Prime Minister Gordon Brown has spoken out against any move towards legalising assisted suicide as Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, is preparing to introduce guidelines that will make it easier to help others kill themselves and avoid prosecution.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph on 24 February 2010, the Prime Minister said that changing the law to permit assisted suicide would run the risk of putting the frail and ill under pressure to end their lives.
Keir Starmer is due to issue the guidelines on the controversial subject tomorrow, 25 February 2010, and it is expected that he will make it clear that those who help others end their lives are unlikely to face court action if they acted out of compassion.
Mr Brown wrote:
‘Cases dominating the public arena make for harrowing reading and the first and most obvious response is to say that something must be done. But when these complex, individual and distressing cases are considered in detail, a solution that at first might seem sensible – the right to die in a manner and at a time of one’s choosing – swiftly becomes less straightforward and more worrying.
Mr Brown addressed the question of promotion of palliative care, saying that he was ‘appalled’ by the fate of ‘incurables’, and wrote that palliative care has now become part of mainstream medicine.
‘Let us be clear: death as an option and an entitlement, via whatever bureaucratic processes a change in the law on assisted suicide might devise, would fundamentally change the way we think about death,’ Mr Brown wrote.
‘The risk of pressures – however subtle – on the frail and the vulnerable, who may for example feel their existences burdensome to others, cannot ever be entirely excluded.
‘And the inevitable erosion of trust in the caring professions – if they were in a position to end life – would be to lose something very precious. For when I think of the kind of care Sarah and I saw in our local hospice, where we worked as volunteers, I know in my heart that there is such a thing as a good death.
‘And I believe it is our duty as a society to provide the skilled and loving care that makes it possible; and to use the laws we have well, rather than rush to change them,’ he concluded.
In December 2008 and March 2009, Mr Brown had also said that he was ‘totally against’ changing the law on assisted suicide and that he had ‘always opposed legislation for assisted deaths’.
In September 2009, Justice Secretary Jack Straw clearly expressed his opposition to any attempt to weaken the current law on assisted suicide.
A large number of other politicians as well as lawyers, doctors, nurses, journalists, senior police officers and general public have expressed their opposition to any attempts to legalise assisted suicide in the UK.
Several attempts to legalise assisted suicide have failed in the House of Lords in recent years.
Daily Telegraph (Prime Minister’s article)