No one really saw it coming, but here we are, in the midst of what passes for a watershed debate about assisted dying, centred on the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s terminally ill adults (end of life) bill, and the huge moral and practical questions that swirl around it.
The weekend’s news has been full of the views of people who can speak loudly enough to be heard: three former directors of public prosecutions (all in favour), a former archbishop of Canterbury (ditto) and the healthcare professionals grouped into the Association for Palliative Medicine (against, because legislating to allow assisted dying risks ignoring “the lack of adequately funded specialist palliative care services”).
Meanwhile, Leadbeater’s backers stick to their basic point: that after years of failed legislation and awful human suffering, the bill finally opens the way to a limited but long-overdue change supported by a majority of the public.
Away from all the noise and heat of the argument, you can look at the story in a slightly different way. One of the most remarkable aspects of private members’ bills is that they can be given legislative time with only a vague title: the second reading of this one is scheduled for 29 November – and it could make it on to the statute book early next year – but its content has yet to be published. Its supporters insist that there have been years of debate about assisted dying – but not in the context of a seemingly imminent change in the law (only now, for example, are we hearing from doctors who think that a new NHS “assisted dying service” might be required).
So why the rush? Everything is down to Leadbeater being one of 20 MPs picked at random to pilot their own legislation, and the fact that the prime minister, Keir Starmer, was pushed into giving her bill time by a pledge he made to the broadcaster Esther Rantzen, who has incurable lung cancer. “I’m very pleased that I’m able, as it were, to make good on the promise I made,” he said.
Whether other perspectives might now come into play is down to the arcane workings of the parliamentary committee system, and to whom MPs and peers choose to listen. And one very strange aspect of the story is incontestable: though there are important voices – such as those of disabled people – who are likely to feel excluded, others are entitled to a level of involvement that beggars belief. They include such members of the House of Lords as the London Standard owner Evgeny Lebedev, the former cricketer Ian Botham and good old Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Those people may or may not speak in a debate, or even vote. But others definitely will – not least the 26 Church of England bishops and archbishops who sit in the upper house. Their role is weird. For not only do they represent a faith group that now has fewer than 700,000 weekly worshippers, but most of their shrunken flock actually seems to back changing the law. Still, these senior Anglicans are set to kick up quite a hostile stink.
Plenty of pro-Leadbeater campaigners will argue that it is best to keep your eyes on the prize, and ignore all the eccentric nonsense required to win. But by shining light on the awfulness of our legislative process, this story surely demonstrates not just why the current debate is unlikely to do justice to any of the arguments about assisted dying, but also the reasons why so many other broken and unresolved aspects of our national life remain in that state.
Governments tend to be risk-averse – and wary of big and complicated issues. Eight years ago, the fact that David Cameron decided to retreat from the responsibilities of leadership and subject one such headache to a binary vote triggered the disaster of Brexit. Now, the fact that we have no reliable means of hosting informed, nuanced, properly accountable conversations about many areas of policy makes them even more confounding. The result: huge problems continue to pile up, creating the sense of a country that increasingly doesn’t work, and is too frozen by fear to do much about it.
We all know the list. Like assisted dying, some of the issues on it are those that governments seemingly dare not touch – most obviously laws on drugs that are not just absurd, but hugely socially damaging. But others highlight something arguably even more dysfunctional: problems that politicians talk about a lot, but never get to grips with.
This government is the latest one to postpone reform of a creaking adult social care model. That problem is partly rooted in the fact that our random archipelago of regional and local government is an underfunded, baffling mess, full of bankrupt or near-bankrupt councils, some areas that elect mayors while others don’t, and an archaic council tax that Westminster will not touch.
And so the issues go on. We have a police service that seems to bounce from crisis to disgrace with no real sign of any systemic answers. And even as the climate emergency worsens, there is still no consensus about how our society and economy needs to change to deal with it.
There are traditional ways of trying to make progress in difficult circumstances: a government sets up a royal commission or official inquiry led by an expert or trusted mediator, which then makes recommendations ministers are duty-bound to accept. But perhaps, these days, we are now too suspicious of supposed elites for that approach to really work. There is also the problem of such bodies’ proposals being ignored: witness the economist Andrew Dilnot’s recommendations on social care – whereby no one would have to pay more than 30% of their savings and assets towards meeting their needs – which have bounced around Westminster to no avail for nearly 15 years.
Elsewhere, there is now constant talk about the use of citizens’ assemblies, based on the understanding that when people listen to different viewpoints and share each other’s company, seemingly intractable problems start to become soluble.
Six years ago, thanks to Ireland’s creation in 2016 of a hugely important official citizens’ assembly, this was the way that an era-defining shift on abortion happened. As one account later put it: “It only took 99 ordinary citizens to help break years of political deadlock and reach a consensus on this highly polarising issue.”
Subsequent assemblies have explored the use of referendums, drug use, an ageing society and the policy implications of climate change. All this has the scent of the political future – which is one of the reasons why, in the UK, many green activists are insistent that meaningful climate action will only become politically possible if a citizens’ assembly is at the heart of the relevant decisions.
In the meantime, the story of Leadbeater’s bill surely confirms one thing beyond doubt. Whether or not she succeeds, this ought to be the last big push for social change that involves a mixture of accident, senior politicians’ encounters with famous people, and clerics and speciously appointed peers having more of a say than people who need to be heard.
It is time we had a 21st-century system of collective decision-making; without one, the problems that so terrify our politicians will only get worse.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
