Many of the great advances of liberal social legislation have been made in the form of bills promoted by backbench MPs under a benign Labour government. The abolition of the death penalty in 1965, by a bill sponsored by Sydney Silverman; the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, by a bill from Leo Abse; the Abortion Act 1967, by a bill from David Steel; and the Divorce Reform Act 1969, which followed another private member’s bill by Abse.
To this roll call of liberal reform, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Act is now likely to be added, and Kim Leadbeater’s name will join those of her illustrious predecessors.
In a week in which the House of Commons has also voted to decriminalise abortion, it is good to see that progress is still being made towards giving citizens more choice in how they live their lives – including in today’s case how they end them.
This is a difficult subject, and, as with any step forward to a more liberal society, there are those who object that the change breaches a fundamental moral principle. We understand that there are some difficult moral issues in assisted dying, but we do not accept that today’s vote in the Commons crosses some kind of Rubicon.
The Independent’s starting point is that it cannot be right to treat as criminal someone who is terminally ill and who wants to decide the time and manner of their death – or the people who assist them in this decision. The only question, it seems to us, is whether the protection against pressure being put on someone to end their life was strong enough.
There were those MPs who argued today that those protections can never be 100 per cent secure, and it may be that in no part of life can people be absolutely protected from malign actors. But the protections in the bill are as good as they can be. They have been significantly strengthened since the bill was first published.
The main change that Ms Leadbeater has made to the bill has been to replace a High Court judge with a panel of a lawyer, a social worker and a psychiatrist as the second line of defence after two doctors have approved a patient’s decision. This is a better arrangement, drawing on a wider range of expertise.
There remain concerns about the bill. One of the objections we take most seriously is from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, which says, among other things, that “there are not enough consultant psychiatrists to do what the bill asks”. This is a question of whether the provisions of the bill will be adequately resourced, which is related to the worry expressed by Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, who is opposed to the bill on the grounds that end-of-life care in the NHS is under-resourced as it is.
The Independent’s view, however, is that the issue of resources should not be a reason for blocking the bill. If, for example, there is a shortage of psychiatrists, it would be wrong to deny the right to an assisted death altogether just because it cannot be offered to all.
After all, the current situation is that those with means can travel to Switzerland to take advantage of the law there, as Mary Dejevsky writes in a moving account of her husband’s death. This bill will make that choice available to more people in England and Wales, and under rather stricter rules than apply in Switzerland.
We welcome today’s decision by the House of Commons. It was decisive, although we wish it could have been more so, because this is the kind of change that benefits from a wide consensus. We urge the House of Lords to take its role seriously as a revising chamber. Peers should not seek to block the bill, or to pass amendments designed to render it ineffective. Instead, they should look at those aspects of the bill that are most contentious and seek to improve the legislation if at all possible.
Ultimately, however, the upper house should respect the democratic mandate of the Commons and pass this law, the most significant social policy shift by a private member’s bill since abortion was legalised in 1967, to allow more people to make their own decisions about their lives and how to end them.
