Questions for the BBC

Freelance broadcaster Ray Gosling admitted smothering his lover, who had AIDS, in a 12-minute documentary on death and dying broadcast at 1930 on Monday 15 February on BBC East Midlands’ Inside Out programme. He did not however name the person he killed, nor the place or date of the death.
A spokeswoman for Nottinghamshire police said yesterday that the force had not been aware of the issue until the broadcaster made his revelation on television. Asked if the BBC should have contacted police when Gosling initially confessed to the killing last year, a Nottinghamshire police spokesman said: ‘You would hope that anyone with information about a crime like that would certainly refer it to us in the first instance so police can investigate.’ Police have now arrested Mr Gosling on suspicion of murder.
The BBC has come under criticism for not informing the police about the confession before the programme was screened and has in response issued the following statement which has been reported in a news item on the BBC website and which was also read out at 7.50am by presenter Nicky Campbell on BBC Radio Five Live’s morning news programme yesterday.
‘The BBC said they will co-operate fully with the investigation. They said Mr Gosling's “secret” was not known before he was commissioned to make the report on death and dying, adding: "The first the BBC knew of this incident was during filming for the programme that was broadcast on 15 Feb 2010. The BBC is under no legal obligation to refer the matter to the police in these circumstances.”’
Care Not Killing was contacted by various BBC outlets in the late afternoon of Monday before the programme was screened and asked to provide spokespeople for BBC News Channel, the Ten O’clock News and BBC breakfast. We were not given details of the case but were told that the various BBC producers had received copies of an embargoed report which gave details of a confession to a mercy killing which would be shown on Inside Out.
It was clearly evident from this that the BBC intended to make this ‘murder confession’ an international news story without informing the police that they were going to do so. This raises serious questions about governance and ethics at the BBC.
The viewing public and British taxpayers deserve answers to the following questions which are not answered in the very brief BBC statement above.
1. On what date did the murder confession first become known to members of BBC staff?
2. Who amongst BBC regional and national staff was informed about the statement and when?
3. Was the Director General of the BBC aware of the confession before the programme was screened and if not who was the most senior person in the BBC to be made aware and when were they told?
4. Was legal advice sought at any point about the advisability of screening the programme and if so what advice was given and by whom?
5. Who made the decision to screen the programme on Monday night and was there any connection between this and the imminent publication of the DPP prosecution guidelines on assisted suicide?
6. Did the BBC take into consideration the impact that the screening of the confession and its subsequent global media coverage might have on any prosecution that might ensue?
7. Why did the BBC decide not to inform the police about the confession before the programme was shown?

The fickle nature of opinion polls

Did you see BBC News at Ten tonight? An opinion poll of 1,000 people has shown that fewer now believe that man-made climate change is a reality. Well, of course it would, wouldn't it! The media have been telling us over the last month or two that there has been skullduggery in climate change research. But very few of us - certainly not I - are able to examine the evidence and come to a balanced judgement, so we have to rely on what the media tell us and the spin they give it. And there's also been a cold winter, which is not of course relevant but which makes it hard for those who don't understand the subject to believe in global warming.

I mention all this, as you will have guessed, because it provides a near-exact parallel to our own situation. Opinion polls show support for 'assisted dying', not because those concerned have thought about or understand the subject but because they are reliant on what the media have told them - and good care and good deaths aren't news, whereas prosecutions and Swiss suicides are.

Kay Gilderdale should have been investigated

Phil Friend, Chairman of Radar the Disability Rights Organisation, has today posted a fascinating article in the Guardian titled ‘Kay Gilderdale should have been investigated’. In it he argues that in cases of assisted dying, anyone involved should have to account for their actions.

In response, Emily Halsall, speaking for Dignity in Dying, says that the number of people killing themselves in Oregon with legally supplied drugs from their doctors is ‘small and steady’. But, if you look at the official figures, it isn’t! The numbers have risen fourfold in the 13 years of the law’s existence and they are on a rising trend. If the trend were to be seen in Britain, we would see nearly 1,000 physician assisted suicides a year here. Moreover, independent evidence is emerging that one in six of those who are killing themselves in this way were suffering from untreated depression that was not detected by the doctors who assessed them.

Ms Halsall says that Dignity in Dying wants to protect people from abuse but does not think that the current law provides that protection. So how would that protection be increased, one might ask, by relaxing the law? The standard answer to this, of course, from the pro-euthanasia lobby is that we needn’t worry as there would be ‘safeguards’. Five years ago a parliamentary select committee examined so-called safeguards in Lord Joffe’s ‘assisted dying’ bill and drew attention to a range of weaknesses in them. Yet, though the committee made suggestions for tightening them up, the same old ‘safeguards’ are trotted out every time this issue is discussed.

It's easy to talk in broad brush terms about changing the law for ‘terminally ill, mentally competent adults nearing the end of their lives’. But experience has shown that, when you get down to actually defining these terms with sufficient care to protect the vulnerable, the matter isn’t so easy as it sounds. The safeguards we have seen to date are illusory.

This is a highly complex issue where the stakes are literally those of life or death. We should not forget that public safety is the first responsibility of all law making.

Euthanasia Bill will lead to hundreds of Scottish deaths per year

The End of Life Assistance (Scotland) Bill will lead to hundreds of Scottish deaths per year from assisted suicide and euthanasia if passed by MSPs, Care Not Killing (CNK) Scotland has warned.

The coalition group, brought together to promote palliative care as an alternative to any form of euthanasia being introduced in Scotland, says the scope of the bill is so wide and the safeguards so inadequate that it will lead, if passed, to people being killed without their consent as happens over 1,000 times per year currently in the Netherlands under a similar law.

Speaking on the content of the bill, launched earlier today by Independent Lothians MSP Margo Macdonald, CNK’s Policy Officer in Scotland, Dr Gordon Macdonald, said:

‘Margo Macdonald’s bill is hugely broad in scope, allowing not only assisted suicide but also voluntary euthanasia, not just for the terminally ill but for anyone who is ‘permanently physically incapacitated’, unable ‘to live independently’ and who ‘finds life intolerable’.

‘Ms MacDonald’s optimistic prediction of 50 Scottish euthanasia deaths per year is dangerously misleading. Her proposed bill is even more lax than the current law in the Netherlands where one in 38 deaths is from euthanasia – this would equate to almost 1,500 Scottish deaths per year. Her proposed safeguards are largely illusory because disabled and sick people will inevitably feel pressure to end their lives so as not to be a financial or emotional burden on others. Once euthanasia is sanctioned as a ’therapeutic option’ high profile hard cases will inevitably lead to further erosion of the public conscience and further relaxation of practice. This process of ‘incremental drift’ has been well documented in the Netherlands.’

“We are currently producing a detailed critique of the bill but it is already clear that Ms MacDonald’s proposals, if passed, will introduce a Dutch-type system. In the Netherlands currently up to 1,000 adult patients and dozens of disabled babies, under the Groningen protocol, are killed each year without their consent despite the fact that this is not specifically permitted by the legislation. Half of all Netherlands cases of euthanasia are not reported and increasingly so-called ‘terminal sedation’, giving large doses of sedatives whilst withdrawing food and fluids with the explicit intention of ending life, is now common practice accounting for 8% of all deaths.”

Reply to James Harris posted on the Dignity in Dying Blog

Dear James,

Many thanks for your reply. I'll post this letter on our blog so that your readers can explore the various links.

CNK's arguments against the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide have always been based on evidence and fact as anyone reviewing our website can confirm. We do not use faith-based arguments.

Re our membership list the page on our website that you have linked to has not actually been revised since 2006. The number of CNK member organisations is now not 28 but around 50.

Most, as anyone would expect, are faith-based or pro-life. We have never denied this and would indeed be very surprised if such organisations did not associate with CNK given our aims although as I'm sure you are aware, there are individuals who profess faith who also back the legalisation of euthanasia and many faith-based organisations who do not back CNK.

To claim that people who belong to faith communities are the only ones with principled convictions about euthanasia is nonsense. My experience of your own supporters and spokespeople is that many do in fact have strong ideological and world-view convictions (what I would call faith convictions) about such things as human autonomy, human nature and the meaning of suffering that drive them to a pro-euthanasia position irrespective of any evidence. It would be interesting to explore some of these more existential issues with you in greater depth.

As you have correctly identifed there are also a number of CNK member organisations which have no faith or pro-life connection at all and some of our strongest supporters and spokespeople are people of no faith.

You will no doubt have noticed the coverage given today in the Telegraph to the powerful submissions criticising the DPP guidance by two non-faith based groups - Dying Well (not a member organisation of CNK) and Not Dead Yet (also not a member)

Indeed DID has failed in its objectives thus far because it has been unable to convince the disability rights movement, the medical profession, parliament or the judiciary (all non-faith based entities) of the rightness of its cause. DID's appeal has been instead to a small number of high profile 'hard cases' and its own strategically timed and crafted opinion polls targetting the uninformed and uncommitted worried well and based on simple yes/no questions with selective publication of the answers.

As I said to you in my last letter my personal objections to a change in the law are both principled and evidence-based. I have never denied that. But it is the latter arguments that have won the day in Parliament in both 2006 and 2009.

My challenge to you, would be to be encourage your spokespeople to be honest about the fact that the opposition to a change in the law is actually not solely faith based - one point on which your champion Lord Joffe was challenged on in the Times today.

Whilst talking transparency I would also like you to define the term 'terminally ill' for me. I have raised this issue with your spokespeople on several occasions and received different answers (or more usually no answer) on each occasion but the public has a right to know what you mean by it given that it is central to your campaign.

And finally in the interests of transparency I wonder if you would be willing to tell your supporters and the public what percentage of Tory MPs (who it appears may make up a majority of the new parliament) answered yes and no to the various questions asked in your recent MP poll. You chose not to disclose these facts because they did not support your cause but your readers can check them for themselves on the ipsos-mori website

With kind regards

Peter

CNK Letter to the Times published today

Sir, Lord Joffe seems to be suggesting that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) should disregard the views of people with religious beliefs who respond to his consultation on assisted suicide. It seems that the euthanasia lobby, which Lord Joffe represents, is now suggesting that if you belong to a faith community, your views should be of less account than those of others. I trust that the DPP will disregard Lord Joffe and give proper consideration to the views of all British citizens. To appeal solely to opinion polls sponsored by campaigning groups is overly simplistic. Assisting suicide is a serious matter and legalisation is a complex question that does not lend itself to simple yes/no questions.

This issue is far more about public safety than personal faith. Lord Joffe has been in the House of Lords on every occasion in the past six years when proposals to change the law have been debated and will have seen that most of those who spoke and voted against changing the law were not arguing from a faith basis but from a concern that such proposals were simply dangerous for the population at large and particularly for the sick, the disabled and other vulnerable people. It is disingenuous to imply that most opposition to his proposals is faith-based. He should instead be addressing the serious charge that his so-called proposed safeguards are illusory.

The DPP opposed the publication of guidelines for prosecution of assisted suicide for reasons that should be obvious. We don’t tell people how much they can steal without being prosecuted for theft or how much injury they can inflict without being prosecuted for assault, so why should we treat assisted suicide any differently? Having been overridden by the law lords, the

DPP has attempted to meet the near-impossible remit given to him without inadvertently encouraging the belief that in some circumstances assisting suicide can be done with impunity. But I am sure it will come as no surprise to him to hear that many people see his interim guidelines falling short of this objective and in need of revision.

That the euthanasia lobby sees them as a “breakthrough” tells us as much about their real agenda as it does about the well-publicised deficiencies of the guidelines themselves.

Lord Joffe noises off in the Times

Lord Joffe talks of Care Not Killing being ‘implacably opposed to assisted suicide’. Yes, we are opposed to a weakening of the law. But, if Lord Joffe reads our submission to the Director of Public Prosecutions, he will see that it is not a diatribe against changing the law but a careful and thoughtful analysis of the interim guidelines that the DPP has published as a basis for consultation. Or is Lord Joffe, perhaps, suggesting that, because CNK opposes the legalisation of assisted suicide, its views should not be taken seriously by the DPP? If that is so, then it must follow that the views of pro-euthanasia organisations such as Dignity in Dying should also be marginalised.

Lord Joffe seems to have little regard for the Code for Crown Prosecutors, largely on the basis that one of the Law Lords described them earlier this year as unhelpful. The Law Lord in question is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but I think we need rather more evidence than that that the Code is defective before consigning it to oblivion.

Lord Joffe talks of opinion polls. Would he also support other initiatives, such as the reintroduction of hanging, leaving the European Union and banning immigration, which opinion polls often favour? Legalising assisted suicide is a complex and serious issue which risks putting vulnerable people at risk of self-harm. It is Parliament's responsibility to weigh the many issues involved, including public opinion, carefully before making a balanced decision. Parliament has done that twice in the last four years and decisively, and on a free vote, come down against changing the law.

Lord Joffe states that ‘the CNK response clearly aims to reduce to the very minimum those who will not be prosecuted for assisted dying’. Is he suggesting that it is a responsible objective to maximise instances of immunity from prosecution?

Lord Joffe believes that the DPP's interim policy ‘complies exactly’ with the Law Lords’ intentions. It is not clear how he arrives at this conclusion. What is clear is that a number of the specific conditions proposed in the interim guidelines are open to serious question - for example, that assisting someone who is seriously ill or disabled to commit suicide should be regarded less seriously than assisting someone else or that spouses and family members should be treated more leniently as assisters than others on the flawed assumption that they invariably have the interests of the deceased at heart.

We have made our views known to the DPP, and Lord Joffe and his associates have presumably done so too. We should leave Mr Starmer to form his own judgments without these ‘noises off’.