That’s the BBC, but press and government ministers and PR are just as ignorant of a Scottish dimension to many issues from the chemical castration of pigs to CFP bye-catch to University fees and exotic hospital cross infections.

Scotland needs a better BBC and press as well as a better government.

I appreciate that any bill concerning assisted suicide would try to incorporate safeguards. But I am far from convinced that they would work. Not least, I am unclear how safeguards operating at an individual level would prevent cutbacks in the provision of expensive treatments of diseases like cancer at a collective level.

Look how powers in other areas get extended. For instance, how when the police are given liberty limiting powers that we are assured in parliament will only be used for the prevention of specific serious crimes these powers soon get used to pick people up for minor offences, sometimes curbing what should be legitimate political activity.

Again, look at current problems in determining whether people are sufficiently mentally coherent to sign powers of attorney for people to deal with their affairs (the alternative court procedures are very expensive, awkward and slow). There would be similar pressures to stretch the limits when assessing the mental capabilities of terminally ill people in pain if it came to authorising assisted suicide. Wherever the law drew the line, there would be demands by relatives and health professionals to bend it as far as possible.

And a specific point in response to Edward Carlsson. Browne. “Nil By Mouth”, which usually means dying of thirst, is a horrible way to die where the patient retains any consciousness. I am far from convinced that it is not being used covertly as a means of involuntary euthanasia in hospitals short of space and unable to give every possible treatment for so many old people at the end of their lives. We shouldn’t have involuntary euthanasia at all, but leaving people to die rather than actively preventing distress whilst they are dying is also totally unacceptable.

This is a serious and important issue and it would be nice if people could discuss it without flinging around hyperbolic and misleading terms like “euthanasia” and “murder”.

At least Cameron can point out to the hoi polloi that the Tories have been consistently anti-democratic from before the Representation of the People Act 1832 whilst Labour toy with democracy in times of need, having been for STV before WW2 and even wrote electoral reform into their ’97 manifesto.