The current Labour Government will hardly be the first to bequeath the United Kingdom a legacy of death and taxes. But one would struggle to find an example of a previous government that has accelerated those twin certainties of human life so soon after assuming power.
Labour's watershed budget exposed an existential challenge that threatens to drain our collective coffers. For the first time, the National Health Service's (NHS) annual budget has surpassed an eye-watering £200 billion. Taxpayers must pour ever-increasing resources to this bottomless void to prevent its total collapse.
The Chief Secretary's admission that "everyone recognises that the system is broken" rings hollow against the £20 billion emergency infusion for operational costs—a lifeline offered without any corresponding demands for enhanced efficiency, reduced waiting times, or structural reform. The arithmetic is unforgiving: Even substantial tax increases cannot satiate this growing appetite.
Our triumph of longevity—increasing life expectancy—has become a double-edged sword, as citizens live longer but are more likely to suffer from multiple health conditions requiring intensive care as they age.
Meanwhile, sharply declining fertility rates presage a future in which fewer working-age citizens will be forced to shoulder an ever-growing burden. As our social fabric unravels with care for the elderly shifting dramatically from the realm of the family to state dependency, these pressures can only intensify. Something has to give. While reform is imperative, the NHS' staunchest supporters should not lose sight of its founding ethos, which was and should continue to be to preserve human life, not sacrifice lives for its own financial preservation.
Since this sobering fiscal reality check, parliamentarians are now racing to pass legislation that would enable physicians to facilitate their patients' deaths through assisted suicide. Although initially restricted to those with terminal diagnoses of six months or less, the experiences of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada serve as stark warnings: As surely as night follows day, such "safeguards" will disintegrate on contact with the messy reality of physical suffering and psychological discomfort to encompass an ever-widening circle of patients.
The economic calculus underlying assisted suicide advocacy has always haunted it. Consider the chilling prediction of Jacques Attali, former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, that euthanasia would become "one of the essential instruments of our future societies" once humans persist beyond their productive years, or Baroness Warnock's nakedly utilitarian arguments that those who burden their families or the state ought to be "allowed" to die.
What begins as a right will shade rapidly and imperceptibly into an obligation, not least because the raw economic pressures are impossible to ignore. While inpatient hospice care costs £3,000 to £4,000 weekly, the administration of a cocktail of poisons or treatment in a portable gas chamber will cost a negligible fraction of that. One does not need to be an expert in public policy to recognize that such stark cost differentials will shape future policy decisions.
To be clear, advocates for assisted dying are overwhelmingly more motivated by genuine compassion than by fiscal considerations. Yet they fail to grasp a fundamental truth: A society that offers death alongside care to its most vulnerable has abandoned its moral foundations. When individuals contemplate suicide, our collective response should be to extend hands of friendship and psychiatric support, and to mobilize the voluntary sector. We betray our humanitarian principles by directing them toward state-sanctioned means of ending their lives.
Whatever noble intentions Kim Leadbeater and her supporters may harbor, public policy must be evaluated by a concrete evaluation of its likely consequences. If this government truly aspires to progressive ideals of protecting society's most vulnerable, it must resist the temptation to sacrifice human dignity on the altar of fiscal expediency.
Dr. James Orr is an Associate Professor at University of Cambridge.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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