In Parliament this morning Dr Evan Harris MP (pictured) led an adjournment debate (a brief ad hoc debate, not followed by voting) on the subject of so-called assisted dying. Dr Harris is one of Parliament's leading devotees of killing the innocent. Dr Harris described the situation in Britain thus:"Assisting someone to die is punishable with 14 years of imprisonment ... and that seems to me to be inappropriate with the sort of cases that we're dealing with at the moment. We all know the examples of where people are seeking assistance to die, and that is different to assisted suicide ... What we are not talking about here clearly is assisted suicide. Assisted dying is for people who want to live, not for people who want to die in the case of assisted suicide, so I have no difficulty with the current law which criminalises assisted suicide, where people are suicidal and they are helped through websites or indirectly ...
Dr Harris went on to say that "Dignitas as we know helps people with incurable illnesses to die ... and over 100 [British citizens] have travelled to Switzerland have an assisted death since October 2002."
I invite Dr Harris to visit the website of Dignitas, where he can read a recent speech by Dignitas founder Dr Ludwig Minelli, in which he said:
"By accepting the idea of suicide in principal (sic) and by being prepared to offer professional help with suicide, DIGNITAS is recognised as a credible and trustworthy source of help for people in suicidal situations ... We must be prepared to offer professionally-supervised assisted suicide to those people whose problems cannot be solved ... As long as residents of those countries have to travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide because the law of their own country does not allow them to ask for it at home, neither their freedom of choice nor their right to suicide can be said to correspond with the guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights." (my emphasis)
The pro-suicide movement championed by Dr Harris rivals the pro-abortion movement in its use of “political language ... designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (George Orwell) And so, both for his claims in his speech this morning and for his record of other outstandingly deceptive claims, I am today giving Dr Harris a special lifetime Orwell Award.
