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September 17, 2024 - 7:00am
Over the weekend it was announced that a vote would be introduced to legalise assisted dying in Britain, with the Labour government saying it will not obstruct an MP from drafting a private members’ bill on the subject. While polling shows that assisted dying carries the support of most of the population, it remains a deeply divisive issue, with disagreements reaching across party lines. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is said to have a “strong opinion” in favour of allowing assisted dying, and has previously supported a change in the law.
It is likely a coincidence that the bill is being introduced just a week after the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published its report showing the desperate state of Britain’s economy and finances. But in the future it may not be viewed that way, as the two issues are almost certain to become linked. One of the core problems highlighted by the OBR report was how an ageing population could put serious pressure on the Government budget between now and 2070, and it does not take much imagination to see how assisted dying might be seen by some — such as former MP and Times columnist Matthew Parris — as a “solution” to such a problem.
When a society ages, it has fewer working-age people to pay taxes and a growing elderly population which is reliant on the state. As older people age past the point of being able to take care of themselves, some of the workforce must leave their roles in the productive economy to become carers.
All of this puts a massive strain on resources. But because it is a simple numbers game, there is no obvious solution. Raising the retirement age can help at the margin, but as the older share of the population grows the effects of such manoeuvres do not last long. There is, however, one potential solution: eliminate some of the elderly population.
This may sound extreme, but the logic would probably not be that the state simply mandates a certain maximum age. Rather, we might imagine a society and healthcare system that finds itself under severe strain and starts putting pressure on the elderly and infirm to “take advantage” of euthanasia. Systems which are experiencing strains on their resources do everything possible to lower costs.
We can already see this logic at work in Canada. Since legalising euthanasia in 2016, the country now has some of the highest rates for assisted dying in the world. In 2022, 4.1% of people in Canada died through euthanasia — almost one in 20 deaths. There have been numerous reports of Canadian physicians putting pressure on ill or disabled people to allow themselves to be killed. Yet despite the enormous rates of euthanasia and the obvious abuses, the country is considering expanding services to people with mental illness. This is currently postponed, but it will likely become law at some point, thereby expanding the scope of the euthanasia programme further.
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