Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, I follow the noble Earl with respect, but I am afraid that I cannot follow him in supporting the Bill. I believe that killing and assisted killing is wrong and that this Bill would be a serious breach of principle. I want to make just two points in the short time available. I respect the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, for his courage in introducing the Bill, his intentions and his compassion. I was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office for 10 years in the mid-1990s. The Home Office is a place where all the worst aspects of society go through your in-tray every day. You learn more things about the disagreeable sides of society than you ever wanted to learn. If you legislate in a way that relaxes principle, you will find that you have to look at it through the prism of the worst things that people will do with it. You have to assume that human frailty, running the whole gamut from wickedness to weakness, will search out the weaknesses in the Bill. If you permit killing to take place you have to assume that there will be abuse and have to look at it without a rosy view of human nature. I offer that thought on the slippery slope. My view is that it is much better to put effort into palliative care, which is a very positive approach to the end of life, rather than bring forward death. I am proud to be a trustee of the Cicely Saunders Foundation. I was delighted when the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, paid a tribute to Dame Cicely Saunders who I believe was one of the truly great figures of the age in which we live. We miss her very much. I learnt from her that whatever one’s route of illness at the end of life—whether cancer or some other progressive disease—the symptoms are very similar, whether they are breathlessness, fatigue, pain or any of the other terrible things that can happen to people at the end of their life. The main issue is how those symptoms can be relieved and how people can be enabled to die with dignity. It is curious in the age in which we live that while huge amounts of money are spent on prevention and treatment of progressive illness, we turn our backs on the whole against spending money on research into relieving the symptoms in order to allow people to die with dignity. For every £500 we spend on research into cancer, less than £1 is devoted to symptom relief and end-of-life care. Those figures come from the National Cancer Research Institute. It is very odd that we are blind in that way. The gross imbalance is probably worse for other progressive or terminal conditions than for cancer. I would much prefer it if we could unite in this House to put effort into improving palliative care, which is a positive approach to the end of life with huge public support, rather than to put effort into assisted suicide, which I find to be inherently negative as an approach to death.