Making law is about the head, not the heart. I don’t want MPs offering personal testimony | Simon Jenkins

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Recently, John Healey, the relatively new defence secretary, made a personal confession. He told how his son’s current military service “plays on his mind when deciding to commit British soldiers to areas of risk”. He confessed that “it makes me lose sleep” and helps him “understand the gravity of military action overseas”.

We can only sympathise, and some might perhaps be thankful that such human responses weigh on decisions being made on our behalf.

But should they? The recent argument over assisted dying led to one of the most emotional debates ever heard in the House of Commons. Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill was passed with one MP after another rising to recount the loss of a relative or friend. They told of deaths in agony, screaming in pain, gasping for breath, and the traumas of loved ones. Commentators listened in awe. Sketchwriters laid down cynical pens and declared that never had they heard such a moving and impressive debate.

Laws are for everyone. Legislators pass them not for themselves but in the interest of the nation. If they stand to benefit financially or professionally, they must declare it. But if the interest is personal, we assume the reverse. We see them as bringing their own suffering to inform debate. I am not sure it does.

The current proposal to impose inheritance tax on farms was challenged by the Northern Ireland MP Carla Lockhart. She spoke of her “deeply personal” reaction to the tax, to her feelings of “uncertainty, disappointment, apprehension, dread and heartbreak” at the chancellor’s policy. Lockhart then admitted she was a farmer. I suppose all taxpayers could say the same.

One of the best-remembered Commons speeches of recent years was on a domestic abuse bill in 2019 by the Labour MP Rosie Duffield. Her account of her own suffering, “of reward, punishment, promises of happy ever after, alternating with abject rage, menace, silent treatment and coercive control”, reduced MPs to tears. She pleaded to “anyone who is watching and needs a friend, please reach out”. The then speaker told a silent chamber that it was “as simultaneously horrifying and moving” as any speech he had heard in 22 years in the Commons.

Similar debates have taken place over sexual harassment, hate speech and racial discrimination. It can be hard to argue pragmatism and judicial priorities against the emotion of personal distress. The argument over assisted dying has strong feelings on both sides. There was horror at the pain and indignity of some deaths. As we listened, it was hard not to shout, enough, let the bill through at once. Then there was horror at the prospect of coercion, after which it was equally hard not to see “loved ones” and doctors who already practise assisted dying in other countries as vulnerable to being castigated as – to deploy the terminology of vehement opponent Danny Kruger – killers.

I found the debate as moving as did most of the supporters of the bill. I likewise respect Healey’s admission that fatherly concern weighs on his mind in deciding on military deployment. I respected Duffield’s desire for more action to be taken against domestic violence. But I also think that personal experience should not influence decisions taken in the public interest. Nor should it influence rational debate. The purpose of a democratic parliament is to separate public goods from private ones, in favour of the former.

Adjudicating on crime and punishment is not a matter that western criminal justice delegates to its victims, though Islamic sharia law can do so in the payment of diya, or financial compensation. If the punishment for murder was left to relatives of the murdered, capital punishment might still be with us. We do not allow the mugged or their relatives to determine the fate of the muggers. If crooked water board directors were to be punished by their customers, many would end up at the bottom of a reservoir.

In the case of assisted dying, it is hoped that the moment for emotion has passed. The Leadbeater bill must now endure a different, perhaps no less tortuous fate, that of parliamentary procedure. As proposed, the bill appears unsatisfactory, and now we know that up to 30 MPs who backed it previously may withdraw support at the next parliamentary vote.

Leaving “assistance” to be determined by judges and additional doctors seems needlessly bureaucratic. Some have suggested this process might consume all the six months that the dying person is expected to survive. But these safeguards are themselves a response to emotion, not reason. The six-month time limit would seem a discriminatory infringement on freedom of choice.

The desire to protect vulnerable people against coercion is legitimate. But it should depend on concepts such as risk and proportionality. In other countries coercion has not been a serious problem. If the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Spain and Switzerland can chart this delicate path without descending into a contest of horrors, so surely can Britain. As the MP Kit Malthouse said in the debate: “We are a 1,000-year-old democracy and should be able to design legislation on this issue ourselves.”

I want legislators to decide what is in my interest free of the incubus of personal bias or emotion. It is everyone whose child they are sending to war, whose wealth they are taxing and whose liberty they are curbing. Personal testimony may move the crowd – and the House – but we should have a care about the extent to which it could, or should, make law. At the heart of such decisions should be reason and reason alone.