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.

The liberal establishment is in a right tizzy.

Following some pungent comments by senior Catholic figures (thank God for the Catholics’ insistence on their right to speak out clearly on moral issues) and ahead of next month’s vote on the Human Fertilization and Embryology (HFE) Bill, Gordon Brown has done a U-turn and decided to allow a free vote on the more contentious parts of the Bill. It’s took him his usual long period of dithering and indecision before he finally conceded to normal parliamentary practice on this matter of individual conscience.

The secular liberal elite (and one or two senior Catholics including Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, chief executive of the Medical Research Council) are aghast. Gosh, the peasants, the people and the prejudiced are revolting. Don’t the great unwashed understand who knows best on these moral issues? A free vote in Parliament of all places! Whatever happened to our cherished all-controlling secular nanny state?

So, the hand-baggers have been hand-bagged and – inevitably – the fight-back begins. It starts on the front page of today’s house-magazine for the liberal elite, The Independent on Sunday (IoS), with banner headlines (ironically under a full-colour tabloid-style advertisement to “Train Your Brian” – yes, really, you couldn’t make it up) informing the world of their outstanding news scoop: “Exclusive: Right Wing Christian Group Pays For Commons Researchers.”

This world-shattering earth-moving piece of news (clearly more important than the renewed murderous fighting in Basra, this weekend’s vital elections in Zimbabwe or the key UN climate-change convention in Bangkok) is all about 12 innocuous wide-eyed young Interns who personally scrimp and save for the supposedly glamorous privilege of working for a year as an assistant to an MP. It’s a decade-old political education programme for young people who are attached to MPs of all parties, but the work is often tedious and unglamorous and their status is sometimes little above that of the tea lady.

But they are CHRISTIANS and they are sponsored by a CHRISTIAN organisation! Oooh! And the sponsoring organisation, CARE, is strongly against aspects of the HFE Bill. Oooooh! CARE has (unspecified) “links to the powerful Christian right in America”. Oooooooh! The IoS has smelt a Christian conspiracy against the HFE Bill…

Actually, I’d like to smell an effective IoS conspiracy against Christians in the article, but the story is so weak and so unworthy of any front page that I’ve nothing to get my teeth into.

And the best bit is a quote from that fount of all non-believer wisdom, celeb Professor Richard Dawkins (I love the man, we so badly need him to continue with his high-profile and entertaining proselytism on behalf atheist fundamentalism and shrill bigotry). “If only these restless busybodies (CARE) would keep their prejudices to themselves, nobody would object,” he opined, “but they can’t resist inflicting their ignorant opinions on others.”

Ah yes. Such a helpful contribution from such a wise, erudite, open-minded, liberal Oxford academic.

If you want to see an intelligent but completely closed mind that’s been shut tight with lock and bolt, you’ll do no better than to read Prof Dawkins. Even good academic atheists are embarrassed by him. Or as the director of the Human Genome Project said, “Dawkins has abandoned his much cherished rationality to embrace an embittered manifesto of dogmatic atheist fundamentalism.”

When the IoS has to buttress their article with quotes from Richard Dawkins you know that their story is weak, very weak.

Come on IoS, you can do better than this.

Last week I went to the ‘Passion for Life’ meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. It was part of a roadshow that various pro-life groups are running around the country in response to the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill (what a mouthful!) now before parliament. Lord David Alton and Ann Widdecombe MP are the main speakers.

The main objections to the Bill are that it will

(a) allow the creation of human/animal embryos, (b) hammer a nail in the coffin of fatherhood, and (c) further liberalise abortion law.
As I arrived, there were around 150 shrieking protestors outside, mainly from women’s rights and pro-abortion groups together with some SWP activists. Inside there were maybe 750 people, mainly Catholics I guess.

Unknown to the rest of us, around ten of the protestors – all women – slipped into the meeting too. Interestingly, they stayed completely silent until the moment David Alton showed pictures of aborted children. At this they jumped up to object loudly. But David had the loudspeaker. He simply raised the volume and continued calmly.

The protestors shouted their objections off and on during the following speeches. Some had to be escorted out by the stewards.

But the last speaker was the formidable Ann Widdecombe. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of her on a dark night. As most of the vocal protests were about abortion, that inevitably was the subject she majored on. She likes an argument.

As one of the protestors was being taken out she (the protestor) kept bellowing, “What about women’s rights? What about women’s rights?”

“What about women’s rights indeed,” Ms Widdecombe bellowed back. “What about the 50% of aborted children who were female? What rights did you give them?”

Brilliant. Simply unanswerable.