Life & Mortality Quote by Polly Toynbee

Numbers do the dirty work here: Toynbee stacks percentages like sandbags, not to “add information” but to box in the opposition. If four out of five people support assisted dying, and they’ve done so for a quarter-century, the implied verdict is that resistance isn’t principled caution - it’s democratic denial. The repetition of 80% is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it makes the consensus feel not just large, but stable, boringly persistent, the kind of public preference politicians ignore at their peril.

The sharpest move is her choice of constituencies. She doesn’t cite generic “voters”; she names practising Catholics and Protestants, and even Church Times readers. That’s a deliberate raid on the usual moral high ground. Assisted dying is often framed as secular modernity versus religious tradition; Toynbee’s subtext is that the churches’ institutional leadership is out of step not only with society but with their own pews. By specifying “practising,” she preempts the easy dismissal that religious support is superficial or lapsed.

Context matters: Toynbee is a columnist steeped in Westminster inertia and culture-war choreography. This is an argument aimed less at persuading the undecided than at shaming gatekeepers - legislators, bishops, editorial boards - who can keep a popular reform bottled up. Polls aren’t policy, but that’s part of her point: when opinion is this consistent and cross-tribal, the burden of justification flips. The question becomes not “Why change?” but “Who benefits from delay?”