Britain’s Sentimental Suicide 

Euthanasia is coming to Britain. It is arriving slowly, step by step, but it has the awful inevitability of a battering ram hammering against a splintering gate.  

There is an Assisted Dying bill currently traveling through Parliament. It passed through the Commons, with the last chance to stop it falling upon the House of Lords, which is primarily a revising chamber that is generally unwilling to block legislation. This marks, incredibly, the eighth attempt to push through euthanasia in the UK since 2010. “Once in a generation” choices have a way of being offered over and over until the “right” decision is reached. 

The bill, proposed by British Labour Party member Kim Leadbeater, is a private member’s bill, meaning that it technically has nothing to do with the government. Yet in practice it has had the tacit backing and approval of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The bill is presented as being narrowly about pain relief for the terminally ill, but it permits any patient who’s been given six months to live the option to seek an assisted death for any reason. Critics have pointed out that as written, the bill will allow vulnerable patients, including those with anorexia and learning disabilities, to seek euthanasia.  

Parallels have been drawn to Canada, which passed a very similar law, initially restricted to the dying. But legal challenges and campaigning saw Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) extended to those without terminal conditions, and there are now plans afoot to extend it to the mentally ill as well. Regular stories surface of patients who sought an assisted death after years of inadequate healthcare and delays for those seeking procedures and treatment. The UK’s NHS, with its long waiting lists and rationing, is worryingly similar to Canada’s struggling healthcare sector.  

Britain is a very different country from America. In the US, a federal republic and a laboratory of democracy, individual states can move out far in advance of national norms, as when Oregon legalized assisted suicide in 1997. Thus, radical change arrives in different places at different speeds, as states poke holes in the legislative dike. By contrast, In Britain, where Parliament is all-powerful and local government powerless, epochal legal changes happen all at once and with dizzying speed. 

Already England is a very different country from the one I grew up in during the 1990s. When I was born in 1992, it was illegal for schools to “promote homosexuality,” 94 percent of the population was white, and Hong Kong was still a British possession. The pace and scale of social change since then is almost unimaginable, and I think many outsiders are unaware of just how much Britain as a whole was a profoundly conservative society until very recently.  

This innate conservatism has, paradoxically, acted as an accelerant for destructive change in certain circumstances. British people are highly susceptible to the invisible influence of social expectation and civility. These habits of orderliness and respect, shaped by powerful Victorian- and Edwardian-era institutions, helped create the context for one of the most peaceful, prosperous, and powerful nations on earth. Yet these same habits, born of a society marked by voluntary associations, private enterprise, and mutual aid, the unique William Morris cocktail that is English Tory Socialism, were hijacked to serve the interests of an overmighty central state.  

What this has led to in recent years has been extraordinary passivity in the face of terrible government abuses, from the Horizon scandal in which postal workers were wrongly prosecuted, to the “metric martyrs” (the shop owners jailed for refusing to abandon imperial measurements), and most infamously, the children and parents who were ignored in the Pakistani grooming gang scandal. When poorly executed and punitive pandemic measures were imposed, the contrast between the vigorous resistance of a significant section of American society and the near-universal compliance of Brits was notable. Though a willingness to comply was born of a noble history of collective organization and trust, it has become something corrupt and complacent, with curtain-twitching neighbors reporting each other for daring to break lockdown protocols or take a walk. This habit of passive compliance has come at the direct expense of the old culture of active citizenship. Fewer people, especially the young, volunteer. Trust in institutions and authority has plummeted, a change again concentrated among younger people, a generation that also reports the lowest levels of support for democracy and free speech.  

This culture of low trust and high obedience is not new and it is not unique to Britain—it is the culture typical of authoritarian states like Russia and China, where civil society has been degraded for generations, removing resistance to authority even as it disintegrates social bonds. That this process is being repeated in Western democracies hints at something very disturbing: that liberalism itself is increasingly an authoritarian force. 

This brings us back to the assisted dying bill. The first time this issue appeared before parliament was in 1936, at a time when many Western societies were sterilizing and euthanizing those seen as biologically “unfit” and a burden on society. Though post-Edwardian British society was far more comfortable with eugenic arguments than we are today, the debate at that time was also framed in terms of pain relief and compassion. Even in Nazi Germany, the state murder of the disabled was euphemistically described in terms of Gnadentod (merciful death), and it was justified not only as a public health measure, but as an act of mercy. Yet there was a powerful locus of resistance present at that time that is increasingly absent now—a worldview rooted in natural law.  

Speaking in that 1936 debate, the Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent, a Catholic peer, was grappling with accusations that religious parliamentarians were imposing their morality on the dying. His answer then was considerably less meek than the sort religious politicians feel compelled to make today: 

We do not oppose it because the Church condemns it, but because the law of nature brands it as evil and a cowardly act. What about other people? What about the Jews? Are they in favour of this change? I am sure we all justly regard the Jews as being a humane race, but I am assured that there is not an orthodox Jew in the world who would not oppose this measure tooth and nail. What about the Mahomedans? Do they approve a measure of this kind? Not at all. They consider it to be contrary to the natural law and the law of God. Of course, if this question is to be considered, as I am sure it will not be by noble Lords in this House, as if there was no God, then the situation is different. Then we are driven back to being governed only by sentiment. Well, sentiment has its merits, and in many ways I think sentiment does much good. But if we allow it to run away with us, then it means an abandonment of principle, it means that we are governed by our emotions, and we sacrifice that great virtue of grit which has been such a great characteristic of our race. 

This latter is a very sharp observation indeed. While religious conservatives are often tempted to brand atheism as a chilly and rationalistic creed, the reality is that in the absence of an account of natural law, we will be inclined to make far-reaching changes because we are moved by some emotional whim or shared passion.  

A century on, Britain has without a shadow of a doubt lost that “great virtue of grit.” It’s been long observed that age-old habits of stoicism and humane rationality have given way to cloying sentimentality. A widely reported national turning point was the funeral of Princess Diana, in which maudlin public sentiment was given free rein, and more shockingly, reflected by press and politicians, with Blair’s secular sermonizing about “the people’s princess.” Since then, England has turned distinctly twee, with such surreal scenes as a magistrate accusing a pair of drunken vandals of being “the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for” after they made off with a fiberglass statue of the fictional bear. As we’ve dispensed with traditional religion, our relationship with death has become increasingly mediated through fiction and celebrity. Paddington himself has become a kind of angel of death, with people posting cartoons of him leading the late Queen away by the hand after her death.   

Funerals are no longer solemn rituals of mourning but are instead framed as “celebrations of life.” Death, which should open human life to the infinite and eternal, is cut down to a human scale, seen as a mere cessation rather than an ushering into the eternal. The very fact of natural death itself seems to generate a certain discomfort. The hospice movement, which has strongly objected to assisted dying, has simply been ignored by proponents of euthanasia, who instead emphasize that the bill will offer a “safe and compassionate” death. At every stage of existence, our experiences must be sentimentalized and sensitized.  

After centuries of emotional sobriety, Britain has descended deep into an all-out emotional bender, a state of spiritual drunkenness encouraged by an establishment keen to manipulate public attitudes through appeals to sentiment. This was very evident in the parliamentary discussion of assisting dying, with emotional anecdotes dominating a large part of the debate, but it reflects a wider social pattern. In the wake of the Southport attack, in which a child of Rwandan refugees murdered a group of young girls with a knife, there was widespread rioting. The emotive-industrial complex thrummed into action, with a public campaign against kitchen knives led by a survivor of the attack. Insane regulations in the wake of atrocities are becoming something of a national staple. Basic freedom of assembly is hampered by mountains of paperwork thanks to regulations like Martyn’s Law (named after a victim of the Manchester arena bombing) which means that village halls need contingency plans for terrorist attacks.  

Despite huge opposition from palliative-care doctors, hospices, and disability campaigners, parliamentary proponents of physician-assisted suicide are curiously unable to answer repeated and coherent concerns about compulsion, pressure, and the moral hazards of doctors prescribing death, rejecting every amendment designed to address these issues. The core of their campaign is faith-based—the sacrality of human autonomy, and the “human right” to take radical ownership of your own death. Americans wondering how we came to have this epochal law in parliament may be amazed to learn that it came about because of a promise to a minor celebrity.  

It all started with Esther Rantzen, a popular TV presenter who has had a second life in the charity sector, most famously founding Childline, a helpline for children facing abuse. Following a terminal cancer diagnosis, Rantzen decided she should have the right to take her own life and started a campaign with herself at the center of it. During the 2024 general election, she met with the now–Prime Minister Keir Starmer, extracting from him a promise that he would allow a debate on assisted dying. Following his election, Rantzen’s daughter appeared on TV seeking to menace Starmer, warning him that the family would “come down like a tonne of bricks” on him and that “if you lied to my mum, God help you.”  

This is, I’m sorry to say, how politics is now conducted in Britain. Maudlin sob stories overrule cool-headed reason, and the earnest concerns of those most at risk in a world of legalized euthanasia are shouldered aside by a horde of damp-eyed and sharp-elbowed campaigners. In this arena of the passions it is the fit, famous, and fortunate who triumph, and the weak who ultimately suffer. Britain has lost its head, and is set to lose its soul in the process. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.