Didn’t we have a lovely euthanasia debate…Evangelicals Now

There were several things about the recent debate in the House of Commons on euthanasia which were revelatory of where our society is at. They are lessons we need to learn.

I’m not talking about the obsession with autonomy – something which the elites of our society are desperate to believe in. They are used to getting things their way and cannot see why they should not be able to choose the time and place of their own death. Don’t fall for the line that this was all about preventing insufferable pain – the Leadbetter bill is not restricted to those who have unbearable pain. As has been amply demonstrated in other countries with euthanasia laws, the slippery slope into involuntary euthanasia is all too real. But my concern in this article is with three other issues.

1. Government by opinion polls – dictators govern by plebiscites.

They do so to give their policies the fig leaf cover of democracy. Western ‘progressive’ governments use opinion polls for the same reason. In Scotland before the same-sex marriage (SSM) decision, if people were asked if the traditional view of marriage as between a man and a woman should be retained – the majority tended to say yes. And so, the pollsters changed the question to ‘do you believe in equal marriage?’ It’s much harder to say no to that. In the same way Max Mitchell, in an article in the online Unherd, pointed out that whilst 73% in a YouGov poll said they supported ‘assisted dying’, when the question was changed to ‘assisted suicide’ almost half of the public (46%) thought it would be too complicated for a safe and practical implementation. Government by opinion poll is just government by the mob – or at least by those who control the mob through the means of media manipulation and educational indoctrination.

2. Didn’t we have a lovely debate.

Immediately the vote was declared in favour of assisted suicide I noticed that many of the MPs in favour started congratulating themselves and flattering their opponents by saying what a wonderful, respectful debate it was – showing Parliament at its best. I was a bit surprised at how prevalent this was until I remember a similar thing happening in the Church of Scotland General Assembly when they debated SSM. When the liberals won, they kept saying how wonderful the debate was, respectful, etc. They didn’t want anyone getting upset. ‘Look how civilised we are’ they boasted, as they mocked God’s law and overturned it. Likewise with Parliament … the knife that was stuck in the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable may have been stuck in ‘nicely’… but it still has the same effect. ‘Didn’t we have a lovely debate’ will cut no ice on the Day of Judgment!

3. No room for religion.

The journalist Lewis Goodall wrote an astonishing article in The Independent in which he argued that religion had far too great a part to play in the debate – but dishonestly. It was somewhat ironic that within the article he himself was dishonest in the extreme – for example, arguing that there had been no slippery slope with abortion since the 1967 Act. Despite the fact that whilst the proposer of that Act had stated that he expected around 6,000 abortions per year – only for ‘emergencies’ – we now have over 200,000 abortions per year, and in effect abortion on demand, as a form of contraception.

But Goodall’s main point was that he thought that many MPs were hiding their religious motivations, which he obviously regards as suspect. He went so far as to state that ‘holy books are ill-placed to help us resolve’ the issues surrounding death. It’s not just Alastair Campbell’s infamous ‘We don’t do God’. Now we are told we shouldn’t do God. It’s just not the right, ethical, polite, modern British thing to do. It is yet another step down the slippery slope of our nations slide away from Christianity.

The final outcome will not be known until the middle of next year – we can only pray that the unlikely alliance of left-wing socialists such as Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Angela Rayner and David Lammy with true liberals such as Tim Farron and Jamie Stone and social conservatives such as Iain Duncan Smith, will overcome the libertarian progressives such as David Cameron, Rishi Sunak, Emily Thornberry, Keir Starmer and, somewhat surprisingly, the majority of Reform MPs (although Nigel Farage was opposed). May the Lord overrule and preserve us from a Godless, polite, and manipulated society.