Kim Leadbeater’s faith in assisted dying is dangerously misguided
The first striking thing about the debate on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which is to have its second reading today, is how personally its sponsor, Kim Leadbeater MP, feels about the issue.
She was “devastated” to hear that disabled people feared being pressure into suicide if her bill passes, though she did not change so much a word of her bill as a result of her devastation. She was “disappointed” that Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, dared to oppose her bill because the NHS could not implement it safely, even though he, of all people, would know. She finds the term “assisted suicide” “offensive”, even though assisted suicide is exactly what she has been promoting.
The second striking thing about the debate has been Ms Leadbeater’s limitless faith in the bill, which bears her name because she, quite literally, won a lottery. “I don’t have any doubts whatsoever’ about assisted dying bill”, she told an interviewer this week, after her bill was torn apart by experts from every conceivable angle over the course of two weeks. As she never tires of telling people, her bill contains the “strongest safeguards” in the world.
I think I understand Ms Leadbeater’s faith in her bill. It would be dangerous to have doubts, when the former Lord Chief Justice, President of the Family Division of the High Court, Chief Coroner, and dozens of the country’s most senior jurists think your bill’s legal ‘safeguards’ are unworkable and made out of chocolate, that the High Court would grind to a halt because of her bill, that there are no means to detect coercion nor to investigate suspicious deaths.
It would be dangerous to lose faith, when disabled people tell her that they fear for their lives if her bill were to pass, when her government’s own adviser on suicide prevention warns that it would undermine suicide prevention, when doctors point out that, far from offering a ‘good death’, many who die this do so in agony, over hours, and even days, when palliative care specialists tell you that to legalise assisted suicide would fatally undermine their work, because a dead patient is cheaper than a live one.
It would be dangerous to have second thoughts, when your parliamentary colleagues from all sides, including at least a third of Cabinet and many dozens of Labour MPs, declare that they cannot support your bill. It would be dangerous to stop believing when Diane Abbott and Sir Edward Leigh, the Mother and Father of the House, who have never agreed on so much as the colour of the sky, are united against “this dangerous assisted dying bill”.
It would be dangerous to lose your nerve, when Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, and many other jurisdictions have witnessed the slippery slope whose existence she denies, jurisdiction which have legalised state-sponsored death for sick toddlers, disabled people living in poverty, depressed people, and many others. To this Ms Leadbeater counters confidently that assisted suicide works perfectly well in Oregon, where people have received assisted suicide for anorexia, arthritis, sciatica, and hernia.
No, Ms Leadbeater, whose parliamentary career will now be forever associated with this bill, cannot afford to back down. Nor can the lobbyists of death who have thrown their full support behind her, who have covered the interior of Westminster tube station with pro-assisted suicide posters, who have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a professional advertising campaign, who have even printed promotional dog shirts for their cause. Does she ever wonder where that money is coming from? Then again, it is probably better to not ask too many questions.
Ms Leadbeater may not want to ask too many questions; but her colleagues should. They may think that, by voting for this bill, they will secure their places in the history of progressive social reform in Britain. But when the horror stories of family coercion, of the sick being driven to assisted suicide because of inadequate NHS care, of medical staff pressuring their patients to free up beds by dying, they will have to answer for anger of the voters. They will not be able to say “I had faith in this bill”, because it simply won’t be good enough.