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How the assisted dying slippery slope will allow you to request your neighbour's death by 2029

THE assisted dying bill coming to parliament this week is just the start of a slippery slope to death on demand for anyone you don’t like. Here’s how it will work: 

2024: Assisted Dying bill passes

Britons with six months to live who are of sound mind win the right to end their own lives. Thousands do so. Millions more are furious other people have been given a right they do not have, which is unfair, and march for it.

2025: Labour lose a by-election

A panicked Keir Starmer searches for anything cheap that will make him popular. Settles on assisted dying, extends it to a year to live and removes the ‘sound mind’ provision. Channel 4 schedules its first live assisted dying in the hope of winning back the Big Brother audience.

2026: Dying hits TikTok

Assisted dying becomes a social media craze, with famous ‘deathgimmers’ attracting millions in sponsorship deals. Nigel Farage, with the practiced ease of decades of bandwagon-leaping, rebrands Reform as Death UK. Their skull-faced masks are everywhere. A parliamentary rebellion sees the clause about ‘progressive illness’ removed.

2027: Daily Mail campaign launched

The Mail and Telegraph decide, given the unpopularity of every other Conservative policy, this is their key vote-winner and launch a ‘Death for Everyone’ campaign. The Daily Express is unfortunately unable to join in as their last reader passed away in March. Gen Z decides that, as Netflix now costs £28 a month, death is their only option.

2028: All restrictions removed

All restrictions around assisted dying are removed, to popular acclaim. Sarco death pods are installed in every branch of Starbucks and queues stretch out of the doors. Anna Wintour proclaims ‘expiring is the new aspiring’. Charli XCX announces the ‘hot dead summer’. ‘But why must I suffer others to live? Whither democracy?’ ask the broadsheets.

2029: Nominations open

A private member’s bill allowing citizens to nominate others for assisted dying passes with widespread support, because everyone assumes nobody will nominate them. Piers Morgan is first to pass the threshold and laps up the publicity. The UK’s population falls to four million. The housing and NHS crises are solved. Net zero achieved. Everyone happy.

Five fair, reasonable punishments for people who use their phones in the cinema

NO reprisal is too extreme for the subhuman scum who use their bright phones in dark cinemas. Even these punishments are entirely reasonable: 

Exile

Banishment from these shores is the soft option. When you’re approaching the climax of Gladiator II, where Paul Mescal is riding two rhinos at Caesar through a coliseum full of sharks while toting twin AK-47s, and some dick gets their illuminated rectangle out? Being shipped to St Helena is absurdly generous. They ruined your immersion in the story.

Being catapulted over the horizon

Forget about the logistics of sourcing and operating a trebuchet. Focus on how joyous it would feel to see them disappear over the horizon in a majestic arc, comparable to the narrative arc of Paddington in Peru. Such a spectacle wouldn’t just restore much-needed order to the nation’s cinemas, it would also bring the community together. There’s literally no downside.

Bringing back the stocks

Like iPods, society turned its back on placing people in stocks far too soon. Public humiliation is the only consequence that gets through to morons who film the ending of Wicked and put it on TikTok. For extra irony, spectators will be encouraged to video themselves throwing rotten fruit and bags of dogshit at them.

Tarring and feathering

Sounds quaint and rural, coating an individual in tar and covering them in feathers? In reality it’s an excruciating punishment, as painful as it is humiliating. Good. Inflicting it on transgressors will return cinemas to revered temples of quiet and darkness. Even a quick scroll during a Sky advert will be stamped out.

Force them into baby-friendly screenings

What could be a more fitting punishment? Having disrupted your screening with their phone, their viewing experience will be ruined by screeching infants who are strangers to reason. For repeat offenders, put them into Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie or Thelma the Unicorn. They’ll never do it again, if they survive.

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