STEPHEN DAISLEY: Dignity in dying isnt handing desperate patients suicide pills. Its giving them care, support and comfort

A failure to deliver is nothing new in SNP-run Scotland but it is not often that this is a cause for relief.

Ministers have yet again delayed their plans for a National Care Service, which would centralise care provision across Scotland. Councils and unions are opposed and the Holyrood opposition parties say it is little more than a power grab by Nationalist ministers.

The nation’s care services are in a pitiful condition but expecting them to get better by putting the Scottish Government in charge is betting on hope over experience.

This is the government that transferred untested and Covid-positive patients out of hospitals and into care homes during the pandemic. The longer social care is kept out of their hands, the better for all involved.

So, for once, SNP incompetence is welcome, but applying the brakes to one bad idea does nothing to improve the sorry state of care in Scotland. Growing old should be something we look forward to after a full and fulfilling life, not a prospect drenched in dread.

We should be confident that services will be there when we need them and that they will be delivered promptly to the highest quality with our wellbeing of paramount importance.

Yet talk to Scots over a certain age and they will tell you just what a struggle they go through to get the support they need. Others, not yet at that stage but approaching it, express foreboding at the prospect. They have heard all the horror stories about underfunding, long waiting lists, delayed hospital discharges, and care staff shortages.

There are, of course, some very good care homes and some excellent services, but the fears are not without foundation. Care services have been starved of investment, in part because of almost two decades of local government funding cuts inflicted by the SNP, the very people now offering themselves as the answer. Centralising provision under a National Care Service would be like awarding the arsonist the contract to rebuild after the fire.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater is pressing ahead with her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Others are kindling fires of their own. At Westminster, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater is pressing ahead with her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. It’s a calm, clinical-sounding name but what it amounts to is euthanasia. A separate consultation into assisted dying is taking place at the Scottish parliament. Ministers have already said the Bill is not in Holyrood’s powers as issues relating to lethal drugs are reserved to Westminster.

Leadbeater’s legislation would allow the NHS to dispense suicide drugs to vulnerable patients who say they wish to end their lives. Patients would require a terminal diagnosis and a prognosis of six months or less. Leadbeater considers her proposal ‘robust’ because it would need the agreement of two doctors and a High Court judge.

These checks and balances are intended to reassure us, but we know how these things work. Pass Leadbeater’s Bill and the euthanasia lobby will begin campaigning to weaken what safeguards are in it. ‘Terminally ill’ will be redefined or replaced. The involvement of the judge will disappear. Two doctors will become one, and so forth.

We know all this because the slippery slope is not a logical fallacy; it is simply how progressives operate.

As I wrote here in September, we would do well to learn from the example of Canada, which has allowed euthanasia to lead it down a dark path. Ottawa introduced medical assistance in dying (MAID) in 2016, with assurances that it would only be for the terminally ill.

Within five years, ‘terminally ill’ was expanded to include serious ailments where death was not ‘reasonably foreseeable’. From 2027, it will include people diagnosed with ‘mental illness’.

In less than a decade, Canada saw a 1,200 per cent increase in MAID deaths, which now account for almost one in every 20 deaths in the country, with one third of patients opting for suicide citing ‘perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers’ as a reason.

If it can happen in Canada, it can most certainly happen here.

Proponents of euthanasia try to portray it as a progressive move to make it seem as though only conservative-minded people are opposed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is no coincidence, I think, that the two most prominent voices opposing the Bill are the two Labour ministers who would have to implement it.

As Health Secretary, Wes Streeting would oversee an NHS newly empowered to help patients kill themselves. As Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood has responsibility for the courts which would decide who is allowed killer cocktails and who is not and where those accused of having coerced loved ones into suicide would stand trial.

Streeting says: ‘I worry about palliative care, end-of-life care, not being good enough to give people a real choice. I worry about the risk of people being coerced into taking this route towards the end of their life.

‘And I also worry, even where you’ve got really loving families who are very supportive, about those people who think they’ve almost got a duty to die to relieve the burden on their loved ones.’

Mahmood says: ‘I feel that once you cross that line you’ve crossed it forever. If it just becomes the norm that at a certain age, or with certain diseases, you are now a bit of a burden. That’s a really dangerous position to be in.’

A dangerous position indeed, especially in Scotland. Here we face the prospect of assisted suicide becoming legal at the very point where the nation’s care services are in crisis and the SNP government is trying and failing to cobble together an alternative to which the sector is already opposed.

This is not a context in which to make life-or-death changes to the law affecting those heavily dependent on care services. To make matters worse, some of Scotland’s hospices are warning of ‘an insurmountable funding gap’ and ‘a risk that, for the first time ever, hospices will have to turn people away’.

Underfunded care services, hospices closing their doors, and posters in your GP surgery reminding you that suicide is always an option. That is a society that has not merely lost its way but smashed its moral compass to smithereens. It is a judge-led public inquiry waiting to happen.

Those of us opposed to euthanasia in principle do not want to see doctors turned into dealers of lethal drugs. We do not believe suicide should be available on prescription. Instead, there should be significant investment in palliative care to guarantee no one is left to suffer so horrendously that suicide seems the only way to escape the pain.

Dignity in death is not achieved by handing a desperate person the means to kill themselves. It is achieved by giving them the care, support and medical assistance to ensure their life comes to a natural end with as much comfort and as little suffering as is possible.

The terminally ill, the ailing elderly, the severely disabled – these are not just categories. These are people, their lives matter, and they deserve better than this. Instead of helping them to end their lives, we should put their quality of life at the centre of what health and care services do.