The UK assisted-dying bill gets more dangerous by the day

This article was published by Spiked on March 1, 2025.

Kevin Yuill

By Kevin Yuill

Kim Leadbeater’s promise to create the ‘safest’ assisted-dying legislation in the world unravelled even further this past week, as MPs rejected yet another proposed safeguard to her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which would legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales.

Labour MP Rachael Maskell tabled [introduced] an amendment that would have required a patient to meet ‘with a palliative-care specialist for the purposes of being informed about the medical and care support options’ before an assisted suicide could proceed. In other words, they would have to consider options for alleviating their pain. Yet this most innocuous amendment was defeated by 15 MPs to eight on Tuesday.

This was hardly a surprise. Having been voted through in the House of Commons last November, the bill is now in the committee stage. Yet Leadbeater stacked the committee of MPs in her favour. Although the committee is supposed to ‘improve’ the bill, it has repeatedly thrown out sensible amendments.

Maskell’s amendment would have done nothing more than reassure terminally ill patients that there are alternatives to killing themselves. Given the severity of the decision, you would hope that the assisted-dying process would leave as many opportunities for patients to reconsider as possible.

As one observer noted on X, you currently have to undergo far more rigorous checks to be able to donate a kidney than Leadbeater envisages for an assisted suicide.

Conservative MP Danny Kruger, who leads a minority of cross-party MPs on the committee fighting Leadbeater’s bill, noted how important it is that ‘a patient has clearly understood their palliative-care options’ before choosing to end their own life. The assisted-suicide advocates on the committee took a very different view. Tory MP and supporter of the bill Neil Shastri-Hurst worried that requiring a consultation with a palliative-care specialist would ‘bog down the whole process with layer upon layer of bureaucracy’.

As far as the likes of Shastri-Hurst are concerned, the fewer obstacles in front of the proverbial man on the ledge, the better.

In order to try to keep up the pretence that assisted dying is a ‘compassionate’ cause, Leadbeater resorted to relaying emotional anecdotes. ‘There are cases where palliative care cannot meet a patient’s needs’, she said. ‘We have a lady in the public gallery this morning whose mother had a horrible death, having had ovarian cancer and mouth cancer; she had to have her tongue removed, so she could not eat and drink, and she essentially starved to death.’

This is certainly tragic, but it hardly makes sense as an argument. There will also be plenty of cases where palliative care can meet a patient’s needs.

Fellow Labour MP Stephen Kinnock was clearly less concerned with the optics when he complained that ‘the amendment would increase demand on palliative-care specialists’. He is right that the existence of patients demands doctors. But there is an undeniably sinister undertone whenever questions of money and resources raise their head in the assisted-suicide debate. Death, all too often, appears as the ‘cheaper’ option than healthcare or to assistance to carry on living.

The rejection of Maskell’s amendment is merely the latest in a long line of attempts to ensure the Leadbeater bill has as few meaningful safeguards as possible. So far, the committee has also voted down amendments to prohibit ‘encouraging’ someone towards assisted suicide, exerting ‘undue influence’ prompting someone to choose assisted suicide or ‘manipulating’ someone to choose assisted suicide. It has also rejected the requirement that a six-month diagnosis of a terminal illness must have ‘reasonable certainty’ before an assisted suicide approved. It has even rejected a request, backed by eating-disorder charities, for illnesses to not be regarded as terminal for the purposes of this law if they can be caused by stopping eating and drinking.

All these failed by 15 votes against and eight in favour, reflecting the bias of the committee, except for one, which lost 14 votes to nine.

This won’t be the end of it, either. Leadbeater’s ‘judge plus’ amendment, which has yet to be considered by the committee, will try to remove a safeguard originally included in the bill that would have required each assisted death to be signed off by a High Court judge. This was initially a big selling point for her bill, with more than 61 MPs citing it as a reason to vote in favour. Now, Leadbeater plans to replace the judge with ‘death panels’ of social workers, lawyers and psychiatrists.

Clearly, Leadbeater and her pro-assisted suicide colleagues are hell-bent on ramming this legislation through parliament, whether or not it is fit for purpose. Let us hope that enough MPs are paying attention to these insidious developments – and that they vote this disastrous bill down at the earliest opportunity.

Kevin Yuill, emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (HAASE).

Previous articles by Kevin Yuill:

• Why is the Labour Party putting assisted suicide ahead of social care? (Link)
• Why we need to kill the UK assisted dying bill (Link).
• No safe way to legalize euthanasia (Link).