A Draft Statute That Does Not Pass Muster

Even The Times editorialises:

It may once have seemed shrewd to allow assisted dying legislation to be introduced as a private member’s bill. That strategy allowed the prime minister to make his personal support well known, associating himself with what he regards as a progressive reform, while minimising government infighting. Letting the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater act as the lightning rod for the bill also means that Sir Keir Starmer has avoided any ­accountability for the quality of the legislation. His government has repeatedly emphasised its neutrality despite his implicit patronage, as evident when Sir Keir made a point of promising the campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen that Commons time would be set aside to consider a change in the law.

It is now obvious that the shortcomings of this strategy outweigh such advantages. Entrusting such a consequential and delicate legislative exercise to a relatively inexperienced backbench MP has resulted in a poorly drafted, unworkable bill. Now facing appropriate scrutiny in the House of Lords, peers have tabled more than 1,000 amendments to the legal text. Many are concerned that the proposed law, which would entitle adults deemed to have less than six months to live to a state-assisted death, offers inadequate protection to the elderly, vulnerable and mentally unwell, who risk being coerced into ending their lives prematurely and against their interests.

Though in her more emollient moods Ms Leadbeater has welcomed the “robust debate and scrutiny” her bill would face in the Lords, she has since criticised the opposition it has met with there as “cruel” and unnecessary. Peers are being accused of exploiting procedure to stall the bill’s passage into law. Such allegations savour of hypocrisy given Ms Leadbeater’s own procedural gamesmanship. When building the House of Commons committee that scrutinised her bill, Ms Leadbeater sidelined those with principled and religious objections and refused to call a wide enough range of critical expert witnesses. Also excluded were sceptical MPs with medical and legal training. Instead, she handpicked largely compliant or novice MPs to work on the bill. The result, unsurprisingly, is a draft statute that does not pass muster.

That the bill was tabled by a private member may now, ironically, prove to be its downfall. Though extra legislative time was allocated in November, and again last week, to consider the Lords’ amendments, the number of days that can be devoted to private members’ bills is limited, to prevent them from displacing government business. The bill is likely to fail to clear the Lords before the end of the present parliamentary session, and cannot be straightforwardly carried over to the next session. It would instead have to be reintroduced from scratch or formally adopted as part of the government’s programme.

There would be nothing constitutionally untoward about Ms Leadbeater’s bill running aground in the Lords. Though by convention the upper house does not obstruct government business, there is no onus on it to extend special treatment to a private member’s bill. If the prime minister wants to see an assisted dying law added to the statute book, he ought to commit the necessary time and resources to make it fit for consideration. State-sponsored suicide, should it come to pass, will be among the changes for which his time in office will be most remembered: whether for good or, as seems more likely, for ill.

As Adam James Pollack writes:

During Committee Stage scrutiny of the assisted suicide Bill in the House of Lords, a radical Labour Peer named Baroness Hayter sent shivers down the spines of all those who understand the importance of suicide prevention.

On the first day of the Bill’s scrutiny following the Christmas recess, on Friday, 9 January, Baroness Hayter argued that assisted suicide “is not a life or death issue”, and asserted that it is not really suicide at all, simply because those concerned would die anyway. Hayter appeared to claim that terminally ill people who end their own lives cannot be said to have done so by suicide.

Regrettably, this is not the first time the noble Lady has made such dubious comments. Last year, she intervened in a speech opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide to argue that it is currently “completely legal for [individuals] to commit suicide without anyone doing any checks about whether they have capacity, ability or anything else. So the Bill is in fact adding a safeguard that is not there at the moment, because at the moment someone can take their own life.”

Rather than seeking to prevent individuals from ending their lives, Baroness Hayter appeared to suggest that legalising assisted suicide would give individuals with suicidal ideation a clearer, more definite route that they could take towards ending their lives, and that this might be a positive thing.

Hayter has espoused similarly confounding nonsense on other occasions too. During the House of Lords select committee scrutiny of the assisted suicide Bill in the autumn, she made another revealing remark, arguing that the legislation would add “safeguards” for those who already “take their own lives early”. Hayter has also insisted that “suicide is not an offence” and that “people have an absolute right to commit suicide”. In a nation that funds suicide prevention campaigns and mourns every death by suicide as a tragedy, making such statements unqualified is remarkable.

On another occasion, Hayter, a previous General Secretary of the radical Fabian Society,argued that legalising assisted suicide would be “a great improvement to the status quo” in that at the moment, “someone can go to Switzerland or, indeed, commit suicide themselves here, but there are no safeguards whatsoever”. The clear safeguard that assisting an individual in any way to end their own life is quite rightly currently illegal appears to be lost on Hayter.

This is the doublespeak of the assisted suicide lobby: legalising assisted suicide to protect people from suicide. We are told that legalised lethal drugs for the terminally ill are “safeguards” against suicide by other means. We are told that suicide carried out with state approval ceases to be suicide at all.

Kim Leadbeater MP, the Bill’s sponsor in the Commons, took the same approach when she said she found it “very uncomfortable” to hear her Bill described as legalising assisted suicide because, she claimed, the terminally ill “are definitely not suicidal.” Yet her Bill amends the Suicide Act 1961, to make lawful the act of “providing assistance to a person to end their own life.” If that does not describe suicide, it is hard to imagine what would.

Like Hayter, Leadbeater draws a distinction between suicide that is to be discouraged and suicide that is to be offered on prescription. Both women appeal to compassion; both rely on evasion. In October, I wrote in these pages about Leadbeater’s hypocrisy in attending a suicide prevention charity exhibition and calling for “the need for continued work on suicide prevention”, while at the same time spearheading the effort to legalise putting the onus of assisting suicide on the state.

The six-month prognosis test, which would determine an individual’s eligibility for assisted suicide, only adds to the absurdity of the situation. There is no moral alchemy that turns a suicide into an act of “care” simply because a doctor makes a guess at how close the individual may be to death anyway. As we have seen in Canada, once suicide is treated as healthcare, the boundaries dissolve, and eligibility criteria are rapidly expanded.

And that, perhaps, is the point. Once society accepts the idea that some suicides are rational, the cornerstone of its entire argument begins to crumble. Assisted suicide becomes the test case for whether we still believe that it is a good thing to safeguard life.

Suicide cannot be rebranded into compassion by the doublespeak of a grim band of fanatical campaigners. It remains what it has always been— the tragedy that is the deliberate, premature ending of a life — and it should continue to be the duty of both our laws and our culture to prevent it in all circumstances.