The saying tells is that “silence is golden”. It comes from Arabic culture, going back to the 9th century CE at least, and is the shortened version of the original phrase: “Speech is silver, silence is golden”. While I have considerable sympathy with the notion that silence is richer and more splendid than speech, there are darker interpretations of what an imposed silence might mean.

Reading the excellent book by Wren Radford, Lived Experiences and Social Transformations, I was reminded that being silenced – or coercion into quietness – is far from golden. Reflecting on her childhood Wren Radford recalls:

‘I have been reading to myself most of the day; being quiet, which is seen as the same as being good’

To fit into an adult world, not causing trouble or manifesting needs, is one kind of upbringing. In some contexts silence can be its own form of resistance, especially when speaking the truth might lead to punishment. Our present political culture appears to be silencing whole swathes of people; those who have been encouraged to see themselves as powerless and irrelevant. In such circumstances the unheard might turn towards more extreme politics as a way to voice their dissatisfaction with a status quo that relentlessly favours the wealthy and denies opportunities to those who place the community ahead of the individual.

I have been thinking about silenced voices while editing a forthcoming edition of Crucible on assisted dying/suicide. It was while doing this work that I came across a blog by a now-retired member of staff from the University of Leeds. I had done a little work with Professor Allan House and our interactions were always memorable. Allan is an emeritus professor of liaison psychiatry.

On the first occasion we met, Allan was teaching on the Postgraduate Certificate in Health Research. I was one of a group of 20 or so NHS employees, mainly doctors and some nurses, who had opted for this course of study. By way of introduction, Allan asked us to identify ourselves and our role in the hospital. When I had spoken, Allan moved on, but after the next introduction returned to me. He clearly found it intriguing and a bit ‘left field’ to have a chaplain on the course, which perhaps sparked off a number of questions and unusual considerations. Subsequently we met a few times to explore some research ideas. It was at the start of the first of these that Allan said with a suitable degree of firmness: “I’m an atheist and a republican”.

In his blog on the topic of current legislation about assisted dying/suicide, Allan is more vociferous than the Bishop of London. I don’t have any personal knowledge, but Allan may well be in favour of some kind of assisted dying – but he is clearly very strongly opposed to the current legislation. His blog post is entitled “The dark ideology behind the assisted suicide campaign”.

In giving evidence to the Bill committee, in a private capacity and as a subject matter expert, Allan was undoubtedly frustrated with the imprecision of what is being proposed. Firstly, he cannot see how this is anything other than the facilitation of the wishes of someone who is suicidal. Indeed, the current proposals include an alteration to the Suicide Act 1961, effectively exempting anyone (in end-of-life cases) of culpability for encouraging or assisting a suicide.

“At the core of this position is a libertarian or hyper-individualistic privileging of personal choice to the exclusion of all other considerations: it doesn’t matter why the choice is being made, only that it is being made by an ‘autonomous’ individual”.

Other considerations have been silenced. Supporters of the Bill push back every attempt to ensure that there is some exploration by a competent professional of why someone wants to be supported to end their life. This means that there is no evaluation of issues which might be either improved or removed by a suitable intervention. All that matters is that the individual has capacity and isn’t being explicitly coerced. House sees within the current Bill a judgement that applicants for the process “are leading a sort of un-life, something so self-evidently valueless that there is no need to explore why they don’t want it”. He clearly believes that this is both wrong and irresponsible.

Being quiet isn’t always the same thing as being good. Far from it. Many years ago, during a bust-up about chaplaincy provision in the NHS, when I believed the Church of England’s central body was acting badly, my Bishop shared with me that he’d checked out with the lead Bishop for the NHS that I wasn’t “getting in the way”. I was rather surprised to hear this (and I think he regretted sharing it) but had sufficient wit to reply: “Sometimes someone needs to get in the way”. Despite this moment of candour I know that all too often I’ve been silent and perhaps the issue for all of us, including myself, is to speak what is inconvenient to the people who would rather we remained quiet.