Polly's pop at a "pitiless God" distorts my argument

There’s more than one argument for opposing assisted dying.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A hand rest gently on another outstretched hand.

Alexander Grey on Unsplash.

I hesitate to have a pop at the venerable Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, partly because I like and admire her work. And partly, in this new media environment in which my enemy’s friend is my troll, I fear aligning myself with foam-flecked righties who use words like “Guardianista” and “wokerati”.

But she wrote a column late last week about assisted suicide that was just plain wrong. And, actually, I think she’s being profoundly illiberal on the subject, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.

Assisted suicide – voluntary euthanasia, assisted dying, call it what you will – was a hobby horse of mine some 15 years ago when I wrote a book against it. Slightly more recently, Toynbee and I were on a broadcast interview together on an entirely unrelated subject when, to the bemusement of the presenter, she suddenly raised assisted dying to have a go at me. It was quite flattering.

Anyway, last week’s Toynbee column was of a kind, dismissing the anti-euthanasia case as the province of religious nutcases (presumably like me). Consider this massive straw man of a sentence: “Only God can decide how long we should suffer before death comes at a time of his pitiless whim, they say.”

I’m used to this, though not from Toynbee. Debating assisted suicide, it’s only a matter of minutes before someone will say that I shouldn’t impose my “sanctity of life” beliefs on other people. Eh? I’ve never used that phrase in this context (whatever it may mean). In fact, my views on assisted suicide are entirely secular, though informed by a faith that respects the primacy of compassion for and defence of the most vulnerable in our society.

I believe that a jurisdiction that enshrines in its legislature the principle that some lives are more worth living than others takes us into very dangerous moral territory. Related to that, a two-tier structure for the value of human life in the medical professions is abhorrent. That’s why I say that to despatch the weakest and most vulnerable among us is unacceptably illiberal.

The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way.

A bill will come back to parliament to change the law to allow assisted suicide this autumn. With new PM Keir Starmer in favour and a very different configuration of the House of Commons post-election, its chances of passing are said to be high.

But even Lord Falconer, the parliamentary poster-boy for assisted suicide, who convened a ludicrous “independent” commission in 2012 stuffed with euthanasia enthusiasts and useful idiots, has accepted that no so-called safeguards can entirely ensure that no lives will be lost to malfeasance or malpractice.

So, my question to Falconer and Toynbee is this: How many unnecessary lives lost to assisted suicide is enough to have what you want? 100? 50? One? Another number?

It’s commonplace for deeply distressing accounts of agonising deaths to be rehearsed in support of assisted suicide. Toynbee did so last week. But as Falconer must (or should) know, hard cases make bad law. The only focus here should be on how best to ensure that no one need die a bad death.

For Falconer and his supporters the solution is to legislate so that terminally ill patients can be helped to kill themselves. But speaking to end-of-life medical professionals, such as Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, many of whom claim that advances now mean that bad deaths are vanishingly few, it’s clear that the UK’s world-leading palliative care has in sight the day when no one need die a bad death.

That’s no comfort to someone who is suffering at the end of their life right now. But assisted suicide puts that palliative care target in jeopardy, when it makes death a form of medical treatment. Look at the record – the Netherlands now allows assisted suicide for those who are simply “tired of life”. That’s not where end-of-life care should go.

The burden of proof under the Suicide Act (1961) lies with the defendant, who currently faces a maximum jail sentence of 14 years for assisting or encouraging a suicide. Those who have demonstrated that they have acted with compassion and consent have in turn been treated with compassion and leniency in the application of the law. Invert that burden of proof, with the Crown needing to prove that an unscrupulous relative or friend coerced a victim into suicide, and we’re into a fresh hell of moral jeopardy.

The law works as it stands. The terminally ill, the disabled, the profoundly depressed and the aged and vulnerable really shouldn’t be treated as a nuisance to be helped on their way. Again, as we might expect Toynbee to know, that is wholly illiberal.

It looks like the assisted suicide lobby will get what they want this year. It will be hailed as a great liberal social reform. Doubtless they will find it in their hearts to forgive me if I continue to demur.

Column

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Middle East

War & peace

2 October 2024

4 min read

‘The silent stars go by’, mocking the Middle East peace process

Where are today’s witnesses to peace in the Holy Lands?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Dots of light, caused by missles, fall across a night sky above the city

Iranian missiles above Jerusalem.

BBC News.

The evil shooting stars of ballistic weaponry over Jerusalem would have been clearly visible from Bethlehem, just to the south of the capital in the occupied West Bank, last Monday evening.

“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep/ the silent stars go by” goes the children’s Christmas carol. Nothing deep and dreamless about sleep in the little town of Bethlehem just now. Those deadly Iranian-dispatched stars were silent enough, until their alignment with Israeli ones in the Iron Dome. Then “Whump!” as each star collapsed, leaving a black hole in the night sky.

How depressing that these shining stars of violence and hatred should hang in the same sky that, it is said, hosted the star to mark the birthplace of the Prince of Peace. Depressing but not surprising. The Christ child grew up to foretell to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you.”

He predicted his own death in Jerusalem. And, for sure, the Christ is still being crucified there, every time a man, woman or child loses their life to that violence and hatred, there or in the surrounding region.

Where are wiser counsels this week, witnesses to peace in the Holy Lands? The legend has it that magi followed the messianic star to the stable. Who looks to these different stars in the night sky this week and asks what they mean?

Iran’s hardliners, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t countenance a dove with an olive twig.

It’s a bit of a stretch to apply the status of magus to Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new reformist president who had just been sworn in when he watched the rockets launched. His only similarity with the magi may be that he watched those travelling stars in the sky from an eastern perspective.

But Pezeshkian has, at least, tried to talk of the possibility of peace, among a Middle-Eastern cast who can only speak of war. He arrived back in Iran from the UN general assembly, where he had declared that Iran is “ready to lay down its arms if Israel lays down its arms.” He added: “We want to live in peace.”

Even if it’s not the wolf living with the lamb, or the leopard lying down with the kid, it does at least envisage a time when an Israeli wolf may lie down with the Iranian leopard. But Iran’s hardliners, under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t countenance a dove with an olive twig. They’re consumed with vengeance for Israel’s killing of their putative military leader, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon. And death must always be followed by more death in this scenario.

Followers of the Nazarene into Jerusalem committed to something very different, a defeat of death as a weapon of despair. Two millennia later, we might expect leaders of a western world founded on the principles of those first followers to speak to peace as the overriding priority for the lands from which their religion derives.

To draw the West into a war with Iran in defence of Israel. A re-elected president Donald Trump would be a useful dupe for this ploy...

Not a bit of it. Peace in the Holy Lands doesn’t even sound like a strategic aim for the West anymore. On the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US Army general David Petraeus asked: “Tell me how this ends?” No such foresight today. The all-consuming desire seems solely to show that we’re on Israel’s side, come what may.

President Joe Biden responded to Iran’s aerial attack by saying that the US is “fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel”. For his part, prime minister Keir Starmer declared that “Britain stands full square” with Israel and supports its “reasonable demand for the security of its people.” Admirable sentiments, but they don’t point to peace any time soon, so long as they encourage Israel (or anyone else) to escalate conflict.

In some quarters, this is held to be deliberate Israeli policy: To draw the West into a war with Iran in defence of Israel. A re-elected president Donald Trump would be a useful dupe for this ploy, abetted in part by the more extreme ends of the US Christian Right, for whom Israel must be protected at all costs as the locus for the second coming of the Christ. So, war with Iran is Armageddon, the great conflict of the End Times.

These are truly terrifying prospects. For the time being, it’s possibly enough to note that the president of Iran speaks more about peace than the West currently does. Given that the West is supposed to represent the legacy virtues of Christendom, that is in turn alarming.

That Bethlehem carol goes on to note “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.” As we raise our eyes to the fearsome lights in the night sky over Israel, we might wonder whether, when it comes to peace, silence from Christian nations is really enough.