We must help this brave man die

For the past six weeks, I have had on a lectern in my office a photograph of Tony Nicklinson, the man with ‘locked-in syndrome’ who wants to be allowed to die but lost his High Court case on Thursday. He has the support and blessing of his family in this endeavour, and I very much suspect that most of the people in this country would most emphatically not wish to have this condition, which means he can communicate with the world only by blinking.

He certainly had the pity of Lord Falconer, a decent man and politician who does support the concept of assisted dying and had the difficult and unpleasant task of telling Tony that if anyone in the UK helped him to die, that would be seen as murder. As a writer who has to know his way round the meaning of words for a living, I know, and so does practically everyone in the country, that the loaded term ‘murder’ surely cannot be used in the case of somebody who is compos mentis requesting help to die. Murder is violence, certainly unasked for.

I’m told that people are telling Tony that ‘God loves him’, that being the reason they don’t want him to die. I wonder what he thinks about that?

Somehow there surely must be some way to help him. After all, it can be said that Tony, like many others, is a prisoner of technology, kept alive because technology can do it, whether he likes it or not. Is that the Brave New World?

Sir Terry Pratchett,

Salisbury