Diana Rigg’s plea for assisted dying was heartfelt, but wrong

“Nobody talks about how awful, how truly awful the details of this condition are, and the ignominy that is attached to it. Well, it’s high time they did. And it’s high time there was some movement in the law to give choice to people in my position. This means giving human beings true agency over their own bodies at the end of life.”

The late Dame Diana Rigg’s impassioned plea for the legalisation of assisted dying – made in recordings before her death from cancer in 2020, was revealed by her daughter, Rachel Stirling, at the weekend. Stirling had promised the star of Game of Thrones and the Avengers TV series that she would share her mother’s message with the public.

Reading Rigg’s words going into graphic detail about her treatment for lung cancer, it is impossible not to hear that fierce, articulate voice in your mind. She was an incredible woman.

Arguing against her would appear to put me in a tough spot, at risk of being seen as unspeakably cruel. But here’s the thing: I have endured more than my own fair share of pain and ignominy. I spent an indeterminate but excruciating length of time with a cement truck on top of me. It snapped my pelvis and left me with a bleed on it that nearly killed me. I had a collapsed lung, several broken ribs, a broken leg, a crushed left arm, now a couple of centimetres shorter than the right one. That lorry also severed nerves. Those are just the... highlights.

The aftermath was torture. Stirling explains how at one point, her mother had a canula inserted without any pain relief. I’ve been there. In the dead of night, I had a nurse screaming at me because I dared to call for morphine. I was left for hours without any pain relief at all after being transferred from the Royal London to Whipps Cross hospital. No doctor could be found to approve in triplicate what had already been prescribed.

So I know agony. I know humiliation, too. I’m only now, years after the event, trying to write a book about my experiences because they wrecked me mentally. But I’m still here. Disabled, in pain, psychologically fragile but Not Dead Yet, as the campaign group against assisted dying is called.

The problem with the arguments in favour of assisted dying – or assisted suicide – is that they are inevitably couched in emotive terms. The arguments against, much less often heard, are based solely on practicality. They pose an awkward question: what happens to lives that are less valued if assisted dying is put on statute?

Life with disability and health issues in today’s Britain is far from easy. Just this year, I had to raise a complaint against one London hospital that seemed set upon preventing my receiving an effective treatment for the fierce pain I still experience. My body is frequently wracked with it. The worst affects my foot, which feels as if it is constantly being attacked by a million hot needles, each one dripping in sulphuric acid. I find it impossible to wear socks, even with the temperature approaching freezing. As a result, sleep frequently eludes me.

To treat it, I periodically have a patch laced with capsaicin, the active ingredient in chilli peppers, applied to literally burn off the pain fibres. If that sounds excruciating, it is. The bureaucratic impediments put in the way of my receiving it are no less painful. When I asked about an alternative, a spinal electrode, I was told I would have to scale another mountain. The message? Don’t bother.

That is just one example of the challenges I typically face. And I am by no means in a bad position on the scale of disability. I am, for example, able to work. Some aren’t. Under the government’s latest plans, they now face being forced to meet medically ignorant job coaches regardless of how sick they are.

Rigg’s statement referenced climbing the Eiger. For disabled people, every morning involves climbing the north face. After midday, we square up to the Matterhorn. For some, it’s K2, all day, every day.

And yet we endure because we want to live. Despite the challenges, the contempt for us displayed by all the main political parties, by officialdom, by a health service that has lost the capacity to care, by abusive members of the public who shout slurs at us with apparent impunity, we endure.

What frightens us is Covid – and Canada. Covid, because when it struck the NHS was talking about leaving disabled people untreated or slapping do-not-resusistate orders on us without consent. Canada, because it has legalised Medical Assistance in Dying (Maid), and people with disabilities now feel pressured into taking it up for a lack of other options.

Recently, we heard from Rose Findlay, a quadriplegic woman from Ontario who posted a video arguing that it would be faster for her to pursue a medically assisted death than it would to wait for the state to provide support. There was Amir Farsoud, a disabled man who faced being evicted from social housing. He applied for Maid because he feared that he would be unable to cope with homelessness. How about the veterans who had it suggested by a now suspended caseworker? Be assured, they will be joined by others.

It is no good saying yes, but that wouldn’t happen here because we’ll include safeguards. So did Canada. They were chipped away at. It is now talking about offering Maid to people with depression. This supposedly “progressive” nation is turning into a dystopia before our eyes. What next? Maid for the elderly, as envisiged in the recent Japanese film, Plan 75?

My beloved grandfather had a similarly terrible experience to that which Rigg had. But my view remains the same. You simply cannot allow “assisted dying” unless and until you are willing to provide disabled people with the tools they need to live. Britain appears reluctant to do that.

Case closed.