There’s nothing so sad as a good policy thrown out because of vague fears about where it might lead, one day, if we made absolutely no effort to stop it, put no safeguards in place, deliberately switched off the electric fence around the T-Rex pen and morphed spontaneously into the full cast of the Lord of the Flies.
In The Times, Tim Montgomerie invokes this kind of slippery slope amid the fields of Elysium, writing that euthanasia – on its way to being legalised in this country – should not be written into law because of the potential for misuse.