The typical MP

I read yesterday that the reason the proposed assisted dying bill failed in the Commons in September was that a good proportion of our MPs have a strongly held belief that assisting dying is wrong and are unable to vote for such a measure whatever other people - the 80% of the electorate who think that assisted dying is right - might think. Their beliefs trump those of the rest of us.

Which is not as wrong as it might sound, as part of the point of a representative democracy is to lift legislation, to some extent at least, out from the tricky tides of democratic fashions. Other descriptors which spring to mind include erratic, treacherous, fickle and murdoch-media-fueled. There are times, I imagine, when a lot more than half the population would vote to bring back flogging, if not hanging. Perhaps we are in one of those times now.

That said, I got to wondering about the sort of people who are apt to get to be MPs these days. We do not have lists in the way of much of the continent and I don't suppose we have anything like as many Trade Union sponsored MPs as we once did. So to get to be an MP, you usually have to be able to get through the rough and tumble of selection and then to get through the rough and tumble of election. Your name does not just emerge, quietly and discretely from some bureaucratic huddle. You have to be able to take plenty of knocks and reverses on the way and this is not a business for the faint-hearted. Not a business, perhaps, for those who want to be able to chuck in the towel when the game is up.

Not the sort of person, perhaps, who might want an assisted death on their own account. Or at least that is what they might think when they are hale and hearty. So the trick is to somehow get it through to them that, in this matter at least, they have no business inflicting their own take on the ends of others.

PS: think of California! See http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/california-does-something-sensible.html.