Bruce the trouble is that Britain would make a mess of it.
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Whilst I can understand your point, this is not really much of an argument, is it? If this is true then why bother making any improvement in the UK? Why bother with any new safety measure? Why bother with any new regulation to reduce risks? Why bother change anything?
Besides, thereās plenty of things successfully introduced and run in the UK.
We havenāt even been able to launch an ID card. We arenāt even able to decriminalise marijuana.
You only need a few court cases before things that are controversial but considered successfully introduced end up being withdrawn and an āinquiryā set up which takes years to conclude that whatever it was was badly introduced. There is then a āblame gameā and whoever did whatever wrong is publicly disgraced.
This type of law is incredibly controversial and divisive as there are so many ifs and buts and so many groups who are against it.
There is great fear by politicians because so much could go wrong particularly where mental illness crosses over into physical illness.
What we usually do in Britain to introduce something without formally introducing it is to do so in a sideways move. For example in the case of ID cards they have instead gone for a far more invasive move to gain access to bank accounts, ban large cash transactions without invasive checks, introduced facial recognition tech etc. Far more controversial moves but these are more difficult to challenge as they are bitty and in many cases loopholes in other legislation such as data protection act amendments etc.
In the case of assisted dying, the sideways move would be to decriminalise those who go abroad with a relative, etc.
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I do see your concern. However Iām weighing that against the reality of condemning people to weeks or months or years of needless suffering with no upside. And I would again point to countries who are running assisted dying schemes with little problem. And just because their population is a bit smaller, 40 million in the case of Canada, I really do not see how that is a significant factor. 40 million is not much different from 65 million when it comes to infrastructure, dissemination, governance. organisation, or anything.
It seems to be there is on the one hand a vague, small, potential risk of problems and on the other a whole bunch of needless suffering. On a set of scales it is surely clear which way the scales would fall.
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I totally agree that we should have legislation, I just donāt think this will happen for a long time for the reasons given.
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Well Iād still vote against if asked.
And I still think itās the thin end of the wedge.
I donāt care what other countries do, thatās for those citizens to decide, but unless the common man or woman has lost all control of the democracy in the UK we should be asked to vote on Assisted Dying, instead of allowing some grumpy old men in government who are not in touch with the people do it for us.
Everybody has a smartphone now, so how hard could it be?
I would have nothing against a referendum on such an issue - provided it was simply to determine the views of the nation. That is, the result would not be binding.
This is because its a complex and emotive issue. Referendums are always bad at giving an answer to complex and emotive issues. They are prone to misinformation, misleading notions and poor logical conclusions (from both sides). But the worse thing about referendums is that they fail to provide the āwhat next, how will that workā. The question is necessarily one of support or not support. That fails to give the details of exactly what system, requirements, process, safety guards, monitoring, governance, etc. are people being asked to support or not support.
Of course we run a representative democracy precisely because of such complex issue.
one thing is for sure and that is that we will never ever have another referendum about anything ever.
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Yes, I agree Ms Pimmyā¦
Iām in favour of it though recognise peopleās concerns ā¦
but surely it was the same when the Abortion Laws were first brought in. I wonder how many times they were tweaked and fine tuned.
Abortion, Assisted Dying ā¦ Theyāre both dealing with Life or the death of Lifeā¦ in protecting individual rights and fighting a balance that does not offend but suits everyoneās needs.
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And in your opinion I suspect they never give the result that you agree with Lincsā¦Most people are just thick arenāt theyā¦?
You can blame the internet and the media for all the misinformation, and itās usually presented by the establishment.
I think they are only now fine tuning them, at least the legislation is being debated to decriminalise abortion.
Abortion laws are a good example of how the law can be adapted to let anything happen. The laws are actually very strict but there are hundreds of thousands of abortions each year because about 90% are for the āmental distressā reason. Now I donāt know for sure whether a doctor has to make a diagnosis to even prove the mother would be so depressed that it would be more harm to her to keep a baby, but it is expedient to use that option so it becomes a tick box.
Many people are quite de-sensitised to abortion, but if the same tick box process was used for euthanasia they would be up in arms. The right to life becomes very subjective.
Actually that is not true - the 2014 Scottish independence referendum ended up with exactly the outcome I was hoping for.
And, no-one can deny that the āestablishmentā (whatever that is but lets call it the government of the time) provides lots of misinformation in the lead up to a referendum. We saw that in the project fear of the 2014 referendum - lots of exaggerated claims of imminent disaster if there was a leave vote. Then they did the same in 2016.
The bigger problem is that a referendum assumes the possible change being voted on is fully understood and well defined. That was not the case in either 2014 or 2016. Both were just āleaveā with no details on what that would actually look like.
I would not say that people who voted (in what I would call the wrong way) to leave in either referendum were thick. I would say that they let gut feelings of rejecting a perceived bad thing (either the English Westminster or the EU Brussels) and a jingoistic believe that walking away from that ābad thingā would necessarily be better. And as there was no detail in either case of what the leaving would result in, this allowed that jingoistic believe to settle on vague ideas, not specific hard arrangements. That is not being thick, but it is definitely not applying clear headed, objective thinking. It is subjective hoping.
Back in 2014 it seemed certain that full Scottish separation from the UK was going to be problematic, economically damaging and very risky. A trade border with England? A loss of military capability? Either a dependency of the English pound or joining the euro zone?
Back in 2016 it seems very clear that that leaving the EU would be economically damaging, stifle trade with the closest partners & difficult (impossible) to replace further afield, and increase Putinās threat to Europe. That is what has happened, as would similar worries for the 2014 leave vote.
Both sets of worries about leaving are simply looking objectively at what certainly would be lost, what risks and unknowns are created and how difficult it would be to address both. However this objectivity gets blurred by there not being a clear definition of what the post-leave situation would be in detail. Every objective worry can be (was) countered by a ānot necessarilyā made up vagueness on how things would be after leaving.
I hope this makes sense - even if one continues to be in the mindset of jingoistic hope and warm fuzziness of imagined (but not actually real) independence.
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