Assisted dying bill suggests we have forgotten how to debate in this country - Yorkshire Post Letters
I watched some of the debate on assisted dying on the BBC Parliamentary channel. It was good to see MPs debating according to merit rather than party loyalties.
I just wish that spirit could continue on other big issues of the day, rather than resorting to name-calling and reversal, which seem to have become the norm in this country today.
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Hide AdOn the other hand, only now, after the vote, are important issues being raised regarding assisted dying, not by MPs but by specialists in the medical and the care fields. These issues should really have been raised in the parliamentary debates. It's as if in this country we have forgotten how to debate.


To my mind, in a debate each side states its case, then explains why they think the other side's case is flawed. Yet I saw no evidence of that in the parliamentary chamber. The same cases were being constantly put for and against, with MPs bobbing up all over the place to restate their case in a slightly different way. With the best will in the world, they were not really engaging with the issues.
This is true of probably all debates on big issues of the day. The argument for climate change, for instance, is that the science is fixed because 95 per cent of scientists agree on it, and those who question that are 'climate deniers'.
The argument on the other side is that no science is fixed and that the level of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is miniscule. No genuine scientist would find either argument convincing in itself. The only way to judge a question of physics is to dig out the seminal paper on the subject.
So where is the peer reviewed physics paper that says that the earth's climate is changing because of man-made carbon dioxide?
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