This is parliamentary hubris at its worst

Telegraph

5 days ago

Having given up on its half-baked attempts to 'drive up living standards', the Starmer administration now appears to be embarking on a killing spree. Those advancing the decriminalisation of late-term abortion and legalisation of state-assisted suicide seem to believe we are witnessing 'Parliament at its best'. I'd argue this is British politics at its hubristic worst.
Consider the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) legislation. Such a serious change in our civilisation should not have been brought in via a Private Members' Bill, allowed to scrape through the Commons amid heated accusations of distortions of the truth, blatant procedural failures, and MPs who were rushed through debates without adequate time to consider its contents.
A change of such magnitude, unmentioned at the general election, should have been introduced by a properly prepared Green Paper, then a White Paper, or possibly even a Royal Commission. It should not have been a few hours of debate and a rigged committee stage, passed with sly help from a Government unwilling to publicly advocate the change, but willing to skew the process in its favour.
The result is a law risking a massive amount of harm. Those who think the NHS can be trusted with the power to kill its patients deliberately (as opposed to in the natural course of its business) have clearly not attempted to see a GP nor been near a hospital lately. They also haven't read the 150-page impact assessment, which looks like a 'Green Book' exercise conducted by tone-deaf junior civil servants. It claims costs would be low, even going so far as to suggest assisted dying could save the NHS money.
Part of this exercise says that four months of medical care would no longer be provided on average to those patients opting for assisted dying. That, in 'year one' (actually half a year), between 273 and 1,078 people in England and Wales would request assistance to end their lives, rising to somewhere between 1,737 and 7,598 in the tenth (full) year.
This number seems rather low, given that Canadian doctors, with a smaller population, helped more than 15,000 to die in 2023. The Bill's advocates claim that the scope of the legislation is much narrower than in Canada – but I suspect that based on the experience with abortion laws, that judicial interpretation and legislative amendments will probably widen it over time.
However, many start the process of applying for 'voluntary assisted dying', and the number who actually reach the ultimate stage would be rather smaller. In the two months the approval process takes to complete, many would withdraw their application, some would die before approval, and others would become incapable of giving legal consent. All of which implies a good deal of wasted effort – and probably some emotional wear and tear – by doctors, administrators, pharmacists, and lawyers, which could impact on willingness to be involved, or lead to slapdash performance.
The NHS is in such a state of collapse, despite a budget of £210 billion this year, that there are men, women and children who should be alive today who are dead because of its 'care'. Can it really be expected that assisted dying will be the one part of the system that functions without the errors that characterise the rest of the health system? I highly doubt it.
Look at NHS performance in other fields and mistakes are practically guaranteed: the health service paid out a record £2.82 billion on settling medical negligence claims in 2023-24, an increase of over £180 million from the previous year. How long would it take for the first assisted dying lawsuits to start coming in? Then there are the practical limits to its implementation: close to half of doctors (47 per cent) recently surveyed by the BMA are not willing to breach the Hippocratic Oath's injunction which says: 'I will not give a drug that is deadly.'
If we are going to allow people to end their lives, it should not be within the state-run healthcare system. But nor should it be in the care home sector. Can you imagine the worry for the frail and perhaps confused when Dr Death turns up for the weekly cull? Instead, we could mimic the abortion model: procedures carried out largely in outside clinics, partly privately funded. Or the hospice model of charities receiving some NHS funding. Or perhaps we follow the Dignitas scheme: a fee-paying service provided by non-profits, as required by Swiss law.
To date, the legislative process has been driven by emotion, short-sightedness, and by politicians who are so powerless that the only lever they seem able to pull is the one which finishes us off early. It has been rushed through by amateur policymakers oblivious to how it will work in practice, who have ignored the complexities of assisted dying in favour of a debased utilitarianism. Let's not now make bad law worse.