By Angela Craig
In mid-December Rishi Sunak formalised the abolition of the post of Minister for Disabled People, which had lain empty since the latest government reshuffle. After some protest, nominal responsibility was allocated to the portfolio of a junior minister. A post that had survived other right wing Conservative governments, alongside the programme of vicious assaults on disability benefits, independent living and in-work supports, and even the deadly double standards of the pandemic, was gone. While it would be reasonable to conclude that given this history the position had done little to protect and advocate for disabled people, its abolition is nevertheless an indicator of an attitude: of the worse that may come – and not only for disabled people.
On the level of benefits, Hunt’s Autumn Statement spelled out an escalation in the long-running assault on the incomes of those disabled people that require benefit support. Changes to the Work Capability Assessment intend to remove entitlement to Employment and Support Allowance (which has been gradually replacing Incapacity Benefit) from hundreds of thousands of people. Hunt stated his aim of halving the number of people in receipt of the benefit; the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates 370,000 fewer people will qualify in its first three or four years. The benefit cut would currently equate to an income loss of around £5000 a year: hitting many of those already on the lowest incomes. Disabled people will also be threatened with further benefit sanctions if deemed to be uncompliant with work search policies. An end to ‘free’ prescriptions and legal aid has also been trailed.
All of this has been accompanied by the usual narrative about work-shy disabled people and their responsibility for ‘unsustainable’ pressure on the welfare system: people freeloading, sitting at home and failing to do their ‘duty’ by the country. The divisive rhetoric may stir up hate crime, but in reality, as the IFS points out, very few disabled people will find employment: ‘the overwhelming majority are expected to…remain on benefits, just with a lower level of income’.
This is part of the immediate backdrop to another threat to disabled people, and to others whose lives are misunderstood, marginalised or broadly considered of less value. This is the stepping up of the campaign to legalise assisted dying (voluntary euthanasia). Unlike attacks on political representation or living standards, this issue finds support even within the left.
Socialist Action has argued previously against an individualised, abstract approach to this issue. Instead, the material conditions under which the legalisation of euthanasia – however ‘voluntary’ – is being promoted must be considered. The legalisation of assisted suicide cannot be reduced to the idealistic concept of individual choice. We must consider the social relations that pertain: what would be the significance of such a change in law – one giving physicians the right, perhaps obligation, to consider active killing as a treatment option and thereby formally altering the contract between physician and patient? What would be the impact on different social groups? What is the significance of the push for this legal change now, coinciding as it does with the increasing privatisation of health services, a critical lack of care services and widespread social exclusion of disabled people? What political climate is it taking place within? Organisations of disabled people – in contrast to some of the well-known advocates mentioned here – have been strongly opposed to change in the law. Socialists should consider why.
In the last few weeks public lobbying for the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia has increased sharply.
Here are just a few examples. On 9th December, The Guardian ran a prominent article on the actor Diana Rigg’s apparent ‘impassioned plea for assisted dying law’ before her death. On 14th December Radio 4 broadcast ‘What can the UK learn from other countries about assisted dying?’ On 16th December, The Guardian ran a further article: ‘Assisted Dying campaigners hope to make 2024 the tipping point for UK legislation’. On 19th December, the announcement by the television presenter Esther Rantzen that she is considering assisted suicide at Dignitas (based in Switzerland where assisted suicide has been lawful since 1941) received major coverage on broadcast, print and online media. The Guardian covered it directly and ran a further prominent article on the same day: ‘UK assisted dying campaigners hope for new vote in next parliament’. Further articles were posted on the same day: ‘MPs moving towards majority backing for assisted dying, ex-minister claims’. The ex-minister – who told The Guardian he had been ‘working the tea rooms’ – being Boris Johnson’s former deputy mayor Kit Malthouse. Again on the same day The Guardian carried an ‘explainer’ (actually, part of its sympathetic coverage) article, on euthanasia laws around the world and a prominent opinion piece by a columnist entitled ‘Bravo, Esther Rantzen, it’s only the wimps in Westminster who are too afraid to talk about assisted dying’. The barrage of material is ongoing.
Legalising voluntary euthanasia has in fact been regularly debated in the UK parliament, and devolved governments, in recent years. But it is evident this is a significant push in a relentless campaign. Another reflection of the intense lobbying that has taken place is in the change in the British Medical Association’s position in the last year, from opposition to legalised assisted dying to ‘neutrality’.
The current barrage of media coverage barely mentions opposition by disabled people. Disabled people’s campaigns to oppose legalising assisted dying have stressed that such is the lesser value accorded to certain lives – maintained through structural discrimination and social exclusion and reflected in such crimes as the disproportionate deaths of disabled people from Covid and assessment procedures for benefits that drive people to suicide – that the legalisation of assisted suicide poses a significant threat to disabled people. Fear of impairment is such that many non-disabled people believe they would rather be dead than alive in certain circumstances: experience often changes this. Nevertheless, in the eyes of health professionals as well as broadly across society, death is commonly viewed as a kind of release from suffering for disabled people.
The ‘othering’ of disabled people is profound and deeply rooted.
But the legalisation of assisted dying has other reactionary potential, again, given the real material conditions in which it could take place.
Currently one in four domestic homicides in England and Wales are of people over 60 years old. The vast majority of victims are women. Until recently such murders would not even have been counted in the Crime Survey for England and Wales as it had a cap at 59 years. In 2018 that was raised to 74. The current cap excludes care homes: potentially concealing homicides of older and disabled women in these settings. Research has shown how violent crime against older women is often treated as ‘elder abuse’ or ‘safeguarding’ and is rendered gender-neutral. The threat is commonly normalised. One subset of older women victims is those who die in so-called ‘mercy killings’. Sentencing in such cases tends to be low. Research by the Femicide Census has shown that of the known 27 deaths claimed to be ‘mercy killings’ over a decade only one resulted in a conviction for murder and a full-life tariff.
There will be many individual factors in any of these cases. However, they take place in a social context of age-infused misogyny which renders the lives of older women invisible and undervalued, and in a socio-economic context of increasing inequality and intense pressure on routes out of abuse. The danger for violence against women – older and/or disabled specifically – to increase if the law formally sanctions ‘mercy killings’ is obvious.
As things stand, with assisted suicide continuing to be outside of the law, when such cases happen, as they do, prosecutions are very rare.
The legalisation of assisted suicide in the context of a retreating welfare state, rapidly growing poverty and inequality and with entrenched and inter-related misogyny, ageism and disablism, is a regressive proposal and a worrying prospect. The priority of socialists should be on tackling inequalities by progressive measures, defending the availability of good health care, not supporting the normalisation of termination of life as a response to ill health.
Image used: from Disability News Service