Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[crazy canuck]

I didn't realize it was only a North American saying - and only an English American saying at that.

Yes and it's possibly a class imbibed expression, my guess is, it's comparing the inferior print quality of a bromide photographic image versus one produced using paper coated in silver halide solution. So it's referencing something only the lower classes could have just afford to have.

That's really interesting. Thanks 

[Barrister]

Again, I can imagine an extension of assisted dying being done in a bad way. I'll worry about that once that extension happen and we'll know the details. I am not going to want to condemn thousands of people -potentially myself included- to a tormented nightmare of months-long agonising death just because this VERY limited bill MIGHT at some point in the future, assuming a series of various fuckups by legislators, be the precursor of a badly regulated MAID law.

I can't understand how you guys can have this position.

"Just pass the bill, and we'll work out the details later" tends to not actually work in practice.

I'll give you a different Canadian example.  Also under Trudeau we passed marijuana legalization.  The regulations were to follow.  And I mean they did eventually come - but there's a fucking marijuana shop in every single strip-mall.  I don't think any proponents of legalization ever expected the outcome we wound up with.

The time to get the details right is before the thing happens.

[HVC]

I'll give you a different Canadian example.  Also under Trudeau we passed marijuana legalization.  The regulations were to follow.  And I mean they did eventually come - but there's a fucking marijuana shop in every single strip-mall.

And civilization fell

[Sheilbh]

Also the detail is in the bill - that's kind of the problem a lot of opponents have had. It's wanting.

With some very odd details like the total exclusion of civil liability (including for negligence) and restrictions on coroners. The details of the bill are basically a process flow for something where absolutely nothing goes wrong and it's all fine, the concerns of opponents are that something might go wrong and the bill is silent (at best).

Edit: And in my view, generally almost as bad as "pass the bill and sort out the details later" is passing legislation that is designed for the best case scenario.

[mongers]

Well the parliamentary political process went well, MP representing the wide range of views on this issue and considering the details without it being turned into a national culture wars sling-fest.

I wonder if the incoming US House of Representatives could debate and consider something similar in the US?

[garbon]

Well the parliamentary political process went well, MP representing the wide range of views on this issue and considering the details without it being turned into a national culture wars sling-fest.

I wonder if the incoming US House of Representatives could debate and consider something similar in the US?

I'm not sure why you want to turn discussion to the US in this thread. I would think we have enough threads discussing those Republican assholes.

[mongers]

I didn't realize it was only a North American saying - and only an English American saying at that.

Yes and it's possibly a class imbibed expression, my guess is, it's comparing the inferior print quality of a bromide photographic image versus one produced using paper coated in silver halide solution. So it's referencing something only the lower classes could have just afford to have.

That's really interesting. Thanks 

Ha Ha, nope I'm definitely wrong, for some reason I can't access the OED online, so looked it up in my large Chambers dictionary, which says this:

Bromide n. .... ; a platitude; a dull platitudinous person (from the use of bromides as sedatives) ...

[Sheilbh]

Why would it need disabled people's support?

Incidentally just to follow up on this, from a disability activist's point of view.

But this also, I think, gets to Diane Abbott's point. The people who are used to exercising agency and autonomy in their lives may truly experience this as an increase in their autonomy. But that is in part because of their relationship with the state, where they use the health service occasionally at moments of acute need. Why wouldn't they "trust doctors"?

But the people who are already reliant on and routinely interacting with the state, including its caring functions like the NHS and care system, as well as DWP have far less trust. I think we have to acknowledge that's for very good reasons, it's a different relationship to the state and to agency and autonomy. As pointed out by another disability activist we are a country where it can take up to two years to get the right wheelchair (and as Abbott noted, the palliative care system only gets 30% of the funding it needs):

MPs may trust doctors to manage assisted dying. Disabled people like me cannot
Liz Carr
Two friends recently woke up in hospital to find 'Do not resuscitate' orders on their notes. We're all too aware that some lives aren't valued as much as others
Thu 28 Nov 2024 15.20 GMT

It's a cold November evening, and MPs are no doubt snuggled up wondering what to watch on TV and how to vote on Kim Leadbeater's assisted dying bill. What a perfect opportunity to watch my documentary on that very theme, Better Off Dead?.

You may know me or you may not. I'm the wheelchair-using disabled woman who spent eight years playing the forensic boffin Clarissa in the BBC drama Silent Witness. I'm also a disability rights activist, and when it comes to assisted suicide (as I prefer to call it) I'm a bit of a nerd. Oh yes, and I'm opposed to a change in the law: I don't think we should allow medical professionals to assist some people to end their lives.

Because those in favour of it like to discredit any opposition as anachronistic and arising from faith, I feel obliged at this point to tell you that I am not religious. Instead, I oppose the bill from a secular social-justice perspective. I should also state for the record that opposing assisted suicide does not make me cruel, evil or lacking in compassion – although I'm regularly called these things by proponents.

As someone who relies on the health service and the state for my survival, I simply have a healthy distrust of giving either of them any more power over my life – and death – than they already have. Though some people want the right to die, many of us are still fighting for the right to exist. That's why I'm part of Not Dead Yet, an international network of disabled people who oppose a law that would give the state and the medical profession potentially even more involvement in many ill and disabled people's lives.

While I was making the documentary, a disabled friend had a serious but completely treatable condition yet was placed in a frailty ward – a place for older people (and my friend) where the support provided was more about cups of teas than CAT scans, and where, on one night, none of the staff were qualified to provide her with a cannula for pain relief as she screamed in agony. It was "lucky" that she had a life-threatening seizure that put her in intensive care, because that's when the medical staff began to provide active care. But still she woke to find "Do not resuscitate" (DNR) written on her notes without her consent. It was a tough time.

A month later, another of my closest friends, who is also a disabled person, had a similar adventure. The district nurses who visited him day after day failed to notice the delirium that sepsis had caused until he was rushed into hospital with near-total organ failure. And there, despite his fervent opposition to a DNR, there was one on his notes, too. His partner and brother, my partner and I and a palliative care consultant I know from this campaign worked through the night to have this removed. The next day in a "the end is nigh" conference with his doctors, they were shocked to hear that this 58-year-old disabled man in a wheelchair had any kind of life – any kind of quality of life.

Both of these friends will be joining the rest of us who are passionately protesting against assisted suicide outside the Houses of Parliament tomorrow. We'll be there because we fear that this law will further enshrine these misconceptions, underestimations and stereotypes – and the inherent inequality that exists for ill, older and disabled people. There are too many anecdotes about disabled people having to fight the insidious, unconscious bias that says people who have certain conditions, look a certain way or need care or support might just be better off dead. And we remember the early days of Covid when the death tolls rose, with the reassurance from behind the podium that those dying were only people with "underlying health conditions". As someone who fitted that definition, I was so frightened at seeing myself as a statistic every single day that I resorted to my survival mode of humour and tweeted that I might as well change my name to Underlying Health Condition, just to cut out the middle man. In case you're wondering, I never did.

During that time, many of us feared that if we ended up in hospital we wouldn't stand a chance of ever leaving. They were dark times for everyone and difficult choices were being made in impossible circumstances. Decisions over who should get the bed or the ventilator or the resources, however, felt very personal: "frailty scores" meant those of us who needed help with basic daily tasks were, even briefly, placed lower down the list of priorities. Infected people were moved into residential care homes with older, frailer residents. Letters went out to similar homes including those for people with learning difficulties to suggest "blanket" DNR orders. If we learned anything from the Covid-19 pandemic – so far – it is perhaps that some people's lives aren't valued as much as others.

Leadbeater has repeatedly suggested that we need to put our faith in medical professionals, lawyers and judges. But many doctors and judges admit they are fallible. My experiences and those of many other disabled people, also show this is true. And faith in our current broken systems and the people trying their best within them doesn't feel like a gold-standard safeguard to me.

As long as the lives of marginalised people are seen as more disposable than others, how can any safeguards truly protect us from the potential abuses, coercion and mistakes that will come if assisted suicide is legalised?

That's why I made the documentary. And that's why I urge MPs to watch Better Off Dead? before this life-and-death vote.

    Liz Carr is an actor and disability rights activist

[Tamas]

And any of this applies to the current bill how?

A theoretical dystopian future thst cannot possibly directly stem from this bill is simply a disingenuous reason to remove people's right over their own bodies and life.

Especially since it is impossible to address the above concerns to the author's satisfaction with anything but the complete absence of assisted dying. And even so her very examples show that absence of assisted dying would do nothing to address her concerns.

[Legbiter]

As pointed out by another disability activist we are a country where it can take up to two years to get the right wheelchair (and as Abbott noted, the palliative care system only gets 30% of the funding it needs):

Perhaps the NHS has finally found something in which it can truly excel.

[Sheilbh]

Starmer's appointment as Cabinet Secretary (head of the civil service) gets my concern with him. Starmer talked about wanting a "complete re-wiring of the British state".

So he's appointed Sir Chris Wormald the guy who almost got the job last time, who is a career civil servant (joined in the early 90s) - and in fact so much a part of the civil service establishment that he had to recuse himself from the Infected Blood Inquiry into what went wrong because his dad was a senior civil servant in the Health Department when things were going wrong

He was also the Permanent Secretary in the Department of Health and Social Care from 2016 to 2024....He was incidentally a guy very strongly pushing the chickenpox style covid parties idea, his boss (then Cabinet Secretary) Mark Sedwill texted him "presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it and develop herd immunity before the next wave. We just want them not to get it all at once and preferably when it's warm and dry". Wormald replied "exactly right. We make the point every meeting, they don't quite get it." Counsel for the bereaved family in the covid inquiry describing his evidence, "to be succinct, those who listened to his evidence found it to be an object lesson in obfuscation, a word salad, so many many words, so very little substance... institutional defensiveness at its highest form."

Guardian sketchwriter John Crace described his evidence as "finest civil servant traditions not to issue any document that could be construed as helpful. The sole purpose of the civil service was the perpetuation of the civil service. [...] Imagine what it would be like working with Chris. A lifetime in the hell of a bureaucratic cul-de-sac. Where process trumps outcome every time. But he will get his reward. People pay good money for that kind of futility. Which is why he's tipped to be the next cabinet secretary when Simon Case steps down. Make that Lord Wormald."

Briefings from anonymous civil servants goes from "devoid of charisma" and "his appointment personifies the failing upwards culture that makes so many of us want to leave the civil service" to "a top-class civil-servant and all round good bloke" (I can't help but feel that all round good bloke is not contradictory with failing upwards, if you're also an all round good bloke).

Some people who worked with him did have praise for him. Tim Leunig who's an economics professor and was an advisor to Sunak and Javid in the Treasury has said he's "clever, committed, strategic, principled and with a good understanding of politicians". People have praised his work with Michael Gove in Education where he was seen as helping deliver a reforming policy. Lord Bethell, a former health minister during covid said "when the killer zombies invade, I'd like Chris Wormald at my back" (I think you can read that a few ways), Javid says he's "brilliant and dedicated", while Matt Hancock has added that he's a "natural reformer".

We'll see and his supporters could be right and he could be just the man to deliver the sort of systemic reform needed - I'm not convinced. And that is my concern with Starmer. I feel like at his best the analysis and quite swingeing. But the default solution is just more of the same, by the same people, in the same way and hoping for a different result because you're "serious" and not a "populist" (I really, really hope I'm wrong or I'd be very worried about what comes next if Labour, with a stonking majority can't deliver and can't reform...)

[crazy canuck]

The alternative to having a professional civil service that knows what it's doing is what is about to happen in the United States.

You might rethink your position in about four years.

[Sheilbh]

I feel like a lot of our problems are that people are boiling it down to only those two alternatives

Either Matt Gaetz or a man who makes Sir Humphrey sound like Che. And in fairness I could be wrong and he could be great, but that would mean Matt Hancock is right about something which just seems implausible.

[Zanza]

In Germany, commercially assisted suicide was made illegal in 2015. The constitutional court then decided in 2020 that this violates basic human dignity, the core tenet of our constitution. It also told parliament to properly regulate it in a way that individuals can actually exercise their basic rights. Guess what parliament failed to do in 2023 in a long debate... Now we have legal assisted suicide in principle, but no real way to exercise it. 

[Richard Hakluyt]

I think this Wormald fellow sounds like a perfect fit with the current government. He can help Starmer relabel the levers of government and polish their brass work whilst failing to notice that half of them are no longer connected to anything.