The past week has seen a big step forward for the growing culture of death in the UK.

The Director of Public Prosecutions decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute the parents of paralysed former rugby player Daniel James for their part in helping him die at the Swiss clinic Dignitas. The suicide of motor neurone disease sufferer Craig Ewert at the same clinic was the subject of a sympathetic documentary broadcast on Sky TV. And the BBC’s Panorama programme about Scottish former political firebrand and Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Margo MacDonald was entitled “I’ll die when I choose” – which indicates which side of the debate that programme was on.

So it’s been a good few days for the euthanasia and assisted suicide campaign. It seems Dignity in Dying (aka the Voluntary Euthanasia Society) and their chums have learnt the lessons of the gay rights movement over the past 15 years or so – that life is about public relations and press coverage. Corner the media and you’ve won the battle.

The extraordinary success of the homosexual movement which moved from quirky margins (‘the love that dares not speak its name’) to dominant mainstream in less than two decades resulted from the fact that it was almost entirely media driven. There was no discussion about the social effects, the health consequences or the moral issues involved in the gay lifestyle. Presentation beat principle, style trumped substance and we bought into it lock, stock and barrel. Gay became the new straight in our superficial celeb culture society, so Little Britain and Graham Norton usually occupy our weekend prime-time TV slots.

It was the seminal ’After The Ball’ by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, published in 1989, that first set out the gay media strategy. Their six-point programme was designed to change heterosexual perceptions of the gay community, and included (a) talking incessantly about homosexuality in public ‘to make gayness seem less furtive, alien and sinful’; (b) portraying homosexuals as victims; and (c) themselves ruthlessly sidelining some less acceptable members of the gay community such as ‘drag queens, bull dykes and the North American Man-Boy Love Association’.

I don’t know if the death lobby has a similar six-point strategy, but they are certainly talking incessantly. They are promoting those who assist and commit suicide as courageous selfless victims. And presumably they will begin also to distance themselves from the obscene horror shows that illustrate our current degradation of human life, such as the recent online suicide by a Florida teenager who killed himself in front of his webcam while computer users egged him on and the two Finnish students who, ten months apart, wrote suicide notes, posted YouTube videos and then went on killing sprees that included themselves.

They didn’t value life. Neither does our creeping and creepy death industry.