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.

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Comment

Migration

Politics

Romance

3 July 2025

5 min read

Families like mine are impossible now, thanks to the idol that is the net migration target

Politician priests are making pointless sacrifices on the altar of numbers

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A Border Force officer wears body armour with Immigration Enforcement written on the back

UK Border Force.

Let me tell you a love story. Eighteen years ago, in a time before politicians had taken to immolating their values on the altar of the semiannual net migration totals, I fell for the pretty Scottish bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. The romance presented some challenges for an American like me, but none that were insurmountable. She found a year-long internship near me in Seattle and, just before she returned home, I popped the question.

The process of applying for a UK visa was just another bit of the tedious logistics of an overseas move, the kind of thing a romantic comedy skips over with a ‘One Year Later’ movie subtitle so that it can end with a joyous wedding ceilidh in a picturesque Scottish locale. Our first few years together in Edinburgh were lean ones. Having takeaway coffee more than once a week felt like a scandalously indulgent luxury. Even so, I was able to progress seamlessly from my marriage visa to indefinite leave to remain, to citizenship.

None of this would be possible if we were young twentysomethings in love today. We would fail every test of what the Home Office now considers to be acceptable romance.

During our first year of marriage, the stipend my wife received while training for ministry would have been well short of the £18,600 income threshold introduced in 2012 for a sponsoring spouse, let alone the £29,000 required now. While we did have some savings, they were nowhere near the £88,500 now needed to waive the income requirement, and, in any case, would have been substantially drained by the £5,000 in fees and health surcharges that a two-and-half-year spouse visa now costs. It is little wonder Brits who have found love abroad, even ones in a substantially better financial and professional position than we were then, are now finding it impossible to move back to the UK.

What is the cause of these new barriers? A hint can be found in the title of a recent Guardian article about recommendations for a slight relaxation of the income threshold to between £23,000 to £25,000. ‘Lowering UK’s income requirement for family visas ‘would increase net migration’, the piece was headlined. When even the most left wing major daily in Britain can’t report on the possibility of things being marginally easier for Brits who have the temerity to love a non-citizen, without framing it in terms of net migration, it’s a sign that we have all fallen captive to this singular statistic.

Net migration is a number created by humans and yet it has come to play the role of an angry god which demands sacrifices every time it is reported. The right of working class people to marry a non-citizen spouse, the economic viability of our universities, and the proper staffing of the NHS are all victims its politician-priests have offered up in hopes that they would satiate its hunger. Net zero maybe next.

There is no particular reason to think totting up the total number of people who arrived in the UK with the intention of staying here for a year and then subtracting the total number who left with the intention of staying abroad for a similar duration is a particularly meaningful exercise. It conflates people like me, who came here with every intention to settle and start a family, with students coming for a one-year master’s, doctors filling vital roles in NHS with children try to stay with with a migrant parent and Afghan refugees seeking long-term sanctuary with oil workers serving time in Aberdeen before moving on to Calgary or Brunei.

The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to think carefully about how much of each form of migration to allow, but when they are all grouped together under this single measure a peculiar logic sets in. Want to do the right thing by welcoming refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong? Well, then, we’ll have to offset that with restricting visas for overseas students and throwing our higher education sector into chaos. Need more highly skilled programmers working in banks in London? Well, maybe we can balance that by demanding care workers abandon their kids if they want to look after someone in Nottingham. There is no reason to weigh the needs of these different sectors against each other, and yet the logic of this statistic demands that we do.

The Bible has a word for human-made things which take on their own singular, violent logic. It calls them idols. While that word may conjure images of golden calves, the accusation which biblical writers consistently make against idolaters, that their idols blind them to what is really important and numbs their critical thinking, applies equally well when the idol is a statistic. The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments. It has made us unable to say what should be said without glancing nervously at its imposing shadow. It causes us to say things that should never be said and not notice how absurd they are.

Instead, we should be able to celebrate that hundreds of thousands of people want to come to study at our universities (the vast majority of whom return home after finishing their studies) and, hopefully, someday also be able to celebrate when hundreds of thousands of refugees are able to return to a peaceful and liberated Ukraine without having to calculate that the former will raise and the latter lower our totals. We should be able to welcome easing of income restrictions on spouse visas without noting that it will lead to a marginal increase in net migration. We should be able to see that sending an eight- and eleven-year-old back to Brazil without their parents is not, in the words of a Home Office official, “a degree of disruption in family life” which is “proportionate to the legitimate aim of maintaining effective immigration control”, but rather a gross violation of human decency.

Migrants are not just numbers on a balance sheet. The diversity of our lives, what we give to the UK, what we receive in return, cannot be summed up in a single annual figure. And yet every six months, as the figure comes out, politicians express disappointment and announce measures to put that little bit of extra pressure on us, so that maybe a few more of us who can leave will. In the process they are sacrificing to this idol not just the peace of mind and the economic well-being of many migrants, but also much of the vitality of the nation as a whole. The Bible has a solution for idols. They are only fit to be melted down, destroyed, and forgotten. It is time to consider giving this one a similar treatment.

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