Justice secretary's assisted dying intervention is explosive - and potentially embarrassing for PM
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood joins former prime minister Gordon Brown in condemning the assisted dying bill ahead of a historic vote on Friday.
With six days to go before Friday's historic Commons showdown on assisted dying, it's the opponents who are turning up the heat.
Another example of Starmer making a poor political decision. Not so much that the assisted dying measure is wrong, but this is an unusual political issue with good arguments on both sides, not one for a Prime Minister in severe political difficulties.
Starmer's political outlook was never suited to this kind of battle anyway. He is neither persuasive nor sufficiently pragmatic and this difficult, two-sided moral problem is way beyond his ideologically obtuse and weirdly amoral political outlook.
As a psychological aside, some arguments about winter fuel payments also raised the spectre of death. Starmer gone by Christmas begins to seem more likely.
7 comments:
Give Two Tier Free Gear Kier Starmer Farmer Harmer (TTFGKSFH) a rule book and he is happy. Assisted Dying is a contentious issue outside the established rule of law, with pros and cons on both sides, and it seems to me that he suffers from indecision.
The idiot is even more a national liabilty than Gowdon Brown ever was. Blair ran away when he realised that he was soon going to be found out, and left the bewildered Brown to try and pick up the pieces, where he failed miserably!
But this is all self- inflicted, with Rachel from stapler supplies cobbling a hopeless budget, and the manic Ed Miliband screaming inanities at all and everyone, without a clue about what he's talking about!
A GE is a must now, with nearly 700,000 voting, the idiot has to start becomng less naive and grow a pair. Fat chance.
I was disappointed by Brown's contribution to the debate. I'll grant that he was a terrible Chancellor of the Exchequer but I don't think he was all that bad as a PM. Anyway I knew him when we were young and can vouch that he was then an able lad.
So his contribution disappointed me: praying in aid his poor daughter is in bad taste and is anyway irrelevant. Anyone who proposes that we must choose exclusively between hospice care and euthanasia is simply being blinkered or dishonest. We could perfectly well have both. Indeed, we always have had both except that the euthanasia was probably illegal.
DJ - yes he's a rulebook man and this issue was bound to cause him political problems. A better leader could perhaps handle it well enough, but Starmer isn't that leader.
Scrobs - I don't see the idiot changing in response to any of this, he comes across as hopelessly intransigent. He hasn't even given up on getting back into the EU in some form, in spite of what he says.
dearieme - yes, many of us do have personal stories around this issue, but Brown should have left his daughter out of it. Hospice care and legal euthanasia ought to be possible, but those who say the euthanasia would be abused are also pointing out the obvious - it would be.
A bit of basic due diligence on Starmer's part would have revealed the Muslim Mahmood would have principled objections against euthanasia. He could at least have got the cabinet onside and voluntarily agreeing not to publicly express opinions. But, as you say, that's a skill he lacks. Lawyers just want to win and walk away with the money.
Sam - yes, due diligence would have revealed the principled objections. Maybe he didn't care because he didn't realise that an internal dispute doesn't look good in any situation.
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