Rifts within the Labour party look set to fracture along new lines, as a Labour MP says she’ll reintroduce the highly controversial assisted dying bill.
Lauren Edwards, MP for Rochester and Strood, has said she will use her second place in the Private Members’ Bill ballot to bring forward the same Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill Kim Leadbeater introduced last year. The original bill was narrowly voted through by the House of Commons but fell in April after running out of time to clear the House of Lords because of the huge number of safeguarding amendments tabled.
“By bringing exactly the same legislation, Edwards is threatening to trigger rarely used powers to override peers’ objections should they refuse to pass it again”, said the BBC. Under the Parliament Acts – only used seven times in the past century – a bill that has been voted through by the Commons in two consecutive parliamentary sessions can pass into law without the Lords’ approval.
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The original bill, on which MPs were give a “free vote” according to conscience, caused deep divisions in Parliament. And as Edwards makes her new move, her fellow Labour MPs are also “at each other’s throats” over their party’s future direction, said The Independent. Last time round, Keir Starmer voted in favour of the bill and one of his potential leadership contenders, former health secretary Wes Streeting, voted against. “Andy Burnham’s position is not clear”.
Labour MP Ashley Dalton, who has cancer, is “deeply concerned” that the bill is returning. “Voters put us in power to reduce the cost of living and fix the NHS,” she told The Independent. We debated this “deeply divisive and flawed” bill for over a year but its supporters did not “listen or to make the necessary changes”.
Supporters of assisted dying “insist” the bill only failed because “a handful of peers blocked it”, said Hannah Barnes in The New Statesman. “They are ideologically opposed to the principle,” Sarah Wootton of campaign group Dignity in Dying told the magazine. In response to fears that vulnerable people could be coerced into taking their own lives, she said current criminal law requires “no systemic exploration” of whether a terminally ill person who takes their own life has been coerced to do so. “I don’t see how you can argue that having greater scrutiny, transparency and regulation” won’t protect people “more than the status quo”.
Yet “blaming a handful of peers for the bill’s demise ignores the concerns that were raised by others before debate even began”, said Barnes. There were numerous worries from across the political spectrum “about the bill’s lack of pre-legislative scrutiny and the absence of detail about how assisted dying would work in practice”. There was no support from “the medical royal colleges”, nor from “any major disability charity or organisation”.
I support the right to die but not this legislation – because it only “covers a vanishingly small number of people”, whose needs could really “be met via decent palliative care”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. It is designed for a person who has six or less months to live, is of sound mind and wishes to die without pain or uncertainty. But “when I talk to people about” assisted dying, most of those who “want the right” are those who do not want “to spend years in expensive, suspended animation while their dementia costs eat away at everything they’ve worked for”. But this legislation “is precisely designed not to provide for people who do not wish to have a slow death via dementia”. I fear politicians are “much more squeamish about that aspect of wanting the right to die than the average British person”.
What next?
Some doubt that the legislation would even pass the House of Commons this time. If it doesn’t, it would hardly be “a surprise, given that Leadbeater’s legislation passed its Commons Third Reading by just 23 votes”, said The Spectator. “That means only 12 MPs would need to switch from support to opposition for it to fall.”
Edwards has claimed she does not want the bill to be forced through and is open to making changes. “There undoubtedly are lots of peers who have tabled sensible amendments, and they should be considered in the usual way,” she told BBC Radio 4. “It’s all about following the proper democratic processes that we have.”
