Its official title is the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, but it might more accurately be named the Law of Unintended Consequences. MPs voting for Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill to legalise assisted suicide are, by extension, voting for the return of capital punishment under the next government.
Once the state assumes the power and function of dealing death to citizens who are non-culpable of any crime, it will be impossible to resist the public demand for the death penalty to be inflicted on the most culpable in society: those who have committed murders of the most depraved kind, of whom the Southport perpetrator might be taken as a perfect example.