SHOULD Esther Rantzen be killed? It is a question that preoccupies the Daily Express.
Last Friday, the paper’s splash was a quote from her: “I never thought I’d be alive to see the law change, but perhaps I will. I can hardly believe it.” This was only the latest in an extraordinary series of 14 recent Rantzen-themed front-page splashes that promote assisted dying: “Esther’s ‘heart lifted at thought of dying in favourite place’”; “Esther’s tears over ‘cruel law’”; and “We must give Dame Esther her final campaign victory” among them.
The paper that earlier brought us such front pages as “£12 Trillion Brexit Trade boost” has now replaced “Get Brexit Done” with “Get Esther Done” as its great cause.
Two things are strange about this. The first is that — as with Brexit — it is the elderly and not very prosperous readers who will suffer as a result; the second is that it is Dame Esther herself who is one of the leaders of the campaign. Perhaps these things are not as odd as they appear. As with Brexit, the underlying delusional slogan is surely “Take back control.” This makes sense in the context of consumer journalism, where one is in a constant struggle for power and control with large and powerful entities, and the rules are set by legislation. It also makes sense if you are a showbiz personality, a star for whom everything possible is done to ease your passage through life — and why not out of it, as well?
One way of understanding the argument is to ask whether we are created by our choices or by our relationships. Obviously, these two causes can’t entirely be disentangled, since they act on each other all the time; but people prefer to think that one or the other is fundamental, and, when it comes to assisted dying, they will choose accordingly. Secular optimism is underpinned by a belief in the power of choice, and so, of course, is all advertising. And, if you underplay or entirely ignore the importance of relationships in people’s lives, and in their understanding of their own lives, then assisted suicide can seem a simple act of liberation.
SIMPLICITY is what the papers want from an issue. Appeals to grand principle sell more than close attention to the messiness of practice. No campaign is going to admit the obvious, awful truth, that there will be innocent losers and terrible mistakes made under any conceivable law. People who should have lived will die, and people who should have died will live. These are not mistakes that can be undone when they are detected after the event.
The Harold Shipman case is instructive here. He managed to kill 130 older women before anyone noticed and reported their suspicions — and, even then, his mistake was to change one victim’s will in his own favour. Only then did the relatives find something suspicious in her death. This seems a powerful argument to slippery-slopers like me.
But consider one consequence of the scandal, which was that the rules on prescribing opiates were tightened up so much that doctors found themselves unable to alleviate a huge amount of pain and suffering. So, if you trust doctors, you are laying yourself open to the depredations of a bad one; if you don’t, you are hindering the good ones from doing their job.
The Guardian tends to the same view on this question as the Express. Increasing choice is correlated with progress in a rather Blairite way, and there is seldom any consideration of how increasing choice for one group diminishes the choices of the outgroup. Progressive opinion generally argues that all opposition to assisted dying is religious — meaning that it is emotional, immature, and irrational, and can safely be disregarded.
There are a great many atheists outraged at this, but I am not completely certain that their outrage is justified. The notion of intrinsic value, to human life or anything else, seems to me to imply the existence (if that’s the word) of God. In the sublunary world, all value is relational: it is value to something for some purpose. Some people and some things, demented older people among them, are, therefore, completely valueless: they are no use to anyone. The intuition that says that this is false must be a religious one, even if to admit this is to agree with Polly Toynbee.
MEANWHILE, in news of the industry, it has emerged that the front runner to buy The Daily Telegraph, now that Sir Paul Marshall has snaffled The Spectator, is Dovid Efune, a fanatical Zionist based in New York, where he owns the online New York Sun. This week, he gave a plug interview to Robert F. Kennedy, and tweeted that “Israel under Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership has set the stage for the liberation of Lebanon, its restoration as a modern free market country, and the opening of the road to peace in the Levant.”
The Conservatives who freaked out about the prospect of Qatari ownership of the Telegraph because it was foreign might have been more careful what they wished for.