The debate is everywhere — in the newspapers, on telly, in the pub and round the dinner table — not so much whether assisted dying is a good idea as how on earth did team Starmer manage to handle it so badly?

The question I hear again and again in debates over what our MPs might think they’re doing is ‘are they corrupt or are they stupid?’

I think we have our answer

The furore over assisted dying is perhaps the clearest evidence yet of where this government is at. It is blindingly obvious that the stakeholders in this issue are likely to be deeply emotionally involved. It’s going to be about brokenhearted families; severely disabled people who are struggling to cope; about nurses and doctors who sometimes face the choice of risking their careers or adding to heartbreak and suffering when a patient asks for something that’s currently illegal; about carers who have seen people driven to desperation by poverty and shortages of proper care, and to cap it all, religious people talking about gods who have very firm rules about suicide.

And yet team Starmer waded into this and turned the debates and votes into snitty competitions that ended up with a proposal both sides of the debate disapprove of. It’s quite simply unbelievable, unless something else is going on.

There are some MPs who have more or less said the old and the disabled are too expensive to care for, but only a few and they’re mostly Tories, so although Starmer’s government have proved themselves capable of such callousness (Palestine, winter heating allowance, so called benefit fraud, telling the WASPIs to do one…) there has to be more to it.

Try this for size

Starmer, Streeting, and more than a few others have private health care companies amongst their backers. Companies don’t give politicians large bungs in the hope that they’ll generally do what they want. Donations of tens or hundreds of thousands come with very specific shopping lists, and they don’t go away. They breathe down their politicians’ necks, and make it quite plain when things aren’t going the way they want them to.

It leads to politicians making inexplicable U-turns, such as, for a hypothetical example, an MP getting out of a sticky moment by saying to a committee, “it’s okay – we’ll have a high court judge overseeing the difficult decisions,” then getting a phone call from a prospective contractor saying “no, no way. That would be time consuming and expensive. Dump the high court idea right now, or that’s the end of money.”

–o0o–

Such things may or may not be true — but haven’t the last few years in politics made it very, very clear that we need to outlaw corporate donations to political parties, MPs and parliamentary candidates?

********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

You can make one-off or monthly payments by BACS to Mrs K Green, Sort: 07 01 16, Acct No: 43287058, Reference: blog

Or via Paypal…

Click here to donate via Paypal

Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.

Cheers,

Kay

********************