Death is Devolved
It may come as a surprise to you but we’re all going to die. What’s at stake in the discussion about the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill is whether you get the opportunity to chose the time and conditions of your own death. I’m in favour of it. People should have control over the way they give birth, just as they should be in control of the way they die. The home birth and the home death movements are part of building a civilised society – it’s just the bit in between needs sorted now.
The bill would “allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life”. The aim is to allow those aged 18 and over with “mental capacity” to seek medical assistance to end their life if they have less than six months to live. The restrictions seem to be very robust.
The process must involve two independent doctors being satisfied that the person is eligible, and the medics can consult a specialist in the person’s condition and get an assessment from an expert in mental capacity if deemed necessary. A High Court judge must hear from at least one of the doctors regarding the application and can also question the dying person as well as anyone else they consider appropriate. There must be at least seven days between the two doctors making their assessments and a further 14 days after the judge has made a ruling for the person to have a period of reflection on their decision.
Labour MP Kim Leadbeater formally introduced her Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to Parliament in October. If the Bill passes the first stage in the Commons, it will go to committee stage where MPs can table amendments, before facing further scrutiny and votes in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, meaning any change in the law would not be agreed until next year at the earliest.
Leadbeater’s Bill would apply only to England and Wales.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur has introduced a Member’s Bill – Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill – on the issue at Holyrood.
Under the proposals, eligibility requires being a resident of Scotland for at least a year, being registered with a GP in the country, and being mentally competent. The likely first key vote to take place in the Scottish Parliament on McArthur’s bill will be in late spring or early summer 2025. Again the restrictions are very robust.
Without going into the details of the (Westminster) bill being debated today, the issue raises some important constitutional issues.
The first is you realise that what is being proposed means that it’s seen as possible that there should be two different laws within the UK about such an important matter (a matter of life and death) yet it was seen as heresy and sacrilege for the Scottish Government to put forward a recycling scheme that would be particular to Scotland.
That’s incredible when you think about it.
The second is that if the bill passes in Westminster it will go ahead. If the bill passes in Holyrood it will be quashed.
That’s incredible when you think about it.
It is inconceivable that Westminster would allow Holyrood to legislate on such a matter, even though it is clearly a devolved matter. Devolution, increasingly has been put on a DNR.
Much of the opposition to the bill at Westminster seems to be predicated not on the principle at stake but on concerns that the ‘guardrails’ and safeguards to prevent the legislation are not sufficient because the NHS is in such a perilous economic state. So, we are about to jettison a good law (that’s supported by 2/3 of people polled in E&W) because people have fears that the NHS can’t cope. That’s a terrible reason to vote this down.
The choice should not be between quality palliative care and dignity in death. The arguments seems to be that Britain is too broken to reform. “We’d like to create an opportunity for dignified dying but, sorry, the NHS is too over-stretched and dysfunctional to make this work.”
Death is devolved, but only in principle. But we are wedded to a state that is so dysfunctional it can’t change. Let that sink in.
The westminster bill is flawed in as much as it suggests the patient themself must administer the medicine to end their life to themself
In certain terminally patients this would be immpossible .im thinking of motor neurone disease which i understand can restrict patients movements so that administering to themselves is not an option.
The Leadbetter private member’s Bill has been passed at Westminster by a majority of 55, with an absolute majority of MPs voting in favour. SNP MPs abstained, on principle, because the Bill applies only to England and Wales and because, as you mentioned, there is a Bill on the same issue to be voted on by Holyrood.
Personally, I hope the Scottish Bill passes and that Westminster accepts this even if it means that there are different through mainly similar Acts in Scotland, England and Wales.
However, over many years, on a number of issues, there has been separate or an absence of legislation in Northern Ireland
It is noteworthy that Labour, Tory and LibDem MPs for Scottish constituencies voted at Westminster. Had they not voted, the Bill would still have passed. It is also noteworthy that some MPs for Norther Irish constituencies voted, with SF, as usual, abstaining.
Will Westminster, with its ‘unwritten constitution’ or ‘perfidious Albion’ reputation accept these variations or will it overrule Holyrood and impose the England and Wales legislation, while permitting no assisted dying legislation in Northern Ireland?
I certainly did not support EVEL as many Westminster votes on English (& some Welsh) policies have consequences for Scotland (eg WFA). This appears to be one bill that had no such direct implications for Scotland and was not party political so I do wonder why MP’s outside England & Wales thought they were entitled to vote?
Debates about assisted suicide and the state’s role in providing a legal framework for it, usually focus almost entirely on either on the abstract principles involved (moral, legal, religious) or the regulation of the ways and means (who is affected and in what circumstances, and how is it administered). But rarely is the discussion widened to encapsulate the wider social, political and economic context in which it is being proposed.
There are good reasons why some people are wary of legal reforms that aim to make the process more accessible to people, even though they might fully agree with the principle of the individual’s right to make an informed choice for themselves. This relates to the historical, and very current, attitudes towards people viewed as ‘unproductive’ by professionals (doctors, nurses, social workers) and also the state itself. There is a widespread assumption (often unstated, but sometimes openly acknowledged) that poor, elderly, sick or disabled people are a ‘burden’ on society (or should that be capital) because of the cost and inconvenience involved in maintaining their independence and dignity, and that these lives are worth less than ‘productive’ people. It’s a small step then to being not just worth less but worthless. This is obvious when you look at the UK government’s war on disabled people (John Pring’s book ‘The Department’ catalogues the cost in lives by the DWP’s treatment of disabled claimants), the ease with which Labour is prepared to accept increases in avoidable deaths in order to reassure corporations, ‘high value’ tax payers and hedge funds that it is ‘fit’ to govern. Or remember how, at the outbreak of Covid, GPs were directed to go through their patients and apply DNRs (which in practice appears to have ended up being assigned to those with a serious physical or learning disability without their or their families’ consent). Or the unthinking disregard for the elderly hospital patients discharged en masse to care homes where the virus decimated the residents. It is frightening to discover how widespread the contempt for ‘useless eaters’ lurks just below the surface in public policy. The fact that it is done unconsciously, and without debate makes it all the more insidious.
In our society as it actually is now, whatever regulations and guarantees are put in place, assisted suicide legislation will always be felt by some as a threat even if, as individuals, they agree with the principle of giving people control and choice. This is because, however restricted, it could become one more step towards rehabilitating an underlying societal eugenics that has never really gone away since its open espousal by intellectuals and policy makers last century.
This is not an argument against assisted dying. I’m all for it for myself. Just a reminder that, in practice, it can’t be separated from questions of inequality and power relations in society.
Well, they voted for the bill.
“The choice should not be between quality palliative care and dignity in death.” – I’m not convinced this is a good argument.
The Labour Government will not properly fund palliative care, so it’s largely left to charity – and charity is always a failure of government.
So people will opt for assisted suicide because they are unlikely to get good palliative care.
I believe that palliative care, which is functionally assisted dying, should have been fully funded as a built in feature of the NHS before we discuss an assisted suicide bill.
The question on a moral level seems to come down to the right to dignity in death versus the sanctity of life.
I don’t wish to impose my personal moral beliefs on anyone else therefore I think it is correct to give each individual the right to choose how they die according to their beliefs and wishes.
@John, careful with that thought.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusade_bull#Northern_Crusades
And the phrase “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” was inscribed on the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1913, according to Wikipedia.
I can understand the validity of such a vote in a country with a representative democratic system using proportional representation for elections, but here, in a country with a FPP system, a government that gained 34% of the vote to get 412 seats (about 64%), we have to ask if even on a free vote is this really democratic? On matters such as this, shouldn’t this be put to the people?
Such an argument could be made against every decision made at Westminster since it was first established. However, if the ‘people were to decide’ on this issue polling evidence suggests the people would vote in favour of assisted dying by around 70%.
Electoral reform is needed. However to base your claim on such a narrow partisan base is wrong.
What claim?
2000 AD’s Judge Dredd’s Megacity One combines both schemes in Resyk, where the bodies of citizens are processed and recycled into something useful, one gathers. So if England and Wales adopted that scheme, would they let the harvested resources flow northward for use in Scotland? Or if devolved schemes were allowed, would the material be pooled and distributed on need?
An excellent proposal. I am sure it will be raised at the committee / Lords stages of the bill. Using the recycled English to resource Scottish matters would be a fitting reparative move, an inversion of the colonial boot, though I suspect would still be subject to the Barnet formula.
@Niemand, I appreciate your appeal to justice, and of course some day a Scot might have the heart and stomach of a king of England too, but I was thinking mainly of the Circular Economy (and even the Circle of Life — don’t watch the dreadful Lion Kings — must be part of that).
And perhaps we should be commemorating people digitally, not materially, when we come to it. No physical monuments, which appear largely to overshadow moral basements.
Although again appealing to justice, we should send home the mortal remains of our colonial people-looting:
https://impact.ed.ac.uk/our-shared-world/changing-the-legacy-of-colonial-collecting/#:~:text=During%20the%20colonial%20period%2C%20explorers,discredited%2C%20racial%20theories%20of%20superiority.
Theoretically, medical consensual murder would be free across the UK, so it wouldn’t break the internal market rules, and an analogy with monetarised recycling is is invalid, and offensive.
‘Monetarised recycling’ : )
Medical concensual murder ! Have a word with yourself.