post isn’t to discuss the merits or otherwise of yesterdays vote, as long overdue as the outcome was welcome was. Its to make the rather obvious point that rather than showing parliament at its best, which seems to the prevailing opinion, pronounced upon by MP’s themselves and slavishly reported on and amplified by the media, it showed it at its worst, and as MP’s as the self-aggrandising blowhards I’ve always suspected most of them are.

Consider this. Yesterday the chamber was packed. There was barely enough standing room. The debate lasted hours. MP’s on both sides of the argument made impassioned, intelligent speeches. Lots of them admitted they had changed their minds after speaking to their constituents. Some even shared those stories. The mood was of calm solemnity, befitting the occasion.

Now try and think back of the last time you can think of that happening. Difficult isn’t it? Those seemingly never ending Brexit votes don’t count. They were to calm and reason what death is to life. No, its only when a decision to go to war is being debated that the chamber is like it was yesterday. The one that sticks out in my mind was the debate on the eve of the Iraq war and that was in 2003! Possibly there been a few more since, but only a handful, and a newborn baby’s hand at that.

Normally the chamber is hardly ever close to being full. Only for Prime Ministers Questions (PMQ’s) is it full and that’s only because MP’s hope that they’ll get the chance to ask the Prime Minister a question, which’ll hopefully get them on national or regional TV news and remind their constituents who they are. They can then put a clip of it on their website. PMQ’s lasts for half an hour once a week and as soon as it’s over MP’s vanish as fast as a virgin on prom night. So far from yesterdays debate showing Parliament at its best, it in fact showed what it could be, but very rarely is, the exception that proves the rule..

That’s my first problem with all this. The second concerns what happens next. Because if you only based your conclusions on TV news footage from outside Parliament as the result of the vote filtered out, you’d be forgiven for thinking that by the end of next week there’d be disabled people in wheelchairs screaming as they were being propelled by unscrupulous relatives to death centres and it would all be perfectly legal.

The problem with a properly functioning democracy is one of its inherent flaws; that unless the electorate knows how it functions – at least have a have a basic understanding of how it all works – it isn’t a properly functioning one. Not in my book anyway.

Whilst the bill passed the second reading in Parliament yesterday, there are still loads more stages for it to go through if it is ever to become law. Many MP’s appeared on TV stressing their unease about the bill as it is currently drafted, but were at pains to point out that they’d only voted for it to progress through its many Parliamentary stages precisely because they wanted the time to scrutinise it, to suggest amendments and have more debates. The haggle scene in ‘Life Of Brian’ is the clearest example of what all this means in practice; the earliest it’ll become a law that people can make use of is early 2026 at best.

And having a right to do something doesn’t mean you’ll actually ever do it, but that if you wanted to, you could. As far as I’m concerned, the sort of people who are wilfully misinterpreting what happened yesterday in parliament are not too dissimilar to anyone who detects an ‘ist’ at the start of this post.

November 29, 2024

34:63 presents “Is our democracy functioning or funct?”

It has been over two months since my last blog, and in that time an awful lot of awful has happened. All of which I have opinions on and some of which I’ll share. But not today.

It is the so called assisted dying bill that will be voted on today in the Parliament I want to discuss. Partly because it will assist more than just the staggering few people able to meet its ridiculous threshold. Partly because it is unutterably obscene that towards the end of the second decade of the 21st Century there is even a debate to be had about this.

And also, far more importantly, for citizens not to have the right to die, is the most blatant example of discrimination in Britain today.

As I understand it, the bill allows that anyone with a terminal illness and has less than six months to live could apply to exercise the rights in it. To do so, they would need two doctors not only to confirm the terminal diagnosis but also confirm their mental capacity to make such a decision. And also to satisfy themselves that no coercion was at work and options regarding palliative care had been explained and rejected. Only then could a High Court judge give approval.

Really? Just even getting a doctors appointment is enough of a challenge these days but then I suppose if one can afford to take a case to the High Court, going private isn’t a problem. And that’s my first problem with this whole farrago right there. The wholly unnecessary and ultimately self-serving bureaucracy involved. Because no matter what is decided in parliament today, one thing will be certain; the lawyers will be riding first class on the gravy train.

It will certainly call in at judicial review. Possibly taking the scenic route via legal challenges and interminable appeals. Then it might call in at the Supreme Court, before heading onward to Europe. This isn’t the way a properly functioning democracy, one that is at ease with itself should conduct itself.

But leaving all that aside, the most fundamental issue and one which I think has been overlooked when discussing this issue is age discrimination. Age discrimination that is predicated upon unfairly prioritising the needs of the unborn against those of the undead. One that places a greater value on the the right to life than on the right to die.

There are no preventative checks that the state places upon being able to have a child, no suitability assessment, no background checks to establish previous criminal behaviour, and no evidence of one’s financial capacity to successfully embark on parenthood.

Why all the hoops and hurdles at one end and largesse we can ill afford at the other. It may seem that I’m contradicting myself or going off on a tangent here but the proposed changes that the assisted dying bill suggests are basically trivial. Around 350 terminally ill people take their own lives every year. That’s nowhere near enough. We can’t afford the pensioners that are alive today – over 16% of the population – never mind tomorrow.

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility, last year £142 billions were spent on various pensioner benefits. That’s 5.1% of national income or over 48% of the welfare budget, with absolute the certainty that this number is only getting higher. By 2060, nearly a quarter of the population will be over 65, meaning that the ratio of worker to pensioner will be 2:1.

I understand why the bill only applies to the terminally ill with less than six months to live. That way it has more chance of being passed today, paving the way for more additions later. But assisted dying should be properly seen as an act of civic good, a practical way to put give back by giving up. Living to beyond 80 should be seen as an act of unspeakable selfishness. It baffles me why living to a ripe old age a good thing? Ripe soon turns to rotten.

And I’m as guilty of age discrimination as it relates to assisted dying as anyone else in assuming that only the old might want to die. What is so wonderful about life for a 45 year old now to make them think it’s only to get better? All that good weather we’ve been having lately?

If we had a properly functioning democracy this would have all been resolved years ago and the right to die would be a given. If we had politicians who dealt with the electorate as mature adults capable of thinking in the long term, whereas we got was a succession of career driven opportunists unable to look beyond the election cycle. But we don’t have a functioning democracy. However I might yet be pleasantly surprised. The bill might pass.

Then we’ll see exactly how democracy functions.