Starmer rushes to legalise assisted suicide as MP pledges Bill within weeks

A Labour MP is to introduce a Bill on assisted suicide within weeks amid claims that the Prime Minister wants a law in place by Christmas.

Kim Leadbeater, the MP for Spen Valley, will table a Private Member’s Bill on October 16 and the Government will give it time to proceed into law if the House of Commons votes in favour at a Second Reading.

It will be the first time MPs will be given a free vote on assisted suicide since 2015 when a Bill introduced by Labour MP Rob Marris was rejected by 330 votes to 118.

Ms Leadbeater, the sister of murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, has rejected the concerns of doctors and disability rights campaigners that an assisted suicide law would wreck palliative care and put sick, vulnerable and elderly people under pressure to kill themselves.

She said: “It will not undermine calls for improvements to palliative care.

“Nor will it conflict with the rights of people with disabilities to be treated equally and have the respect and support they are absolutely right to campaign for in order to live fulfilling lives. I support these causes just as passionately.”

“The Health and Social Care Select Committee report earlier this year found that where legislation similar to mine has been introduced elsewhere around the world it has been accompanied by improved palliative care provision and has not impacted negatively on the lives of disabled people.”

The claims of the select committee have been rejected as “inaccurate”, however, by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre, an Oxford-based institute serving the Catholic Church in the UK and the Irish Republic.

Ms Leadbeater also promised robust safeguards – in spite of evidence from every jurisdiction where euthanasia and assisted suicide have been introduced that such protections are easily and quickly eroded and removed.

She said: “I believe that with the right safeguards and protections in place, people who are already dying and are mentally competent to make a decision should be given the choice of a shorter, less painful death, on their own terms and without placing family and loved ones at risk of prosecution.”

Catherine Robinson, spokeswoman for Right to Life, said: “Making assisted suicide legal poses an acute threat to vulnerable people, especially in the context of a struggling healthcare system.

“Members of the Prime Minister’s own cabinet recognise this problem and that, within this setting, certain people will likely be particularly vulnerable to coercion”.

“With an NHS described by the sitting Health Secretary as ‘broken’, and the 100,000 people who need palliative care dying each year without receiving it, this assisted suicide legislation is a disaster in waiting.

“Every suicide is a tragedy and this remains the case for those suffering at the end of their life. The situation for people who may already have a serious illness is not helped by a failing health care system and a cold home.

“In such cases, vulnerable people may feel pressured to end their lives prematurely. This would be an extremely poor indictment of our healthcare system and society as a whole.

“The UK needs properly funded high-quality palliative care for those at the end of their life, not assisted suicide.”

She pointed out that no major disability advocate groups in the UK – including Disability Rights UK, Scope and Not Dead Yet – support a change in the law to introduce assisted suicide or euthanasia.

Nor does any doctors’ groups in the UK support changing the law to introduce assisted suicide or euthanasia, including the British Medical Association, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Physicians, the British Geriatric Society, and the Association for Palliative Medicine.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions and an atheist, committed himself to bringing forward a Bill in a telephone call filmed by ITV.

He assured Dame Esther Rantzen that “I’m personally in favour of changing the law” after the television presenter and foundress of Childline, the anti-bullying and anti-abuse charity, announced that she had joined Dignitas, the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland, and might wish to end her life there if treatment for stage four lung cancer fails.

“I think we need to make time,” Sir Keir said. “We will make the commitment. Esther, I can give you that commitment right now … we will make time for this vote.”

His assurances later prompted Bishop Mark Davies of Shrewsbury to use their votes to stop assisted suicide and euthanasia becoming law.

Bishop Davies said: “Opening the doors to euthanasia would change the medical and nursing professions in their relationship to the sick and the aged; distort the way the sick and the elderly are viewed in society when it is less costly to kill rather than to care; put intolerable pressures on the sick and the aged who are made to feel a burden; and advance a culture of death which has extended to more and more people in countries where euthanasia has been adopted, even extending to the mentally ill and to children.”

Last month, the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales offered resources to Catholics to help them to combat the threat of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

At present the 1961 Suicide Act makes assisting a suicide punishable by up to 14 years in jail, though prosecutions and jail sentences are extremely rare.

Activists have repeatedly sought to change the law through both the courts and Parliament. The last time MPs were able to vote on an assisted suicide Bill was in 2015 when it was rejected by 330 votes to 118.

With the spread of euthanasia and assisted suicide throughout countries of the Western world in the last decade, more MPs are expected to vote in favour of a change in the law. Similar Bills to scrap legal prohibitions on doctor-assisted death will soon also be considered in Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

MPs in Westminster are likely to be granted a free vote with their consciences and some will oppose any Bill.

They include Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, a Muslim, who has already made her opposition clear.

She said: “I don’t intend to support it … I know some MPs who support this issue think, ‘For God’s sake we’re not a nation of granny killers, what’s wrong with you …?’ [But] once you cross that line, you’ve crossed it forever.

“If it becomes the norm that at a certain age or with certain diseases, you are now a bit of burden … that’s a really dangerous position.”

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has also declared himself “conflicted” and “deeply uncomfortable” about legalising assisted suicide or euthanasia.

He said: “Candidly, when I think about this question of being a burden, I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country, is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available.”

(Photo of Keir Starmer with Kim Leadbeater by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

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