Granny really is a burden, and ought to accept she must be killed in order to save the state some cash.
That is the outrageous proposal from Matthew Parris, a former Tory MP who wrote in the nominally conservative Times newspaper last week that “it will be a healthy development” for the old and infirm not just to consider undergoing assisted suicide, but to be “urged” to do so.
His article came shortly after Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said he will push to legalise assisted suicide if—or, rather, when—he wins the next general election.
Parris has given sharp focus to an issue that has been quietly gaining momentum in British politics. During the Covid lockdown citizens were advised “don’t kill Granny,” even as elderly hospital patients reported receiving bullish medical requests about them signing “Do Not Resuscitate” forms (DNRs).
Alistair Thompson, a spokesman for Care Not Killing, which campaigns for improved palliative care and against assisted suicide, told The European Conservative that the narrative running through Parris’s article “shows the spirit of the 1930s eugenics movement lives on and can be pushed by someone who claims to be progressive.”
In his revoltingly life-denying column, Parris wrote:
I don’t dispute the objectors’ belief that once assisted dying becomes normalised we will become more apt to ask ourselves for how much longer we can justify the struggle. Is life still giving us more pleasure than pain? How much is all this costing relatives and the health service? How much of a burden are we placing on those who love us? How much of a burden are we placing upon ourselves? We will notice others asking themselves these questions and we’ll feel empowered by changing social norms to ask them ourselves. Discussion will become more open. It will become common practice to pose this question without embarrassment, and to weigh the answer up.
In a doubling-down article for the supposedly ‘conservative’ Spectator magazine, he added that assisted suicide “is not a novel desire” and accepted that it is rooted in “Darwinian” thinking.
“All credit to Matthew Parris for making the honest case for assisted suicide,” responded Danny Kruger of the New Conservatives group of MPs in a sarcastic post on X. He joked that the bodies of those who believed themselves too burdensome could perhaps “then be turned into green energy? A modest proposal,” Kruger tweeted, referencing Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay that suggested the starving Irish solve their problems by selling their children to be eaten.
Dominic Cummings, who for some time served as former prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief aide, added that it was “on brand that a pundit bang in the heart of [the] Tory Establishment now campaigns to kill old people to save £.”
It’s a logical development for the rancid [Conservative] party—anti-growth, higher taxes, let out the worst criminals … cheer on the trans child abuse madness, collapse emergency health system—then when youre about to be destroyed by voters tell them the old must be killed to save taxes for the Tory rentiers.
Care Not Killing’s Thompson told this publication that while Parris’ argument is “appalling,” in that it “pushes a chilling and well-worn narrative that says some lives are simply not worth living, because of age, disability or illness and therefore should be ended,” it is by no means unique.
Indeed only a couple of years ago two Scottish academics published a paper on the economics of so-called assisted dying [and] highlighted the savings to health budgets if the law was changed. In the same paper, the academics also claimed that another benefit would be increased organ harvesting from those whose lives were ended.
While just last year a senior politician in Guernsey echoed an economic argument for assisted dying, suggesting there could be “considerable savings … if assisted dying was to be introduced here in the island.”
Labour is gunning to push this approach to the forefront—though likely not with Parris’ level of directness—when it gains power at the next election, while the Tories have already signalled they will take a back seat on the issue.