The one important response to this week's Falconer report on legalising assisted dying comes from the government of the day. On Thursday the justice department duly declared that "any change to the law in this emotive and contentious area is an issue of individual conscience and a matter for parliament to decide, rather than government policy."

This is rubbish. If the government funks "emotive and contentious" reform, such as to the outdated 1961 suicide act, who else will grasp it? The government controls the law because it controls parliament. When it says something "is a matter for parliament", it wants nothing done. As for assisted suicide being "an issue of individual conscience", that is what Falconer says it should be and the government is denying. The response is specious.

I am sure British palliative and hospice care is "the best in the world", as its champions claim whenever this issue surfaces. Of course the process of decline into death should be conditioned by a respect for life and compassion for the dying. Nor is it any longer the case that dying has to be painful, or that doctors cannot relieve it to the point of death. Various surveys indicate that roughly a half of all doctors have been asked to help someone die, and a third of these claim to have consented. Those who want and can afford to die of their own volition can go to Switzerland. No one is likely to be prosecuted for helping them. So, says the government, why not leave things alone?

Falconer argues that legal incoherence and suppressed criminality are no longer good enough. The fact that no assisted deaths have been prosecuted since the government "clarified" the law last year still leaves criminality hanging over the assisters (and hundreds of doctors). Driving suicides abroad is like driving abortions abroad, as if shifting a moral dilemma offshore somehow eases it. Falconer suggests that it no longer be murder to help someone to die who is over 18, is terminally ill, wants to die and is fit to ask. As for the objection that legalising assistance would "risk increasing the pressure on vulnerable people", of course it would – but "risk" requires regulation, not denial. Allowing cars to drive fast is a risk, but not an argument against cars. Falconer's proposals for managing that risk are adequate, to the point of bureaucratic overload.

As we live longer, this debate grows ever more desperate. What Falconer did not do, and should have, is give it a more strident ideological context. Opponents of assisted dying are on a par with those who regard any suicide, like abortion, as an "offence against life". To them, humans are not autonomous but exist for the purposes of some outer entity with dominion over them. That used to be God, but is increasingly replaced by a more potent enemy of individualism: the state.

The state is already preoccupied with trying to stop individuals doing what they wish – always "in their own interest". It daily increases control on how they work, play, eat, drink, smoke, drive and learn. It governs every year of their life and, under the 1961 suicide act, every step in their decline to death. This right apparently overrides any claims of love, compassion, dignity and personal and family relationships. The modern individual is regarded by the law as first and foremost a possession of the state, the purest form of communism. This attitude is now supported by a Tory-led coalition.

It is a truism that personal responsibility and self-determination are in retreat before the onward march of government. But while this is bewailed in general, it is supported in particular by demands for new regulation with each new crisis, most recently in the care of elderly people and "problem families". Incoming governments pretend to de-regulate, but never do. When in opposition, politicians seek to curb the state, deplored as "not the same as society" by David Cameron in a sudden Blairite seizure. Yet ever since Cameron found himself with a state of his own, it has taken on a warm, cuddly appeal.

Polls on assisted dying regularly show three-quarters of the public in favour of some degree of legalisation. Doctors are more evenly divided, unsurprisingly as their job is to keep people alive. But even the BMA, which used to oppose assisted dying, voted in 2005 "not to oppose legislation which alters the criminal law, but to press for robust safeguards both for patients and for doctors who do not want to be involved in such procedures."

I regard the view of the philosopher Mary Warnock as conclusive on this subject, that an adult's freedom of decision over his or her own body should trump any overriding claim from the state. This applies to the environment of death as much as creation. As Warnock wrote in the Observer last Sunday, we should proclaim "how deeply we desire a good death, for ourselves, our friends and family; and how much we resent the assumption that death must be fended off at all costs, whatever our wishes". Nor should the response of loved ones and others be wholly ignored. "The desire to escape the intolerable humiliations as well as the pains of incurable illness," wrote Warnock, "usually combines with the desire not to be a burden or a futile expense; this is a perfectly respectable motive, which should not be thought of as the outcome of undue pressure."

In her dispassionate analysis of the law on dying, the LSE law professor Emily Jackson has challenged the "slippery slope" argument that any benign reform should be opposed as possibly leading to a malign outcome. She points out that "the grey area problem exists whenever we attempt to regulate anything". Merely banning a benefit that could possibly become a disbenefit is stupid and possibly counter-productive, as with the law on so-called recreational drugs. A crude society allows itself to be ruled by imaginary fears. A civilised one rolls up its sleeves and tries to draw lines.

Nothing prevents death, but the government need not force on the dying an unwanted, unnecessary indignity, family trauma and legal confusion. It should listen and legislate. It should not declare assisted dying a matter of "individual conscience" while leaving it subject to criminal law and calling it murder.

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