To Correct The Record

Yuan Yi Zhu writes:

Before MPs voted to support the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, Kim Leadbeater, who has sponsored the bill, rose on a point of order.

There were murmurs in the House. Then Leadbeater said, a little sheepishly, that she wanted to correct the record. She had wrongly implied that serving members of the judiciary had indicated they support the bill. The Judicial Office had written to her, telling her off; and now she was repenting at the eleventh hour.

It was a fitting conclusion to a debate that has been, from beginning to the end, characterised by falsehoods. Still, MP after MP stood up and thanked Leadbeater for the way she had conducted the debate.

I say this is Leadbeater’s bill, but it is perhaps more accurate to say this is Dignity in Dying’s bill. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society (as it used to be known) has for almost a century tried to legitimise the principle that lives can be ended when they’re not worth living.

Ahead of the vote, Dignity in Dying, flush with money, advertised on a massive scale. They plastered Facebook with ads. They covered the walls of Westminster tube station with posters showing people jumping in joy to celebrate being able to kill themselves. (There is at least one suicide attempt every week on the underground network.) Dignity in Dying knew this vote was their best shot at legalising assisted dying in a century, and they held nothing back

In parliament, Leadbeater has not behaved much better. She and her supporters knew from the beginning that too much debate on this issue was dangerous. She waited until less than three weeks before the vote before she released the text of her bill. When it was impossible to scrutinise, she was telling every gullible media outlet that her bill would have the strongest safeguards in the world.

There was no way, she and her allies said, that Britain would become like Belgium, where depressed teenagers can now legally take their lives with the help of doctors. Or the Netherlands, where disabled toddlers are now involuntarily euthanised. Or Canada, where disabled people are regularly asked by doctors whether they want to be euthanised. No, Britain would be different, of course.

Then, when the bill was released, it turned out that Leadbeater’s world-beating safeguards were about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The bill says that assisted dying will require sign-off from two doctors, the second of whom is meant to be ‘independent’. In reality, the first doctor will be allowed to pick and choose the ‘independent’ doctor. If the independent doctor disagrees about going ahead, the first doctor can simply pick another.

Leadbeater has repeatedly argued that one of the safeguards in her bill is a required sign-off from a High Court judge. In reality, our overworked family courts are not going to have the time to properly scrutinise thousands of assisted dying requests a year. And the wording of the bill means judges will not even have to hold a hearing before making their decision. It is hard to understand what the purpose of this ‘safeguard’ is – except perhaps to make wavering MPs feel better about voting in favour.

Often during the assisted dying debate it became apparent that the bill’s supporters had no idea about its shortcomings. Many did not appear to have actually read the bill.

Christine Jardine, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, fumbled so badly at answering the most basic questions about it on Newsnight that she stopped making media appearances for her side for weeks. Another supportive MP, Tony Vaughan, confused the High Court and the Court of Protection, and accused his critics of ‘hair-splitting’.

A few years ago, Canada was all the rage among assisted suicide’s promoters in England. Once the horrors of its Medical assistance in dying (MAID) regime had been laid bare before the world, the death lobbyists switched to Oregon as their go-to example. In the House today, MP after MP stood up to say that Oregon was an example of best practice.

In Oregon, there are reported cases of people being given ‘assisted suicide’ for anorexia, sciatica, arthritis, complications from a fall and, incredibly, a hernia (we do not know the precise details of these cases because medical files are destroyed after death). Yet this was the system our legislators wanted to replicate.

Many MPs, in five- or ten-years’ time, will claim sheepishly that ‘we didn’t know this would happen’, or ‘we didn’t vote for this’ when the disabled and the vulnerable are killed. But MPs cannot be allowed to claim ignorance.

They were warned, they knew exactly what would happen and they will have to assume moral responsibility for every single wrongful death that the Leadbeater bill will cause. History will not be kind to them.