Liberals are awful. The Leadbeater vote makes this unhappy fact clearer than ever. Of the big parties, the Lib Dems were 85 per cent for assisted suicide, while Labour were only 59 per cent in favour. 

The Tories were 19 per cent in favour, and every one of those “ayes” ought to be de-selected, if there is anything meaningfully conservative to British Conservatism. The arch-liberals who constitute the Commons-based survivors of Rishi Sunak’s Tory cabinet were even more disproportionately in favour of this evil measure. From the Lords, David Cameron had laid the ground for Sunak’s risible reasoning, set out in his local paper.

A rout then, prepared by the worst men to have led the party since John Major? Not necessarily, and not just because what’s left of the House of Lords has one chance left to justify itself as part of the constitution worthy of right-wing support.

There will be the usual tendentious crap that this clearly exceptional, clearly government-backed bill should be treated as if it were merely a “normal” PMB going up to the Lords. And so it shouldn’t simply be defeated, nor just revised to death, or gutted in such a way that the whips in the Commons won’t then have to programme tonnes of government time, which will in turn present losable division after losable division there.

… it is assisted suicide, whatever the scolds and pukes might disingenuously claim

Tory supporters of the House of Lords, miserable state though it is — and I am one — should be very clear about this: if the Lords has a job to do, this is it. If they don’t do it, that’s going to be very close to being it for them. There is no point to an upper house which will not revise. 

We should be clear about what this is, and it is assisted suicide, whatever the scolds and pukes might disingenuously claim. This is Moloch revealing himself, and what we’re going to see now is who his worshippers are. As it’s not “the state” which is going to be coming for granny, or the sad and unfortunate. It’s going to be you and me who come for them: the state’s now just going to legally let us. It’s going to be nurses and doctors and bureaucrats and relatives and bookkeepers who come with suicide-assistance in mind. And yes, for no one should fool themselves about this either, it’s going to be broken and frightened people who are going to understandably let themselves become the victims of these people who come for them. 

I should be clear about one other thing: I’m, for want of a better term, a moderate Shipmanite. Doctors should be able to quietly murder people, more so than ever now that technology otherwise hatefully keeps us alive for so awfully long. They performed this blessing unobtrusively for generations until Harold Shipman ruined it for all of us. But of course what destroyed the humanely sensible regime anyone related to a doctor active in the previous century can readily tell you about is our — or rather, parliament and the courts’ — response to Shipman. This was an absurd overreaction that primly destroyed a reasonable and time-honoured way of doing things.

We should be allowed to gently slip into the night; the right people to put us and our families out of our miseries were the caste who had both the honed techniques to do so and a realistic appreciation of life available to them to know when to. We should put this genie back into the bottle and retvrn. The odd over-achieving GP would be a very small price indeed to pay.

Instead, where are we? In a place only NHS cultists could think sane. Where now our clogged courts and prissy, unfathomably lazy medics will preside over a regime of bottom-up murder: exactly the wrong sort we shouldn’t want, and precisely the one which will lead to the worst societal outcomes.

Being marked for timely death by a doctor who needed to do so discreetly is the polar opposite of filling in your drop-down menu of multi-gendered death options and wanly hoping that self-sentencing will be carried out competently and on time. The first is kindness and a burden manfully shouldered (with risks taken prudently in the expectation that courts would be sensible and the police adequately intelligent). The second is #OurNHS and all the hell which will come with it.

This, ultimately, is why I still hope Starmer’s dreadful measure will be defeated, or at least readily reversed. Because what’s going to take ownership of it in this parliament, should the bill pass and come into law, is our health service. Thus, every vile Belgian or Canadian atrocity will happen tenfold here, on Labour’s watch, with, all hatred of the press notwithstanding, our far more vigorous media culture inescapably holding the government to account. Cynics thought Starmer was ineptly hoping to kill this bill off a week ago, when in fact he was, typically tenaciously, following his ideologue’s heart. But he’ll live to wish it had died in committee. One can but hope it finally does some harm to the NHS as well.