With a blitzkrieg of euphemisms, the campaigners for the so-called Assisted Dying bill are misleading MPs and trying to force the NHS into providing what Diane Abbot calls, with strict accuracy, a ‘national suicide service’.

Campaigners have appropriated the language of ‘dignity’, ‘compassion’, and ‘choice’, and use it in a way that casts opponents of the bill—which include palliative care doctors who have given their lives to reducing pain for those who are dying—as causing people to undergo an agonising death. The campaign is being led by a group founded in 1935 to promote voluntary euthanasia. Its posters now line the Westminster tube station with happy photos and taglines such as ‘My dying wish is my family won’t see my suffer. And I won’t have to.’ In 2006 this group rebranded from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society to Dignity in Dying.

The real arguments are, in Orwell’s words, ‘too brutal for most people to face’

George Orwell would have understood. In his essay ‘The Politics of the English Language,’ he perceived the tendency of politicians to ‘defend the indefensible’; thus ‘political language consists largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’. Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of the bill, said on BBC radio that she finds the term ‘assisted suicide’ offensive. People should be suspicious when politicians refuse to name the thing they are promoting. The long title of her bill refers to providing terminally ill adults with ‘with assistance to end their own life’. This is physician-assisted suicide. ‘Assisted dying’ is a misleading term and was likely chosen for that purpose. A Survation poll found that only 43% of people understand that ‘assisted dying’ means providing people with less than 6 months to live with lethal medication to end their life. A majority think it means something else: giving people who are dying the right to stop life-prolonging treatment (42%) or providing hospice-type care (10%); 5% answered ‘don’t know’. Campaigners claim some polls show large majority support for the bill, but closer inspection reveals that this depends on people believing that the bill has safeguards that it in fact does not have, or on misunderstandings such as those in the Survation poll.

Leadbeater also obscures reality when, quoting Nick Boles, she says the bill is all about choice in a liberal society: ‘If you don’t like the idea of assisted dying, don’t seek medical assistance to arrange your own death. If liberal democracy means anything it is this: that every individual should be free to live their life in the way they want’. It is surprising to see such a bare appeal to what Isaiah Berlin called ’negative liberty’ (lack of constraint) in this context and from a Labour MP. The Labour Party has historically stressed positive liberty, which people have when they can freely pursue opportunities without being subject to lack of economic means or implicit forms of duress. How meaningful is a choice to die when you have a terminal diagnosis, or are struggling with depression, mental illness or disability, or feel that you are being a burden on your family or the NHS? Are you truly free to say no when a doctor raises the possibility of choosing to end your life—as doctors are expressly permitted to do under the bill—and when palliative care is underfunded?

Wes Streeting, Secretary for Health, and many other prominent Labour MPs have refused to support the bill, saying that we should not even be having this debate given the dire state of funding for palliative and hospice care. And yet campaigners persist in casting opponents of the bill as not only lacking in compassion, but as willing agents of causing others to suffer. Dignity in Dying says on its website: ‘This is an issue about compassion and changing an inhumane law which tortures dying people.’

A group of eminent lawyers, including Lord Falconer KC (who proposed a similar bill in 2014) echoes this line in a recent letter to the Observer: ‘Our current law does not serve to safeguard the sanctity of life. By criminalising assisted suicide, it can cause people to end their lives before they require help to do so. Our law does not protect weak and vulnerable people: it requires people to take decisions about their end of life out of sight, alone and without the help of professionals.’ This relies on hidden premises that, among other things, normalise suicide. And the argument is like saying that the law that forbids people from buying heroin in pharmacies is forcing them to buy adulterated doses on the street. Orwell said that ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ The language of the above argument is corrupting; it twists our understanding of what is causing the pain and casts aspersion on people dedicated to caring for the terminally ill until death. This bill is opposed by the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatrics Association, and by a coalition of 350 disability organisations, including Not Dead Yet. A group of more than 3000 medical professionals have signed a letter opposing the bill. Wes Streeting, who as Health Secretary would have to implement the bill, opposes it, as does Shabana Mahmood, who as Justice Minister would oversee the judicial approval process in the bill.

These and many other opponents of the bill have pointed to a lack of safeguards and to the rapid, dramatic expansion of physician-assisted suicide in Canada, where 4% of deaths are now administered by its MAiD programme: Medical Assistance in Dying (yet another instance of the sort of euphemism Leadbeater is employing). Originally confined to terminal patients whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’, similar to the Leadbeater bill, MAiD has been extended to people in need of better care. In a 2022 article on MAiD, Yuan Yi Zhu reported that ‘a disabled woman applied to die because she “simply cannot afford to keep on living”. Another sought euthanasia because Covid-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment which kept her chronic pain bearable’. A former Paralympian who requested a stair lift for her home said that she was offered MAiD in response. In 2027, MAiD will be extended to people whose sole condition is mental illness.

Proponents of the bill say that this will never happen here, and they castigate opponents as either not understanding the Leadbeater bill or fear-mongering. Make your own best judgment about who is right on this point, and what the future is likely to hold in a country with a chronically underfunded public health service. But we can all rest assured that if the UK adopts the bill, and then gradually expands it in the direction that Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium have all taken, comforting euphemisms will flow in a steady stream. The real arguments are, in Orwell’s words, ‘too brutal for most people to face’.