Assisted dying campaigners condemn ‘undemocratic’ friends as legislation change thwarted

The landmark Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill ran out of time in the House of Lords on Friday, scuppering its chances of becoming law in this Parliamentary session

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Assisted dying campaigners have said they’ve been stripped of hope by “undemocratic” peers as a proposed law change was sunk by the House of Lords.

The landmark Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill ran out of time on Friday, scuppering its chances of becoming law in this Parliamentary session. The House of Lords heard passionate arguments on both sides in its final debate, as opponents branded it unsafe and unworkable. However supporters accused peers of trying to block it by running down the clock – despite the Bill being backed by MPs.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who spearheaded the Bill, said a fresh attempt would be made to bring it back after the King’s Speech on May 13. She said: “I am confident. I’m trying to stay positive, I’m trying to stay optimistic. We’ve got to do that. But there is a real sense of sadness and sorrow today.”

She said she’d been inundated with messages of “rage and dismay” from the public, adding: “That doesn’t sit comfortably with me, and it won’t sit comfortably with colleagues in the Commons.”

Dame Esther Rantzen’s daughter, Rebecca Wilcox, said the bill had been thwarted by a “petty few” as she spoke of her sadness that it would not help her mother. The broadcaster revealed in 2023 that she has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and that she has joined the Swiss Dignitas organisation.

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Speaking after the debate, Rebecca said: “I hope this isn’t the end for us. It is absolutely the end for Mum and I’m so annoyed she hasn’t hasn’t been able to see this go through.”

She added: “We’ve got the stamina, we’ve got the energy, we will do it. We’re on the side of right. We’re on the side of choice and compassion, and it was a brilliant Bill. Whatever those extravagant fantasists may have said, it was a brilliant Bill, with safeguarding at its core.”

Asked if her mum was hopeful she would still be alive to see the law change, she said: “I think she’s hopeful that brilliant minds who are behind the Bill will get it through again. It’s an unknowable thing about whether she will be around to see it.”

Campaigner Sophie Blake said she was devastated that the Bill had not passed. The 53-year-old was diagnosed with stage four secondary breast cancer in May 2022, and has said she doesn’t want her daughter Maya or her family to remember her suffering at the end.

Sophie, a former Sky Sports and BBC TV presenter, said: “The hope and relief we felt last summer when Parliament voted for this bill has been taken from us. We are devastated and we are angry.

“Like so many of my friends and fellow campaigners, living with terminal illness, it isn’t death we fear. As heart-breaking as it is to have your future cut short, what we fear is how we might die.

“For the first time, we had a sense of peace, knowing that while we live with these cruel life-limiting diseases, we might at least be spared unnecessary suffering at the end, and that peace is then stripped away.

“I don’t want my daughter, my parents or my family to be left traumatized, forced to want to be suffering against my will at the end of my life. A small group of unelected peers have denied the House of Lords the chance to vote on a legally passed Bill, a bill that was overwhelmingly had had public support. This was not scrutiny. This was an obstruction.”

Catie Fenner’s mum Alison went to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to end her life in 2023 after being diagnosed with motor neurone’s disease. She said the family had suffered extreme trauma and stress, and still fear a knock at the door from the police.

She said: “Seeing what has happened with this bill has been utterly heart-breaking, not just for the memory of my Mum and what she had to go through – and the fact that I wanted to stop any other family having to go through what we did – but for all the wonderful people, strong, brave, terminally ill, people that I have met on this campaign who will suffer because of this and the many, many others that we know of.”

In an emotional debate, Labour peer Lord Cashman revealed that his former EastEnders co-star June Brown pleaded with him to help her seek an assisted death. He starred alongside the actress, who played chain-smoking launderette worker Dot Cotton in the BBC soap, in the late 1980s.

He said: “I also remember my dear friend June Brown, who implored me to get her to a country where she could die with dignity and the death that she wanted.”

But Baroness Campbell of Surbiton said disabled people had asked her to say this “particular Bill frightens them, and they want me to explain to your Lordships why it is dangerous for them”. The crossbench peer, who has spinal muscular atrophy, said disabled people “fear unequal access to care shaping their choices, they fear subtle coercion that cannot be easily detected”.

Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson said the Bill had failed because “there are too many gaps in it” and said she felt there was “a lot of misunderstanding about what people might get” under a law change.

Gordon Macdonald, from the Care Not Killing campaign group which is opposed to a change in the law, said: ”The House of Lords scrutiny exposed this Bill as ‘skeleton legislation’ riddled with gaping holes. It is now clear that this Bill was both unsafe and unworkable.”