Assisted Suicide Is Not Euthanasia

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Feb 252010
 

Today we’ve had the news that the UK’s prosecution service has issued guidelines on where people will be prosecuted in cases of assisted suicide. Basically people won’t be if they assist someone provided they stick to certain conditions. Fair enough. But there’s a bit of a problem here – we’re in danger of allowing some groups of people who wish their life to end to be allowed their wish and others not to.

Part of the problem is the use of the phrase euthanasia which is mistakenly believed to imply “putting down” those people who are in dire straits with or without their consent. In particular people are worried that euthanasia opens the door to killing those who are inconveniently lingering. Such killings have occurred throughout history and are probably occurring today.

Assisted suicide is not euthanasia – the key is the word suicide – it is an active decision by someone to end their life. Ordinary suicide is of course legal (at least now), but assisting someone’s suicide remains illegal. So anyone in extremis who needs help in ending their life needs to find someone who is prepared to undertake the risk of prosecution to help out.

There are two problems with this. Firstly it limits the availability of assisted suicide to those who do have a friend or lover prepared to take the risk. Not everyone has such a close relationship with someone else, so we are essentially saying that such people have no way out of an intolerable situation – is that fair ?

Secondly, as assisted suicide remains illegal, it is something that is carried out stealthily in private with no oversight. It is easy to see that there are any number of possible abuses here – murder could in some circumstances be disguised as assisted suicide. And we certainly do not want to make murder any easier to get away with.

What we need is to legalise assisted suicide and require some form of procedure to make it more open and subject to oversight. In particular we need to ensure that other avenues are explored – we need to ensure that people do not opt for assisted suicide when other options are available.

Today’s announcement was essentially the easy way out – it doesn’t give those in favour of assisted suicide what they want and neither are those opposed happy about it. Whilst legalising assisted suicide will also not make those opposed happy, they need to understand that keeping it illegal won’t stop it.

Stafford Hospital – Now We Know

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 242010
 

Today the report into the failings at Stafford Hospital was published. I admit I have not read the report, but the gist of the findings have been widely publicised in the media today. Even without reading the report, there are some immediately obvious outcomes.

It is clear that the management of Stafford Hospital failed abysmally to fulfil their basic duty of care to the patients. Some have criticised the government targets for distracting the management from their core responsibilities. That is rubbish – it does not take a genius to realise that no matter how many targets you are meeting, if patients are dying because of inadequate care, then you are failing in your duty as a responsible manager, and as a human being.

Personally I believe there is a clear case for the former Chief Executive, Martin Yeates to be charged with corporate manslaughter. If he had not been in charge and someone else with basic common sense had been running the hospital, then several hundred patients would not have died.

Those campaigners complaining about the report being a total whitewash (even before they had the chance to read it in many cases!) might want to consider bringing a private prosecution against Martin Yeates – even if there is little chance of him being found guilty (corporate manslaughter is weighted in favour of the corporations), dragging him through the courts is the beginning of some sort of punishment.

The other obvious things is that although the NHS did finally spot what was going on at Stafford Hospital, is that the NHS needs to dramatically improve the monitoring of hospitals. To some extent this has already been done, and the government has announced another inquiry into monitoring of hospitals.

Tory Election Bribe #1 – Bank Shares

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 212010
 

Pssst … want to make a quick bundle ?

Just vote for the Tories and they will let you buy shares in the Banks we own for cheap. Sounds good doesn’t it ?

Sounds like a bloody stupid idea to me. To sell the shares cheaply, the government would have to make an enormous loss on the money it used to bail out the banks in the first place. Now saving the banks was probably the right thing to do, but so would be hanging onto those shares until they can be sold at a reasonable profit … or at least not a disastrous loss!

It’s all very well offering to throw money at the electorate to increase the chances of your party winning, but surely the government finances are in no state to start throwing money away like this ?

Perhaps when you are considering selling your soul … sorry I mean vote, for a handful of bank shares you should think a little more broadly than your wallet.

The funny thing is that the Tories seem to want to encourage the less well off (even students!) to invest in shares. I’m not sure what planet the Tories are from, but it probably isn’t the best idea to encourage these people to gamble with their money (which is what share investments are – a gamble) before they have a sensible amount of savings.

Tories Have Trouble With Pregnancy Numbers

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 202010
 

I did sort of miss the opportunity to make a timely comment on the Conservatives monumental gaff in relation to figures they published regarding the number of teenage pregnancies amongst deprived communities. But it is such a good example of Tory stupidity that I am going to make a comment anyway.

Apparently the Tories claimed as an example of Labour failure that the percentage of teenagers who got pregnant before the age of 18 in the most deprived areas was 54%. The actual rate was 5.4% which itself was a decline since 1998 when the rate was 6%; or in other words the highest rate was during a year where Labour had little chance to correct the mistakes of the previous Tory government having only been in power for a year.

Now of course anybody can make a mistake, which is why in any circumstances where you need to avoid making mistakes you check and double-check your data. And when you have previously made yourself look a fool by making a mistake you triple-check things. And obviously an organisation would have these facts checked by someone other than the author.

So what does a mistake like turning 5.4% into 54% mean ? By itself, not a great deal but it indicates a certain lack of care about the details.

After all, 54% is a ridiculous enough figure that you would normally say to yourself “Eh?” and have another look. The Tories obviously came up with a figure that helped their claims and ran with it.

It’s the sort of carelessness that is not the sort of thing you would like to see the next government use.

UK Electoral Reform

 Politics  No Responses »
Feb 092010
 

Gordon Brown has announced plans to reform the electoral system in the UK after the election – if Labour is elected, and they do not change their minds. Of course they look likely to give us one choice of reform – choose Labour’s preferred option or no reform. What kind of choice is that ?

We should be telling Parliament what kind of electoral reform we want and not just calmly expect what suits the government of the day. If you look at what Gordon Brown is proposing, it probably represents the minimum possible change to our present system. The Alternative Vote (what GB is suggesting) consists of people voting by listing their preferred candidates in order of preference; if there is no overall majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is excluded and the votes of those who voted for him or her are shared out amongst the other candidates according to their second preference.

The idea is that no MP is elected without representing the majority view of his or her constituency. Ok, sounds better than the current system, but is it as good as one of the following :-

Or even the zillions of other possibilities out there – Wikipedia has a good selection.

There are certain advantages to Gordon Brown’s preferred system – it is a relatively small change and does make things a bit fairer. I would myself prefer a more radical change, but I am quite willing to let the people decide and not have our choice restricted to a simple yes or no to choose some politician’s choice. After all, how sure are we that this is actually best for us and not best for the Labour party ?

Of course as you might expect, the Tories are against any form of electoral reform, and the Liberals are in favour (although this isn’t their preferred system).

What I would like to see is a referendum giving us a proper choice amongst a range of options. That would be complicated to difficult to do properly and would be more complex for us people to decide – we would have to spend some time thinking about what we want. We would need a neutral group reviewing possible systems and keeping the list of options down to sensible numbers. We would also need a neutral group coming up with a list of advantages and disadvantages for each, and ideally stop the politicians from making recommendations (asking a politician to keep quiet is wildly unrealistic I know).

The key thing is that we should be making the choice and not the politicians.

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