Keir Starmer signals support for assisted dying as MPs prepare for crunch vote
Keir Starmer has suggested he backs a bid to change the law on assisted dying as MPs prepare to cast their final vote.
Tensions have been mounting in Parliament over the landmark bill, as more than 50 Labour MPs urged Commons Leader Lucy Powell at the weekend to intervene to delay the crucial third reading vote to allow for more scrutiny.
MPs voted by 330 to 275 in favour of legalising assisted dying in November - but it is unclear whether some MPs will switch sides when they vote on the bill in full. The Prime Minister said his position on the highly sensitive issue "is long-standing and well-known" but he stressed it was a matter for individual MPs as the government remains neutral.
At November's historic 'yes' vote, when a majority of 55 supported the principle of assisted dying in England and Wales, Mr Starmer voted in favour. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill has since gone through line-by-line scrutiny in tense debates in the Commons chamber.
Spearheaded by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, the Bill proposes to allow terminally ill adults with less than six months to live to apply for an assisted death.
It is expected MPs will hold a key vote on Friday which could either see the legislation progress to the House of Lords, or fall.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Starmer said: "It is a matter for individual parliamentarians, which is why I've not waded in with a view on this publicly, and I'm not going to now, it's coming to a conclusion.
"There has been a lot of time discussing it, both in Parliament and beyond Parliament, and quite right too it's a really serious issue. My own position is long-standing and well-known in relation to it, based on my experience when I was chief prosecutor for five years, where I oversaw every case that was investigated."
His comments came as the ex-Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged MPs to reject the Bill, saying it had "fundamental flaws".
Mr Brown said: "It has become clear that whatever views people hold on the principle, passing the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) bill into law would privilege the legal right to assisted dying without guaranteeing anything approaching an equivalent right to high-quality palliative care for those close to death."
But the daughter of terminally ill broadcaster Dame Esther Rantzen said England and Wales must "catch up with the rest of the world" in changing the law. Rebecca Wilcox told Sky News: "We need to show that we are an empathetic country that appreciates choice at the end of your life."
She added: "It's a Bill for the terminally ill. It's a Bill for adults, and in every jurisdiction where they've had a similar Bill with such strict safeguards it is not extended to anybody else. It has not widened the scope of it. The slippery slope doesn't exist.
"So what we have here, what Kim Leadbeater has brought forward and has pushed through Parliament so gracefully and so carefully and empathetically, is a really safe, clever piece of law that will stop the cruel status quo that exists at the moment where nobody knows what they can do, where people are dying in agony every single day."
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Sky News
17 minutes ago
- Sky News
Clear crisis as Starmer marks first year - here's what I've observed from last 12 months
July 5 2024, 1pm: I remember the moment so clearly. Keir Starmer stepped out of his sleek black car, grasped the hand of his wife Vic, dressed in Labour red, and walked towards a jubilant crowd of Labour staffers, activists and MPs waving union jacks and cheering a Labour prime minister into Downing Street for the first time in 14 years. Starmer and his wife took an age to get to the big black door, as they embraced those who had helped them win this election - their children hidden in the crowd to watch their dad walk into Number 10. Politics latest: Corbyn starts new party Keir Starmer, not the easiest public speaker, came to the podium and told the millions watching this moment the "country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal". He spoke about the "weariness at the heart of the nation" and "the lack of trust" in our politicians as a "wound" that "can only be healed by actions not words". He added: "This will take a while but the work of change begins immediately." A loveless landslide That was a day in which this prime minister made history. His was a victory on a scale that comes around but one every few decades. He won the largest majority in a quarter of a century and with it a massive opportunity to become one of the most consequential prime ministers of modern Britain - alongside the likes of Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair. But within the win was a real challenge too. Starmer's was a loveless landslide, won on a lower share of the vote than Blair in all of his three victories and 6 percentage points lower than the 40% Jeremy Corbyn secured in the 2017 general election. 👉 Click here to listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈 It was the lowest vote share than any party forming a post-war majority government. Support for Labour was as shallow as it was wide. In many ways then, it was a landslide built on shaky foundations: low public support, deep mistrust of politicians, unhappiness with the state of public services, squeezed living standards and public finances in a fragile state after the huge cost of the pandemic and persistent anaemic growth. Put another way, the fundamentals of this Labour government, whatever Keir Starmer did, or didn't do, were terrible. Blair came in on a new dawn. This Labour government, in many ways, inherited the scorched earth. The one flash of anger I've seen For the past year, I have followed Keir Starmer around wherever he goes. We have been to New York, Washington (twice), Germany (twice), Brazil, Samoa, Canada, Ukraine, the Netherlands and Brussels. I can't even reel off the places we've been to around the UK - but suffice to say we've gone to all the nations and regions. 2:03 What I have witnessed in the past year is a prime minister who works relentlessly hard. When we flew for 27 hours non-stop to Samoa last autumn to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) summit, every time I looked up at the plane, I saw a solitary PM, his headlight shining on his hair, working away as the rest of us slept or watched films. He also seems almost entirely unflappable. He rarely expresses emotion. The only time I have seen a flash of anger was when I questioned him about accepting freebies in a conversation that ended up involving his family, and when Elon Musk attacked Jess Phillips. I have also witnessed him being buffeted by events in a way that he would not have foreseen. The arrival of Donald Trump into the White House has sucked the prime minister into a whirlwind of foreign crises that has distracted him from domestic events. When he said over the weekend, as a way of explanation not an excuse, that he had been caught up in other matters and taken his eye off the ball when it came to the difficulties of welfare reform, much of Westminster scoffed, but I didn't. I had followed him around in the weeks leading up to that vote. We went from the G7 in Canada, to the Iran-Israel 12-day war, to the NATO summit in the Hague, as the prime minister dealt with, in turn, the grooming gangs inquiry decision, the US-UK trade deal, Donald Trump, de-escalation in the Middle East and a tricky G7 summit, the assisted dying vote, the Iran-Israel missile crisis. 10:50 He was taking so many phone calls on Sunday morning from Chequers, that he couldn't get back to London for COBRA [national emergency meeting] because he couldn't afford to not have a secure phone line for the hour-long drive back to Downing Street. He travelled to NATO, launched the National Security Review and agreed to the defence alliance's commitment to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035. So when he came back from the Hague into a full-blown welfare rebellion, I did have some sympathy for him - he simply hadn't had the bandwidth to deal with the rebellion as it began to really gather steam. Dealing with rebellion Where I have less sympathy with the prime minister and his wider team is how they let it get to that point in the first place. Keir Starmer wasn't able to manage the latter stages of the rebellion, but the decisions made months earlier set it up in all its glory, while Downing Street's refusal to heed the concerns of MPs gave it momentum to spiral into a full-blown crisis. The whips gave warning after 120 MPs signed a letter complaining about the measures, the Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall had done the same, but Starmer and Reeves were, in the words of one minister, "absolutist". "They assumed people complaining about stuff do it because they are weak, rather than because they are strong," said the minister, who added that following the climbdown, figures in Number 10 "just seemed completely without knowledge of the gravity of it". That he marks his first anniversary with the humiliation of having to abandon his flagship welfare reforms or face defeat in the Commons - something that should be unfathomable in the first year of power with a majority that size - is disappointing. To have got it that wrong, that quickly with your parliamentary party, is a clear blow to his authority and is potentially more chronic. I am not sure yet how he recovers. 2:58 Keir Starmer said he wanted to rule country first, party second, but finds himself pinned by a party refusing to accept his centrist approach. Now, ministers tell MPs that there will be a financial consequence of the government's decision to delay tightening the rules on claiming disability benefits beyond the end of 2026. A shattered Rachel Reeves now has to find the £5bn she'd hoped to save another way. She will defend her fiscal rules, which leaves her the invidious choice of tax rises or spending cuts. Sit back and watch for the growing chorus of MPs that will argue Starmer needs to raise more taxes and pivot to the left. That borrowing costs of UK debt spiked on Wednesday amid speculation that the chancellor might resign or be sacked, is a stark reminder that Rachel Reeves, who might be unpopular with MPs, is the markets' last line of defence against spending-hungry Labour MPs. The party might not like her fiscal rules, but the markets do. What's on the horizon for year two? The past week has set the tone now for the prime minister's second year in office. Those around him admit that the parliamentary party is going to be harder to govern. For all talk of hard choices, they have forced the PM to back down from what were cast as essential welfare cuts and will probably calculate that they can move him again if they apply enough pressure. There is also the financial fall-out, with recent days setting the scene for what is now shaping up to be another definitive budget for a chancellor who now has to fill a multi-billion black hole in the public finances. But I would argue that the prime minister has misjudged the tone as he marks that first year. Faced with a clear crisis and blow to his leadership, instead of tackling that head on the prime minister sought to ignore it and try to plough on, embarking on his long-planned launch of the 10-year NHS plan to mark his year in office, as if the chancellor's tears and massive Labour rebellions over the past 48 hours were mere trifles. 1:16 It was inevitable that this NHS launch would be overshadowed by the self-inflicted shambles over welfare and the chancellor's distress, given this was the first public appearance of both of them since it had all blown up. But when I asked the prime minister to explain how it had gone so wrong on welfare and how he intended to rebuild your trust and authority in your party, he completely ignored my question. Instead, he launched into a long list of Labour's achievements in his first year: 4 million extra NHS appointments; free school meals to half a million more children; more free childcare; the biggest upgrade in employment rights for a generation; and the US, EU and India free trade deals. 1:03 I can understand the point he was making and his frustration that his achievements are being lost in the maelstrom of the political drama. But equally, this is politics, and he is the prime minister. This is his story to tell, and blowing up your welfare reform on the anniversary week of your government is not the way to do it. Is Starmer failing to articulate his mission? For Starmer himself, he will do what I have seen him do before when he's been on the ropes, dig in, learn from the errors and try to come back stronger. I have heard him in recent days talk about how he has always been underestimated and then proved he can do it - he is approaching this first term with the same grit. If you ask his team, they will tell you that the prime minister and this government is still suffering from the unending pessimism that has pervaded our national consciousness; the sense politics doesn't work for working people and the government is not on their side. Starmer knows what he needs to do: restore the social contract, so if you work hard you should get on in life. The spending review and its massive capital investment, the industrial strategy and strategic defence review - three pieces of work dedicated to investment and job creation - are all geared to trying to rebuild the country and give people a brighter future. But equally, government has been, admit insiders, harder than they thought as they grapple with multiple crises facing the country - be that public services, prisons, welfare. It has also lacked direction. Sir Keir would do well to focus on following his Northern Star. I think he has one - to give working people a better life and ordinary people the chance to fulfil their potential. But somehow, the prime minister is failing to articulate his mission, and he knows that. When I asked him at the G7 summit in Canada what his biggest mistake of the first year was, he told me: "We haven't always told our story as well as we should." 3:42 I go back to the Keir Starmer of July 5 2024. He came in on a landslide, he promised to change the country, he spoke of the lack of trust and the need to prove to the public that the government could make their lives better through actions not words. In this second year, he is betting that the legislation he has passed and strategies he has launched will drive that process of change, and in doing so, build back belief. But it is equally true that his task has become harder these past few weeks. He has spilled so much blood over welfare for so little gain, his first task is to reset the operation to better manage the party and rebuild support. But bigger than that, he needs to find a way to not just tell his government's story but sell his government's story. He has four years left.
Telegraph
37 minutes ago
- Telegraph
There will be no second chance for Labour
The ANC were the first to coin the slogan 'make the country ungovernable' as they sought to depose the apartheid government in South Africa. An unruly people would weaken the centre, extract concessions and push tensions until they became contradictions. From there, you get the real prospect of regime change. Britain remains a relatively prosperous and secure nation. But it is becoming palpably less governable by the day. This is not confined to one party or leader. The lifespan of prime ministers and their cabinets are getting shorter. Parliament is sovereign once again, but it does not feel that way. Successive governments have failed to grip the centre and act decisively to overcome Britain's malaise. This is the task that falls to Labour. These are not easy times in which to govern. The Government has little room for manoeuvre. The bond markets are tetchy, gilt yields are higher than they have been for decades, pushing up the cost of borrowing. The failure of the leadership to shave £5 billion off welfare spending only increases the nervousness. Scleroticism has taken hold in seemingly every institution. How have we got here? And how can Labour get us out of it? From the 1990s through to 2016, the political class on both Left and Right was characterised above all by complacency. These were the fat years. Growth was good, largely because of a booming services economy centred on London and the south east in general and the City of London in particular. This growth enabled New Labour's economics of redistribution that supported the country's heartlands. After years of hardship, Blair's model seemed to finally bring the warring factions of the country back together again. The 2008 crash should have shaken the political class out of its complacency, exposing the precarity of our heavily financialised economy and the malaise that lurked beneath the surface of our now fragile economic model. While services had grown, our productive capacity had been denuded. Strategic industries had been closed down, outsourced or sold off to foreign investors. Regions once massaged by public sector employment opportunities and welfare found these tools were no longer powerful enough to smooth the cracks left by deindustrialisation. The recession marked the juncture at which Britain began to decline relative to the US and most other European nations, yet it prompted little critical reflection. Austerity was the coalition government's answer – and it was an expensive one. Huge structural weaknesses in our economy were reduced to a matter of simple accounting. Investment dried up and infrastructure could not keep pace with maddeningly high levels of immigration. Growth, productivity and real wages flatlined. Complacency was still the order of the day for a political class who had grown decadent and far-removed from the real conditions of the country. Whatever else it may have done, the vote to leave the European Union punctured this complacency. Blue Labour had been warning since 2009 that all was not well in the body politic, that lurking beneath the glitzy New Labour veneer social disaffection was growing. Blue represented melancholia as much as conservatism. Now all was out in the open: the disconnect between the political class and the country it sought to govern; the towns that had been left behind, their economic purpose in a global economy obscure; and the dysfunction of government, parliament and our public institutions. The Conservatives proved incapable of exiting this quagmire. The 2019 government began with an 80-seat majority and ended in ignominy and an announcement of a new fund for chess players. Lacking the will or confidence to take on Treasury orthodoxy, immigration trebled and levelling up was abandoned. The civil service was left unreformed. Growth continued to stagnate as judicial overreach and regulatory constraints made building impossible. A few brief spasms aside, inertia replaced complacency as the defining feature of our political class. As little as a year ago, you could still find echoes of complacency in the political and media class when they spoke of Labour's election win as a victory for the 'grown-ups'. But fixing a broken political system, a dysfunctional state and a stagnant economy requires more than a clean suit and tie. It has taken Labour one year to discover what took the Conservatives 14 years: that Britain, its economy and its institutions, are barely functioning. Too many in Labour defined themselves solely in opposition to the Conservatives and thought a new Government need only focus on 'delivery', with a few technical fixes here and there. Others wanted to reduce the task of governance to a form of altruism for those in need. Their vibes-based politics has no resonance in the country, no acknowledgment of the hard reality of trade-offs in a low growth economy, and no solutions for Britain's malaise. If there is a divide in Labour it is not between Left and Right, New Labour or Blue Labour, but between those who understand the severity of the country's situation and those who do not. The future success of this Government depends on this understanding. It must be an insurgent on behalf of the people, willing to grip the centre and take on its own party and the scleroticism of our institutions as it rebuilds a shattered country, shifting resources to the productive economy, to build, make and grow, driving social and economic development, radically reducing immigration and speaking for the whole country as one people united in a shared national identity and purpose. This is the choice facing Labour, the fork in the road in this inauspicious moment – a retreat into the comfort zone of liberal progressivism confined to the prosperous areas of the country, doing things for a client electorate, promising the impossible, or a striving for a radical rebuilding of the national economy, renewing our sovereign democracy and building our national revival on a broad, cross-class coalition. This way lies a second term and a new political settlement. The first year has not gone well, but there will be no second chance for Labour.
Scotsman
37 minutes ago
- Scotsman
Listening to those who have lived experience
Decisions made by groups are better, says Ewan Aitken The recent by-election in Edinburgh caused by the death of much-loved councillor Val Walker, was interesting for a number of reasons, not least the closeness of the result – a mere 97 votes. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Congratulations to the winner Lib Dem Kevin McKay, he has big shoes to fill. He won in Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart from a field of 13 candidates – including five independents – who says no one is interested in politics?! Labour were ahead for much of the counting process as votes transferred from candidates dropping out although, at one point, the Green candidate slipped into the lead after the SNP dropped out. It was only after the Conservative votes were redistributed that Kevin took the lead for the first time. I wrote that sentence with some trepidation. It does not mean Kevin is somehow a Tory or even beholden to them – some of their votes went to the Greens and some to Labour. When the SNP dropped out their votes were redistributed between the Conservatives, Labour, Greens and LibDems. When the Green candidate dropped out, the distribution of their votes was not quite equal between the remaining Lib Dem and Labour candidates, but not far off. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad My point in going into this detail is not just to prove I really am a political 'geek', but to suggest that it is a sign of the change in politics which I think will make the biggest difference in the future. Voters are much more sophisticated in their political choices, and they choose to offer their support for many different reasons which often transcend party or ideological lines. The proportional representation system we now have for local government is not perfect, but it at least gives space for that kind of breadth of thinking and to see potential in people we might largely disagree with but may still have ideas worth exploring. There is a great deal of evidence that decisions made by groups holding diversity of views are better – they are more robust and likely to be more successful. This is why populism is a dangerous political phenomenon. It is built on the shallow foundations of simplistic, untested answers to complex problems and dissent is strongly discouraged to the point where dissenters are in danger. The present political arrangement at the City Chambers between Labour, The Lib Dems and the Tories is clunky and can be slow and difficult to manage but it at least means there are different voices in the room when decisions are being taken. One of the most important things we do in Cyrenians when designing new services is listen to those who have lived experience of the tough realities of homelessness and its causes. That often makes for difficult conversations and hard truths about the difference between theory and practice, data and human experience. It doesn't give any one perspective a veto and not everyone is always happy with every conclusion. But if they have been in the room when the decision was made, they at least understand why it was reached and who was being listened to when it was taken. Spaces which encourage people with different perspectives to work collaboratively seems a wise antidote to an often divided world, and the voters of Fountainbridge/Craiglockhart seem to be encouraging that same point of view. Ewan Aitken is chief executive of Cyrenians
