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3 weeks ago
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Don’t be taken in. Campaigners try to create an impression that the herd is moving their way, hoping to set off a stampede. “‘Chaotic’ assisted dying bill at risk over High Court U-turn”, goes one headline this week. But as the assisted dying bill makes its slow way through detailed scrutiny in Kim Leadbeater’s committee, it’s not happening. Only in the pages of the Tory press are MPs stampeding: actual MPs seem to be moving little, and if anything in favour, according to the campaign group Dignity in Dying. The vote at second reading was won by 55.
Leadbeater’s amendment to replace a high court judge’s approval for an assisted death with a panel of three professionals – a psychiatrist, social worker and lawyer – set off an avalanche of claims that this was tipping the vote against her. Here’s the Mail’s headline: “Social workers to sit on ‘death panels’ in Labour MP’s watered-down assisted dying bill”. Social workers! According to the Mail’s story, MPs who had previously backed the bill “said they were now thinking again amid an angry backlash”. The Times quoted 10 Labour MPs signing a protest, without mentioning that these 10 MPs were always against assisted dying.
The Times has been relentless. According to one of its reports, medical experts have warned that amendments to the bill could be a “slippery slope” – the experts being, of course, those who were always anti-assisted dying. Leadbeater’s amendment is due to practical evidence from the likes of the former chief justice Jonathan Sumption that high court judges in an overwhelmed court system couldn’t take this on. Nicholas Mostyn, a former high court judge, gave evidence that the bill “would not fly at all” without “enough judges to go around”. The justice ministry requested this change, though the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, opposed it. The former president of the supreme court Brenda Hale gets much coverage for suggesting a district or circuit judge could take this on, but as a prominent supporter of assisted dying, she told the Financial Times that she didn’t think “the proposed panel is necessarily a bad thing”.
Rather less coverage goes to her support for an amendment, backed by Humanists UK (of which I am vice-president), that extends eligibility for assisted dying to 12 months before death, not six months, to allow for those with neurological conditions such as motor neurone disease or Huntington’s. Amendment 234, which is highly unlikely to pass, lays the ground for a future extension. Most people travelling to die at Dignitas in Switzerland have longer than six months to live. Polling for Humanists UK shows a majority of voters support there being no time limits for those with degenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis, by 73% to 9% against.
This is just one of more than 350 proposed amendments to the bill. Many of these seem intended to gum up proceedings, so when the committee ends by mid-April opponents can protest that too many amendments went undebated. All kinds of angles and wrangles are in play. How about this indignation from the Telegraph: “Depressed people who are terminally ill could be eligible for assisted dying.” Some, who are dying in pain and seek a quicker death, may indeed be depressed. But if that disqualifies them, it’s a catch-22. Should only the cheerful be qualified to end their lives?
The well-financed but opaque campaign Care Not Killing has put out a tidal wave of online messages to postcode-targeted voters featuring a picture of their local MP. They feature the following message: “Breaking News. MP ‘watering down’ assisted dying protections. Your MP must reconsider their position.” Typical is one sent to abstainer Chris Bryant’s voters, which cost the campaign in the region of £500 to be seen up to 15,000 times on a screen. Will MPs take fright? I’d imagine not: the polls for years have been strongly in favour of assisted dying. YouGov’s tracker holds steady, with 68% of the public supporting assisted dying. Others are even higher.
The Labour MP Lewis Atkinson, a Leadbeater supporter who sits on the bill committee, has been subjected to such ads, along with a prolific religiously organised write-in. Opponents on the committee, he told me, are trying to kill the bill with delays: the committee spent 10 hours over the first two days of this week discussing one clause. When some near-identical amendment was refused, Danny Kruger, a committee member and lead opponent of assisted dying, tweeted out that the committee has refused to exclude people with impaired judgment or those “unduly influenced” by others.
Atkinson said this was nonsense, explaining that an amendment using the word “manipulated” might not be selected over another near-identical one using the proper legal term “coerced”. . But they can claim the bill’s proponents rejected the idea of manipulation. He fears they will run the committee out of time, and then claim that the debate was stifled. The argument made by the UK’s highest-ranking Catholic bishop, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, who claimed that MPs spent “more than a hundred times longer debating foxhunting than assisted dying”, will certainly not be the case. The religious have a considerable army behind them, but mostly they are not as honest about their God-driven reasons for opposing the bill as the single campaigner I spotted recently in Westminster with a placard reading “Suicide is self-murder. Don’t go to hell.”
The point of a bill committee is to take screeds of evidence in order to improve it. But you can expect any change to the bill to be greeted by sham indignation from those who have always been opposed to it. The last word goes to the Express, the bill’s unexpected sole champion in the rightwing media. Headlined “Plotters against assisted dying bill must not win”, it concludes “the wreckers within Westminster should know that millions of people will be outraged if this vital reform is delayed. We will not give up this fight.” It only takes 28 MPs to change their mind for the bill to fail.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
