They Must Fulfil Their Duty

Even The Times editorialises:

Rarely has the role of the House of Lords as a revising chamber been so important: the debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which began on Friday, will hear from about 190 peers, a record number. Their task will be to amend, approve or reject this deeply flawed bill, which passed its third reading by the House of Commons in June by the narrow majority of 314 votes to 291.

Almost every stage of this private member’s bill backed by Kim Leadbeater, the MP for Spen Valley, has been marked by a skewing of the process and argument. As Baroness Falkner of Margravine pointed out, this was an inappropriate parliamentary vehicle for such a radical change to the law, which deserved the extensive evaluation of evidence that would have attended a government-sponsored bill. Thereafter, during its committee stage, serious questions were raised over the membership of Ms Leadbeater’s committee and the witnesses called: both were imbalanced in favour of those who were already demonstrably in agreement with assisted dying. The rushing of this legislation through the Commons resulted in a bill that many MPs, even those not opposed in principle, strongly argued was unfit to proceed further. It was opposed by the justice secretary at the time, Shabana Mahmood, the health secretary Wes Streeting, and a coalition of 350 disability organisations. A number of royal medical colleges voiced deep concern. Amendments that might have safeguarded the most vulnerable against potential abuses of the legislation were voted down, including one to require a person requesting assisted dying actively to demonstrate mental capacity, and another to deny the service to those mainly motivated by a fear of being a burden to society.

To comprehend the shocking extent of the bill’s deficiencies, one might reflect that it somehow arrived at a point whereby a doctor would be permitted to raise the option of assisted dying with a patient who has learning disabilities. And that private, for-profit providers can become involved in ending an individual’s life, on the inherently unreliable medical prognosis that they have six months or less left to live. A landscape mined with the potential for ethical failures has been created, and renamed as progress. The Lords would be more than justified in concluding that this bill, which is both sloppily designed and blundering through the most sensitive terrain of life and death, is irredeemable. During the debate, the former prime minister Theresa May spoke powerfully in opposition, arguing that there remained insufficient safeguards to prevent people from being pressurised to end their lives, sometimes for the benefit of others. Many peers, too, have expressed disquiet over the apparent dismissal of the alternative of vastly improving palliative care. Indeed, this bill includes the chilling possibility that hospices could be denied public funding if they refuse to provide assisted dying services.

Lord Falconer, the former Labour justice secretary who is sponsoring the bill in the Lords, assured peers that “the public want this”. Yet a growing gulf is emerging between many people’s theoretical ideal of a pain-free death sought only in extremis, and the practical likelihood of a profit-driven system in which the vulnerable can be insidiously pressured into choosing their own extinction. It should not have fallen to the Lords to protect the public from the latter scenario. Now that it has, they must fulfil their duty.