Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, on the last two occasions when this subject was debated, I fully supported the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, and I continue to do so. Even more so now do I believe in the desirability of further examination at Committee stage of what is proposed. As the noble Lord, Lord St. John of Fawsley, said, your Lordships’ House is an ideal forum for such examination. Owing to the time pressures of this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, came up with a string of assertions of what she believed were the defects of this Bill. It would be ideal if all her points could be examined and debated in Committee. If we come to that point at the end of today by passing the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, to commit the Bill to a Committee of the Whole House, I sincerely hope that any opposition will be entirely constructive. I believe that, as many noble Lords have said, we should be taking more account of public opinion. However much some inconvenient opinion polls are discounted, it seems to me to be clear that a convincing majority of the public are in favour of some change in the law. My justification for that view are the figures that I used in our previous debate and those that the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, quoted today. I have wanted to ask many speakers who have opposed the Bill today this question: are you content that we should have a continuing procession of cases to Zurich in Switzerland involving people who do not accept the present orthodoxy offered by the Churches and by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay? I recommend that anyone who is trying in future to understand this stage of our debate should listen to a recording of what some of your Lordships may have heard on Radio 4 just after eight o’clock this morning. It was a perfect vignette of our arguments. A distressing case was articulately presented by a woman called Sally McIntosh, who would have liked to have been able to avail herself of what the Bill would allow. However, she said that she had only a few weeks to live and could not get the paperwork required by Swiss rules ready in time. That was followed by the two Archbishops, who had absolutely nothing to offer that individual. They went on, in the expected form of words, to question the concept of autonomy and to argue that, because it is impossible to get the law into a perfect state, everything should remain unchanged. That woman had consciously and with rational consideration rejected palliative care, but that strategy is not allowed by the Churches or by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. Because of what I call their absolute position, whatever distressing circumstances you might describe, you are told that you have not thought it through properly. My noble friend Lady Finlay told us in her speech that when she hears the words, ““I wish I were dead””, she needs to interpret them for you—on the grounds that you do not really mean what you say. And I imagine that if you are not convinced by her first interpretation, she will explain again, and so on. I am not just personalising this on her: that is now the attitude of the Churches, and I would personally call it ““Kafka-esque””. That is the intractable difficulty of the position where no exceptions are allowed in the debate. In my view, the discussions around autonomy have become a self-induced fog, to obfuscate the debate and to cause apparent uncertainty. It sometimes seems like a medieval disputation that, almost by definition, has no solution hence no conclusion can be arrived at. Similarly, it sometimes appears that because perfection cannot be reached in framing a law in this apparently very difficult area, nothing should ever be done. In my opinion, those have become largely excuses. We get the phenomenon of ““society”” being defined in such a way that it can never, by definition, allow enough autonomy ever to permit a decision for people to be allowed to avail themselves of the option under this Bill. I believe that those amount to excuses for perpetual inaction. We should be more practical.