When my grandparents were born in the 1880s life expectancy in the UK was 46 years. Today it is 81, although many will live much longer.

Things have changed. 100 years ago, if you were lucky, you lived a little past your retirement. You weren’t a problem to your family or the State. In 1967 the Beatles sang “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” They imagined 64 to be old. Ringo is 85 and Paul 83. Not long-ago grandparents were rare; now we have great-grandparents and multiplying care homes.

Longevity is a mixed blessing. There is joy but also struggle. Not only must the elderly cope with being less in demand and less productive; they must also handle being a drain on everyone else’s resources. Both governments and families struggle with the financial implications. Longevit has been called “the curse of medicine”, which offers years of life, but with no promise of quality of life.

The problem for me of the Assisted Dying Bill is not primarily one of moral principle. It would be absurd to say that life must always, at all costs, be preserved, or that doctors must never knowingly shorten it. Some treatments have the side-effect that, while diminishing pain, they will shorten life. There has long been a tension in the campaign for assisted dying between the respectable cases, surrounded by lots of safeguards, and the ones whose emotional charge really powered the campaign, where people were facing not months but a life sentence of increasing pain and helplessness.

What the campaigners rightly want is an end to avoidable suffering; but, when it’s put as simply as that, it sounds more like the State making suicide available to everyone.

Life often entails suffering, for which, in this world, there is only palliative care. The palliative treatment for old age is mostly love, and that is not something that governments can supply. The money for assisted dying will come out of the NHS budget. The money that hospices and care homes need will not.

I was delighted to learn that the General Synod voted overwhelmingly to “reaffirm that every person is of immeasurable and irreducible value and request His Majesty’ Government work to improve funding and access to desperately needed palliative care services instead of enacting a law that puts the most vulnerable at risk.”