Assisted suicide has won the battle, not the war

In an unusually packed UK House of Commons last Friday, 314 MPs voted for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and 291 voted against. The ‘assisted dying’ bill, as its proponents call it, thus passed its third reading – but only just. This was MPs’ final say on whether to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales. The bill now heads to the House of Lords.

Although opponents of assisted suicide ultimately lost the vote, we can take some succour from just how many MPs switched sides. The majority voting in favour last week was less than half of what it was in November at the second-reading vote. It is clear that the more assisted suicide was debated, the more the backlash grew – in parliament and among the public. The publicity around the bill fuelled an opposition movement that was far larger and more vocal than when MPs last debated this 10 years ago.

Friday’s debate made it clear that fewer and fewer people are being fooled by the euphemisms of the assisted-suicide lobby. ‘Assisted dying’, ‘shortening death’ – these are just pretty labels for something far uglier. ‘Assisted dying’ simply means assisted suicide. ‘Shortening death’ is meaningless. You can’t shorten death, you can only shorten life – by killing. What the bill actually permits is a doctor prescribing poison so that a patient can end his or her own life. It means turning the health service into a suicide service. It means doctors can be charged not with saving the lives of the sick, but with ending them.

Much of the press woke up to the dangers, too. Aside from the Daily Express, which urged MPs on its front page to give celebrity Esther Rantzen the ‘present’ of an assisted suicide, most newspapers turned against the bill. Even The Times, which was previously supportive of assisted suicide in principle, called on MPs to reject what it described as a ‘deeply flawed’ bill.

Several Labour MPs – Kanishka Narayan, Markus Campbell-Savours, Paul Foster and Jonathan Hinder – deserve credit for switching from yes to no between readings. They clearly engaged with the arguments and understood the bill’s shortcomings.

Contrast that with the bill’s sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, who dismissed questions about her legislation as mere ‘noise’. Eager to curtail debate, she pushed it through the Commons as quickly as possible. Indeed, parliament allotted just 65 hours to discuss this literal matter of life and death (although a few more hours were squeezed in). The parliamentary debates on banning foxhunting, in contrast, were given 700 hours.

The process exposed an alarming number of new MPs – especially the 2024 Labour intake – as depressingly out of their depth. Many owe their positions to their loyalty to Keir Starmer, a known supporter of assisted suicide, not to any great grasp of policy. Some clearly hadn’t even read the bill properly, let alone understood the broader moral implications.

For instance, Labour’s Jim Dickson, in an obsequious question to Leadbeater, said the bill had ‘the strongest safeguards’ against wrongful killings ‘of any jurisdiction in the world’. To back up his claim, he cited the impact assessment, which was published last month. But the impact assessment makes no such claim.

Or take Chris Coghlan, a Lib Dem MP, who says he ‘voted for assisted dying for the relief of suffering’, even though suffering is not mentioned in the bill as a reason for granting an assisted suicide.

Then there was Christine Jardine, Liberal Democrat MP, who warned that if children were not informed about assisted suicide, then they would just Google how to kill themselves and suicide attempts among young people would spike. Thus, a policy of assisted suicide was presented as a means of suicide prevention. This mixture of Orwellianism and idiocy was common from the pro-assisted-suicide side.

After last week’s vote, Kim Leadbeater was praised in the media for supposedly hearing both sides patiently. She did nothing of the sort. She dismissed critics, leaned heavily on tear-jerking anecdotes and turned the debate into an exercise in emoting rather than thinking.

Assisted suicide may have narrowly passed, but the political wind is still blowing against it. The day after the Commons vote, the Daily Mail reported that Reform UK, the party currently topping the polls, could pledge to repeal Leadbeater’s legislation ahead of the next General Election.

To which all I can say is: bring it on. A full, frank public debate is precisely what this issue needs. The fight to stop the inhumanity of assisted suicide is far from over.

Kevin Yuill is emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide.