Assisted dying invoice: MP slams Lords ‘crackpot’ amendments hampering proper to die
Former NHS surgeon Peter Prinsley, who became an MP, is urging the Leader of the House to extend the session to stop Lords ‘filibustering’ the assisted dying bill
A former NHS ear, nose and throat surgeon, Peter Prinsley who is now a Labour MP, says some of the House of Lords amendments to right to die legislation are “crackpot”.
The MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, has spoken in the Commons in support of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill and told of his experiences of seeing patients suffer “dreadful” deaths. But he told The Mirror how he has been urging the Leader of the House to extend the session to stop the suspected delay tactics taking place in the House of Lords.
And he warned there could be ‘consequences’ for the Lords if the bill is stopped as it is what the vast majority of the public wants. He said there are limits to palliative care and “there are patients who might wish to choose assisted dying if it were available. Who are we to deny that?
READ MORE: House of Lords give Assisted Dying bill ‘more time’ after ‘time wasting’ accusationsREAD MORE: Assisted dying bill: ‘I’m a doctor – we need to stop horrific, frightening deaths’
“I’ve seen patients with terrible head and neck cancers, whose lives have become quite intolerable for some period of time, until they actually die.
“The typical thing that we would see in advanced head and neck cancers is the loss of the ability to speak, the loss the ability to swallow, eventually the loss of the ability to breathe as the airway becomes blocked.
“And then finally of course the terrible problem is when the tumours can actually erode into large vessels in the neck with sudden death, in conscious patients as large quantities of blood come pouring out of their necks…That really is the most dreadful end of a life. These are the sort of patients I think of.”
About assisted dying being made legal in this country, he said: “When I was a young doctor, I thought this was never something that we should ever consider.
“But as I became an older doctor, and the more I saw of patients in great difficulty towards the end of their lives, I realised that this was something that we should consider.
“And you know, we’re not obliging people to do this, we are just making it something that they can choose if they wish. And what I believe about Kim Leadbeater’s bill is that it’s very, very carefully considered.
“There are sort of amendments which are being used to try and delay this thing in the House of Lords. There are more than a thousand amendments. Some of them are completely crackpot.
“I mean, a good example of a crackpot one is insisting that everybody should have a pregnancy test. Now, if an old man is dying of prostate cancer, first of all, he’s an old man with a prostate so he can’t be pregnant. Making people have pregnancy tests in that situation is just self-evidently bonkers.
“There’s another one which I think is mad – some sort of stipulation against people traveling overseas in the last year of their life.
“If you’ve had a terminal illness and you have family in America, going to visit your family in America might be exactly the sort of thing you’d want to do. So that’s a completely crackpot amendment. They’re amendments designed to disable the process rather than actually sensible suggestions. What’s going on here is a filibuster.”
The MP is suggesting the leader of the House of Commons allows the measure to be passed over into the next session.
“So normally what happens is that in a private member’s bill if it doesn’t come to a conclusion before the end of parliament session it falls and has to be re-legislated but that wouldn’t necessarily be the case with the government bill.”
But he said this is not a rule and could be overruled explaining the current session runs out around Spring.
“The filibuster would come to an end immediately because the people in the Lords would simply see that there was no merit in trying to stop it,” he argues.
The MP says he believes there are a “group of people who are philosophically opposed to the idea of assisted dying” such as the 21 Bishops who sit in the House of Lords.
“They should just say so,” he says ,”instead of hiding behind a thousand amendments. So there’s a parliamentary device being deployed here to try and defy the will of the elected chamber of the House Commons.
“The opinion of the people in the country is very very strongly in favour of this. If it did in fact fall as a result of what was going on in the Lords, this would be a constitutional difficulty which might have consequences for the Lords themselves.”
Those who oppose the bill claim it would alter society’s attitude towards the elderly, seriously ill and disabled, signalling that assisted dying is an option they ‘ought’ to consider. And they say high quality palliative care can effectively alleviate distressing symptoms.
