From: Daily Telegraph

It's difficult to believe that there hasn't been some co-ordinated PR effort by pro-suicide Lords to soften us up. The 1961 Suicide Act made it an offence to assist a suicide, punishable by up to 14 years' imprisonment. But the Director of Public Prosecutions is poised this week to compromise that statute, by saying that only sometimes will it be an offence to assist a suicide. And that is, in reality, a change in the law that will not have been effected by Parliament, but by a ginger group of Lords and lawyers.

First we had Lord Phillips, Britain's most senior judge, expressing his "enormous sympathy" for those who wanted assisted suicides.

Then we had Lord Falconer, arrogantly and quite revoltingly, suggesting last week that Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, lacked Christian compassion if he didn't agree with the peer's line on the subject.

Charlie Falconer is, of course, no stranger to a political autocracy. His substantial seat on the sofa of his old flatmate Tony Blair put him at the heart of a regime with contempt for Parliament and a missionary zeal for attenuating it.

He will be quietly satisfied this week that the small matter of the sovereignty of Parliament hasn't stood in the way of what he wants. Never mind that his own meddlesome amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill, which would have legalised assisting a suicide, was defeated in the Lords only a few months ago. Never mind that legalisation has never stood a chance in the Commons.

For Lord Falconer, such problems are minor irritations in the petit bourgeois machinery of Parliament. Far better, for him, to have the legislature circumvented by multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy's appeal to the old Law Lords. There Lord Phillips won a direction that the DPP should "clarify" when assisted suicides will be prosecuted.

The DPP, Keir Starmer QC, has dutifully played his role in this legislative charade. He made some respectable noises after the Law Lords' ruling that it wasn't for him to change the law. Then he proceeded in effect to do just that. First he surprised us by saying that his guidelines would apply to suicides committed in Britain, not only to those who choose to fly to the grim Dignitas death clinic in Switzerland. And now, this week, he is expected to decriminalise those who assist a suicide on "compassionate grounds", distinguishing somehow between those who "assist" and those who "encourage" a suicide.

Good luck to him on explaining that distinction to the police. We should reserve our judgment on his guidelines until we've seen them, but it sounds to me as if the DPP is drafting bad and ambiguous measures that will undermine unequivocal existing statutes. Such measures will put the elderly, infirm and vulnerable at greater risk than they are today.

Stand by, after the DPP has done his business, for calls for the Suicide Act to be repealed, once it has been so effectively undermined. Which I suspect was precisely the intention of those Lords and their pro-suicide friends. Make an ass of the law and the law must be changed.

What's so dispiriting about all this is that a deathly cabal is succeeding in usurping an age-old provenance of life over death without proper parliamentary debate. We will end up with a Dignitas-style clinic, with its grotesque aspirations to self-destruction as a consumer choice, in Britain.

The DPP's draft guidelines will turn into policy next year, possibly after a general election. David Cameron's family has had tragic cause this year, with the death of severely disabled six-year-old Ivan, to know the unique value and sanctity of every human life, however afflicted.

Let's hope he brings that agonising insight to an abused legislature and Lord Falconer's dark and dreadful path to hopelessness.

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