Dame Esther Rantzen has died, presumably naturally at her home in the New Forest. I don’t normally lay into those who are recently departed, for example I waited nearly a fortnight before deconstructing the ‘Palestine’ obsessed political views of murdered MP Jo Cox and I do this for moral and probity reasons, but for Esther Rantzen I’ll make an exception. This is a woman who used her final years on the Earth to campaign not for better hospice or end of life medical and social care but instead for a state assisted suicide/murder law that would have imperilled a whole load of vulnerable Britons had her campaign succeeded. It would have placed in peril the terminally ill, those with long term but manageable medical conditions, those with mental health issues, adults with dementia and those afflicted by Downs Syndrome and many others. It would also have been a law that the State and other bad actors could use to get rid of those who are inconvenient or expensive.

Dame Esther was once a beloved screen entertainer and journalist who popularised consumer protection programmes on TV through her work on the ‘That’s Life’ television series. She also was the impetus behind Childline which allowed abused children to reach out for help. However, she has left this world not as someone many Britons once revered for her achievements but instead as a person who campaigned strongly for a bad law, a law to legalise assisted suicide/state murder. That law would, as it has in places like the Netherlands and Canada, if it had been enacted have created some appallingly bad outcomes. It would have been abused by the greedy relatives of the terminally ill, by abusive partners, those who see the terminally ill as an ‘inconvenience’ and would have been administered by Britain’s failed National Health Service, something that gave me little confidence that such a law would be administered without cock ups. Her campaign has stained her legacy and stained it indelibly.

I am compelled to say the words ‘may her memory be for a blessing’ for the sake of her family but we should not overlook what she supported in her final years and what she supported was a potentially abusive and open to abuse assisted suicide law. She allowed herself to be used as the celebrity frontwoman for that motley collection of eugenicists and utilitarians who have no respect for life and who lurk beneath the draperies of polite society.

She should have thought more deeply about what she was campaigning for and what the implications would be for the law change she campaigned for. Sadly she did not do that and instead of being remembered for her copious achievements in broadcasting and society in general, she’s going to be remembered for two attempts to bring in a terrible law put forward by terrible people which would have had terrible outcomes for some of the most vulnerable people in British society.

We do not choose what our post death legacy will be, I hope mine will be that I had the courage to say ‘sod you’ to the more unpleasant parts of society, faith and politics, but I have no power to compel that legacy. Dame Esther did have the power to choose what she was remembered for and in my opinion she made the wrong choice.

Link

https://news.sky.com/story/broadcaster-and-campaigner-dame-esther-rantzen-dies-13593676