Best Of

In response to others, and personal, here's why I support AD. My father was very active in his 80s - still tending his garden and allotment, socialising and so forth. But around 90 his body gave way. He had to leave his house, utter misery for him, and move to a care home. He was immobile and incontinent. He was as miserable as fuck. There was no prospect of recovery. But his brain was still absolutely fine. And he wanted to die, because the quality of his life was absolutely zero. He even asked us, his sons, to dispense with him. Of course we said no. So, he spent the last 2.5 years of his life, which had been absolutely splendid until then, in abject misery. For no good reason.

That sounds awful and I am sympathetic.

I am still opposed to the AD bill though. The safeguards against coercion by staff and/or relatives are not robust enough. A lot should be done to improve End of Life and palliative care first. This is a very valid alternative for many, and doesn't leave patients feeling coerced. I also make a distinction between assisted suicide and assisted dying, the latter requiring active medical intervention.

Bart is being a bigger idiot than usual. Suicide rarely occurs by rational decision in clear consciousness. Very often it is an impulsive act by those with treatable mental disorders.

Suicide is the number one cause of death of young men in this country, but there is no safe and humane way of doing it. Driving people to obscene acts like jumping in front of trains, of off bridges, or causing horrific scenes for their loved ones to discover.

Nobody should be left to feel that a train, or similar, is their only way out.

If someone wants to die they should be offered support, eg Samaritans style, but if they have firmly made their mind up there should be a safer and more humane option than stepping in front of trains.

Assisted death should be an option to everyone who desires it, whatever their reasons. Their life, their choice.

The love of my life had terrible depression. One dark night - many years after we'd had to separate - she climbed up to the top of a cliff overlooking a disused quarry and threw herself to her death into the rancid water down below.

I often think how wretched that final walk must have been. In the dark. Bushes scratching. The wind.

So yeah - more mental health support and other options would be kinda good - male or female.

Christ, that's awful. I'm so sorry. x

EXC - I've seen a leaked policy document from Labour in opposition which sets out how to approach assisted dying.

The document sets out how it could be introduced as a private member’s bill, suggesting that would still allow “heavy influence” for the government in the process

https://x.com/jessicaelgot/status/1996237497626456337?s=20

https://t.co/lZR8lCnCZz

That's not news is it and it's a matter of conscience not party political.
Some people want to die with dignity rather than in pain.
A friend's parent recently passed with metastatic cancer that had spread to the spine, they were in constant pain at the end and wanted to pass several weeks before they did.
My parent has late stage Alzheimer's, they had clearly expressed a wish not to exist as they do now, physically they're in good health so it could be years of cognitive decline, this bill wouldn't help them, but it might help some people.
It's not going to be compulsory FFS, it'll give a small number of people a choice.

If it's only about those who choose it why does the Bill allow doctors to suggest it? Suicide is not a medical treatment. There are no clinical indices for it. A doctor is in no position to know whether someone should commit suicide - let alone suggest it. Suicide is not a medical treatment.

Why are the training slides which the NHS is already developing saying that the training should be targeted at oncologists and palliative care doctors?

Why is there no conscience opt-out? What about people who do not believe in it, whether medical professionals or hospices? Why are they not given a choice?

Why have those proposing the Bill refused all safeguards - especially to prevent coercion?

Why is the government refusing to find palliative care properly?

Why did Starmer say in the Commons recently that the law should be "effective" and "enforceable" but notably refused to say that it should be "safe"?

Why is Falconer saying that being poor is a reason to get the state to help you kill yourself? There was a time when the Labour Party thought its job was to help the poor, to alleviate their poverty. Now it thinks they should be killed instead.

Every single medical group, the disabled groups, those who know about coercion, coroners etc - everyone with any expertise in the care of the very sick etc.,has said this Bill is unsafe and will lead to the forced deaths of the vulnerable. And the Labour Party is the one seeking to push it through with minimal scrutiny, without a proper mandate and by bullying those who raise concerns.

Last week I told my oncologist that on no account was he or any of the team treating me even to think about suggesting suicide to me. He told me that he wouldn't and that he didn't believe in it. But I now have to worry - on top of everything else - if this bill becomes law that when doctors tell me there is nothing more they can do for me - whether this is really a medical assessment or whether they are under financial pressure to stop treating me because it will save the NHS money and push me into suicide instead because to the state my life is no longer worth living. That I should even have to worry about this is unconscionable. This Bill will break the trust a patient should be able to have in their doctor. It will break the NHS if it becomes a service which thinks that the administration of death is what it should be doing.

Those on here who handwave this fear away can fuck off, frankly. And I never ever want to hear again from Labour Party supporters that they are somehow morally better than everyone else. When the state adopts an attitude which views the sick, the disabled, the old, the abused, the mentally ill, the mentally distressed, the unhappy, the poor as lives which are not worth living, as people who should be helped to die rather than helped to live, a moral Rubicon has been crossed. "Let's kill useless mouths to feed for the greater good" is an experiment that's been tried before and it did not end well.

EXC - I've seen a leaked policy document from Labour in opposition which sets out how to approach assisted dying.

The document sets out how it could be introduced as a private member’s bill, suggesting that would still allow “heavy influence” for the government in the process

https://x.com/jessicaelgot/status/1996237497626456337?s=20

https://t.co/lZR8lCnCZz

Why is it being leaked now? Does someone want to give Starmer's premiership an assisted death?

Esther Rantzen asked them to

That's (end of) Life!

How about "you can have assisted dying, but the lethal injection has to be given via a carrot shaped like a willy" as a compromise?

I genuinely hope not

I noticed an interesting statistic in the ' Lifeboat' winter edition that in the RNLI 200 year history around 4 million lives have been saved

That is extraordinary and something those associated with it can be very proud of

It's a fascinating organisation. They have their own boat designers incorporating off the shelf kit into the shell of the boat. Good for maintenance purposes. Great away day for engineers/big kids who get to sit in the cabin. I did baulk at the offer to climb through some of the very tight crawl spaces.

You may know one of our son's has qualified as a helm for the Llandudno inshore lifeboat and is on a career path to one of the coxswains of the all weather boat

The dedication is enormous and the training on going both in the classroom, at sea, and in Poole

@IanB2 may be interested on his recent course he navigated the AWB to Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight from Poole

And never forget, they are unpaid

I could not have put it better myself.

"Yesterday, Elish Angiolini published the second part of her inquiry into sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces — another meticulously compiled report destined to vanish into the Governmental void. At 235 pages, it follows last year’s 361-page effort, which was prompted by the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard and whose recommendations ministers enthusiastically welcomed before doing precisely nothing with them.

The inquiry heard that the National Police Chiefs’ Council had produced guidance to help forces tackle these crimes. Yet as of September, over a quarter of police forces still hadn’t bothered to implement it. Angiolini’s own survey found more than three-quarters of young women aged 18–24 had been made to feel unsafe in public because of male behaviour.

But the most damning part of this stage of the inquiry is not what was found — it’s what cannot be found. “No one was confidently able to tell me how many women nationally report being the victim of sexually motivated crimes in public spaces,” Angiolini told the press conference. There are no reliable national figures for rape in public places. None for indecent exposure. None for sexually motivated assaults. This absence of even the most basic data betrays the truth behind the Government’s much-vaunted pledge to halve violence against women and girls in a decade: it cannot reduce what it does not bother to count."

Meanwhile that utter **** Lammy tries to use victims as a justification for abolishing jury trials.