Can we get over this ‘I agree with assisted dying in principle’ thing? If we were living in a perfect world, where doctors didn’t kill patients, where relatives didn’t exercise coercive control, where disabled people were equal citizens, and where elderly people weren’t made to feel like a burden, then of course nobody would be against assisted dying. But, in such a world, we wouldn’t need laws, because everyone would be perfect and able to regulate their own behavior. Societies make laws precisely because they recognize that people are fallible: few people may be truly evil, but all of us make mistakes. Of course, it was badly constructed homicide law that prompted Starmer as and other Directors of Public Prosecutions to support AD. But bad laws work both ways: There have been too many cases of medical malfeasance and malpractice in this country, of which Harold Shipman is just the tip of the iceberg; too many husbands, like David Clarke, murdering their wives ‘out of compassion’, it is inevitable that some will use assisted dying for the wrong reasons, whether malicious or misguided. So, if we are to legalize assisted dying, preventing abuse should not be some optional extra tagged on at some late stage in some Parliamentary subcommittee, it should be at the very heart of the legislative process. What alarms me about @KimLeadbeater and her colleagues on the assisted dying committee is that they are so uninterested in trying to use their law to prevent abuse.