The assisted dying bill was an exercise in ‘disability erasure’

The one really distressing aspect of the Commons debate on assisted dying was how Labour MPs, who got the bill over the line, so casually turned a tin ear to disabled people.

No disabled people’s organisations or charities were in favour of the legislation, as campaigner Baroness Jane Campbell made clear in the Independent – so they simply erased us. The message from the party, which is also pressing ahead with a review into disability benefits, is that we don’t count.

The very real concerns expressed by the likes of disabled parliamentarians such as Baroness Campbell, Baroness Grey-Thompson, not to mention experienced legislators such as mother of the house Diane Abbott, and their colleagues who have worked as carers, were swatted aside.

Meanwhile, we were treated to a torrent of highly emotive arguments, which ignored not only the fears of Britain’s disabled community but also the practical concerns raised by the likes of the former lord chief justice Baron Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Sir James Munby, the former head of the High Court’s family division.

Thomas said he feared – and I think he will be proved correct – that no one has grappled with the potential impact on family courts, while Munby said it was not “the proper function” of a judge to decide who was eligible for assisted suicide.

If it is not the proper function of judges, what of the two doctors who are also supposed to sign off and participate in this process? Are we now going to witness people “doctor shopping” if they are thwarted by those who understandably take the view that their first duty is to “do no harm”? Will there be lists of death-friendly GPs posted on Facebook?

A friend of mine, similarly opposed (and fiercely) to this dreadful piece of legislation was admirably phlegmatic about the result after I texted a four-letter word, followed by “bad day”. “More work to do,” they said.

I very much fear that work is going to have to be directed not towards opposing the bill as it makes its way through the Parliamentary process, but to combatting the very real danger we now face: that of policy creep.

Because how long can it be before the victorious lobby starts chipping away at the “safeguards”, which are supposed to address the concerns over people like me, with health conditions or disabilities, being coerced or guilted into ending their lives earlier than they would like to avoid becoming “a burden” to their families? Or to the state?

Does anyone really imagine that a well-resourced lobby, which had its manipulative posters prominently displayed at Westminster and other central London Underground stations (and just think for a moment about how crass that move was) is simply going to pack up and go home if and when the bill reaches statute?

That’s not the way these things work. It won’t be long before there are more posters, this time attempting to tug at the heartstrings of naive legislators over how difficult and humiliating the process supposedly is, and how it must be made easier.

This is what happened in Canada, which has dived headlong into a dystopia where something frighteningly close to the suicide booths that Simpsons creator Matt Groening envisaged for the year 3,000 in his satirical Futurama are in operation today. Slowly but surely, the safeguards in that country’s original law were taken down so that you now have homeless veterans being offered “Medical Assistance In Dying” (MAID) as opposed to help.

Don’t you dare try and tell me that “it couldn’t happen here”. It could. Have you tried using the NHS recently? You’re made to feel a burden just for trying to book an appointment. Getting the treatment I need sometimes feels like slogging through the Amazon jungle with a blunt machete.

I live with pain. Every day. Sometimes, it is agonising to the extent that I’ve felt like getting a machete myself and using it to cut my own foot off. No, I am not kidding. Chronic pain can take you to very dark places. But even with it, I want help not to die, but to live. And the treatments exist. It is just getting increasingly hard to access them. Now there is an alternative to navigating the health service’s bureaucratic swamp, I fear people are going to turn to it.

We’ve got to this point partly because Keir Starmer preferred to listen to the siren song of that of Esther Rantzen while acting as if disabled Britons don’t exist. Can you really blame me for feeling terrified that Britain is embarking on a downward spiral into its own version of Canada’s horror show?