Ashley Dalton (Labour MP) speaks out against Britain's assisted suicide bill

Ashley Dalton UK (MP) L

This is the speech in the British parliament by Ashley Dalton (Labour MP) West Lancashire who is living with terminal cancer. 

Dalton spoke against the assisted suicide bill on Friday September 11, 2026. 

Dalton is not philosophically opposed to assisted suicide but she is concerned about it's effects and she was opposed to the bill which was defeated by a vote of 286 to 270. (Link to the speech) 

The last time this House considered this bill at Second Reading I was keeping a secret.

Whilst Honourable and Right Honourable members were debating the issue I was grappling with my own terminal diagnosis. I was told I have stage 4 incurable metastatic breast cancer.

I was overwhelmed with grief fear and anxiety. I was scared of what was to come and I was fearful of how it was to affect my family and my loved ones.

I was scared that I was going to get very poorly and thinking how will I cope, how will my family cope, I will I be cared for, how will I afford it, how badly will it hurt and how long will it last.

When you hear those words, depression anxiety, grief, shame and guilt come inbounds.

Suicide risk is highest immediately after diagnosis and it usually falls quickly within three to six months.

I would be lying if I said that when thinking about all that was to come I didn't consider that it might just be fairer and easier on everyone if I just got the dying done as soon as possible.

Having treatable depression however will not exclude anyone from an assisted death in this bill and depression is common among people with terminal illness but it is often treatable.

Clinicians are trained to prevent suicide in people suffering from depression, but where will the line be drawn. This bill makes no provision to support this difficult transition or to create safeguards around it.

A person can also be suicidal and have unmet mental health needs prior to developing a terminal illness and then ask the state to kill them without any assessment of their psychological health just their mental capacity. Because mental capacity and mental health are not the same thing.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists recommends a holistic multi disciplinary assessment of every applicant. The three person panel at the end of the assessment process in this bill is not what most NHS clinicians recognize as a multi-disciplinary team. It certainly does not allow the meaningful multi-disciplinary decision making. The assessment needs to happen at the beginning of the process, not the end and each team member should be independently assessing the patient, in person, this is not what is being included in this bill.

Now I don't know how long I will live. I will be on treatment for life, however how long or short that may be. I at the moment live between scans in 9 to 12 weeks blocks of time. The last scan may show that the disease is stable but the next scan may show that it is growing again. If the disease is stable the drug is working and we can carry on. Eventually the drug will stop working, the cancer will grow and we will have to try another drug and see if that works.

At some point we'll either run out of drugs to try or I will be too poorly to tolerate them. Then I die. It could be months, it could be years, no one really knows.
Prognosis is notoriously difficult to predict. Palliative care professionals and oncologists tell me that whilst they can more or less give me an indication of when I'll die when I'm a few days or weeks off, anything beyond that is a flip of a coin.

But what the palliative care professionals have told me is that palliative care can help me when I die.

But in the campaign around this bill it seems to me that it is being implied that a person with a terminal illness will have a dreadful painful death unless they have access to assisted dying and it is simply not true.

Palliative care in the UK is excellent. Far to many people do not have access to palliative care that they need. But the idea that it is not possible to alleviate pain and discomfort is false.

People, I, have been terrorized with tales of people vomiting up their own feces as though this is common place during death. It is vanishingly rare. Bowel obstructions are more common but they are treatable, I know, I have had one.

It's nothing short of irresponsible to scare monger people like me into believing that our deaths will be horrific when all the evidence suggests that with access to good palliative care deaths are, on the whole, gentle.

The answer is not to terrify people and their families. It's to sort out palliative care and social care first because of this takes place in a vacuum.

Until we can say that everyone who needs it has access to high quality palliative care then we are offering nobody a choice. A terrible death or an assisted death is not a choice it's a threat.

Whilst I speak today from the position of someone with a terminal illness, I am acutely aware that this is not about me. This debate is also not about an abstract concept or a position of principle. The question that will be put at the end of this debate will not be that this House has considered the question of assisted dying it won't even be that this House agrees with the principle of assisted dying. The question will be that this House agrees that this bill be read for a second time. This bill. Not the bill it might have been, not the bill members might have hoped it would be, not the bill it could be. This bill. And it incidentally it says absolutely nothing about the House of Lords. That is not the question that we are being asked.

And whatever Honourable and Right Honourable Members think about the principle of assisted dying surely our first and foremost responsibility is to write law that is safe and workable.

Not one of the professional bodies that will be tasked with delivery of the bill will attest that it is either safe or workable. The Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Association of Palliative Medicine, the Royal College of Physicians all say the bill is seriously inadequate. They aren't opposed to assisted dying in principle, but they cannot support this bill.

Instead of bringing a bill identical to the last so the Parliament Acts could be used and it can be forced, un-amended on the statute books, why didn't the proposers spend the summer working with the Royal Medical Colleges, professional bodies and organizations to build a bill that they could also support. If they had done that it would have been very difficult for those opposed to principle to argue against the bill, but they didn't. This is not about sides, this House is not a debating society, it is about making the law.

Whilst we may be campaigners out there, in here we are all legislators. It is our responsibility not to pick a side and dig in but to work together to build the best laws that we can and that is never truer than with a private members bill on a matter of conscience.

This bill does not protect the most vulnerable, it does not protect the poor, the old, people with disabilities or black and minority and ethnic people being disproportionately affected. It does not protect people who are mentally ill, it does not recognize that not everyone has the same level of agency, control or influence over their decision making and what the clinicians who are asked to deliver the bill are saying is that it isn't even workable. That there is every expectation that it wouldn't even work for the terminally ill people who want an assisted death either.

And there is no stopping it. Auto commencement in the bill means that if it is passed by the commons and pushed through by the Parliament Act and even it the government and NHS is not ready it has to happen on the strike of four years from it being passed. Even if there is no funding, even if palliative care is still broken, even if it is known to be dangerous flawed or unworkable, it is happening - ready or not.

This is not a last chance saloon. This debate has been going on for years, it is not a once in a generation opportunity, it could come back again at the next parliament.

My days could be numbered but that doesn't mean that I want this Chamber to rush through bad law just so I might have a chance to see it or use it. It's of huge importance.

If Honourable and Right Honourable members have any doubt that the exact bill before us today is not the best it could be. Is anything less than excellent well thought out and robustly drafted legislation that protects the vulnerable and recognizes the expertise of our world class clinicians, and a bill that I and other terminally ill people deserve, then I urge them to vote NO or vote to abstain.

We agree with nearly everything that Dalton said, but we, of course, oppose killing people in general, as much as we recognize that the British bill was completely flawed.