Assisted Dying Bill

[1457bloom]

According to the latest yougov poll, 73% of the general public are in favour of this bill. Why is it that I hear politicians are against it. They are elected to represent their constituents. yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50989-three-quarters-support-assisted-dying-law

Not even in yet and already people want it expanded.

I wonder if future votes may look different? Apparently many MPs.we're unsure and there were abstentions. I don't think a private members bill was the way to do this without a full and wide consultation amongst stakeholders e.g. the NHS, hospices, disability and cancer charities, faith leaders etc.

The debate and it is a big one will mature and I wonder if the result will be just that we have sorely neglected palliative care and there should be more state funding for hospices? We also need fewer deaths in hospital of possible.

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Wrote someone once.

We cannot escape the existential question that will enter people's mind when they ask the one of the most famous question a of English literature....to or not to be.

All the medics in the world can't answer this question and yet at the end its a question we have to face. How many last minute reversals will there be? Could someone pause half way when imbibing some pharmaceutical and what would the medical response be....admitted the remainder somehow (??????) or Medicare the patient to combat the effect of the drugs saving their life?

How do you get into a legal framework someone saying they wish for someone to continue administration of a drug if they themselves feel conscience has made them a coward? Alternatively do you just have medics on standby for resucitation?

Assisted dying will heap pressure on broken services, ministers warn.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/0e411c79-8091-4c3f-bade-fd8e56807bd5?shareToken=e16be4f301ed2b6b57d397a44cc6d9177_

Given that, even if the bill passes through the parliamentary process without a hitch, it won’t be implemented for at least a couple of years that’s entirely irrelevant. Particularly given the government’s plans to improve those services.

Victims are waiting between 2 and 5 years for a case to go to court (BBC news, today).

How on earth can they also sign off assisted dying requests? Am I missing something, or is there a specific court set aside?

Capacity in the legal system has been raised as a potential issue.
But there is a big difference in the resources that are required for a full court hearing vs. the sort of judicial review process that is required for this.

Do you mean rubber stamping what the doctors have written?

Don't you have homework you should be doing?

The role of the judges is a massively contested area of this Bill. not least by some of the most senior judges like Sir James Munby, who asked after the publication of the Bill:

‘The issues
It may be helpful at this point to recapitulate the issues, discussed in this and my previous paper, as they arise under the Falconer Bill:

• What level of judge is to exercise this jurisdiction? Is it to be a High Court judge? Or a more junior judge?
• What is the function of the judge? To what extent is the judge expected to exercise a discretion?
• Process and procedures:
• Who can apply to the court and who should be joined as parties?
• Is there to be a hearing or is the application to be dealt with ‘on the papers’ and without a hearing?
• If there is to be a hearing, is this to be in public or in private? Are there to be reporting restrictions? Are the identities of any of the participants, in particular the patient, the witness and the countersigning doctors, to be anonymised?
• What procedures are to be adopted for testing and, if need be, challenging the evidence? Who should exercise that function?
• Is there to be an independent evidential investigation? If so, who is to undertake this and who is to pay for it?
• Should the judge be required to give a judgment in every case and be required to publish the judgment?
• How are appeals to be incorporated in the process?
• What public funding arrangements will there be?
• Even assuming the adoption in every case of the most rigorous procedures, how confident can we be that even the most rigorous procedures will be adequate to identify and prevent possible abuses and in particular be adequate to detect what may be very subtle external pressures?
• Does the conscience clause apply to the judges?
• Is what is proposed a proper role for a judge, given that the judge’s function is not to decide some disputed issue or to resolve some controversy but only to certify that the decision taken by the patient complies with the law?’

https://transparencyproject.org.uk/assisted-dying-what-role-for-the-judge-some-further-thoughts/

You're 50 odd years too late for that. Nice try though.

In these blogs that I linked to above Sir James Munby, former President of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales argues that there aren’t enough judges to manage this workload around assisted dying even if that was all they did all day, all week, every week. Which would obviously ruin access to justice for other people.

‘The impact of the proposals on the judicial system and the administration of justice
A final matter to consider is the impact the proposed judicial involvement will have on the judicial system and the administration of justice.
Kim Leadbeater MP suggests that as many as 3% of the adult population might eventually choose assisted dying. In 2023 there were 577,620 adult deaths in England and Wales (total deaths 581,363 of which 3,743 were of children under the age of 18): 3% of that is 17,328 – I round it down to 17,000.
Let us assume, in order to illustrate the scale of the problem, that each application takes an average of 2 hours (I make clear that I do not accept that 2 hours would be sufficient).
That would require a total of 34,000 hours of judicial involvement. A High Court judge sits in court for 40 weeks a year, 5 days a week, the court day being 5 hours (to be clear: this is the ‘sitting time’; High Court judges work for much more than 5 hours a day).
So a High Court judge sits for a total of 1,000 hours a year. Including the President of the Family Division there are 19 judges in the Family Division, between them sitting a total of 19,000 hours a year, a figure far short of the 34,000 hours of judicial involvement required on this calculation. The figure speak for themselves.
Where are the judges to be found? And what of the impact on the wider administration of justice which, as is unhappily notorious, is already under enormous strain?’

People who are in favour of this law do trust and expect that there will be stringent requirements for how it should be done. As was promised. I assume that most of those supporters wouldn’t support this Bill without that.

But campaigners haven’t specified what they want a judge to actually do, or worked out how practical it would be for them to do it, The parameters are so way off that it feels a bit cynical and PR-y of campaigners to tell us that Judges will be involved as an assurance that patients will be protected properly.

Yes I feel like that. The "oh a judge is involved" gives reassurance until you stop and think about what does involved mean? I think lots of people picture a hearing after the judge has met and talked to the terminally sick person, that was my first thought but then I considered the practicalities and realised that the chances are this would not be the case.

The link you gave is very interesting.

Section 12 deals with the approval of the High Court.
I would expect 12(4) and 12(5) will be the subject of a lot of discussion in Committee, and likely clarifying amendments.