What Price Sanctity?

In an effort to stop the rot I’m just going to throw out the best I can muster, though I’ve never been much of one to triumph over adversity. There’s a fair share of adversity to deal with at the moment so if triumph can be measured by a bit of a ramble that no-one will read then I shall consider myself the champion of the world; at least for a wisp of a moment in time.

There’s nothing quite like a good old difference of opinion. Very few people think exactly alike and so it stands to reason that we all dream, or hope, or remember in very different ways to the next in line. I, for instance, believe that the earth is round and that the moon landings happened and that the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist (even though I really, really hope I’m wrong) and that grass is green, the sky is blue, blood is red and shit definitely stinks, no matter where it comes from. I believed Gregg Wallace was an arsehole long before he went out of his way to persuade everyone of the fact, and I believe that we (well, not me, someone) voted in a Labour government on some poorly thought out principle and now, only a few months later, are starting to see just what a dreadful, poorly thought out decision that was. I believe the world is trapped in a spiral of decline and that the only people who refute this are too rich to care, and I believe that with every passing day whatever humanity there is left is being eroded away, until one day there will be none of it left at all. I also believe I’m running on empty at the moment, which possibly explains why I haven’t written anything for six weeks. I certainly feel empty, but I’ll try not to get too concerned; there are plenty of small pleasures left to spark the odd fire, de temps en temps.

Anyway, the point is that it is perfectly acceptable to see things from a different point of view. Many Christians, for instance, think that life is sacred, but it doesn’t take many minutes leafing through the Bumper Christmas Book of Christian Atrocities (available now in hardback) to work out what a huge load of bullshit that is. Life, in reality, is no more sacred than a kettle, an industrial detergent, a gassed badger or a flattened hedgehog. There are bin liners filled with used nappies and dropped ice cream cones, gently melting into baked hot tarmac, that can summon up more worth than the value given to every man, woman and child that takes a hit for the team simply because someone forgot that life was supposed to be sacred. And watching a hefty enough portion of our more or less useless parliament ramble on about how sacred and special life is before a crucial vote on assisted dying was to watch people who clearly haven’t had enough pain and anguish in their lives. Personally, because I’m the kind of person I am, I would ban anyone who voted against assisted dying from bringing the law in to work for them, years from now when they reach their lowest point. The point when they’re writhing in agony, their every breath splintered by shards of torment. The point when the lines between their pre-ordained sanctity of life and the urgent desire to be shut down with immediate effect are at their most ambiguous. I wonder how Jacob Rees-Mogg voted.

What am I saying! Everybody must know how Jacob Rees Mogg voted. He’s as Catholic as it comes, and no doubt happy to put his life into the hands of God, chiefly because there can’t be many people left out there who would even bother to piss next to him if he was on fire. Rees-Mogg, who perhaps has the slenderest connection to reality of anyone living in Great Britain right now, was keen to express his views on (where else would have him) GB News, the general gist of which were that the sanctity of life is above all other concerns and that “it is not for a man to bring life to an end”. And yet here we are, in the favoured position of being able to sift through history with ease and find chapter after book after library of evidence to suggest that what man seems to like almost more than anything else in the world is to bring life to an end. And it’s idiots like Rees-Mogg and dithering pillocks like Diana Abbott (at least this is stupidity delivered democratically) that fuel the fire of confusion amongst those too wrapped up in sentimentality that they can’t recognise the raw power of a parliamentary bill that finally starts to cut through the decay at the core of our idea of health care.

Many of the MPs that were unable to get past the ludicrous, fairy-tale notion of the sanctity of life were also quick to suggest that we need a reform of, and boost to, our palliative care system. This notion too is one of pure comedy. The NHS isn’t so much on its knees as already clumsily nailed into a coffin, firmly returned to the earth and busy being scattered with soil and a single, struggling rose. The truth is that effective palliative care will never work as a provision as long as we play God and insist that every human is forced to live for as long as they possibly can, regardless of how ungodly they are beginning to smell. And this is sad beyond words. The sadness of seeing what the human body is reduced to when all there is left to prop it up are kisses and tea. The even more aching sadness of how the mind plays tricks until all that is left is a mind in agonised turmoil – incapable of ration, process, recognition or thought. Some say that the new parameters will allow the weak, ill and elderly to be manipulated by those who would take advantage of the situation, but isn’t that what being alive has pretty much always been about; you have your moment in the sun, you get old and weak and then someone much younger just starts taking the piss?

I don’t know how long I’ll last but I hope it’ll be a while. My optimism on such matters ebbs and flows with the turn of each day and the specific kind of trouble each one has the potential to deliver. I know that this law will take another age to get fully dressed up and then there will be the inevitable teething problems and the odd semi-tragic anomaly that will get the sanctity crowd all knickery and twisted. But if it means that someone has the choice to wrap themselves up a little early – to snuff out the pain, to say goodbye properly and to avoid doing something far less dignified in a moment of desperation – then I say this new law will very possibly be one of the only genuinely worthwhile things that will happen while Sir Keir Starmer is at the helm of this crappy, hopeless, beautiful little cluster of islands. Now, of course, you may well disagree with me on this, and you are well within your rights to do so. I am very rarely right about anything, and even when I am it is rarely for very long, but I can’t see this one being anything but a step in the right direction. Christ, a step in the right direction; when was the last time you saw one of those?

G B Burton. 01.12.2024