And this article from The Times is fascinating!
POLITICAL SKETCH
The assisted dying debate should not be happening like this
For the first time, a bill introduced by a backbench MP requires evidence from expert witnesses at committee stage. The technicalities might be tedious but this is a mess
Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill on assisted dying is already not like any other private member’s bill there’s ever been
The not-uncontroversial Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has reached what’s known as “committee stage”, which means that a small group of specially selected MPs meet to carefully scrutinise the legislation line by line but woah woah woah hang on a minute, isn’t that Professor Sir Chris Whitty? What’s he doing here?
You remember him, right, the Covid guy? Hands, face, space, bald head, occasional death stares at Matt Hancock? Yep, that’s the one. But he’s not an MP is he, never has been, never will be, so what exactly was he doing, up in the Grimond Room in Portcullis House, trying his hand at scrutinising legislation?
Admittedly, some people care more about this sort of thing than others, but the scrutiny of legislation at committee stage has been, until now, an MP’s job, and that’s how it should be. The backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill on assisted dying is already not like any other private member’s bill there’s ever been. For the first time, a bill introduced by a backbench MP has required evidence from expert witnesses to be given at committee stage. Whitty was the first such witness, across three full days.
The technicalities might be tedious but — whatever one’s view on assisted dying — this is a mess. The reason it’s never happened before is because legislation this potentially enormous has always been introduced by governments not backbenchers. That a change in the way we live of this significance may be passed into law without the government of the day expressing a view is abnormal in the extreme. A more experienced government, frankly, would have contrived a way for this not to be happening, but it is, and it’s wildly controversial.
Leadbeater has been accused, and not unfairly, of “stacking the decks” on assisted dying, chiefly by calling a range of witnesses who are, by and large, in favour of its introduction. There are doctors and public health officials in, for example, Canada, who now advocate against assisted dying because of the unintended consequences of its introduction there. None have been called.
But if the idea was that this was to be three long days of polite agreement then it didn’t quite happen. The first thing the legislation would have to do is come to an agreed definition on who was and wasn’t “terminally ill”. That’s the easy bit and it’s not easy.
“If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer most people live at least another ten years,” Whitty said. Other people may have only months to live but that is because they are simultaneously afflicted with what he called a “constellation” of illnesses, none of which are strictly terminal, some of which may even go away again. Working out who qualifies for assisted dying and who doesn’t is the bill’s first unresolved mess.
The other is who is going to do the assisting. Medical professionals are members of society too, Whitty explained, arguably unnecessarily. They are entitled to strong views of their own. They also tend to go into the profession to save lives. They may not wish to do a shift on the assisted dying wing, which is not like any other medical service, and that is their right.
We heard from Dr Andrew Green, the chair of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, who put it rather bluntly. “I do not believe it is ever appropriate for a doctor to recommend that a patient go through an assisted dying process,” he said.
Leadbeater is, of course, a member of the committee herself. When things weren’t going her way, she naturally had a good line in passive-aggressive disagreement. “We should be able to embrace a holistic approach that happens in other countries,” she told Whitty at one point. He did not appear altogether sure what this meant.
At the end of the day came Dr Rachel Clarke, who has become something of a celebrity doctor in recent years after writing about working on Covid wards during the pandemic. She is, first and foremost, a palliative care doctor and what she had to say was rather damning.
“The patients who will beg me to end their life”, she said, “it is not from the cancer, it is because they have not received proper palliative care.”
People will choose to die quickly, in other words, to be spared the misery of dying slowly with the NHS. She went on: “It doesn’t have anything to do with assisted dying, but if we do not address that simultaneously, then people will choose to end their life because we as a society don’t care about them enough to give them the care that might make life worth living.”
This is a debate of unimaginable complexity, wrought with intense strength of feeling. It’s not a subject on which a government can possibly be neutral. It shouldn’t be happening in this way.