What is in Kelvin's Head?

Assisted Dying – Why I’ve changed my mind

15/03/2026

The time has come to admit it. I’ve changed my mind about assisted dying.

As a priest, the presumption is generally made that I’m against it for religious reasons. Recent aggressive campaigning by those in favour of allowing doctors to help people to end their lives has been relentlessly dismissive of religious reasons for being against it. As though religious people have no consciences worth respecting, no bodies of their own, no pain and no right to be heard.

The truth is, though I am very obviously religious, I do not have any religious reasons for objecting to the proposed law in principle but the longer that I’ve spent time with those who are actually dying the more I find myself unable to support a change in the law. My concerns are not religious but practical.

For a long time I was fairly uncommitted in this debate. My tendency would be to think that the alleviation of pain was the ultimate goal for anyone at the end of life and to take the view that preventing pain might well be a justification for allowing someone to end their life early.

More recently though experience has suggested to me that the question is a good deal more complicated than that. And so I find that I’ve changed my mind. From being moderately supportive of a change in the law, I now find myself fully opposed to the new legislation.

I remember the day when I changed my mind very well too. I had been called to the deathbed of someone whom I did not know. Before I could get into the room with the dying person, their family met me in the corridor. They asked me whether I could help them as things were very difficult.

“We were just wondering whether you could ask the doctors to speed things up a bit.”

I replied that I couldn’t as the law wouldn’t allow such a thing. And I asked why. What was it? Did they need me to help them to speak to the doctors about trying to get some better pain regulation?

“No” came the answer, “No – the thing is we’ve a skiing holiday booked and we leave on Monday – we just need this to be over so we can get away”.

That was the moment that I realised that not everyone dies with people close to them who have their best interests at heart.

Those who are dying are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. They are losing their power to make independent choices. They are vulnerable to the attitudes of everyone they encounter. And almost everyone whom they encounter may have a financial or other interest not only in their death but in its timing.

Spending time with the dying, I’ve also realised that those at the end of life are particularly vulnerable to societal assumptions about being a burden and causing a fuss.

Increasingly, funeral directors are making good money from ghoulishly promoting Direct Cremations – the disposing of bodies without ceremony or the presence of loved ones. To do so, they repeat again and again in their advertising, suggests that it is better to face death without causing a fuss.

Yet everyone who grieves knows that death in itself is disruptive. Death and grief change lives. They are not to be dismissed. No amount of trying not to cause a fuss changes that.

It has all made me realise that when I die, I want everyone to know that I want plenty of fuss. Fuss is how we show one another that we love them.

The desire to cause others no fuss at all though is one of the greatest pressures that the dying feel.

If it were the case that all people had access to the finest palliative care at the end of their lives and were all surrounded by those who had their best interests at heart in institutions where there is no financial pressure on managers and medics then I might be able to get to a position where I might support the assisted dying proposals.

However, we don’t live or die in that world. And until then, the best way to assist people to die is by investing in those studying pain management, better funding hospitals and hospices and by listening to the stories of those who sit alongside those who are dying.

I’ve sat in those rooms many times.

All of us should be in the presence of those who love and care for us when we die. Not all of us will be. The law, as it stands, is the best way to protect the interests of all of us when we die. For these reasons, I hope that our parliamentarians have the courage to vote no when the final vote is taken on this bill. It is legislation that would fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state.

The principle of alleviating pain is a godly one but the reality is that the devil is in all manner of practical detail.

Assisted dying, euthanasia, scottish parliament

47 responses to “Why saying No Thanks is the progressive option”

Richard

15/09/2014

Fascinated by the ethnicity/cultural comments so I’ll leave the economics alone for the time being. I’m a mongrel with a bit of Irish, English, Scottish thrown into the mix. I was parachuted into the Highlands from darkest Englandshire as an infant. My initial experiences at primary school were- well, an experience. I was ridiculed. Snowballs contained sharp objects. Someone setting light to ones’s jumper is an unpleasant experience, all the more so when one happens to be wearing it at the time.

Physical attacks- being pinned to the ground and punched in the face until it turns purple while a healthy crowd gathers round chanting “put the boot in!” Which they did. Freely and liberally.

High school would be different. Except on day one each child had to recite- in the music lesson- the poem “It’s a braw, bricht moon licht nicht the nicht”. At the end of the lesson I was thrown fully clothed from a bridge into the River Lossie.

The reason- accent.

Being stubborn, I became a Scots lawyer and devoted most of my spare time working for charities for the hardest pressed in Scottish society. I made lifelong friends with many Scots and am proud to be their friends. Together we climbed all the Munros, enjoyed the history and freedom of open bothies and howffs, and I had the privilege of fishing some of the finest rivers in the world.

The current referendum is a matter for each individual in the voting booth. I am clear and certain that many are motivated by a cultural love of their land and people, justifiably and rightly so. However, I am equally certain that many will be motivated by racism (look no further than the recent visceral response to the BBCs poor journalism, namely where to deposit one’s TV licence). The ballot box isn’t concerned with motives but in the totting up of yeses and nos, but I have lived the experience of racist bullying and I know it’s still there. I still tense up when I hear the “joking banter” of the rugby terraces variety.

It is right and proper that there is a referendum. We are all being asked to face up to a new reality and that is good, whichever way the vote goes. It is, however, important to recognise that there is an underbelly and that it is ugly. Polite society will deny its existence. I can tell you it is very real, and it is very painful.

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1. Ruth
  
  16/09/2014
  
  Yes it’s sad how even the nicest of people are turning spiteful, petty and vindictive, as fear of the promised utopia being snatched from their grasp swells to obliterate their rational minds. Their desire for a more just society in Scotland has been manipulated and exploited ruthlessly and as the feverish excitement rises it’ll be ugly whatever way the vote goes.
  
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  1. Tim
    
    16/09/2014
    
    It’s a natural matter of psychology that, once people make their minds up, they get more entrenched in their view and only seek evidence to support the adopted position. That some will lack the self-control to keep strength of feeling in check is certainly unfortunate but to a large degree inevitable, sadly.
    
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Paul Hutchinson

15/09/2014

I’m a Northern Englishman with exclusively Northern English ancestry for at least two centuries, living in Northern England. Whilst I can appreciate so much of the motivation for voting yes, I stand with Kelvin on this. Those of us who live north of the Humber need Scotland to be with us, and not across the border. We well understand that Scottish life (I think of church, law, and education, the three areas with which I have most contact) is distinctive, and we certainly can see all the frustration that arises out of government policy over the last 35 years; but Scotland is part of the solutions to the problems of Britain, and without it, the progressive case for the rest of us seems almost impossible to make. No, of course, I don’t have a vote on this, but I feel that the English elites have not made the case that Scotland’s nearest neighbours would want them to hear. Bravo Kelvin – of course I agree.

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Colin Souter

15/09/2014

http://t.co/AoNHm1g6JL

I hope you read these comments, that you read this link and that you understand you are buying into the propaganda machine that is Westminster. We can help people through a more socially just and equitable society but that means starting to “eat the elephant” in bite sized chunks. What we can achieve in an iScotland can be a catalyst for change elsewhere in the UK. It’s not about turning our backs, it’s about giving people the confidence to see what can be accomplished successfully…..

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Alan McManus

15/09/2014

I was about 7 when I learned the word ‘lemman’, when another little boy asked me in the playground in Scots if I had a girlfriend. He went to work in a soap factory as he couldn’t anglicise as easily as I could. I went on to gain more degrees than sense and encountered that word again when my sister was studying the Middle English. 300 years of aggressive anglicisation meant that when Scots children used our rich linguistic legacy from sources as diverse as Norman French and the Hanseatic League we were ridiculed not affirmed. That obsessive educational mindset has hardly changed today. The bland ubiquity of the White English middle class discourse exerts a normalising power of erasure of the cultural diversity of the UK. Racism is evil as is all oppression. We are not nasty bairns in some narrowminded kailyard masquerading as a school. We are a people striving to free ourselves from cultural domination. We are sick of charges of racism and tire of repeating ourselves that independence has NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING ANTI-ENGLISH!

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1. Tim
  
  16/09/2014
  
  My word you have a huge inconsistency error there. Objecting to a `bland ubiquity of the White English middle class’ and yet it’s not anti-English?
  
  You should supplement your identity-based argument with some other reasons, lest your path lead to the dark side.
  
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  1. Alan McManus
    
    16/09/2014
    
    Tim if you’re going to quote me (inevitably someone was going to play this victim card) then do so correctly. The last four words in your truncated quote are adjectival. The noun is ‘discourse’. Dominant discourse need not be bland but in its attempted erasure of the diversity of all other discourse, it becomes bland. Why? Because it relies on phatic communication: what is said is not important. What matters is that always and everywhere that voice is on the air.
    Critical theorists have identified the same phenomenon with Anglo-American discourses. Why is this news to the thinking people who read and contribute to this blog? Perhaps because naming the historical and continuing English colonial attitude to Scotland is such an inconvenient truth that people prefer to divert this discussion down the rabbithole of utter nonsense.
    An example of which is ‘our’ PM pleading ‘heart, mind and soul’ for Scotland not to leave the UK. Thus confusing 1707 with 1603. He doesn’t care about the difference because he doesn’t care about history. What he does care about is power. You’re uncomfortable because I dare to state clearly that there is an abuse of power in the UK and it’s based on class, race, accent, nationality (and all sorts of other categories). The White English middle class, at least those who are complacent in their performance of niceness, are surprised to find that others find their assumptions patronising. And by the way can we all stop using ‘dark’ and ‘black’ as synonyms for evil?
    This strategy of excursion from the unanswered issues brought up by Jo, Robin, Derek, Adrian, Christine and Cliff is a bore. Can we stop now? If you’re not going to address them, or even consider them, then read this written by a good friend of mine from Bristol living in Scotland (no it’s not JKR!): http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/09/13/drumchapel-conversations/
    
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Richard

16/09/2014

I agree with Kelvin’s suggested model of a more Federal union, and yes, Ruth, it is sad.

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Rosemary Hannah

16/09/2014

Of course most Scots are not anti-English. Of course a significant minority are. Of course this campaign has made more Scots anti-English and some already anti-English and Scotland, especially in rural areas, a harder place to live with an English accent.

But Kelvin’s arguments are not about this, and it would be good to get back to substance. I am an internationalist and do not see how voting for separatist nationalism can possibly be squared with that. We are not a colony. We have direct representation in the national parliament.

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Steven McQuitty

16/09/2014

While perhaps not decisive on this debate, one factor that should at least be taken into account is the impact this will have on Northern Ireland. What is left of the Union after a “Yes” vote will be unstable. I can’t imagine a de facto English Parliament in Westminster wishing to retain the union with Northern Ireland given the expense and trouble this has caused in the past. Those who may wish to de-stabilise things further in NI might well resort to the tried and tested [and successful, it turns out] means of politically motivated violence. A well placed dissident Republican bomb in England would no doubt encourage the English to say, right enough is enough – you are on your own. There is, in my view, a significant chance that Scottish independence might well lead to the collapse of the Northern Irish political settlement giving rise to a return to violence. Unionists in Northern Ireland will be feeling particularly vulnerable [which rarely leads to good things] and there will some Irish Republicans who will not be able to resist stirring that particular pot to see how things end…

I suspect most Scots won’t consider this their problem but it will be if they have to deal with an influx of Ulster-Scots “refugees” returning home after a 400 year sojourn in Ulster [with tongue only half in cheek].

I visit Scotland regularly, love the country, and see it as the most confident, progressive and beautiful part of the United Kingdom. I would love to live in Scotland. I wish the best for Scotland, whatever the outcome, it will always have a place in my heart. My children will continue to be subjected to Munro-bagging, beaches on Mull and Harris, the National Museum of Scotland and Blackwell’s bookshop on Chambers street!

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Tim

16/09/2014

Kelvin,
You once tweeted at me that [paraphrase] waiting to get everyone to get on-board was the opposite of progressive leadership.

Here, you’re advocating letting a massive opportunity pass by in a desire to improve the lot of a greater majority (with no mechanism for such on the table) – and yet you’re calling this progressive. I’m afraid this does not compute.

Wikipedia: “Progressivism is a broad political philosophy based on the Idea of Progress, which asserts that advances in science, technology, economic development, and social organization can improve the human condition.”

I guess it’s up to each to decide whether the current choice constitutes an advance, but that simply degenerates to affirming your position regardless of whether it’s progressive or not.

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Elizabeth

16/09/2014

I’m still undecided, but I appreciate the postitive, progressive vision for being better together presented here, after growing rather weary of negativity and fear-mongering.

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Alan McManus

17/09/2014

Outside Tesco, across Maryhill Road from McDonalds, along from the Police Station and the JobCentre, about half a mile from St Mary’s and half a world away, a group of YES campaigners and a smaller group of NOs, side by side, shout slogans and laugh and wave banners and flags and cheer passing car drivers honking in support of one or the other. North Kelvinside, the posh part, is content to display some YES and a very few NO stickers – it’s not done here to make a fuss. The scene outside Tesco only sounds raucous to ears unaccustomed to emotional display. What I hear and what I see is that the people of a place often considered a problem are alive to the possibility of making a difference. Their agency is sought after, Prime and First Minister appeal to them. Their vote counts. Whatever the result of tomorrow’s vote, whatever their continuing problems, this experience of agency is part of the solution.

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