‘The daughter had the power of attorney, it had been signed over when the social worker had suggested it, just in case, and the daughter had to put the house up for sale and then sell the furniture, some to keep.

  ‘Sadly, the house was gutted, it was sold, and the government grabbed the money to pay for the nursing home. But what never happened … was the doctors and social workers sitting down with Mavis’s daughter and going through a list of options – they were just too damn busy for that it seems.

  ‘The nursing home would cost at least three thousand pounds a month, a lot of money, yet a full time carer living in with Mavis would have cost under two thousand pounds a month. And a part-time carer – enough to meet the legal requirements for Mavis to stay at home a little longer, would have cost about a thousand pounds a month.

  ‘So you have to stop and wonder … why it’s OK to spend three thousand pounds a month on a care home, but it’s not OK to spend a thousand pounds a month on a carer, and for Mavis to stay in the home that she had lived in for thirty years or more, a home that she loved.

  ‘It seems like a fraudulent waste of money, and a ruddy disgrace as well. Granted, our social workers are busy, but they could at least hand out a pamphlet of options to the family members in these situations.

  ‘So Mavis was carted off to a nursing home, and very upset at finding herself in one, not in her comfortable home with her cat – don’t know what happened to her cat.

  ‘A few months after moving into the home she seems to have suffered a stroke, she lost the ability to speak, she could not communicate, could not write down what she wanted, and she had trouble walking.

  ‘So they put Mavis in a bed, and … they left her in that bed, for six years. Every day she would wake up and not know where she was, not know who she was, not recognise her son or daughter or even the staff that looked after her each day.

  ‘If she had been in pain, or had an itch, she could not tell anyone. She could not watch the TV or listen to the radio, one eye affected by the stroke.

  ‘So Mavis lay in bed, in her nappies, washed by a carer every other day, spoon fed three times a day, and she lost weight till she looked like a skeleton.

  ‘But Mavis survived in that care home bed for six years, and to my mind that was a living hell for six years. To my mind, I would put the care home staff on trial for torture and send them all to prison for twenty years for being so cruel to someone.

  ‘But the care home staff were just obeying stupid British laws set down by stupid British politicians, who all think that they’re doing the right thing by keeping someone like Mavis alive.

  ‘They’re not, they’re guilty of torture, and if someone had made a documentary about Mavis and her suffering there would have been national outrage about it.

  ‘Try and imagine … waking up each day … not knowing where you are, who you are, not being able to tell anyone where the pain is, if you’re hungry or too cold, not being able to ask for a drink of water.

  ‘Day after day, year after year, you suffer, because the very stupid British government think that they’re being kind. They’re not.

  ‘If Mavis could have been wired up to a machine then we could have seen and measured the brainwave activity … and known that she was in pain, and uncomfortable, and you can be damn sure that six years in a bed is a very uncomfortable situation to be in.

  ‘So what’s the solution? The solution would have been for a group of doctors to make an assessment of Mavis – as to her quality of life - and to then give her a lethal injection after consultations with her family, and Mavis’s suffering would have ended.

  ‘And let’s not forget the cost to the taxpayers. The house that the family sold … it paid for the nursing home for the first two years then ran out, the next four years paid for by the good old British taxpayer, at a cost of three thousand pounds a month.

  ‘So the doctors could have made a decision, and Mavis could have been humanely put to sleep. But no, because the stupid British politicians think such a thing is unthinkable, to have someone put down like a dog that was sick.

  ‘But everyone I talk to says the same thing: I hope I don’t end up like that, I hope I die first. And many of the very stupid voters in this country actually think they have a right to die. They don’t.

  ‘You can wear a bracelet that says No Resuscitation, so that if you have a heart attack or stroke or are in a coma the doctors will not work hard to save you, or they’ll switch the machine off.

  ‘But most people don’t have such strokes, they get old slowly, it creeps up on them day by day, and one day they end up in a nursing home, then they end up like Mavis – and being legally tortured by the British system.

  ‘When you ask young people what they would do, they all very stupidly suggest that they would end their own lives. Well, you can’t end your own life when stuck in a bed and not thinking straight, can you.

  ‘The problem is … that there’s no living will to leave behind to say that if you end up like Mavis - please give me a lethal injection. No, that would be wrong according to our politicians, it would be wrong to end your suffering, but it’s OK to lay in that bed for six years – a living hell.

  ‘What’s needed … is for the politicians to stop thinking that they know what’s best for us, and to ask us … what’s best for us. And what’s best for us is not to lay in bed for six years and vegetate and suffer, to wake each day and panic, to lay in pain and not be able to tell anyone about it.

  ‘So, Doctor Lepus, would you want to end up like Mavis?’

  ‘The answer is a very definite no, as it would be for most people in this country, you’d have to be mad to want to go on, and your family would be selfish and cruel to want you to go on for their sake, so that they could visit you.’

  ‘Justice Cavendish?’

  ‘I hope for a quick heart attack, and most definitely don’t want to end up in a nursing home, unless it was in Corsica with a sea view. And even then I would not want to suffer, and people do suffer in nursing homes, they’re not pleasant places at the best of times.

  ‘But the traditions in this country, and our laws, prevent us from choosing some form of elective suicide. It’s odd, but such an elective suicide is frowned upon always, but for us to sit in a chair all day and cry for many years is seemingly OK in the eyes of the medical community.

  ‘And if a young man is paralysed playing rugby and stuck in a bed, he can’t chose to die, he has to lay in that bed for fifty years, till his body finally gives out.

  ‘There is a place in Switzerland where you can go to die, but your family runs the risk of being prosecuted for elective suicide.’

  ‘Doc Lepus, why do doctors oppose elective suicide?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t, and most of the doctors I know are all in favour of it, it’s the law that gets in the way. Every day of the week our doctors switch off a machine or quite legally kill a cancer patient.

  ‘No one ever dies of cancer, they die from an overdose of morphine, a pleasant way to go – administered by a doctor at a time of his own choosing. Doctors kill dozens of patients every day of the week, and they’re not the sort to want to keep Mavis in a bed for six years, they want the resources used elsewhere.’

  ‘So our laws get in the way?’ I asked, a signal at Justice Cavendish.

  He responded, ‘We’ve had laws against suicide since the early Christian Church deemed it a mortal sin, and our laws stem from the practices of the early church.

  ‘So for the past few hundred years suicide has been against the law, which is a bit stupid because if you commit suicide - how are they going to prosecute you?

  ‘No, the law against assisted suicide is meant for doctors and family, so that a family member does not kill his father early to get the inheritance, which probably did happen a lot.

  ‘And if the son was hated by his father, would you hand that son the right to end his father’s life? So it’s a bit of a tangled web, and we end up with the situation where the British taxpayer is paying a fortune each month to keep Mavis in bed and suffering.’

  ‘Is there no practical solution?’ I complained.

  ‘The solution would be as you suggested, a group of three or five doctors make an assessment, they vote, the family is consulted if there is any family, and a lethal dose of morphine is administered.

  ‘But the church is against it, and most politicians have always voted against such a thing, so … we have the odd situation where an act of kindness has become a sentence of abject torture for our old people.’

  I began, ‘Those of you out there listening to this, who don’t want to end up like Mavis - who want the right to die when it suits you, write to your local MP and make your voice heard.

  ‘And … maybe someday we’ll have a practical solution to the suffering of people like Mavis, someone whose family said suffered terribly every day.

  ‘And for all those big tough men that think they’d just end their own lives, no … you won’t, because you’ll be old and frail and with one side of your body paralysed, unable to move, unable to think clearly but definitely able to suffer and be in pain all day.

  ‘If you want to avoid that suffering down the road, then write to your MP today and make your voices heard. And what are you campaigning for? You’re campaigning for your right to end your own suffering and to die with dignity.

  ‘So we can call this campaign “the Death with Dignity Campaign”, and I will be putting some money into it coming up to the next election and afterwards, and kicking up a fuss.

  ‘What I want from the next Labour Government is a referendum on the topic maybe, or for them to see sense and create a situation where three doctors confer, they meet the family for their consent and then administer a lethal dose of morphine – as they do fifty times a day, every day, for cancer sufferers.

  ‘My nursing homes are there to help people, they’re not there to prolong suffering, and I hope that a year from now we have a law that will help prevent what happened to Mavis.

  ‘Doc Lepus, what’s the law that allows doctors to do that for cancer suffers?’

  ‘There is no specific law that says it’s OK, just that it’s accepted practise – to ease a person’s suffering.’

  ‘But not for a person in a nursing home?’

  ‘Not as such, no, there’s no precedent for that, just that cancer was always seen as very painful and morphine was the solution, and the doses eventually killed the patient.’

  ‘So doctors can quite legally kill a patient, if everyone accepts that it’s better than the alternative, no new laws created…’

  ‘They can kill and they do, and machines are switched off if there’s no next of kin. A lethal dose for Mavis would have been based on any perceived mental stress and bodily pain that she was unable to communicate.

  ‘If she was screaming in pain … they might have killed her with morphine, yes.’

  I cut in, ‘So the law in this land states … that we don’t need laws … we just need established practices that everyone is used to?’

  ‘Pretty much, yes.’

  ‘So the doctors could have done something about Mavis?’

  ‘Doctors don’t visit nursing homes much, and people who go into nursing homes are generally quite stable, as Mavis was, stable yet probably in pain.’

  I asked, ‘Would it be fair to say that British doctors visit nursing homes and attempt to elongate life and improve a person’s health?’

  ‘Well … no, a nursing home is traditionally where people go to die, not to be treated so that they live longer.’

  ‘My nursing homes will alter that outlook,’ I told him. ‘We’ll try and reduce pain, stimulate minds, and keep people alive longer - so long as they’re not suffering.’

  ‘You’re unique in that outlook, which is why people respect your ideas on nursing homes. It’s not that the rest of the population don’t care, it’s just an established part of life that people go into nursing homes to slowly die, not to be treated or stimulated with some good conversation.’

  ‘Do doctors check up on people like Mavis?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they wait a call from the care home, such as a bleed, or trouble breathing. If Mavis was stable, and the same each day, a doctor would not be called.’

  ‘So no one considered her wellbeing, her pain, her suffering, they just obeyed the basic laws and established customs of this country … and kept her alive with a daily routine; spoon feed and change the nappies.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

  ‘Justice Davenport, do people get prosecuted for assisted suicide in this country?’

  ‘They do, but the sentencing is often light. You may have a wife that puts a pillow over her husband’s face to ease his passing. If she’s seventy, and they knew that she loved him, she won’t face a lengthy jail term.’

  ‘But there’s no way for someone to intervene in the case of Mavis?’ I asked.

  ‘It would need an outside group, legal action and medical advice. But that would be a strange day, a court case to end a life. There have been a few, and the judge normally rules on the side of … no suicide nor assisted suicide in Britain.’

  ‘What a primitive and backward system we have,’ I sighed out. ‘It’s OK to suffer for years, but it’s not OK to end the suffering because it’s not an established practise yet.

  ‘OK, moving on. Let’s assume that someone goes into my Phase One nursing home, they deteriorate over the years, legs stop working, mind gets a bit slow, the son takes legal action to move the father to Phase Three and to sell the apartment...’

  Doc Lepus began, ‘That does happen, unfortunately it happens more often than we would like to see, but as it stands the son would go around to the father’s home and murder him, then sell the house.

  ‘If the father is in your Phase One then he’s not actually in a nursing home and nursing home rules don’t apply, he can walk out the door any time he likes till he’s committed to Phase Two or Three.

  ‘The son could argue in court that the father is no longer mentally or physically capable, the father gets moved to Phase Three and the son sells the apartment.

  ‘But the days are gone where anyone wanting some inheritance would have their parents committed to a nursing home, because these days the nursing homes have to all be paid for and they’re damned expensive.

  ‘When a person has to go into a nursing home the old family house is normally sold, so that there’s enough money to cover many years of care in that nursing home, maybe even ten years.

  ‘It’s not the case that you can send your parents to a nursing home, pay the first month’s care and then sell the house; Social Services will stop you from selling the house.’

  I cut in, ‘So if a parent needs to go into a nursing home, there’s no longer any kind of inheritance for a large part of the British population…’

  ‘If the house is worth less than say sixty thousand, and the parent stays alive in the nursing home for a few years, then there’s no inheritance for a great many British people,’ he agreed. ‘That inheritance could be used up in two years, and most residents of nursing homes live more than two years on average.’

  ‘Let’s turn to another form of torture, British police torture. When a British citizen is arrested and held, they’re held in a police cell and may be held overnight, to be interviewed in the morning.

  ‘What happens during the night, and all day long, is that the police open the cell hatch very loudly every fifteen minutes and shout inside: Hey mate, are you still alive?

  ‘They do that … because if the man is drunk, and sleeps on his back in his cell, then he could drown on his own vomit, and then the police would get the blame for a death in a cell.

  ‘That’s why I have a medical bay attached to my soft prison in Leicester, and why drunks and drug addicts go there, and not to a police cell.

  ‘Our police officers are not there to play at being nurses and doctors, that’s not their job, they’re there to fight crime and to solve crimes.

  ‘So in Leicester, the police dump the drunks at my medical bay, in cuffs, and the man or woman is then treated, checked over, and medically observed so that they don’t die from laying on their backs.

  ‘The nurses do the nursing and the police do the police work, which is how it should be.

  ‘But if you’re an average citizen, a good job and a nice family, and the police mistakenly arrest you for a serious charge, then you’ll be held in a cell and kept awake all day and all night, perhaps for two whole days and nights.

  ‘You’re not drunk or under the influence of drugs, yet they still keep you awake, and we have to wonder … why? When I talk to officers off the record, they admit that suspects are kept awake day and night to soften them up ready for questioning.

  ‘And that, ladies and gentlemen, is torture, and it’s banned by the EU and the United Nations. No police, anywhere on this planet, are allowed to keep a suspect awake for a few days and then question them.

  ‘And this is something I’ll be campaigning against in the near future, some High Court legal action against the police and the Home Secretary.

  ‘And despite the fact that no drunks or drug addicts now go to Leicester police station, the suspects are still kept awake I understand, so we may very soon see some High Court legal action against Leicester police for this barbaric practice.

  ‘So, Justice Cavendish, why do they do it and how do they get away with it?’

  ‘They do it to soften up the prisoners, as you rightly pointed out, and because they’re afraid to be blamed for a death in a police cell. That death points towards police brutality, even when there isn’t any, so the police are sensitive to such claims.

  ‘As to how they get away with it, they simply claim that they’re checking on the health of a prisoner who might try and commit suicide or might be sick.’