Momentum may be swinging back towards supporters of a proposed law allowing for the assisted dying – decried by critics as assisted suicide – of terminally ill people in England and Wales. The stage is set for another showdown vote in the House of Commons next month, possibly on April 25th.
The Bill championed by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater passed a crucial second reading vote in the Commons last November, paving the way for England and Wales to begin designing a regime that would allow people with six months or less to live to be provided with drugs to end their own lives if they so chose.
Scotland, Jersey and the Isle of Man are all separately considering their own assisted dying regimes, with health a decentralised power in the UK.
Since the vote in Westminster, however, it hasn’t been plain sailing for Leadbeater and her supporters.
Prime minister Keir Starmer, who first backed assisted dying as a rookie MP a decade ago, allowed a free vote on the issue at November’s second reading, meaning it wasn’t whipped upon party lines. Yet that move served only to show up the extent of divisions on the matter within his own party.
Just 23 Tories voted in favour of the Bill – the overwhelming majority of the Conservative opposition is against it.
About 234 Labour MPs backed it while 147 voted against, with a further 22 Labour MPs abstaining. The Bill was also not supported by several senior members of Starmer’s cabinet, including deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and the cabinet members who would be responsible for implementing an assisted dying regime: health secretary Wes Streeting and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood.
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After an impassioned debate, the measure passed in November by 330 votes to 275, a higher margin than had been predicted. Many observers assumed the size of the victory had put the main question to bed and that some sort of regime for assisted dying was now inevitable. The Bill moved on to committee stage, where hearings have been held this week, including a marathon session on Tuesday.
Some MPs who had wavered but eventually backed the proposal said they had only done so because originally each assisted death would have to be signed off by a high court judge. To mollify her critics, Leadbeater had argued this would make it the strictest regime in the world. Her opponents, meanwhile, which include religious and conservative groups, predicted the regime would be further watered down over time after it became law.
As it happened, their concerns were realised quicker than they feared: the regime was watered down before it became law. Court administrators expressed disquiet about the possible effect of the regime on the operation of the courts. So Leadbeater and her supporters stripped out the mandatory high court judge sign-off that was so crucial in convincing waverers, and replaced it with a voluntary assisted dying commissioner, a post that has quickly been dubbed a “death tsar”.
Leadbeater argued that the judge clause would in practice be replaced by a three-person panel of a psychiatrist, a social worker and a senior legal figure, who could be a retired judge. But opponents of the Bill smelled an opportunity amid the uncertainty to upend Leadbeater’s proposals at a late hour.
But the pendulum may be swinging back again. Earlier this month, the Bill’s scrutinising committee voted 15 to seven in favour of deleting the judge clause, while this week the representative body for Britain’s GPs also seemed to drop its objections to assisted dying, in favour of a “neutral stance”.
In news that might also buttress wavering supporters, fresh data from the National Centre for Social Research this week also showed that public support for some form of assisted dying system remained “high and stable” at 79 per cent.
In advance of the Bill’s third Commons vote next month, after which it would go to the House of Lords for tidying up, opponents of the proposal have been trying to crank up the heat again. Recently, it emerged that the Anglican bishop of London Sarah Mullally complained there was a “serious risk” that older or sick people would feel pressured to choose assisted dying because they felt a burden to others, and there was little provision in the Bill to stop this.
[ Should assisted dying be legalised? Louise Campbell and Des O’Neill debateOpens in new window ]
“The irreducible value of every human person means that no one is a burden, every life is precious, every life is worthy of care. No one should feel compelled to hasten their own death,” she wrote to the committee.
All eyes will be on the Commons when the matter comes back before MPs for another landmark vote in a few weeks.
