LORD 'CHARLIE' FALCONER is today bringing forward a 'right-to-die' bill in the House of Lords. In a lawyerly piece of pedantry, he will tell peers that the bill will not allow 'assisted suicide' but 'assisted dying'.
It will be couched in all sorts of protective flannel and legal assurances to prevent abuses, limiting its provisions to those due to die within six months. The lethal drugs will be held under strict controls to prevent old folks' homes becoming death hotels.
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The trouble is not Falconer's good intentions. Anyone who has met him can testify that he is a cheery chap who always has the best of intentions. It is the unintended consequences of his actions that would worry the Mole.
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Charlie is the luvviest of New Labour luvvies, an Edinburgh lawyer who spent more than a decade in high office because he was a personal pal of Tony Blair.
He passionately wanted to become an elected MP but was dropped from a shortlist for a Labour seat because he had sent his three boys to the fee-paying Westminster School and St Paul's. Instead, Blair made him Solicitor General, promoting him to the Lords with a life peerage, within 24 hours of winning office in 1997.
Falconer was at Blair's side throughout his time in office and, as a leading player in the New Labour project, was intimately associated with a long list of unintended consequences of the Blair government.
There were the measures to allow limited net immigration which soared to two million in ten years (oops); signing up to the Human Rights Act which has been abused to the frustration of successive Home Secretaries ever since (oops); the Iraq war (he now says it undermined democracy - oops); and the light touch legal regulation of the City that allowed the casino bankers to wreck the economy (double oops).
Charlie's CV includes direct responsibility for the Millennium Dome fiasco, which he took over from Peter Mandelson after Mandy resigned from the Cabinet. In his modernising zeal, he also carried out a botched attempt to scrap the 800-year-old title of Lord Chancellor which he held, before discovering it could not be done – a move he now says he regrets (oops again).
Former New Labour ministers like Good-Time Charlie have become pretty adept at saying sorry for past unintended consequences. The only problem with “assisted dying” is that you don't get a second chance.
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