When the focus of Scottish politics shifted to Liam McArthur’s Member’s Bill proposing to legalise assisted dying, my heart sank a little, weighed down by cynicism. We have become highly adept at turning debates over any and every issue into new fronts for bitter, polarised political conflict. Surely the debate over assisted dying would become the latest to be buried beneath an avalanche of invective?
But I have been temporarily disabused of that cynicism. We have been able to navigate the opening of this sensitive, nuanced discussion around assisted dying with the dignity, intelligence, and open-mindedness that it deserves. All while simultaneously blowing up over new hate crimes laws, the final report of the Cass Review of youth gender identity services, and woodburning stoves of all things.
What is different about the issue of assisted dying? It is no more or less prone to becoming a culture war flashpoint than any of the other issues that have been in Scotland in the past half-decade; one need only look to how Canada’s assisted dying laws have become a favourite target of the far right around the world to see that. In a nation whose political life has revolved around slowly intensifying affective polarisation in the post-2014 era, there is no obvious reason why assisted dying would not be weaponised.
The constitutional question has become less central in recent years, true, with the SNP Government hitting a brick wall in its pursuit of independence. But the lines drawn along the constitutional divide during the independence referendum have long since ossified into divides defined not by considered policy preferences but by narrow ideological and highly personalised........