From: Daily Mail

Like a pop star plugging his latest record, the blokeish Director of Public Prosecutions does the rounds of the Press and TV studios to promote his guidelines on assisted suicide.

Keir Starmer QC, named after the socialist pioneer Keir Hardie, is New Labour to his fingertips: Guardian-reading, media-savvy and a strong believer in fashionable liberal causes.

He makes no secret, either, of his passionate belief that in some cases relatives should be given the legal go-ahead to help loved ones kill themselves.

Whatever became of the principle that public officials should be politically neutral?

As the Mail has consistently argued, it is for the people's representatives in Parliament to lay down the rules on such hugely sensitive issues as this.

Yet Mr Starmer presumes to announce that public opinion has 'moved on' since MPs passed the current law, which bans assisting a suicide outright.

Since when has it been the DPP's job to decide what the public are thinking - or to impose his own political and moral views on the rest of us?

True, it wasn't Mr Starmer's decision to publish his guidelines.

In another deeply worrying sign of the times, he was made to do so by the Law Lords - themselves unaccountable to the public, and about to become even more powerful when the Supreme Court opens.

If MPs care about our democracy, they must wrest power back from these politicised, unelected judges and officials who increasingly lay down British law.

email this page | printer friendly version