December 1, 2024 - 3:30pm
Last week in Parliament, MPs voted to legalise euthanasia. Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed its Second Reading by 55 votes. With 59% of Labour MPs and 89% of Lib Dems in favour, it is overwhelmingly likely that the legislation will sail through its remaining stages with a minimum of difficulty and indeed scrutiny.
So when it does become law, should those who oppose it simply accept the situation?
No, because there are several things they can do to continue the fight. Firstly, they can refuse to comply with the language policing of this issue. The most telling moment of last week’s debate was when Danny Kruger’s speech against the Bill was interrupted by a Labour MP on a spurious point of order. He mustn’t use the term “assisted suicide”, she demanded, because it was “incorrect”. Kruger politely, but firmly, declined to be censored. Some people might find his plain words offensive, but others might be offended by the very idea of state-sanctioned death.
Secondly, MPs opposed to assisted killing could seek to introduce a Right to Palliative Care Bill and challenge Keir Starmer to make as much room for that in the Parliamentary timetable as he has for the Leadbeater Bill. After all, if this really is all about patient choice and dignity how could he object?
Thirdly, Parliament should be relentless in monitoring the implementation of euthanasia in the UK. With their power to summon witnesses to public hearings, the relevant select committees are ideally placed to shine a light on what’s about to happen. Of course, with its overwhelming majority, we should expect Labour to do what it can to keep us in the dark.
The last best hope for adequate scrutiny therefore lies with the Official Opposition. Last week, four out of five Tory MPs voted against the Leadbeater Bill. This may be a free vote issue, but when the legislation passes, ministers will be responsible for its implementation and the Conservative front bench for holding them to account. At the very least, an annual Opposition Day Debate should be used to ensure that Starmer and his colleagues have to answer for what they’ve enabled.
With Labour sinking in the polls, the prospect of a Conservative return to power doesn’t seem so distant. Therefore Tory policy announcements matter. Taking inspiration from the Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people, Kemi Badenoch could commit now to an independent review of euthanasia services in the NHS.
The best guarantee that the UK doesn’t go down the same road as Canada and Oregon is the certain knowledge among euthanasia practitioners that a change of government will mean tougher regulation. Most clarifying of all would be a commitment to ensure that those guilty of malpractice face disciplinary action — and, if the law has been broken, criminal prosecution. Practitioners in this country should not be able to count on Canadian levels of impunity.
Finally, Conservatives need not accept Left-wing ideas of inevitable “progress”. There should be nothing irreversible about a bad law. If the safeguards promised by the Leadbeater Bill are not delivered, then a future government must repeal it.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeSensible suggestions. However well-meaning the MPs who voted for this bill, it is an absolutely disastrous start down a very slippery slope. I don’t believe parliament will be an effective brake to the inevitable commercialised legal and moral creep unless a future governments is able to completely overturn the legislation. I still cannot grasp the scale of the utterly irresponsible acceptance by so many MPs of such weak and ambiguous ‘safeguards’.
As far as I can tell, the proposed safeguards in Britain are greater than those in place in the various Australian States.
You mean they’re even weaker in Aus?
Well (in the State in which I live in at least) you don’t have to get sign-off from a Judge.
What safeguards? For example, how do two doctors and, apparently, a judge determine whether pressure has been exerted by a greedy beneficiary, abusive partner, malicious relative even an exhausted carer? All done so that the suicide can be swiftly assisted?
There’s much detail behind that question.
We have even less by way of safeguards in Western Australia, and the legislation is working perfectly.
I sincerely doubt a vote of conscience can have a meaning with today’s MPs. ‘Conscience’ not debatable in the first place, and professionally incompatible, Constituents being an MP’s conscience? Not surprised by the nice LibDem’s statistic. Good idea, the palliative care bill though?
Are you the same person that implied in a similar comment a few days ago that your conscience was somehow more reliable and better than that of MPs ? Seems a rather arrogant assumption to be making.
The way a democracy is supposed to work, is that once a bill is passed, the opposition accept the result until they get a turn at government. Doing everything you can to subvert it, like the sore-loser Dems in the US, is something that nice people don’t do.
I think you’re behind the times with the meaning of ‘nice’.
Glad to be behind the times if ‘nice’ people now means people who do things that they should not. Do you have the updated meaning of ‘bad’ people?
You know the story where the wolf dipped his feet in flour? Or one where a hunter killed and cut the heart from an innocent deer?
An old-fashioned view. When people worked 50 hours a week, there were no washing machines or vacuum cleaners at home, only BBC on TV, etc, work was gruelling and took all of your energy. The rich landowners made the laws and you just worked patiently. Today for most, work is not gruelling, people sit for hours in front of tablets or phones and get instant news, there are hundreds of TV channels plus YouTube. Ideas are instantaneously transmitted.
So you can read The Daily Telegraph AND The Guardian, watch BBC AND GBNews. Why should you just sit there and let a load of pampered twits dictate to you for five years?
This isn’t a class issue.
….or the sore-loser Remainers after the Brexit Referendum.
This is only the start. Using the human rights legislation that Tony Blair so thoughtfully put onto the statute book, clever-d**k lawyers and activist judges will turn this into a free-for-all.
Surely you don’t oppose human rights?
I’ve made clear my support for the passage of the bill, yet i agree with every word of this article.
I suggested (yesterday) that the UK could and should set an example of ensuring the “slippery slope” doesn’t occur, and the writer makes very useful and sensible suggestions as to how this can be avoided.
I’m all for using ‘plain speaking’ and fully agree that the use of terms such as “suicide” are entirely appropriate. The last thing we need is for undue sensitivities precluding full and frank debate on a very sensitive topic. I doubt anyone wishing to use the provisions of the bill (when it becomes law) will have the least qualms about that, whilst in a state of terminal and intractable suffering.
At the same time, the issue of palliative care provision should be brought under the spotlight of public opinion on how the government should spend our money. Make such provision the best it can be and stop funding overseas regimes who don’t share our values, or those entering the country with a similar mindset.
I moved this text from What the death bill tells us about life comments
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Should a Government Help People Die? Article from The Free Press
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Comment by William Rosenberg
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As a neurosurgeon who specializes in the treatment of chronic and cancer-related pain, this hits home. Even in well-developed palliative care programs, knowledge of more advanced, effective techniques to control pain is lacking. We have many such techniques of appropriate invasiveness – outpatient, using a needle with local anesthesia, etc.
True story: a many in his 50s with inoperable lung cancer invading the chest wall, an extremely painful condition. After months of ineffective treatment, he eventually came to me. We did a percutaneous cordotomy (local anesthesia with a needle, about 20 minutes in the CT scanner) and he was immediately pain free. The next morning I checked on him and he was crying. Concerned that his pain returned, I asked him why. He said when he was in pain, all he wanted to do was die. Now that he had no pain, he realized he was actually dying.
He lived about 6 more months, at home, with his family, without pain. Years later, I ran into his son who could not stop thanking me for those six months with him.
There are many more such stories.
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I have nothing to add
I have something. “He lived about 6 more months at home, with his family….” The key word here is family. With a tight family, everybody looks after everybody else. Without family, what is there?
You could be super-intelligent, fit mentally and physically, speak 15 languages, get loads of upticks on UnHerd, etc. But when these diseases hit you, all of that fitness goes and you become a passenger. Without family, what do you do in the long days?
People without families should pay for their choice.
But that has nothing to do with what I think about this law.
Judaism and Christianity clearly condemn suicide, which in this case also has clear signs of murder.
This law destroys one of the pillars on which Western civilization stands, at the foundation of which, like it or not, stands the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
It is no surprise to me that this law was passed by the Labour Party. Socialism is the enemy of humanity, using and glorifying mass murders. If you do not understand this, that is your business, but mark my words – you will pay for it and much sooner than you think
Yes, but the Judaea-Christian tradition was set down at a time when everything was about family life. Huge families lived together and protected each other. Life expectancy in those days was probably 50 years if you were lucky. If you caught a fever you died. So there were fewer of these long lingering deaths where people were kept alive by manufactured drugs.
So you are taking laws laid down when things were so different compared to today, that they are almost impossible to imagine. To be trivial (but it does show what I mean), God could have said that man should never travel at a speed greater than 10 miles per hour. Or that the important thing was to look after your sheep.
So you are taking laws laid down when things were so different compared to today, that they are almost impossible to imagine.
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Laws are about humans, not about medicine or travel by plane, and humans are fundamentally the same. Whether you live 50 or 80 years, whether you travel on camels or on planes, etc., you have the same problems, you make the same mistakes, and you suffer for the same reasons.
Archaeologists recently unearthed a 5th century gravestone near Carlisle. It recorded a British woman who ‘lived sixty years’. Not that she died aged sixty. But that she lived sixty years.
A doctor who writes a column in a Sunday newspaper asked her readers if they would agree to people ending their lives with legalised assisted dying if those people were ‘tired of life’.
Yet even a cursory glance at pages of registrations of death in England in the 19th century will show many infants who would have liked the chance of living long enough to be tired at the end of one year. Death certificates show children dying of whooping cough or peritonitis.
The bill hasn’t yet passed into law (although it probably will) and it’s not being sponsored by the Labour Party. There have been a number of attempts to pass a similar bill (but with less stringent safeguards) under different governments.
It’s not a party political issue, and trying to turn it into one is disingenuous – and i’m clearly far from being a Labour supporter.
All very interesting, but I am neither Jew nor Christian. Why should their “tradition” have any bearing on how I live my life?
Excuse me, you remind me of M. Jourdain from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme:
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“For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it…”
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All the best!
Yes another person setting up the false premise that better funded palliative care can address all the pain and suffering that this bill would allow people to choose to avoid.
Better funded palliative care might address some of the cases. But far from all of them.
Positioning this as an either/or argument is equally as misleading as any of the “language policing” the author claims is going on. Many very well informed speakers in last week’s debate made precisely this point.
It’s also incorrect to assume that this bill will now automatically pass.
The link with palliative care is a bit of a red herring. It’s not about either/or. Won’t labour it here but even the best palliative care, will not remove the desire of some to pick their own moment and will not ameliorate all indignity and pain.
I have considerable reservations and welcome the scrutiny that is to follow at the further legislative stages. Nonetheless the Article comes from the Right and endeavours to make this a slightly more partisan issue than I think appropriate. That said there is nothing to suggest the Right has ever considered better funding palliative care, nor would do so.
Suicide has no dignity.
There is something I have been thinking for some time now and the comment by the labour MP mentioned brought it back o the front of my mind. It is to with the effect of assisted dying on suicide rates in this country. Might this be a reason why some are so keen to insist on the term “assisted dying” rather than “assisted suicide”.