It is remarkable that the BBC decided to give the latest PR exercise in favour of assisted suicide a big push by running it as news today that the Nuffield Council on Bioethics' citizen's jury of 28 people has decided that euthanasia should be legalised. In a kind of broadcasting imprimatur it declared that the jury was 'representative' of the population as a whole and should therefore be regarded as indicative of the way sentiment is going.

Now that's power: to frame dubious propaganda exercises organised by people already committed to change as the state of the nation. What wouldn't I give to have the job of writing headlines for BBC Radio 4; authority without accountability.

I've said this before, but citizens' juries or assemblies are the most spurious exercise in democracy. Any of us could get a selected group of people to produce the result we want, simply by picking the right people, framing the questions the right way, and getting the right set of people to give the expert briefings. Oh and getting the right sort of person to chair the whole exercise.

I may say with bitterness that I saw the thing at work during the Citizens' Assembly that prepared the way for introducing abortion provision to Ireland. That was a loaded exercise. The premise of the whole thing wasn't how best to protect the rights of the mother without losing sight of the foetus; it was framed from the outset in terms of what kind of abortion legislation Ireland should have. The experts that came on took as read that abortion was an unquestioned good and the only question was how, not if. Naysayers were of course included among the speakers in the interests of perceived objectivity, but one expert I know refused to take part, on the basis the whole thing was rigged and others were brought on late into the consultation, when the assumptions were already in place. It was anything but an objective exercise.

As for assisted suicide, I have no doubt that no one actually asked if it was necessary in order to relieve suffering in dying. If the premise was instead how to enable us to die well with the minimum pain, the focus would have been on palliative care and hospices (which now work with people in their own homes as well), not on presenting old and vulnerable people with the choice to relieve their families of the trouble and expense of care for them.

And I wonder how it dealt with the awkward reality that in almost every case where assisted suicide has been introduced, highly civilised, all of them, it has gone straight down the slippery slope into areas we don't much like to think about: the euthanasia of people with dementia, of children whose parents are in favour (Belgium), of the depressed, the handicapped. In Canada many people who take the option of Maid, its version of assisted dying, are worried about being a burden to others. In the Netherlands the fashion for double suicides (including a former prime minister) takes us into the problematic area that Arthur Koestler's suicide with his wife exemplified, namely, that the dominant partner can exert pressure on the weaker spouse to follow suit. It takes an awful lot of magical thinking about British exceptionalism to assume all this won't happen here.

As for the latest private member's bill intended to introduce the measure for people with six months or less to live, it assumes that these diagnoses are precise. They aren't. A friend of mine took time off work last year to be with his father who had been given weeks to live. But that was before he was assigned Macmillan nurses who came to his house, cheered him up, got him to exercise and to eat properly. Nine months on, he's still going strong, with every indication that he'll see out the rest of them.

Dying well doesn't mean being given the Dignatas option at home; it means living well while you can.