I worry that even the best intentions can lead to unintended consequences, and that the desire to help our neighbour could, unintentionally, open the door to yet more pain and suffering for those we are trying to help
Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, Daily Mail, 16 October
The animal analogy really irks me. “You wouldn’t put a dog through this” was Kim Leadbeater’s and Esther Rantzen’s argument [for assisted dying]. But you are not a dog, and I don’t treat you like a dog in any other way
Matthew Doré, honorary secretary of the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland, quoted in Dominic Lawson’s column in The Sunday Times, 13 October
The naysayers are naïve. They fetishise saving life for its own sake and pathologise death. They haven’t witnessed loved ones in prolonged agony in some grim corner of an understaffed ward. Nor have they seen through the fantasy that today’s NHS can provide anything approaching sufficient palliative care
Melanie Reid, The Times, 15 October
Hospitals, already overwhelmed, are being ordered to evacuate. They are running out of fuel and essential supplies, while doctors and nurses battle to save lives with what little they have left. The wounded flood in — children, older people, victims of Israeli airstrikes — but with no resources to treat them. . . This is not a time for silence — this is a time for action. The people of Gaza cannot wait. The world must intervene now before more innocent lives are lost
Statement on Gaza, signed by 38 organisations, 15 October
After having waited decades for justice, the infected and the affected are, in many cases, still being made to wait for the full implementation of the compensation scheme. This is just wrong
Pete Wilcox, Bishop of Sheffield, speaking in a Lords debate on the Infected Blood Inquiry, 15 October
The challenge in thinking about genocide is that a threshold has been set so high and so particular in its terms that it’s going to be very difficult, in almost all cases, to prove the requisite genocidal intent, to allow a court to place on the forehead of a state for ever that this is a genocide state
Philippe Sands, Christian Aid annual lecture, St Martin-in-the-Fields, 14 October
When the clock strikes midnight I shall cease to be the Bishop of Worcester. What I shall become has yet to be revealed. A pumpkin, maybe?
John Inge, former Bishop of Worcester, Twitter/X, 9 October
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