FLINT-FACED Keir Starmer with his Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall proclaimed in the Commons this week how they will cut benefits that help disabled people live in dignity.

Down the corridor and up the stairs sits a committee considering Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill. Its handpicked majority has seized upon people’s fears of living out their last time, alone and lacking human dignity, in order to ram through ill-considered and fatally flawed legislation.

Fear of being unable to clean yourself is cited as reason for an assisted death, while the government sees it as no reason to provide the social care that can give people a good quality of life.

In both instances we are told there is a “moral case.” The juxtaposition is in fact obscene. It does, though, go to the heart of the ethical principles that are engaged.

Socialists can be bashful about talking in such terms. We often focus our arguments on the practical side of the socialist case: rational organisation of the economy, society and state.

On grounds of good public policy, alone, the passage of this Bill is a scandal. Many rookie MPs voted for it to proceed as if they were supporting an abstract principle. They were not. They were voting for this Bill with the promise that the myriad flaws already raised would be “sorted out in committee.”

The committee has worsened the Bill. It has removed, for example, the requirement that a High Court judge be the ultimate control to stop people being killed when they don’t want to die.

This week the majority excluded deaf MP and Bill critic Naz Shah by refusing her entreaties that an unduly long sitting would mean her hearing aids would run down and she could not participate. Disabled people have been treated shabbily throughout.

Leadbeater moved this week to amend the 1946 foundation legislation of the NHS. It provides “a duty upon the minister to secure improvement in the physical and mental health of the people … and the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness.” The amendment is necessary because the NHS under this Bill is to be an instrument of assisted suicide, which is at odds with its founding principle. Think about that fundamental shift.

Almost all those amendments that have sought to introduce safeguards or ameliorate ineluctable dilemmas have been voted down. So it seems from this week that hospices and care homes will not be able to refuse to participate in the scheme and may face withdrawal of public funding if they don’t comply.

More and more people who favour assisted dying in the abstract on the grounds of individual autonomy — also a principle socialists uphold — are coming out against this Bill as the reality of what it means dawns. That, and the crass behaviour of some of the Bill’s supporters. Not least its sponsor who often comes across as an overexcited games mistress in a 1950s comedy.

It is to be hoped MPs in the Commons can be persuaded to reject it next month. As important is challenging what has become a widespread and dangerously anti-human pattern of thinking in public life.

There is a link between the cuts to disability benefits which provide assisted living and the rush for more assisted dying.

It is not some grand conspiracy to kill off large numbers of people seen as a burden. Though we heard that voiced openly during the height of Covid. The Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner said coronavirus could prove “mildly beneficial” to the economy by killing old people with complex health and social care needs.

But the link is rather in the undergirding worldview. That is that we have individual rights and responsibilities — and that is just about it. Anything called society is a product of those individual transactions. Margaret Thatcher’s view.

There may be a few other moral considerations in the margins. Or there are duties we are meant to patriotically embrace, such as driving towards war in the name of national security and slashing welfare to pay for it.

The state’s responsibilities to help people through welfare and other mechanisms, meanwhile, are whittled down from what’s left of the post-war consensus. People who cannot participate in the labour market are regarded as less worthy than those who can — no matter what they contribute elsewhere or their own intrinsic value. Those requiring significant adjustments to live are the most burdensome.

So assisted suicide is then purely an individual choice, shorn of the social and sometimes familial pressures or the complex psychological processes through which someone believes they are a burden or are directly encouraged to imagine that they are in a world marked by the cash nexus of individual transactions in place of a social contract.

In both instances there is a retreat from the principle of human civilisation — that we are a society and we are all bound up in it. The US anthropologist Margaret Mead said the first indication of civilisation was not some monumental construction or elaborate artifact, but skeletons with signs of disabling fractures to the legs from years earlier. People unable to keep up with the mobile group were not abandoned. They were carried onwards by those who were able.

In a passage common to all the Abrahamic religions (and which chimes with any truly moral secular standpoint), when Cain in guilt and callous deflection asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” We are compelled to answer yes.

In answer to a proposal tackling undue influence and coercion (thus doctors needing to investigate someone’s motivations for assisted death) one MP on the Leadbeater committee casually interjected, why should anyone want to know? “It is not my business…”

The words of Jacob Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol spring to mind: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

Charles Dickens in 1842 was polemicising against the misanthropic doctrines that gripped the laissez-faire Victorian bourgeoisie. Its liberal wing especially championed the utilitarianism of profit maximisation and the law of the market combined with the prejudices of Thomas Malthus that the poor’s propensity to breed would outpace any increase in living standard you afforded them. Thus producing a surplus population that had to be “reduced” in order to restore the natural balance.

That thinking informed the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 in the middle of the long crisis following the Napoleonic wars. The New Poor Law introduced the workhouse. The old poor laws had apparently been inflationary in providing limited parish assistance without extracting labour.

Joseph Townsend in A Dissertation on the Poor Laws spelt out, “Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjugation to the most brutish, the most obstinate and the most perverse.”

And it is work and ensuring the compulsion to work that go to the heart of the thinking of this government. Or rather, it is profit, capitalist expansion and the exploitation of labour. That’s why the government is indifferent to expert evidence that cutting PIP payments will drive tens of thousands out of paid work as they lose, for example, the car that enables them to participate in the labour market. It thinks welfare makes bad people.

The sleight of hand was summed up in Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s smug and specious claim that “Labour is the party of work — the clue is in the name.”

Labour was actually founded to advance the interests of workers through Parliament — not total hours worked across the economy or productivity per unit of labour. In the turbulent post-war years Labour adopted in 1918 the principle: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry…” through “common ownership of industry.”

It was the Victorian moralists and their later New Right, Thatcherite imitators who venerated work as spiritually uplifting of an otherwise feckless mass, prone to idleness. When the Chartists answered back with the Biblical “he who does not work shall not eat” it was the idle rich not the broken poor they had in mind. 

The labour movement fought for control of work and its fruits, and for the redistribution of wealth to assist the unemployed, the sick and disabled.

Thus the New Unionism of the 1880s in which dockers and others looked not to a character-building single day of work, but to asserting collective power over its availability.

Labour pioneers brought the principle of mutuality. Above all, Marxists pointed to work in its broadest sense of human labour of all kinds, not as some Puritanical talisman against individual sin, but as the collective means through which we transform our world and each other.

Writing in the 1840s, Marx described how work under capitalism is coerced and alienated, standing over and against the people doing the work.

A minority class monopolises the means of production and will let them be used only if a profit can be extracted from workers who have no great commodities other than their capacity to work. And if that is impaired, they are of no value.

It is against that dystopia that socialists should fight today, and from that standpoint address the moral collapse towards the crudest justifications of a dog-eat-dog society.

There is something sinister about Keir Starmer’s veneration of “work” against the actual worker. It has nasty historical undertones. “Work Sets You Free” was the title of an 1873 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach at a time of ethno-nationalist reaction to the growing socialist movement.

The Third Reich adopted it as a slogan above the forced labour and other camps, of course. It promoted a Leistungsvolksgemeinschaft — a high performing ethnic community.

We are not at that point, yet, as a society. But we casually hear humans valued not as each of us innately but rather by our productive contribution. Eugenicist talk is growing. There are ethical dilemmas which can divide socialists. Such is life. But against the devaluation of human life — so often of the poor and working class — socialists should unite and win the wider labour movement and society to resist this pell-mell and anti-human slide.