On Saturday, the day that Harry Patch passed away, the front page headline in The Times was: “Huge public support for right to die”. I was struck by the irony of the coincidence. Patch was 111, the last-known British survivor of the First World War trenches. As the final representative of a generation who had laid down their lives on a vast scale for their country, he was rightly celebrated. And in an age that places increasing weight on the “oral histories” of ordinary people, he was also revered as the last living link to a conflict that defined the modern world. Like Abraham, his venerability was seen not as a debilitating handicap, but as a crowning glory.

Would that all lives could end like that! Would that every old person felt valued, loved and useful to the end. A few hours before my father died, he was tinkling the ivories in an Eastbourne tea room — a musical labour of love, and a useful supplement to his teacher’s pension, that he undertook every afternoon during his retirement, and one that won him a doting circle of female admirers (“none a day under 80,” he used to observe, a trifle wistfully). I was shocked by his sudden death, but joyous that he had been giving pleasure to others right up to his last day. He never knew what it was to feel redundant, or a burden to others, or too frail to contribute to his community.

But sadly his story is not typical. Too often as a society we whitewash the old out of the picture — out of sight, out of mind, out of the loop. And it’s this grim context, I feel, that’s missing from the debate, thus far, about “assisted suicide”.

The Times’s headline referred to a poll revealing that a large majority of people (74 per cent) think British doctors should be allowed to help terminally ill people to die. Even more startlingly, nearly half of those questioned want people with a severe disability or “extreme” pain to have the same right to an assisted suicide, even if their illness isn’t life threatening. Do continual migraines count? Or chronic back pain? Nobody yet has specified where the line should be drawn.

What’s more, two thirds of those questioned apparently believe that people with degenerative illnesses that aren’t terminal, such as dementia, should also be allowed assisted suicide. That perplexes me even more. Are the mentally ill in a fit state to give consent to their own deaths? Or will the next-of-kin decide if and when the fatal potions should be administered? Either way, the idea makes me feel queasy. It smacks of the sort of sci-fi that was once dismissed as “far-fetched”.

Yet support for these ideas is particularly strong, it seems, not just among the old, but among the mid-fifties to mid-sixties. It’s not hard to work out why. This is the generation bearing the brunt of looking after venerable parents. Direct experience of old age’s indignities and frailties can be brutally shocking, especially when they ravage someone you have loved all your life. In addition, the mid-fifties to mid-sixties are also the generation contemplating retirement, probably on a pension far below what they expected. Their children are already mired in debt, thanks to student loans and crippling mortgages. They are terrified not so much of getting old as of getting ill and becoming a drain on others.

I recognise the humanitarian force of the case (put eloquently by Valerie Grove in this paper last Saturday) for allowing people who are terminally ill, or whose quality of life has been reduced to a very low level, to end their lives. But I have two huge worries about changing the law.

The first is what I call the Nietzsche Effect. Nietzsche was a brilliant thinker who had the boldness to imagine what strong-willed human beings might achieve if they dispensed with old superstititions and conventional morality. On paper, his ideas seemed refreshing and liberating. But in the hands of the Nazis, 50 years later, they were warped into a blueprint for genocide. Nietzsche (who detested anti-Semitism) never intended that, but posthumously his reputation legitimised obscene crimes in the eyes of their perpetrators.

The same could be true of the push to legalise euthanasia. I don’t doubt that impeccably liberal, compassionate people are supporting it. But their very goodness makes it hard for them to imagine what signals they are sending to those who are less compassionate or less scupulous.

You can hedge the new law with as many “watertight” safeguards as you like. But you are still conveying a message that assisted suicide is OK in some circumstances. And as the Government has shown with its muddled attitude to drug abuse, saying something is “OK in some circumstances” is a slippery recipe for chaos, hypocrisy and tragedy on a mass scale. What real opposition could there be, for instance, to evil websites that encourage suicidal cults among susceptible teenagers, or manipulative relatives who encourage (or at least fail to dispel) suicidal thoughts in frail relatives, when society has deemed that assisted suicide is “OK in some circumstances”?

That’s my first worry. My second is more fundamental. The argument for assisted suicide rests on the notion that people shouldn’t have to tolerate a quality of life that has fallen below a certain (unspecified) level. But that view would carry a lot more force if we, as a society, could honestly say that we have lifted the quality of life for the very old and ill to the highest possible level that we can achieve.

This, however, is palpably not the case. There are wonderful hospices offering palliative care that brings tranquillity and even joy to the terminally ill. There are also superb long-term care homes for the old and very ill that treat their residents with dignity and devotion, and ensure that their lives are filled with physical, mental and spiritual nourishment. But unless you are wealthy you have no guarantee that you will end up in one of these. And among the rest are some real Dickensian horrors, as anyone who works in the sector knows.

Doubtless there are many people in those grim places who feel (or are made to feel) that their lives are not worth living. Legalised assisted suicide would indeed be one “answer” to their despair — indeed, a very convenient answer for a nation overwhelmed with debt and impossible demands on its health service.

But what a damning comment it would be on our society and its values (and how typical of our “quick fix” times), that we would rather enourage old or ill people to hasten their own deaths than do the much more difficult (but decent) thing of ensuring that they enjoy the best possible quality of life that the nation’s money can buy. Right now we should be searching our consciences, not changing the law.

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