DOMINIC LAWSON: The ‘safeguards’ on this assisted dying Bill are only a rubber-stamping train. The legal guidelines that ruled the loss of life penalty have been safer

Well over half a century since the death penalty was abolished, our MPs have voted to overturn the principle that the state should not, coldly and with deliberation, kill its citizens.

Yet many of those who supported the Bill for so-called ‘assisted dying’ insist it is in the great progressive tradition. The former Labour deputy leader, Harriet Harman, last week exulted: ‘It’s a huge piece of liberalising legislation, up there with the ending of capital punishment and permitting abortion.’

It is certainly huge: we will be a different country if Kim Leadbeater’s Bill becomes law. But a safer one? I don’t think so.

Certainly, it will be much less safe for the most vulnerable, who will be insidiously influenced into ‘doing the right thing’ for their family financially, or simply not to ‘be a burden’.

This was a point made by a number of Labour MPs (mostly women) in last Friday’s debate. They do not embrace this ‘liberalisation’; nor do they see it as ‘progressive’.

As the Mother of the House, Diane Abbott, put it in her contribution to Friday’s debate, citing the 1969 vote to end the death penalty: ‘Public opinion was actually against that change, but MPs believed, on a point of principle, that the state should not be involved in taking a life. It was a good principle in 1969,’ she said, ‘and it remains a good principle today.’

One reason for that decision was the growing awareness that the legal process is not infallible: when someone’s life has been taken judicially, there is no remedy if it turns out to have been based on error, or an abuse of process.

This parallel was pointed out to me by Dr Matthew Doré, the honorary secretary for the Association For Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland: ‘We stopped capital punishment because we made mistakes, despite every safeguard from a full court, months of deliberation and a jury.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill proposed by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater 

‘How many mistakes will two self-selecting doctors make?’ he asks. ‘And the high court judge specified in the Leadbeater Bill is simply a rubber stamp to ease the country’s conscience.’

Here, Dr Doré is alluding to what Leadbeater constantly claims are the ‘world’s strictest safeguards’: that ‘two medical practitioners’ – not necessarily doctors – and a high court judge would be required to check that a person is ‘within six months of death’ and has not been in any way coerced into requesting their own extinction.

But the two medics are not even required to know the individual concerned, and are specifically permitted by the Bill to suggest termination to a person who hadn’t previously shown any interest in such a process. And how would a judge second-guess the medics, or discover if the person concerned had been subject to coercion?

The former head of the High Court Family Division, Sir James Munby, has declared that ‘the architects’ of Leadbeater’s Bill – the lobby group known as Dignity in Dying, formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Society – ‘had chosen to promote a highly unsatisfactory scheme … which can give us no confidence that it will enable the court to identify and prevent possible abuses.’

In her speech introducing the Bill, Leadbeater claimed that she had the judiciary behind her. Towards the end of the debate she was forced to correct the record, as what she had suggested was clearly untrue: ‘I should not have implied that the serving judiciary have in some way indicated their agreement with the Bill. They have not.’

If anything, previously sympathetic leading legal figures have become alarmed at the consequences of such legislation. For example Alex Ruck Keene KC, who, as a barrister representing the motor neurone disease sufferer Noel Conway, spent years arguing in the courts for a change in the law.

Jonathan Sumption was a Justice of the Supreme Court when it considered the case of Tony Nicklinson, who had been paralysed by a stroke and sought (unsuccessfully) judicial support for his own assisted suicide, He said: ‘The current bill is seriously defective… parts of it read like a protocol for an execution’

Last month, he told Politics Home: ‘I never had the slightest doubt that he was not under the slightest shadow of coercion. He knew exactly what he wanted. But the thing which increasingly troubled me, and has increasingly troubled me since, is that it’s not about an individual.

‘Because you have individual stories that are very, very powerful. But the law can’t operate for individuals. The law has to operate for everybody.’

Jonathan Sumption was a Justice of the Supreme Court when it considered the case of Tony Nicklinson, who had been paralysed by a stroke and sought (unsuccessfully) judicial support for his own assisted suicide.

Lord Sumption was affected by the case and wrote in yesterday’s Sunday Times: ‘Privately, I came to the view that the law should be changed… after seeing people close to me struggle with end-of-life choices.’ But he is not, now, supporting the Leadbeater Bill: ‘Those who have come to support the legalisation of assisted dying, as I have, must recognise that it will bring real dangers… in an age of impersonal care, utilitarian attitudes to life, and fragmented families.’

He added: ‘The current bill is seriously defective… parts of it read like a protocol for an execution.’

In fact the Leadbeater Bill is evasive on how, exactly, people’s lives would be ended in this brave new world. It merely states that ‘the Secretary of State must, by regulations, specify one or more drugs or other substances’.

The former Labour deputy leader, Harriet Harman, last week exulted: ‘It’s a huge piece of liberalising legislation, up there with the ending of capital punishment and permitting abortion’

In the context of the death penalty via fatal injection, as carried out in parts of the US, there is much controversy over the efficacy of various drugs.

The writer Dan Hitchens points out, in respect of euthanasia in various jurisdictions: ‘As with death penalty procedures, there is no gold standard, but rather a great variety of options, none of which has established itself as the most appropriate.

‘According to an article in the Lancet, complication rates with assisted suicides may be even more frequent than those with the death penalty … up to 9 per cent have trouble swallowing the dose; up to 10 per cent vomit it up; up to 2 per cent re-emerge.’

And what will be the scale of all this? We cannot know, but when the likes of Harriet Harman cite the Abortion Act as a precedent for ‘assisted dying’ but insist there will be ‘no slippery slope’, it’s worth looking at what happened as a result of that Act, passed in 1967.

During that parliamentary debate, the measure’s proposer, David Steel, said that those who claimed this would amount to abortion on demand were ‘muddle-headed… it is not so’.

But, while firmly insisting that he had no regrets, in 2007, when abortions in England and Wales approached 200,000 a year, Steel admitted he had never anticipated ‘anything like’ the numbers that were then being performed. Now they are more than 250,000 a year. All, of course, licensed by two doctors.

The Leadbeater Bill concerns the end of life, not its beginning. One of its ‘world’s strictest safeguards’ is that doctors should have determined that the individual has less than ‘six months life expectancy’.

But as Professor Ray Powles wrote on the morning of the parliamentary debate: ‘For five decades I have cared for over 4,000 patients with blood cancer, most of whom have died, and I would still find it impossible to predict accurately life expectancy of less than six months.’

In truth, all the Bill’s ‘safeguards’ are designed to be a rubber-stamping exercise, not an inquisitorial process. The death penalty was much safer than this.