hypochondriac

It would be great if it doesn't rise (guardian sources hardly likely to be wrong though in this instance.) because I can continue to invest and contribute to the economy in the process. Loads of people will feel the same. If it is as the Guardian predict we will be well above the German, Italian and French rate. Why would you invest here if that's the case?

Labour should be encouraging investment, not the total opposite. If the conditions become too risky and many investment become too likely to be loss making then no one will bother or will invest outside of the country. This might provide a very short term gain-maybe not- but medium to long term it will make things much worse.

As expected, Labour whacking up capital gains tax. Luckily I'll be selling my investments beforehand and then keeping it all in the bank and doing very little with it. I expect most people will do similar which is the opposite of what should be happening.

Can we not mention Graham Potter? It's embarrassing.

It's not me you need to convince. I don't actually care about a lot of that stuff but I've seen and spoken to a fair amount of labour supporters and voters who have expressed how disappointed they are in the government and how they feel duped given the language that was used prior to the election. If half the cabinet wants Taylor Swift tickets then thats up to them. If the totality of their claims have made a lot of the people who voted for them consider the to be hypocritical or at least not live up to the words they said themselves then that's something I'd be concerned about if I were a Labour MP. What are your thoughts on Labour's first 100 days?

I preferred him when he was delldays with the popinski avatar.

Indeed. Trying to pretend that the issue is simply about allowing people days from death to end their life with dignity and nothing else is indeed very tedious.

It doesn't surprise me that you would fail to understand the nuances of an issue. Besides, your morals are entirely out of kilter to the extent that anyone should generally be concerned if they're on the same side as you on something like this. According to you supporting child rape is not the worst crime in the world.

I'll remind you, a tory thread still exists where you can talk about them to your hearts content. This is the Labour thread about the party in power.

Agree with this. If we were villa or Brighton we'd be loving it.

Your entire second paragraph is an invention in your own mind and you've just ignored all the many examples ive given you of instances where Canada has expanded the law beyond its original remit. Canada is just one example and there are others.

I mostly agree with that. If there was some way to guarantee it applied solely to those with weeks to live then I could see a scenario where I could support it. Practically that's impossible though.

Genius if true.

That's a different discussion but hard to disagree with any of that. I agree mental health support could be much improved but surely the answer is not in the absence of support you can just die and remove the burden of care from anyone else?

Have you just wilfully ignored the cases I have posted above? I would say the most alarming statistic is that only 4% of those who apply for assisted death get denied. Suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease at 41, Sean Tagert required 24-hour care, but British Columbia only provided 16-hour assistance. Paying caretakers for the remaining eight hours cost Tagert CA$264 per day. Health authorities did offer to move Tagert to an institution, but its location was far from the young son who was clearly his father’s prime reason for living, as Tagert described such a separation as a “death sentence”. The man managed to raise CA$16,000 to invest in medical equipment that would allow him to remain at home, but the funds were insufficient. So instead he applied for euthanasia. The end At the age of 61, Alan Nichols had a history of depression and was hospitalised as a suicide risk in 2019 — something of an irony, as in due course the hospital staff, according to his family, was altogether too helpful in facilitating the patient’s application for euthanasia. That application was accepted, even though the only health condition it cited as so intolerable that Nichols wanted to die was “hearing loss”. After Nichols was put to death, his family objected that the man was not suffering unbearably, had been refusing to take his medication, and wouldn’t use the cochlear implant that helped him hear. But no medical personnel had ever contacted his relatives, out of respect for patient confidentiality. In more than one instance in Canada, too, patients seem to have been actively pressed to consider pulling their own plug to save the health system money. Hospitalised for a degenerative brain disorder, Roger Foley was, according to Associated Press, “so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations”. In one recording, the hospital’s director of ethics informs Foley that his hospital stay is costing the institution “north of $1,500 a day” — quite the guilt trip. Foley asks about the plan for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show,” the “ethicist” said. “My piece of this was to talk to you, to see if you had an interest in assisted dying.” But Foley himself had never expressed the slightest interest in dying For while the Australian province of Victoria, for example, forbids doctors from bringing up the option of euthanasia, lest it be mistaken for medical advice, Canada’s physicians can cheerfully recommend being killed as one of patients’ “clinical care options”. Thus, Sheila Elson took her daughter to an emergency room in Newfoundland six years ago. Unprompted, the doctor informed Elson that her daughter of 25, who had cerebral palsy and spinal bifida, was a good candidate for euthanasia. As Elson later told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the doctor chided that not taking up the state’s kindly offer to slay her daughter would be “selfish”. At least four cases have been unearthed of veterans with, say, PTSD being encouraged to consider assisted dying in preference, as one staffer put it diplomatically, to “blowing your brains out”. Maid has been active in prisons as well, whose population is also costly and understandably prone to feeling glum.

A young woman who survived an ISIS bombing chose euthanasia rather than live with the trauma, according to a report. Shanti De Corte was a 17-year-old student traveling with her classmates at Brussels Airport when ISIS terrorists detonated a bomb. The March 2016 blast, along with two others set off by the group at a Brussels subway station, killed 32 people and left more than 300 injured. De Corte was not physically injured in the attack, but endured years of panic attacks and depression afterward, the Mirror reported. She tried to kill herself twice, in 2018 and 2020, and posted regularly on social media about her struggles. De Corte, then 23, chose to be euthanized earlier this year, which is legal in Belgium. She died on May 7 after two psychiatrists signed off on her request.

I'm really really not. Look at the quotes from the article I posted above. Better yet read it for yourself. I can find you plenty of other examples but they are ending the lives of Canadians at a rate of 10,000 a year.

Some quotes from the article: In The New Atlantis, Alexander Raikin described the case of Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, along with other mental and physical illnesses. She presented these symptoms to the MAID assessors and her death was approved. Meanwhile, she wrote in a note evidently meant for those to whom she had granted power of attorney: “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” She was put to death on September 26, 2021, via a lethal injection, at the age of 41. In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of a 23-year-old man named Kiano Vafaeian, who was depressed and unemployed, and also had diabetes and had lost vision in one eye. His death was approved and scheduled for September 22, 2022. The doctor who was to perform the procedure emailed Vafaeian clear and antiseptic instructions: “Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” Vafaeian could bring a dog with him, as long as someone would be present to take care of it. About two weeks before the appointment, Vafaeian’s 46-year-old mother, Margaret Marsilla, telephoned the doctor who was scheduled to kill her son. She recorded the call and shared it with The Free Press. Posing as a woman named Joann, she told the doctor that she wanted to die by Christmas. Reciting basic MAID criteria, the doctor told her that she needed to be over 18, have an insurance card, and be experiencing “suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.” The doctor said he could conduct his assessment via Zoom or WhatsApp. Marsilla posted on social media about the situation. Eventually, the doctor texted Marsilla, saying that he would not follow through with her son’s death. the Associated Press reported on the case of Alan Nichols. Nichols had lost his hearing in childhood, and had suffered a stroke, but for the most part was able to live independently. In June 2019, at age 61, he was hospitalized out of concern that he might be suicidal. He urged his brother Gary to “bust him out” of the facility as soon as possible. But within a month, he applied for a physician-assisted death, citing hearing loss as his only medical condition. A nurse practitioner also described Nichols’s vision loss, frailty, history of seizures, and general “failure to thrive.” The hospital told the AP that his request for a lethal injection was valid, and his life was ended. “Alan was basically put to death,” his brother told the AP. When people who were suffering applied to the MAID program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible. If autonomy is your highest value, these trends are not tragic; they’re welcome. Death is no longer the involuntary, degrading end of life; it can be a glorious act of self-expression. In late 2022, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons released a branding video that paid tribute to the assisted suicide of a 37-year-old woman afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissue. The video, titled “All Is Beauty,” was released the day after the woman’s death. In a series of lush images of her on tourist-destination beaches and at a dinner party, the video portrayed her death as “the most beautiful exit”—a sort of rich, Instagram-ready consumer experience that you might get from a five-star resort. Tyler Dunlop is a physically healthy 37-year-old man who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, and has no job or home or social contact. “When I read about medically assisted dying,” he told a local news website earlier this year, “I thought, well, logistically, I really don’t have a future.” Knowing that “I’m not going anywhere,” as he put it, he has started the process for approval under MAID. The New Atlantis published slides from a Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers seminar, in which a retired care coordinator noted that a couple of patients had cited poverty or housing uncertainty, rather than their medical condition, as their main reason for seeking death. Similarly, when a nation normalizes medically assisted suicide, and makes it a more acceptable option, then more people may choose suicide. A 2022 study in the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health found that in four jurisdictions—Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium—where assisted dying is legal, “there have been very steep rises in suicide,” including both assisted and unassisted suicide. The physician who assists one person to die may be influencing not just that suicide but the suicides of people he will never see

A Canadian literally requested a ramp for her house from the local government and was instead given the option of assisted suicide so that's not some ridiculous far fetched scenario, it actually happened in a country that legalised a very similar bill that we are proposing. You say you disagree with the Canadian move towards assisted dying for any sort of pain both physical or mental. Can you not see how quickly Canada went down that path once assisted dying was legalised? That could very easily happen here and in my opinion would actually be quite likely. You're just wrong to suggest that this bill wouldn't move us closer towards the direction of prematurely ending the lives of those who are considered by others or consider themselves to be a burden. I know you're wrong because it's actually happened and is happening in countries that legalised this now. I really think you should look into this a bit more because what is proposed doesn't do what you think it does. Anyway you're not going to agree. You set out saying you couldn't think of a single reason why someone would object to this bill, hopefully at the very least you can see many perfectly valid reasons to object to it even if you don't agree. Just in case you do want to approach the subject with a more open mind, here's a good article on the subject with even more terrible examples from Canada: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/canada-legalized-medical-assisted-suicide-euthanasia-death-maid/673790/

I don't think you're going to understand but you're just wrong about cases like that never getting through because they have done so in other countries where this has been legalised. No one other than yourself has brought up holding up a bus on this forum. There are a plethora of other entirely valid scenarios outlined above that you dismiss as unrealistic when I'm telling you that they're not and giving you real world examples of cases exactly like them that have resulted in people ending their lives.

Not sure why you're using ridiculous examples. The proposed assisted dying bill isn't talking about starting with the most obviously chronic and painful conditions. That's not what is being proposed.

We aren't miles away from a Canada type situation. It took just two years from Canada legalosing assisted dying for terminal illnesses to the situation they are in today and no we aren't literally talking about people on deaths door. Look at the bill being proposed and then also consider the implications once it inevitably expands. It's nonsensical for you to pretend that there would not be situations where people would feel pressure either overtly or subtley to end their lives prematurely. It happens whenever these bills are introduced.

Both my aunt and my mother had and have MS and I have relatives in Canada so I can absolutely identify with what you post. Even if we just ignore all the other arguments made above, a society that moves from a state of care towards one that normalises death as a solution to suffering will absolutely have broader societal effects. It will have an inevitable change on how certain illnesses and people are viewed and how they view themselves as you've outlined. For some there will be an encouragement of death as a solution and Canada is not the only country to introduce this with the best of intentions only to see it expanded in very short order with the view of life in society permenently altered.

I've outlined in detail my concerns above. Obviously I strongly disagree with the proposed law even though I also acknowledge that there are some people who suffer with terminal illness. Like you say it's a complex issue and I can see valid arguments on both sides.

Yes but it obviously is something to lay at the government's door given that the vote and possible passing of the bill wouldn't be happening without them being in power.