According to Japanese folklore, elderly relatives were removed to a mountain or one of Japan’s haunted forests and left to die, a practice called “ubasute”, or granny dumping.

However widespread this prevaricating form of euthanasia really was, it appears that the UK might soon introduce a similar policy for its own aged people. While the proposed Leadbeater Bill wouldn’t exactly leave Deirdre to die in Epping Forest, its effect would be the same: the abandonment of senior citizens considered to be a drain on state resources. 

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s bill would legalise assisted suicide for terminally ill persons in the UK. A first vote will take place this week at the Houses of Parliament on 29 November. The Dignity in Dying campaign group, which supports the Bill, has urged MPs “to vote for choice, for safety, for compassion”. While that might sound thoroughly progressive, in the context of an ailing health service and budgetary crisis these catchwords will prove to be positively lethal.

The elderly would be the chief target of such a law, as we have seen in Canada, where in 2022 the average age of a person killed by Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was 77 years; 95.5% were aged 56 and above, while 85% were 65 and above. In total, MAiD killed 13,241 people in Canada in 2022, and as many as 15,000 in 2023.

While “MAiD” might conjure up a Marian image of compassionate intercession from above, the truth about assisted dying, or state-sanctioned killing (as it ought to be termed), is that it will usher thousands of pensioners into early graves. One funeral home in Canada has even sought to expedite the process from lethal injection to cold casket by providing in-house suicide rooms. Imagine dressing yourself in the suit and tie you’ll be buried in.

One must wonder about the advocates of assisted suicide. In the BBC documentary “Better Off Dead?”, actress and campaigner Liz Carr confronted a giggling Canadian doctor who’d personally euthanised over 400 patients through MAiD. Carr, who is disabled, was visibly uncomfortable as she looked down the gun barrel of Dr Ellen Wiebe’s wide eyes as she explained that killing patients was the “best work I’ve ever done”.

There’s something about doctors with Germanic surnames that just sounds more nocuous than a Dr Smith or Dr Lefevre. Take Philip Nitschke, for example, otherwise known as “Dr Death”, whose Sarco Pod killed its first user in remote Swiss woodland last September. An aged American woman was reportedly asphyxiated by nitrogen gas inside this suicide coffin as its inventor watched via webcam from Germany.

Arrests followed, not least because Dr Death’s invention “does not meet the requirements of product safety”, at least in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Peter and Christine Scott, an English couple who have been married for 46 years, have signed up for a dual Sacro Pod, another of Dr Death’s innovations. Among the reasons that the Scotts cited for suicide is Britain’s National Health Service.

“Look at the alternative”, Mr Scott complained. “The chances of getting prompt NHS treatment for the ailments of old age seem pretty remote so you end up trapped by infirmity and pain… I don’t want to go into care, to be lying in bed dribbling and incontinent – I don’t call that a life.”

Let’s not fool ourselves. The UK isn’t safe from Dr Death either; last year, he recommended his Sarco Pod for Scots in a letter to Liam McArthur, the MSP seeking to legalise assisted suicide in Scotland. Dr Death’s bio-degradable suicide chamber might be coming to a home near you, perhaps even your own dining room – not since the age of Victoria have the dead been laid out on British tabletops. While the Victorians have been accused of wallowing in death, Nitschke’s celebration of suicide as a “euphoric” experience is more disturbing than any stone-faced mute processing behind a horse-drawn hearse on its way to some grey suburban cemetery.

The adoration of suicide by Dr Death and others wouldn’t be so dangerous if there wasn’t also a crisis in palliative care, a sector that receives just 33% of its funding from the UK government. Mr and Mrs Scotts’ fears are well-founded. Indeed, a recent Marie Curie poll reported that nearly half (49%) of bereaved respondents were unhappy with the end of life care that a family member received, and one in eight made an official complaint.

Even the Health Secretary, Wes Streating, says he will vote against the Leadbeater Bill because of the poor state of palliative care offered by the NHS. “I am not sure as a country we have the right end of life care available to enable a real choice on assisted dying”, he told the FT Weekend Festival in London in September.

Five hospitals providing palliative care have been forced to cut jobs in recent months to relieve financial burdens, the BBC reported in August; surely this influenced Streating’s decision to reject the Bill. The Department of Health all but admitted that not all British citizens have access to high-quality end of life care. It added that, due to a “£22 billion black hole in the public finances… these problems will take time to fix”.

The Association for Palliative Medicine (APM) of Great Britain and Ireland is also overwhelmingly opposed to assisted suicide.  One of its former presidents, Dr Amy Profitt, fears that such a law would “mean that the NHS cuts back on cash for palliative care”. She highlighted the example of New Zealand, once ranked third worldwide for the quality of its end of life care, dropping to 11th after assisted suicide was legalised in 2019.

It would be wise for politicians to listen to these medical professionals on the frontline of palliative care. Yet Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary of the APM, said that (as of 15 October) Ms Leadbeater had not yet consulted his organisation. Experts like Dr Doré seem increasingly marginalised when their opinion should be given extra precedence.

“It is bonkers”, says Dr Doré, “that we are talking about having an assisted dying/assisted suicide Bill that would be 100% commissioned and funded by the NHS when we leave the palliative care sector to be funded by the charitable sector. That is the state essentially endorsing death while not funding and paying for palliative care.”

While campaigners for assisted suicide frame these laws as matters of “choice” and “compassion”, the urge to balance budgets is surely never far away. An abstract “cost analysis” by the Canadian Medical Association Journal concluded that MAiD could save the Canadian state between $34.7 and $136.8 million every year. The authors were certainly “not suggesting medical assistance in dying as a measure to cut costs”, of course, but still, it would “release funds to be reinvested elsewhere”.

Similarly, a Belgian health insurance boss lauded assisted suicide as a method of saving taxpayer money and freeing up hospital beds and care homes.  

There are signs that the public is waking up to the utilitarian compulsion to put many of them into a premature grave. A June 2024 poll conducted by Whitestone Insight found that 43% of British adults feared that the health system would be incentivised by assisted suicide to influence patients to take their own lives because of the financial burden on the NHS.

This nagging sense that the British state wouldn’t mind if certain people, especially the old and infirm, would die for the sake of budgetary responsibility is increasingly present in the minds of the public. The Labour Government’s controversial decision to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners only affirmed this growing apprehension, as demonstrated when Labour’s conference delegates voted to reject the cuts in a non-binding vote.

Whatever the true motivation actually is, such policies appear more and more like a fatally practical form of triage by a heartless bureaucracy attempting to plug a fiscal black hole. Now that the Scotts have paid as much as they can into the system, the motivation to keep them around – and to encourage them to stay alive – simply isn’t there.

The idea, or rather the image, of a cancer patient in irredeemable agony on a hospital bed is the emotive frontispiece of a campaign that will surely elicit the sympathies of many people. But the devastating truth is that patients who “choose” assisted suicide do so out of fear of being a burden or because they’ve been let down by health services.

In Canada, for example, the most common reason for MAiD in 2022 was “the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3%), followed by loss of ability to perform activities of daily living (81.9%)”. “Inadequate control of pain, or concern about controlling pain” was only ranked third at 59.2%. One unfortunate cancer patient turned to MAiD after waiting ten weeks for chemotherapy. Assisted suicide was granted to him within two days.

Similarly, in the US state of Oregon, where assisted suicide is also legal, 91.6% of such deaths in 2023 cited loss of autonomy as a reason; other motives included a less enjoyable life (88.3%) and loss of dignity (63.8%). More worryingly, 43.3% said that they did not want to be a burden on loved ones, and 8.2% stated that the cost of their medical expenses was also a concern. “Inadequate pain control, or concern about it” was only ranked sixth at 34.3%. The warning is there for all MPs to see.

When assisted suicide cures a patient by killing them, as the Leadbeater Bill essentially proposes to do, many who “choose” death will be senior citizens suffering at the hands of a neglectful, cash-strapped state that has left them to die in the dark forest of a beleaguered health service, which is no choice at all.

Rather than dumping granny, then, the British state should prioritise the provision of quality end of life care, not only as a matter of true compassion, but also to protect us all from the frosty clutches of Dr Death and his ghoulish ethic.