THE occupants of the chamber known as God’s Waiting Room remained polite, persuasive and precise as they sank the latest attempt to introduce a right for people to choose when to die.
In a debate that showed both the vigour and innate conservatism of the House of Lords, it was a Friday like no other. The chamber is normally deserted at the end of the week, especially one with the summer’s first Test match under way, but yesterday there was a buzz about the busy red benches, and the public gallery overflowed around the narrow galleries.
Three noble baronesses in motorised wheelchairs positioned themselves at the front of the cross benches to oppose the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill.
They were in league with a dozen archbishops and bishops in full black and white vestments who crammed on to the two small benches of the Lords Spiritual near the Sovereign’s throne.
“We have not seen so many bishops here since Sunday trading,” the Labour peer Lord Desai said, loudly proclaiming that he would not be cowed by the religious lobby.
“Religion relies on fear,” he said. “I have no fear of God or the afterlife. I value my life for the pleasure it gives me and I have always liked this Bill because it gives me autonomy.”
Like some other backers of Lord Joffe’s Bill, he wanted to paint its opponents as religious fundamentalists armed only with apocalyptic omens.
Yet rather than relying on Scripture, the Bill’s detractors emphasised that a “slippery slope” would follow legal permission for a tiny number of terminally ill people to opt for an assisted suicide.
Lord Brennan (Labour) gave warning of a new network of “death clinics” and the 3rd Viscount Tenby, a crossbencher, said that the Abortion Act had made London the “abortion capital of Europe”.
He added: “Where good intentions kickstart reform, only too frequently greed and unscrupulous behaviour follow.”
But there was much, much more to this extraordinary debate than hostility to religious authority on one side and Bible-thumping on the other.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch, an Independent Conservative, apologised to his Christian friends for his support for a “reasonable and compassionate” Bill. Citing Christ in his argument, he concluded: “I would suggest that our Lord does not appear to have gone out of his way to preserve His own earthly life.”
Lord Laing of Dunphail (Conservative) stated that “as a Christian”, “I believe one has a personal relationship with God . . . and we should bear in mind that God gave us free will”.
Over seven hours and with 90 speakers, the intricacies of one of the most urgent and complex moral and philosophical issues of the day were laid bare in speeches that every peer kept scrupulously to the four-minute maximum.
Speaking from her wheelchair, the crossbencher Baroness Chapman argued passionately against the extra pressure that legal euthanasia would put on people at stressful and painful times in their lives.
“I have lost count of the number of times I have been told by the medical profession that ‘this could be the beginning of the end’,” Lady Chapman, who is physically disabled, said.
“On these occasions it is feasible that I would have been classified as ‘terminal’ under the structure of this Bill. I would hate to be in a situation where I could be offered assisted suicide.”
In another striking contribution from the line of wheelchairs, Labour’s Baroness Wilkins added: “This is a dangerous Bill. It only masquerades as a modest Bill. No disabled people’s organisation nationally or locally supported it. If it were to succeed it would remove the cornerstone of our law that protects us when we are at our most vulnerable.”
Then, speaking up for the Bill, came Labour’s Lord Ashley of Stoke, the champion of deaf people. “It is quite wrong to patronise or ignore disabled people and even more so to patronise and ignore the terminally ill,” he told the packed House. “This admirable Bill offers a way forward which is compassionate, sensible and pragmatic. It can relieve human suffering by people begging for release.”
Just as it was impossible to pigeonhole peers based on faith or disability, so it was with those who captivated peers with heart-rending accounts of personal experience. Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Labour) had nursed a a man in his thirties who had virulent leukaemia and who had been in excruciating pain for many weeks.
Near to tears, Lady Symons, a former minister, described how the man had at times lost the will to carry on during four rounds of painful chemotherapy each lasting a fortnight. “Fourteen years later he is thriving,” she told the hushed chamber. “I am so glad Lord Joffe’s Bill was not on the statue book.”
The best legal minds were at odds. Lord Mackay of Clashfern, a Conservative Lord Chancellor who evenhandedly chaired a select committee into an earlier version of the Bill, said that if it could be put “into an acceptable form by amendments” it would be right to proceed with it. “I do not think that is so,” he said, so he would vote to stop it. But his fellow QC the Liberal Democrat Lord Taverne accused the Archbishop of Canterbury of suggesting that a right to die would become a duty to die: “The idea that it introduces a duty to die is simply designed to scare with not a shred of evidence to support it.”
Lord Joffe, a crossbencher and human rights lawyer who made his name as part of Nelson Mandela’s defence team in the 1960s, vowed to bring back his Bill “again and again”. His supporters had cited poll evidence suggesting that the public was ready for some sort of euthanasia being legalised.
Lord Moser, the social statistician, who is a crossbencher, said that support had risen from 70 per cent in the 1970s to 82 per cent in the 1990s and called for the Bill to be allowed to continue through the parliamentary process. “This is a subject for society as a whole,” he said.
But in the end peers heeded Lord Carlile of Berriew, the QC and Liberal Democrat who led the campaign to dispatch the Bill. He borrowed from Edmund Burke to insist that peers should be “pillars of what is right and not the weathercocks of perceived opinion”.
The debate showed the vigour and conservatism of the House of Lords. Here some of the main protagonists put their case.
ANTI Rowan Williams ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
Opposition to the principle of this Bill is not confined to people of religious conviction. It would be a lazy counter-argument to suggest that such opposition can be written off because it comes only from those committed to a world view not universally shared.
It remains true that to specify even in the fairly broad terms of this Bill conditions under which it would be both reasonable and legal to end your life, is to say that certain kinds of life are not worth living. We would jeopardise the security of the vulnerable in another way by radically changing the relationship between patient and physician.
PRO Lord Joffe CROSS BENCHER
The current law results in unnecessary suffering by a significant number of terminally ill patients. It is ignored by caring doctors who, from time to time, moved by compassion, accede to persistent requests from suffering patients to end their lives, which results in grave risks to those doctors’ careers, reputations and possibly freedom. It is also ignored by loved ones who face a terrible emotional burden when helping with such a request.
It also forces those with distressing physical diseases to end their lives earlier than they need to because they fear that they may not be able physically to do so later.
ANTI Lord Carlile of Berriew LIB DEM
Everybody in your Lordships’ House knows that those who are moving this Bill have the clear intention of it leading to voluntary euthanasia. That has always been the aim and it remains the aim now. The Bill introduces for the first time into this country the concept of doctors abandoning therapy for deliberately causing a person’s death. The fact that a person in law gives the instrument of death to another person who injects still includes them as the person causing death.
I and many others find that — whether religious or not religious — morally objectionable and I include in that moral objection the vast majority of physicians and general practitioners, the Disability Rights Commission and, as I understand it, the Royal College of Nursing.
PRO Lord Laing of Dunphail CONSERVATIVE
Containment of pain is obviously very important, but I base my arguments on quality of life. Why on earth should we refuse to grant a competent adult their request to receive assistance in dying when suffering unbearably from an illness such as motor neurone disease?
Is it not a form of arrogance to deny someone such as I have described the right to take their own mature journey with dignity and in their own time? Which of us has the right to say, no you can’t?
I see no contradiction between my faith and my support for the Bill. If after prayer one chooses assisted suicide, that is a personal decision between one’s self and one’s maker and we should bear in mind that God gave us free will.
ANTI Lord Winston LABOUR
Old people when they enter hospital are often confused and angry, disorientated. Geriatric wards and old people’s care are constantly under pressure in our very good health service.
In many wards, and I have seen it myself with my own mother’s care, people are left soiled, they are called by their first name, they are not treated with dignity, they lose themselves, and as they become angry and disorientated, they cease to be people.
Recently with my mother I sometimes wondered privately if it wouldn’t be better to end it, and that’s the problem. Because this week she is sapient, conscious, able to hold an intelligent discussion. We need to respect the hoary head in this House above all.
PRO Lord Ashley of Stoke LABOUR
How would those who oppose the Bill respond to a husband, a wife, a son or a daughter who is agonisingly and terminally ill and says they have had enough? Would they say of course I will do what I can to help but you may change your mind in the future? I am afraid the answer is no.
ANTI Lord St John of Fawsley Conservative
The life of a great society depends on a common possession of moral principles. If those principles disappear the society disappears. That is why people are so concerned about this at a time of very great moral change, that one of the fundamental pillars of our society is being shaken.
ANTI Lord Carey FORMER ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
I am against this Bill for a number of reasons, not least because its effects would alter the precious relationship between doctors and patients and assisted suicides could, before a few years are out, be treated as casually as abortion is treated today.
It is interesting that the British Medical Association in its most recent pronouncement on this Bill remarked that the unevenness of good quality palliative care is a matter of extreme concern to doctors.
If this debate led to significant investment in those services that provide end-of-life care our time here would be well spent.
ANTI Baroness Chapman CROSS BENCHER
This Bill has caused me to look at my own life and how other people perceived my life. I don’t often discuss my condition because it is obvious and I don’t want to be defined by it. I have very weak bones. I believe the count of my fractures is now well over 600. About four years ago I had a neck injury that was incredibly painful. For several months I struggled trying various means of pain control. Because I am small and I don’t weigh very much this can make pain control even more problematic.
After trying several forms of medication with no success my GP phoned a local hospice and asked palliative care doctors’ advice. Within 24 hours my pain was under control and I was physically and mentally able to function. I dread to think what kind of decisions I might have made if a Bill like this had been passed previously.
PRO Baroness Jay of Paddington LABOUR
Democratic accountability in Parliament is a relevant matter which should be considered above the force of special interest groups, however many letters those special interest groups may get together to write.
I would say that too, to the noble and learned prelates that will speak, because however much we respect the opposition in principle to this Bill from those of a religious faith and those of us who have a spiritual concern, although not perhaps, a formal religious faith, we do today live in a very diverse and predominantly secular society where the importance of individual human rights are increasingly valued.
ANTI Lord Elton CONSERVATIVE
This would have many unintended consequences, of which I will mention only one. I was a minister in the Department of Health and Social Security. It is an inescapable fact that in the end policy is driven by money, which is why the Treasury always controls policy.
The stark fact is that palliative care is expensive and a lethal pill is cheap. And the generators of policy — I don’t just mean people sitting in the Cabinet Office or in the Secretary of State’s office, but the many, many hundreds who are involved in generating policy in the Civil Service to put the choices between them — will be steered in a critical part by that financial consideration.
PRO Lord Hughes of Woodside LABOUR
Those of us involved in these debates need to be careful about how we present our arguments. I am sure some are done in good faith, I am sure they are done in great principle.
It may be the case that palliative care is very expensive and the pill is cheap but when [peers say] the passing of this Bill [may] lead to murder, doctor shopping and death clinics, that is going far too far.
No wonder people outside are frightened of a very modest Bill indeed. We have to appreciate that there are views and very strong principles and I respect them. But I do not think that people’s lives should be used to promote a religious view which they certainly seek to impose on others.
