The Assisted Suicide Bill Now Looks Certain to Fall. It Was Doomed by its Supporters’ Arrogance

With the welcome news that the assisted suicide bill is almost certain to fall following the Government’s refusal to allocate it more Parliamentary time, Toby in the Telegraph says it was doomed by the arrogance of its own supporters. Here’s an excerpt.

The news that the Government is not planning to allocate more time to the bill that would legalise assisted suicide in the UK – meaning it won’t make it out of the House of Lords before the end of this parliamentary session – will be greeted with howls of outrage by its supporters. This outrage will be even greater given that Jersey has just approved a similar bill, making the Crown dependency the second part of the British Isles after the Isle of Man to give the green light to the landmark societal change.

That fury won’t be directed at the Government, but at my colleagues on the red benches who’ve tabled all those pesky amendments – 1,227 to be precise. “Wreckers”, will be the cry. “How dare they frustrate the will of the elected House? Abolish the Upper House!”

That is unfair. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, to give it its official name, was a complete dog’s dinner, as was acknowledged by almost everyone who looked at it seriously. Not a single Royal College – not the Royal College of Physicians, not the Royal College of General Practitioners, not the Royal College of Psychiatrists – gave the bill its backing.

Dozens of other authoritative bodies and individual clinicians lined up to express concern about the safeguards, the capacity assessments, the coercion risks, the definition of terminal illness, the difficulty of predicting how much time people have left, and the absence of any proper provision for conscientious objection from those doctors and nurses who wanted no part of helping people commit suicide.

That the bill needed major surgery was also the view of its backers. Some MPs who voted for it at third reading acknowledged its shortcomings but said they expected them to be addressed in the Lords. That even extended to the bill’s sponsors. Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who first brought forward the bill in the Commons, said she’d welcome their Lordships’ “experience and expertise”. Lord Falconer told Labour colleagues the bill would “benefit” from that same expertise. They can hardly now turn round and complain that we took the job of scrutinising the bill seriously.

Had Lord Falconer been in a more conciliatory mood, the bill might have made more progress. But he refused to accept almost all of the amendments, meaning that valuable parliamentary time has been taken up debating them. Throughout the bill’s passage, he’s proved to be an absolutely hopeless politician, doggedly defending every clause, however unfit for purpose, and refusing to compromise. In the Lords, the only way to win is by reaching out across the floor and forming alliances. Falconer is more of a demolition expert than a bridge builder.

Most of all, says Toby, it’s on Starmer, who refused to make it a Government bill or give it proper time and do the detailed implementation work necessary. In truth, says Toby, the bill, which is “by some distance, the most consequential piece of legislation before this Parliament”, was never going to make it through as a private members’ bill. “If the legislation is revived, it won’t be until Starmer is out of Number 10.”

Worth reading in full.