ALTHOUGH Easter, with its Christian origins and more recent chicks, eggs and baby rabbits, is traditionally about new life, Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur marked the occasion in Scotland by choosing Maundy Thursday as the day to launch his long-awaited Assisted Dying Bill.

Assisted dying, or assisted suicide for those who prefer to avoid euphemisms, continues to be a cause celebre for many of our elites, for whom the thought of having to be dependent on others for help is apparently a horror to be avoided at all costs — even if the cost means introducing a law that would leave minority groups vulnerable to pressure to end their lives early.

Of course, assisted suicide is not only a cause celebre but also a “cause celebrite” with new members of the fashionable elite regularly wheeled out on the front pages of Establishment newspapers, while those in actual wheelchairs find themselves, ironically, wheeled out of the debate altogether, their voices silenced in favour of the rich and famous.

Recent notable celebrities have included Dame Prue Leith and Dame Esther Rantzen. We can add to their number the probable future prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Critics’ accusations of Starmer’s propensity for flip-flopping cannot be substantiated on this one issue at least where his enthusiasm for assisted suicide has remained remarkably resolute.

But it would be a mistake to assume Starmer’s personal views have a monopoly in the Labour Party. Indeed, in Scotland, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar remains unpersuaded about the case for Liam McArthur’s Bill. He is not alone.

As I have explained before, there is a strong tradition of opposition to assisted suicide from the left, as demonstrated in recent years by opposition from two contrasting Labour leaders, Gordon Brown and Jeremy Corbyn.

For all the attempts of its cheerleaders to persuade us otherwise, it is hard to see how Brown and Corbyn’s concerns — that legalising assisted suicide would provoke a slippery slope as the eligibility criteria inevitably expand, as Corbyn warned in relation to the Marris-Falconer assisted suicide Bill in 2015, that legalisation “would put the most vulnerable people at risk” — have been assuaged in recent years. Indeed, both concerns appear increasingly prescient as demonstrated by two recent pieces of commentary.

First, former Conservative MP Matthew Parris seemingly missed the memo to avoid honesty about the possible motivations for assisted suicide when, writing in the Spectator recently, he admitted “that the spread and acceptance of assisted dying” may indeed add “pressure upon the terminally ill to lift the burden they’re placing on others.” He then gave the assisted suicide movement its Gerald Ratner moment: “And let me bite deeper into the bullet. I think this would be a good thing.”

Shocking as it is, Parris’s thinking, apparently eschewing any notion of compassion or solidarity, also appears increasingly to underlie the way governments consider the practice in jurisdictions where assisted suicide is permitted.

The case was made explicit in a notorious report in 2020 from the parliamentary Budget Officer for the Canadian Parliament which stated that the Canadian government would save $86.9 million in healthcare costs through assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2021, and could make a further $62m of savings if the law were expanded.

As it happened, these savings ended up being conservative estimates as the Canadian government’s projections underestimated how many of its citizens would do the state a favour by sacrificing their lives to inflate the public purse.

A similar mindset could be detected in the second recently published commentary that reinforces the concerns of assisted suicide sceptics on the left: the publication, accompanying Liam McArthur’s Bill, of a financial analysis of the potential savings gained by making assisted suicide legal in Scotland.

While some clever treasury wonk managed to come up with figures that ensured the Financial Memorandum remarkably concluded that assisted suicide in Scotland is “likely to be effectively cost neutral,” in reality, the projections are based on implausible assumptions about the savings that assisted dying would bring — the projections assume those who choose to die would otherwise only live, and require expensive treatment, for “a matter of days or, at the most, weeks.” The reality is that those with terminal illnesses (interpreted dangerously broadly by the Bill) regularly survive for many months and even years.

Quite aside from this, the very fact of undertaking such an analysis creates a worrying precedent in a climate where the likes of Parris are making arguments on the basis of precisely these kinds of calculations.

In this cold, utilitarian, mode of thinking, the most vulnerable, whether those with chronic ill health or disabilities, or those who perceive they are a burden on their families and the state, will inevitably be put at risk.

Contrary to Parris’s thinking, the level of care for such people is indicative of the moral character of a society. Genuine compassion and solidarity with the most vulnerable would instead require working to alleviate the suffering of loved (and unloved) ones towards the end of their lives. Their welfare is put at risk by the very possibility of assisted suicide.

Perceived or real loss of dignity or autonomy are genuine forms of suffering that we can and must do our best to alleviate. Importantly though, these are forms of societal, familial and psychological suffering that can be addressed through palliative care, friendship and support in times of need. They should not be answered by the option of state-endorsed suicide.

Unfortunately, supporters of assisted suicide like Parris think otherwise, instead endorsing an anti-human mentality that views the suffering person as a societal burden to be removed. When Corbyn said that assisted suicide would be open to abuse because “not everyone is nice,” perhaps this is the kind of thing he had in mind.

Chris Whitehouse is a governor of the Anscombe Bioethics Centre and chair of lobbying agency Whitehouse Communications.