This week saw the airing of a controversial BBC documentary regarding ‘assisted suicide’ at the ‘Dignitas’ clinic in Switzerland, with special emphasis on two British men who were determined to end their suffering.

Over 100 Britons have travelled to the Swiss clinic to end their lives, however, none of those family and friends accompanying them have been prosecuted, because the 1961 Suicide Act allows for discretion.

Our host, Alzheimers sufferer and superstar author Terry Pratchett, was visibly moved and distressed as he encountered people who were pre-emptively curtailing their suffering before illness rendered them beyond legal and professional assisted suicide.

For me, Peter Smedley – suffering from motor neurone disease – portrayed astonishing dignity that was simultaneously very British and heartbreaking.

The two sufferers in the documentary may have come across as unusually healthy-looking, for two terminally ill men, but their appearance merely hides a point that is often lost on opponents of assisted suicide. And it is this, sufferers are often forced to make the journey to Dignitas whilst they’re still capable of enjoying some quality of life – for fear that they may reach the point where they can no longer be considered of sound mind and permitted to go with the procedure. The clients are in a position whereby they must cut their lives short by a few precious weeks, weeks of lucidity.

In the final minutes of the programme, we see Peter Smedley being cradled – in a house on a Swiss industrial estate – by a foreign woman with heavily accented English, and this is where the programme hits home. Mr Smedley wanted to pass away in his beautiful home, in his country, with his family.

There is a temptation and a predisposition to empathise with those emotionally devastated people left in the wake of such a tragedy, but to form a rational opinion on this, I believe one must place themselves in the shoes of the sufferer. Ironically, the human body can often resist death long after neurological disease has destroyed the person within – it’s truly a fate worse than death itself to linger in a zombie-like state, recognising nobody and forgetting your own identity.

The questions for our readers are these:

Is the ability to choose when and where to end your own life, the ultimate human freedom?

Should the British Freedom Party consider a policy on assisted suicide?

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