A REALLY big-time Viking’s funeral required the ceremonial strangling of his surplus slaves, who would be put aboard his flaming boat to heaven; but we have outgrown all that.

In our civilisation, it is television presenters whose deaths must be memorialised by the slaughter of the useless and the inconvenient. And so Parliament has answered the question which has preoccupied the Daily Express for the last few years – “Should Esther Rantzen be killed?” (Press, 11 October 2024) — and the answer is “Yes.” It makes the paper’s last campaign, for Brexit, look quite harmless.

The wrongness of the Leadbeater Bill is not primarily one of moral principle. It would be absurd to say that life must always, at all costs, be preserved, or that doctors must never knowingly shorten it. I think that to shorten life by relieving suffering is sometimes the clear duty of a doctor, and this was, I think, the general understanding of the profession until the Harold Shipman case.

Some treatments — some doses of opiates, for example — have the obvious side-effect that they will shorten life while also diminishing pain. A doctor who didn’t know this would be incompetent; a doctor who didn’t prescribe those doses anyway would be unprofessional. I would rather have competent doctors.

My own father, after a massive heart attack, which meant that he would never recover brain function, developed a providential chest infection after 14 days in a coma. When the consultant suggested relieving his breathing with large doses of diamorphine, everyone in the room knew what he was saying — without it needing to be said at all. We all agreed to it, confident that it was what my father would have wanted, too.

This doesn’t mean that I thought that his wishes should decide the matter. Five months before his heart attack, he had been seriously contemplating suicide; I had travelled down on several weekends to try to talk him out of it, not least because my mother would have felt obliged to follow him, rather than face alone a world in which she had failed to keep him alive.

In both cases, the right decisions about life and death were made within the meshes of a loving family, and with much that could not possibly be formalised. At no time was my father entirely free to choose his fate, and quite right, too. You can say that the Leadbeater Bill is wrong in principle because it starts from the assumption that we ought to be the solitary captains on our fate, or that this is what we really fundamentally are. We’re not. We can’t be. We are deeply social creatures, living in relationship.

This is what the legislation ignores or denies. It is written and promoted as if the world were held in a grid of rules. Instead of the meshes of a net, in which living things are trapped and struggle, we now have a spreadsheet in which the data is all penned in its proper cells. What’s worse is that these rules are written as if people were good but stupid, lacking only enlightenment from Big Nanny; but laws must be written to control people who act as if they are evil and cunning. (That is why it was also wrong to decriminalise abortion at any stage.)

The Leadbeater Bill is an expression of managerial ideology in that it ignores the judgement of the professionals involved and the considered opinions of their professional associations. It replaces them with a magical world in which a statement of policy, or of intent, brings about the intended action, and the world conforms itself obediently to the map.

There was always a tension in the campaign for assisted dying between the respectable cases, hedged about with all possible safeguards, and the ones whose emotional charge really powered the campaign, where people were facing not six months but years and years — an indefinite life sentence — of increasing pain.

What the campaigners wanted was an end to avoidable suffering, but, when it’s put as baldly as that, it’s obvious that suicide should be made available to everyone by the State, as is the logic of the law in Canada. There is no slippery slope there, but a straight drop into the abyss.

Life entails much suffering for which, in this world, there is only palliative care. The palliative treatment for old age is mostly love, and that is not something that governments can supply. The money for assisted dying will come out of the NHS budget. The money that hospices and care homes need will not.