The proposed reform - reviewing cases of assisted dying to determine whether prosecution is appropriate - addresses the symptom of individual suffering while leaving the structural cause intact: the market-driven erosion of care infrastructure, the commodification of life’s final years, and the state’s preference for criminalising compassion over reorganising society to prevent such desperation in the first place. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.

Let us be precise: the Crown Prosecution Service is not debating whether people should be allowed to end their lives with assistance. It is debating whether to punish those who help them do so - under a law that criminalises solidarity while leaving untouched the economic conditions that drive people to seek such help. Between 2009 and this year, police investigated numerous cases; now thirteen are under review. Each one is a flashpoint in a society where care has been outsourced, underfunded, and deprioritised, while capital accumulation in health-related sectors continues apace. The reform being applied here is not about legal clarity or humane policy - it is about managing the fallout of a system that treats human beings as units of risk and cost, not as persons with dignity.

Who accumulates in this scenario? Not the person facing terminal pain or irreversible decline. Not the family member who drives them to the clinic, holds their hand, and risks prison for it. What accumulates is social control: the state’s authority to define when life is worth preserving, and when ending it is a crime. The CPS’s review operates like a pressure valve - releasing just enough moral tension to prevent mass unrest, without altering the underlying structure. It is reform as pacification: look, we’re thinking about it - while the NHS continues to shed beds, the social care market fractures under profit pressure, and working-class families absorb the invisible labour of care without support.

This is the reform trap in its most intimate form. The symptom - unbearable suffering at the end of life - is real, urgent, and demands a response. But the response being prepared is not one that challenges the logic of capital accumulation. It is one that assumes that logic: if care is insufficient, the individual must make a private, desperate, and legally precarious choice. The state does not ask whether the system can be reorganised to guarantee care for all; it asks whether to punish those who circumvent the system’s failures. The reform, in other words, is not about ending suffering - it is about containing the political threat that suffering poses to the system’s legitimacy.

And where is the democratic dimension? Nowhere. The working class is not deciding here. The decision is being made for them - by prosecutors, civil servants, and politicians - who have no accountability to those living the conditions that produce these cases. There is no mass movement of people demanding to shape this policy from below; there is only top-down discretion, cloaked in the language of caution and legality. That is not reform - it is administrative containment. Real reform would begin with the self-activity of those affected: the sick, the dying, their carers, their unions - organising not just for a change in the law, but for a change in the relations of care, production, and social reproduction. It would demand not a narrow legal exception, but a system where no one feels driven to end their life because the only alternative is indignity and isolation.

The state’s current posture - reviewing, deliberating, delaying - has a clear structural effect: it stabilises the status quo by absorbing dissent into procedure. Every case reviewed becomes another argument for “caution”, another reason to put off the harder work of reimagining how we care for one another in a world of scarcity and inequality. But scarcity is not natural - it is produced. The UK does not lack the resources to provide universal, dignified end-of-life care. It lacks the political will to prioritise care over capital. And that will is not fixed by piecemeal reform - it is broken only by collective power.

So let us name the question the CPS avoids: not should we punish those who assist dying? - but why must people die in such desperation that assistance becomes a criminal act? The answer lies not in the courtroom, but in the boardroom, the treasury, and the ministry of health. The reform being applied here is not a step toward justice. It is a step toward normalising the conditions that make justice impossible. And if the left treats it as a victory - “at least they’re reviewing it” - then it becomes not reform, but resignation. The mass strike taught us that change does not come from above, even when it wears the uniform of legality. It comes from below - from those who refuse to accept the world as it is, and who build, in their own action, the world they wish to live in. The dying do not need prosecutors to weigh their sorrow. They need a society that values life enough to protect it - not just in its final hours, but in every one before them.