Dan Hitchens writes:
In June 2025 Janet Daby, the Member of Parliament for Lewisham East, started having nightmares: terrible images of death and dying that disturbed her sleep and haunted her conscience. She didn’t need a psychotherapist to interpret them. That month she had joined 313 other MPs in voting through an assisted suicide bill. She was beginning to think she might have made the wrong choice, and the 291 MPs on the other side might have made the right one.
There was one conversation that added to Daby’s doubts: someone she knew who had HIV and AIDS, and who many years before, with a bleak prognosis, had wished for the swift exit of an assisted death; but who had since found the right drugs, and made a decent life for himself. The kind of person who might be swallowed up by a state suicide service before he or she had the chance to find help. That was the kind of person she had endangered with her vote. And now it was too late.
But the British constitution, like life, sometimes gives you a second chance. The assisted suicide bill, which had floated through the House of Commons on a cloud of expensive PR and vague-minded goodwill, now had to negotiate the House of Lords, a place filled with real experts who have also been around the block a few times. In the Commons, you count as a medical authority if you used to be a family doctor; in the Lords, you only qualify if you’ve run a royal medical college or been CEO of the National Health Service. A lot of people assumed that the Lords (who are appointed, not elected) would have to wave through a bill of such importance, given that elected representatives had approved it. The Lords themselves were less persuadable.
And as they examined the bill, over a long period in late 2025 and early 2026, they began to uncover the same kind of problems as Janet Daby. The Royal College of Psychiatrists pointed out, to a committee convened by the Lords, that if people were depressed, the state would help them kill themselves—without asking too many questions about what help they needed. Experts in coercion observed that if people were being psychologically terrorized by an abusive partner, the state would help them kill themselves. One organization after another pointed out that if people fell through the gaps in Britain’s rickety health and care system, the state would help them kill themselves. However much supporters intoned the phrases “bodily autonomy” and “right to choose,” this all began to sound less than impeccably progressive.
More revealingly yet, the bill’s champion Lord Falconer—the last member of the Blair circle still somewhere near the center of British politics—happily embraced the more sinister implications of the proposal. What if, he was asked, people chose an assisted death because they were poor? Well, he said, if they met the broad medical criteria, it was “their choice.” What if it was because they couldn’t access good palliative care? A pity, but “we have to give everybody this choice on the basis of the way the world is for them.” Philosophically, this seemed naive about the nature of freedom. Politically, it sounded nuts. The Lords did not pass the bill. An MP, indignant at this supposed affront to democracy, reintroduced it to the House of Commons. And Janet Daby got her second chance.
Britain has many problems: a broken economic model, a fragmented culture, a political class that seems consistently unequal to the massive challenges facing it. But we are also the inheritors of a remarkable set of institutions, which continue to elevate even the second- and third-rate people who dominate them. You hear many complaints that the quality of parliamentary rhetoric, and of MPs themselves, has declined steeply. And yet the procedures of parliament—the endless committees, the formal debates, the curious relationship between the Commons and the Lords—were, as it turned out, the best way to examine the issue of assisted suicide.
Other countries have debated the subject, but nowhere has devoted so much passion and forensic analysis to the issue. Witnesses were called. Speeches—some extraordinary speeches—were given. Bitter exchanges broke out. And the result was that an initial majority of fifty-five dwindled, over two years of furious back-and-forth, into a deficit of sixteen.
What swung the result? Perhaps less one issue than a steady accumulation of doubts. Hospices and care homes might be closed or defunded—this was explicitly threatened by one of the main proponents of the bill. Disabled people would come under pressure. People would die because the health system had failed them. The high costs of care would provide a powerful incentive for death. The purpose of the National Health Service would be redefined. The supporters of the bill, when they heard objections like this, responded with baffled impatience. Didn’t people understand this was inevitable? It was summed up by the popular Labour MP Jess Phillips, who when asked whether the NHS was in a fit state to deliver an assisted suicide regime, replied: “Of course the NHS isn’t in a fit enough state . . . but you cannot stop progress happening.”
This, for many MPs, was a kind of progress Britain could not afford, and today the bill was voted down by 286 votes to 270. A lot of those who had previously voted for the bill stayed away or abstained. A smaller number, like Janet Daby, switched to oppose the bill. Nobody—not one MP—switched the other way. This is what losing an argument looks like.
The Houses of Parliament themselves are crumbling into the Thames; after a century and a half, they have become a considerable safety risk, and need extensive renovations that Britain will struggle to afford. But on the right kind of evening, lit up against the sky, they are still the most beautiful sight in London.
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