As the years progress I find myself less able to summon up the fury which once propelled me. I have become afflicted by the disease of on-the-one-handism whereby I feel inclined to see things from other people’s point of view and accept that they may have a point.
I am indebted then to the Church of England for causing me to swear at the TV for the first time in many months. Yesterday the 26 bishops and arch-bishops who sit in the House of Lords helped vote down a bill which would have allowed terminally ill people to accelerate their deaths.
Like everyone in the Lords, the bishops legislate over people who have never elected them. They sit in parliament purely because they hold senior positions within the so-called established religion - in reality a minority sect. They have no mandate from the masses, rather their right to rule comes from a belief in 'God', a fictional character intelligently designed in more primitive times to explain our existence.
'God', or at least their version of Him, does not believe in euthanasia. Fine, let these bishops preach their beliefs to the world. Let them live out their lives for as long as the rational world of medical science allows them. That is their right. But it is not their right to impose their religious views on the British people - the vast majority of whom shun their museums, sorry, churches.
By using their illegitimate power in this way, the bishops speak eloquently of the need for the whole decrepit edifice of the House of Lords to be torn down. In a democracy it is simply intolerable for legislators to be unaccountable to the citizenry.
Some like Tony Blair believe that the Lords just needs a lick of pint rather than a wrecking ball. He has cast out most of the hereditary peers, who owed their position to accident of birth, and replaced them with life peers, who owe their status to accident of cronyism. As steps forward go, it would shame a two-year-old.
The next giant leap is apparently to diversify the religious component of the Lords, bringing in more people who hear voices in their heads. What a fine idea that is. I’m sure that in a multi-cultural society like Britain there are many able candidates. A small amount of digging would probably unearth an imam who puts quotation marks round the word Holocaust and, for balance, a rabbi who spends his summers shooting Palestinians. Such men (and they would be men) would make a valuable contribution to the mother of all parliaments. Surely with their help, a much-needed increase in blind faith schools would be a formality.
All this is not to suggest that there are no arguments, either moral or practical, against euthanasia. There are many. But as a secularist I believe that those who wish to avoid suffering by accelerating their own death should be allowed to do so. Those who do not wish to, for whatever reason, should not be compelled to do so. This is only fair.
What is patently unfair is for dozens of unelected clergy to impose their religion on others through the law. I can only hope that the bishops’ votes yesterday helped hasten the death of one aged body - the House of Lords.