The time has come for a defining moment early in a Labour era that has so far lacked definition. This is the week a Labour parliament can make its mark in the long campaign for personal freedoms over birth, sex, life and death. If not, if MPs prove pusillanimous in the face of loud but thinly supported objections backed by organised religion, they will ignore the opinion of a public that is strongly in favour: the British social attitudes survey’s first polling in 1983 found 77% of people in favour of assisted dying, and that figure has hardly varied since then. After campaigning all my life on this, I feel: if not now, then probably not in my lifetime.
Every Labour government leaves new freedoms and laws of human empathy in its wake, things traditionally blocked by Conservative majorities. The Blair government’s civil partnerships were a jubilant breakthrough, along with equalising the age of consent. The Wilson government abolished cruelties and repressions by decriminalising abortion and homosexuality, ending capital and corporal punishment, bringing freedom to divorce and more. Millions of lives were changed for ever in profound ways.
This week tests whether this generation of Labour MPs are made of the same mettle. Only 91 have publicly revealed how they will vote on Friday’s terminally ill adults (end of life) bill. Humanists UK says its headcounts canvassing MPs privately have found 1.8 in favour for every one against; but if those MPs staying silent vote against, it will be lost. There have been seven attempts to pass an assisted dying law since 2010: it is nonsense to say the debate on this has been “rushed”.
Members of the cabinet have broken ranks, disobeying orders not to flaunt their views on this free vote, and opponents to the bill have been making the most news. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, dramatically warns it would create a “state death service”. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, shamelessly scares people that NHS cuts may pay for it. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, are against. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is thought to be on the same side. But Liz Kendall, Ed Miliband, Peter Kyle, Lisa Nandy, Hilary Benn, Jo Stevens and Louise Haigh are in favour. Kim Leadbeater, the bill’s progenitor, expressed her annoyance at ministerial interference getting in the way of stories about “people who have had horrible, harrowing, deeply traumatic deaths or have taken their own lives”.
Having failed to keep his cabinet out of this, Keir Starmer should now step up and speak his mind. In the past, he said: “I personally do think there are grounds for changing the law.” As director of public prosecutions (DPP), he made it less likely that relatives would be prosecuted for assisting a death. (Three recent DPPs back the bill.) He would stiffen the spines of any of his MPs if he openly owned an act of freedom that would be a monument to his time as leader.
Many opponents misrepresent the proposed law. Gordon Brown wrote: “The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care.” But his heartbreaking story of a child’s death that was, he said, mercifully without pain, is entirely irrelevant to this bill. His call for good end-of-life care is universal, but palliative care staff know that the best of care can’t always ease horrific final months. I have seen it in my own family.
Let anyone hesitating understand the worst horrors that can befall you at life’s end, as reported in The Inescapable Truth, written by palliative care clinicians: “Some will retch at the stench of their own body rotting. Some will vomit their own faeces. Some will suffocate, slowly, inexorably, over several days.” They estimate that, on any average day, some 17 people are dying these horrific deaths: it could be you or me. Doing nothing inflicts certain agony. Diane Abbott and Edward Leigh write that “the only adequate safeguard is to keep the current law unchanged”, but keeping the status quo just safeguards suffering.
Older people are more strongly in favour of the right to die than younger people: the older you get, the more bad deaths you encounter and, yes, they are frequent. This is no abstract moral issue here, but a reality that many families are shocked to discover. It explains why, despite all the “state death service” frighteners and the wild misrepresentations, public opinion has not shifted: two-thirds stay as strongly in favour as ever, with only 13% against.
Many of the driving forces behind the well-financed anti campaign are religious organisations. At the same time, Mahmood, Streeting, Brown and many others say openly that religion has informed their views, but then add other reasons. Yet many hide their religious motivation, knowing that in this most secular society, the idea that only God can ordain births and deaths looks preposterous. What kind of God demands people suffer in agony to the very last? Religious people are entitled to their views, but not to impose their notion of the “sanctity of life” on others, as they have in previous unsuccessful right-to-die bills, aided by the 26 bishops in the Lords. The British social attitudes survey found in 2021 that 53% of people have no religion and the Policy Institute at King’s College London found last year that less than half of Britons believed in God or life after death.
The slippery argument is the “slippery slope towards death on demand” that Mahmood warns against. It is a dishonest threat: this bill proposes the toughest safeguards of any among countries or states that allow assisted dying, requiring two independent doctors and a judge to ensure a person is of sound mind, able to self-administer the medication, and is making a free choice, with 14 extra days of suffering to reconsider. The justice secretary knows better than most that no court would be able to relax these terms; the only thing that could do that would be a new bill returning to parliament. Limiting the right to those within six months of death is far too restrictive for many: the public would prefer eligibility to be determined by a patient’s illness, such as motor neurone disease, according to a More in Common poll. But that’s not going to happen, so great torment will still be enforced on many people with degenerative diseases.
Nonetheless, this bill will ease immeasurable suffering for the few using the new law. Above all, it is a comfort to every one of us who must die someday. I have written about this for years, describing needlessly bad deaths of family and friends. After Friday, I hope I never need to again.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
