The Suicide of Britain

Culture

The Suicide of Britain

Legalized suicide is not a matter of mere moral preference, but an attack on central principles of Anglo-American law.

Credit: Anthony Stericker/Shutterstock

The British are of late more than usually intent on self-destruction. The Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer, having swept to power on an anemic numerical vote with the mandate to be something, anything but the Tories, has set to with admirable gusto, taking up consideration of whether the people it notionally represents should in fact literally go kill themselves. Kim Leadbeater, the member of Parliament for Spen Valley, in October proposed a private member’s bill legalizing “medical assistance in dying”—that is, doctor-abetted suicide—and this proposal looks set to become law. 

The internal affairs of distant nations are not our usual hat, but occasionally diseases of the body politic are catching. And there are many fascinating and appalling aspects to this twist of law. Our learned friend Daniel Hitchens has admirably chronicled and written against the many merely human perversities of the bill just passed, including its lack of provisions for the undeniably mentally ill. The Canadian iteration of MAiD has in purely empirical terms been a catastrophe—that is, if you think the state should not be addressed toward killing its own citizens: Physician-assisted deaths accounted for 4.1 percent of all deaths in Canada in 2022. 

Leadbeater has insisted that her law for killing people is far better than the colonials’. “The model being proposed here,” she argued Friday, “is nothing like what happens in Belgium. It is nothing like what happens in Canada. There are strict, stringent criteria, and if the House chooses to pass the Bill, those criteria cannot be changed.” Hitchens the younger has noted that there are reasons to doubt her assertions, not least of which is that notionally friendly legislators seem to be a bit spooked by the bill’s wording as it stands. As ever, a crux is that highly subjective standards—the patient’s feelings—may be used to justify MAiD.

These are all correct and pertinent observations, but to my mind almost beside the point. If the state can pass such laws, and the people support them—as they do by a wide margin, it appears—it seems like the whole business of civilization is wrapped up. The peculiar symptoms of our times—state officers’ refusal to enforce existing laws, the collapse of territorial sovereignty, the rise of human rights theory over traditional conceptions of citizenship and subjecthood, the devolution of state functions to private or quasi-private entities, the transfer of policy-making from political figures to unelected technocrats—are united in their degradation of the political state’s sovereignty. 

Legalization of suicide, in any form, is of a piece with this; it devolves the most important aspect of imperium, the power of life and death, from the traditional authorities in which it resides. Under the common law, felo de se was counted in the same genus as treason or rebellion, and its perpetrator’s properties and estates were subject to special legal scrutiny after his decease—as one of the jurists Kantorowicz cites in The King’s Two Bodies argues, suicide is a crime, not just against the natural law and the divine law, but “against the King in that hereby he has lost a Subject, and (as Brown termed it) he being the head has lost one of his mystic Members.” (This is distinct from the Roman law, which did not consider punishments for suicide unless committed to escape the consequences of a crime.)

An additional kink in this beast’s tail is added by the fact that Britain’s (and Canada’s) doctors are state employees. The state monopoly on violence is the single gold-plated principle of the Anglo-American legal tradition, and, after some fairly hairy experiences with state power from the Tudor period through about, oh, 1776, the American branch of things has been deeply concerned with limiting and delineating the appropriate applications of that monopoly—that bundle of safeguards known as due process. (This is why, for all the best efforts of the newly moderate GOP, the abortion question will always be reduced to a personhood question—is the unborn baby someone to whom due process is owed?) In the current version of the British bill, the decision to approve a request for medically assisted suicide is handed off to a miniature Star Chamber of two doctors. 

This boggles the mind—ten centuries of careful legal construction blown away, and for what? So the British can turn their figurative national suicide into a literal one? (We blandly note that this bill is going through at the same time that the British immigration crisis rages. It is almost as if the powers that be are trying to kill off an existing population and intend to make up the deficits by replacing it with another.) To borrow an utterance used in another time for different issues in a different place, “This is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.”

Some 70 percent of Britons fear that people will be coerced into medically assisted suicide, and 62 percent think more information is needed about the bill under consideration; yet 60 percent still support the idea in theory. If we accept the premise that, in fact, suicide is bad, if only because it attacks the core of the Western legal system (as I have argued here), it is not clear how to remedy this through representative government. 

There is one theoretical recourse in the UK. Even the post-1688 settlement of parliamentary supremacy acknowledges that the British commonwealth is constituted by the Crown in Parliament. It is perhaps time for the head to assert its control over the members—and what else is Charles III doing these days, anyway? I think living up to his regnal name would be more fun than whatever climate activism he is up to these days. But short of this high-flying fantasy, Britain appears set on suicide.

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