Last year I voted to give Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill a second reading in the House of Commons. I had many concerns but thought it was right for Parliament to debate this issue and for the Bill to be able to begin its journey through Parliament. As is often the case, the Bill met stiff opposition under scrutiny in the House of Lords and ran out of time. Today I voted against the same Bill as it was reintroduced. Why?
My position on assisted dying hasn’t changed: I support a change to the law to allow doctors to provide patients facing a painful, demeaning and humiliating death in the final stages of a terminal disease to die with dignity. This is what most of our hospitals and our wonderful palliative care clinics go out of their way to provide already – but too often they do so in fear of the current legal position and the threat of legal or disciplinary challenge.
I do not want to live in a society which signals that life becomes less sacred when painful
But given the gravity of the moral, ethical, clinical and societal concerns this issue inevitably raises, I do not think this Private Member’s Bill (PMB) is the appropriate or correct way to do it.
I had been minded to vote in what’s called a “positive abstention” in Parliamentary convention – voting both AYE to signal support for the aims of the Bill and NO to signal that I don’t think this Bill is the correct mechanism.
But after listening carefully to the debate – over the last 18 months and today in the Commons – I decided I cannot vote for today’s reintroduction of the Leadbeater Private Member’s Bill. An issue of this gravity needs a Government Bill and I have written to the Prime Minister to urge the Government to recognise that the House has clearly signalled it wants a law change. But done properly.
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Steven Edginton
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First, it’s disappointing that the Bill introduced today is exactly the same as the Leadbeater Bill and contains no amendments to reflect the many concerns raised in good faith by MPs and Peers, and a clear refusal by the Sponsor to accept any amendments. Instead, we heard the sponsors urge the House to vote for the Bill to defy “the obstruction of the Lords” described as a threat to democracy, and invoke the Parliament Act to overrule the House of Lords. We heard the argument that the House somehow has a duty to show it cares by not letting the search for perfect drafting get in the way of a vote in Principle for a Bill, even if we aren’t happy with all of its provisions. “If we don’t vote for this Bill we are condemning many of our constituents to an unnecessarily painful death,” we were told. These are dangerously emotive arguments which should not form the basis of a Parliamentary vote on a matter of this magnitude.
Second, PMBs are not suitable mechanisms for an issue of this magnitude which requires the most careful pre-legislative scrutiny, genuine consultation of all the representative bodies involved in the provision of healthcare and all the protections that come with a Government Bill properly introduced, including advice from the Government’s Law Officers.
Passing this Bill onto the Statute Books to legalise Assisted Dying will throw up a mountain of issues for Government as well as patients and those working in healthcare, which have not been properly considered by MPs, or the Government. They need to be.
Third, the arguments of Assisted Dying advocates and the specific provisions of this Bill to legislate to make it legal to accelerate a patient’s death raise serious concerns about the risks of Parliament sending a signal – possibly inadvertently – that life loses its value towards its end, and that we are relaxed about the risk of coercion or the vulnerable, sick and frail feeling society wants to encourage them to ease us of their burden.
I was very concerned to see a raft of safeguards removed in the Bill’s passage in the last Parliament, and other safeguards requested by the medical community dismissed.
This is a dangerous precedent, not least because assisted dying is only one part of a much bigger set of ethical issues thrown up by the increasing pace of advance in modern medicine – from the breakthroughs in genetics, which allow parents to identify genetic disease risks before a child is born, to breakthroughs in disease diagnosis, which mean an increasing number of conditions can be diagnosed without treatment. After a career in biomedical research, and having served as first UK Minister for Life Science, we need Parliament to be better able to deal with medical ethics. This is why the dismissal of the views of so many distinguished medics, Professors, judges, philosophers and lawmakers in the Lords is so disappointing.
The Bill has serious implications for the fine balance between personal and collective responsibility which sits at the heart of a civilised society. As a Conservative, I believe deeply in personal responsibility, but I also believe in collective responsibility and the reciprocal rights and obligations between citizens which constitute a healthy society. No man is indeed an island unto himself.
How we care for our most vulnerable has always been to me a pillar of our society. Whilst I deeply respect the fundamental right of each of us to determine our own life choices, that freedom exists within a framework of reciprocal responsibilities and collective moral and humanitarian values enshrined in our laws and conventions.
I want to live in a society where those facing the final stages of a debilitating terminal disease can choose to ease their inevitable death. But I do not want to live in a society which signals that life becomes less sacred when painful, or is relaxed about people feeling it appropriate to take their own life, or one in which assisted death is widely encouraged or commonplace.
I’ve concluded today that the Commons’ job is not to rush to show it cares, but to show we can legislate carefully to protect the invisible balance of rights and responsibilities between the individual, society and the state which define us all.
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