hypochondriac

I'll remind you, a tory thread still exists where you can talk about them to your hearts content. This is the Labour thread about the party in power.

Agree with this. If we were villa or Brighton we'd be loving it.

Your entire second paragraph is an invention in your own mind and you've just ignored all the many examples ive given you of instances where Canada has expanded the law beyond its original remit. Canada is just one example and there are others.

I mostly agree with that. If there was some way to guarantee it applied solely to those with weeks to live then I could see a scenario where I could support it. Practically that's impossible though.

Genius if true.

That's a different discussion but hard to disagree with any of that. I agree mental health support could be much improved but surely the answer is not in the absence of support you can just die and remove the burden of care from anyone else?

Have you just wilfully ignored the cases I have posted above? I would say the most alarming statistic is that only 4% of those who apply for assisted death get denied. Suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease at 41, Sean Tagert required 24-hour care, but British Columbia only provided 16-hour assistance. Paying caretakers for the remaining eight hours cost Tagert CA$264 per day. Health authorities did offer to move Tagert to an institution, but its location was far from the young son who was clearly his father’s prime reason for living, as Tagert described such a separation as a “death sentence”. The man managed to raise CA$16,000 to invest in medical equipment that would allow him to remain at home, but the funds were insufficient. So instead he applied for euthanasia. The end At the age of 61, Alan Nichols had a history of depression and was hospitalised as a suicide risk in 2019 — something of an irony, as in due course the hospital staff, according to his family, was altogether too helpful in facilitating the patient’s application for euthanasia. That application was accepted, even though the only health condition it cited as so intolerable that Nichols wanted to die was “hearing loss”. After Nichols was put to death, his family objected that the man was not suffering unbearably, had been refusing to take his medication, and wouldn’t use the cochlear implant that helped him hear. But no medical personnel had ever contacted his relatives, out of respect for patient confidentiality. In more than one instance in Canada, too, patients seem to have been actively pressed to consider pulling their own plug to save the health system money. Hospitalised for a degenerative brain disorder, Roger Foley was, according to Associated Press, “so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations”. In one recording, the hospital’s director of ethics informs Foley that his hospital stay is costing the institution “north of $1,500 a day” — quite the guilt trip. Foley asks about the plan for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show,” the “ethicist” said. “My piece of this was to talk to you, to see if you had an interest in assisted dying.” But Foley himself had never expressed the slightest interest in dying For while the Australian province of Victoria, for example, forbids doctors from bringing up the option of euthanasia, lest it be mistaken for medical advice, Canada’s physicians can cheerfully recommend being killed as one of patients’ “clinical care options”. Thus, Sheila Elson took her daughter to an emergency room in Newfoundland six years ago. Unprompted, the doctor informed Elson that her daughter of 25, who had cerebral palsy and spinal bifida, was a good candidate for euthanasia. As Elson later told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the doctor chided that not taking up the state’s kindly offer to slay her daughter would be “selfish”. At least four cases have been unearthed of veterans with, say, PTSD being encouraged to consider assisted dying in preference, as one staffer put it diplomatically, to “blowing your brains out”. Maid has been active in prisons as well, whose population is also costly and understandably prone to feeling glum.

A young woman who survived an ISIS bombing chose euthanasia rather than live with the trauma, according to a report. Shanti De Corte was a 17-year-old student traveling with her classmates at Brussels Airport when ISIS terrorists detonated a bomb. The March 2016 blast, along with two others set off by the group at a Brussels subway station, killed 32 people and left more than 300 injured. De Corte was not physically injured in the attack, but endured years of panic attacks and depression afterward, the Mirror reported. She tried to kill herself twice, in 2018 and 2020, and posted regularly on social media about her struggles. De Corte, then 23, chose to be euthanized earlier this year, which is legal in Belgium. She died on May 7 after two psychiatrists signed off on her request.

I'm really really not. Look at the quotes from the article I posted above. Better yet read it for yourself. I can find you plenty of other examples but they are ending the lives of Canadians at a rate of 10,000 a year.

Some quotes from the article: In The New Atlantis, Alexander Raikin described the case of Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, along with other mental and physical illnesses. She presented these symptoms to the MAID assessors and her death was approved. Meanwhile, she wrote in a note evidently meant for those to whom she had granted power of attorney: “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” She was put to death on September 26, 2021, via a lethal injection, at the age of 41. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of a 23-year-old man named Kiano Vafaeian, who was depressed and unemployed, and also had diabetes and had lost vision in one eye. His death was approved and scheduled for September 22, 2022. The doctor who was to perform the procedure emailed Vafaeian clear and antiseptic instructions: “Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” Vafaeian could bring a dog with him, as long as someone would be present to take care of it. About two weeks before the appointment, Vafaeian’s 46-year-old mother, Margaret Marsilla, telephoned the doctor who was scheduled to kill her son. She recorded the call and shared it with The Free Press. Posing as a woman named Joann, she told the doctor that she wanted to die by Christmas. Reciting basic MAID criteria, the doctor told her that she needed to be over 18, have an insurance card, and be experiencing “suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.” The doctor said he could conduct his assessment via Zoom or WhatsApp. Marsilla posted on social media about the situation. Eventually, the doctor texted Marsilla, saying that he would not follow through with her son’s death. the Associated Press reported on the case of Alan Nichols. Nichols had lost his hearing in childhood, and had suffered a stroke, but for the most part was able to live independently. In June 2019, at age 61, he was hospitalized out of concern that he might be suicidal. He urged his brother Gary to “bust him out” of the facility as soon as possible. But within a month, he applied for a physician-assisted death, citing hearing loss as his only medical condition. A nurse practitioner also described Nichols’s vision loss, frailty, history of seizures, and general “failure to thrive.” The hospital told the AP that his request for a lethal injection was valid, and his life was ended. “Alan was basically put to death,” his brother told the AP. When people who were suffering applied to the MAID program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible. If autonomy is your highest value, these trends are not tragic; they’re welcome. Death is no longer the involuntary, degrading end of life; it can be a glorious act of self-expression. In late 2022, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons released a branding video that paid tribute to the assisted suicide of a 37-year-old woman afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissue. The video, titled “All Is Beauty,” was released the day after the woman’s death. In a series of lush images of her on tourist-destination beaches and at a dinner party, the video portrayed her death as “the most beautiful exit”—a sort of rich, Instagram-ready consumer experience that you might get from a five-star resort. Tyler Dunlop is a physically healthy 37-year-old man who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, and has no job or home or social contact. “When I read about medically assisted dying,” he told a local news website earlier this year, “I thought, well, logistically, I really don’t have a future.” Knowing that “I’m not going anywhere,” as he put it, he has started the process for approval under MAID. The New Atlantis published slides from a Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers seminar, in which a retired care coordinator noted that a couple of patients had cited poverty or housing uncertainty, rather than their medical condition, as their main reason for seeking death. Similarly, when a nation normalizes medically assisted suicide, and makes it a more acceptable option, then more people may choose suicide. A 2022 study in the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health found that in four jurisdictions—Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium—where assisted dying is legal, “there have been very steep rises in suicide,” including both assisted and unassisted suicide. The physician who assists one person to die may be influencing not just that suicide but the suicides of people he will never see

A Canadian literally requested a ramp for her house from the local government and was instead given the option of assisted suicide so that's not some ridiculous far fetched scenario, it actually happened in a country that legalised a very similar bill that we are proposing. You say you disagree with the Canadian move towards assisted dying for any sort of pain both physical or mental. Can you not see how quickly Canada went down that path once assisted dying was legalised? That could very easily happen here and in my opinion would actually be quite likely. You're just wrong to suggest that this bill wouldn't move us closer towards the direction of prematurely ending the lives of those who are considered by others or consider themselves to be a burden. I know you're wrong because it's actually happened and is happening in countries that legalised this now. I really think you should look into this a bit more because what is proposed doesn't do what you think it does. Anyway you're not going to agree. You set out saying you couldn't think of a single reason why someone would object to this bill, hopefully at the very least you can see many perfectly valid reasons to object to it even if you don't agree. Just in case you do want to approach the subject with a more open mind, here's a good article on the subject with even more terrible examples from Canada: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/canada-legalized-medical-assisted-suicide-euthanasia-death-maid/673790/

I don't think you're going to understand but you're just wrong about cases like that never getting through because they have done so in other countries where this has been legalised. No one other than yourself has brought up holding up a bus on this forum. There are a plethora of other entirely valid scenarios outlined above that you dismiss as unrealistic when I'm telling you that they're not and giving you real world examples of cases exactly like them that have resulted in people ending their lives.

Not sure why you're using ridiculous examples. The proposed assisted dying bill isn't talking about starting with the most obviously chronic and painful conditions. That's not what is being proposed.

We aren't miles away from a Canada type situation. It took just two years from Canada legalosing assisted dying for terminal illnesses to the situation they are in today and no we aren't literally talking about people on deaths door. Look at the bill being proposed and then also consider the implications once it inevitably expands. It's nonsensical for you to pretend that there would not be situations where people would feel pressure either overtly or subtley to end their lives prematurely. It happens whenever these bills are introduced.

Both my aunt and my mother had and have MS and I have relatives in Canada so I can absolutely identify with what you post. Even if we just ignore all the other arguments made above, a society that moves from a state of care towards one that normalises death as a solution to suffering will absolutely have broader societal effects. It will have an inevitable change on how certain illnesses and people are viewed and how they view themselves as you've outlined. For some there will be an encouragement of death as a solution and Canada is not the only country to introduce this with the best of intentions only to see it expanded in very short order with the view of life in society permenently altered.

I've outlined in detail my concerns above. Obviously I strongly disagree with the proposed law even though I also acknowledge that there are some people who suffer with terminal illness. Like you say it's a complex issue and I can see valid arguments on both sides.

Yes but it obviously is something to lay at the government's door given that the vote and possible passing of the bill wouldn't be happening without them being in power.

You're an intelligent chap, you can't seriously ask what is wrong with the terms being widened and not be aware of the implications of that. Canada agreed to have an assisted dying bill and then two years later expanded it to people with non terminal illnesses and it has now expanded so that you can be assisted with you death for mental illness. This includes someone with anorexia, a Canadian army veteran with ptsd was offered the option of killing himself unprompted and shante de corte from a different country was a young woman who legally killed herself because she was traumatised by a terror attack. Like I said plenty of other cases so not just an admin error like you try to claim. Once it expands it becomes an option for older relatives who don't want to be a burden on their children, or some children will no doubt put subtle pressure on mum and dad so they can get their inheritance faster. Some will view the option of killing someone as a heck of a lot easier than treating someone with complex problems. And of course disabled people have a right to be concerned about this law given that they will be the ones viewed by some as burdens on society, who are a net drain and so there will be pressure or at best a perceived pressure to do everyone a favour. That's before you even get into the details of the law such as the idea that you will be able to kill yourself if a doctor says you have six months to live (because that's never been wildly incorrect before.) So no it's not just about killing someone with a few days left to live because it actually affects a heck of a lot more people than that and they need to be heard.

The existence of the vote and the makeup of the commons means it will almost certainly be labour MPs that get this passed.

I'd watch the documentary if I were you rather than arrpgantly dismissing what she has to say. It's also a view passionately espoused by Tanni grey-thompson. Also have a look at Canada with the horror of some of the assisted dying over there (or someone who asked a local council over there to fit a ramp for her and she was given the option to kill herself instead.) or the fact there's not a single place where this has been legalised and then the original terms of what has been agreed hasn't then been widened to encompass more people. Also Google shante de corte. I can give you myriad other examples from all over the world if you like.

I actually don't care about the winter fuel payments I just like that Starmer rhymes with granny harmer.

It's the motivation behind policies that I have a problem with. There's nothing hysterical about questioning policies designed to raise money if they don't actually raise any money and create problems instead. You're then left wondering what the motivation is for enacting them beyond penalising groups that Labour are ideologically opposed to. A Labour minister engaging in playground politics, selectively quoting an article about embossed stationary as if that's a representative example of their private school Vat plan is pathetic really but it is enlightening about what some of them think and why they're targeting private schools in particular (and of course many of their children attend these schools but with their freebies and salaries the increase is no skin off their collective noses.) If you look back to the earliest part of this thread, one of the first things I posted was giving Starmer credit for being ruthless in order to attempt to be successful. That was just a few months ago and it seems like a lifetime. I don't understand why the government has gone out of its way to punch itself in the face repeatedly. I know you think it's all overblown and there's nothing to see but they've scored so many own goals that are just unnecessary. Maybe this sacking and reshuffle is an acknowledgement of that and maybe their messaging will improve? Maybe they have a couple of rabbits to pull out of hats for the budget? They could certainly do with being a bit bullish and positive about Britain, if only for consumer and investor confidence.

The politics of spite

We haven't even had the budget yet. Are they going to whack up capital gains? Will we see interest rates climb so mortgage rates bounce up again? Interesting to see the guardian of all things suggesting that the private school vat policy is more complex than they thought (won't really raise much at all it's just a policy of spite.) we've had the same thing about the non dom policy which is now projected to lose money. Will they plough ahead with them anyway? Then we've got the possibility of legalised killing to look forward to. If granny doesn't freeze to death you can bump her off another way. The fact it's all being done with halfwits like Lammy and Raynor in power is just salt in the wound. Like you say a grand old start.

I wonder if you'd be imploring others to get out more if they were having a chuckle at a Conservative government shambles after less than 100 days in power? I think we know the answer. Labour full of integrity though.