Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL]

My Lords, I want to give a message to the House from my noble friend Lady Park of Monmouth, who is in hospital. We have great respect for her all around the House. The message she wanted me to give was that she is very much opposed to the Bill. I have another message—from the leader of our party, David Cameron, who says:"““We should not allow doctors or others positively to accelerate death because I think the long-term consequences of permitting such action are too likely to be dangerous for society. But there will be a free vote””." As noble Lords know, at 5.20 am on 11 December last year, there was a massive explosion at the Bunsfield oil depot in Hertfordshire. Three days later, we received the explanation of what went wrong. My noble friend Lord Newton of Braintree chaired the committee, which found that two safety devices failed, the tank overflowed and so the disaster happened. That disaster illustrates what happens when safeguards do not ““fail to safety””. Failing to safety would have meant that a malfunction of the safety devices would have stopped the tanks filling up and the disaster would not have occurred. Noble Lords may be wondering why I refer to those matters and think that I have come to the wrong debate, but I want to illustrate that the law, as it now stands, fails to safety. It errs on the side of life and protecting the vulnerable. For all its intended safeguards, the Bill will not fail to safety. The present law errs on the side of life; the Bill will err on the side of death. That is all the more worrying because when the safeguards in the Bill fail, there will be no explosion. There will not even be a whimper. The failure may never be discovered, because the patient will be dead. It will then be too late to find out whether the request for assistance in dying was truly voluntary. It will be too late to discover whether the patient’s decision to seek assistance in dying was truly an informed decision. It will be impossible to discover whether the patient, had he lived, would have looked back and been grateful for the fact that he had not been assisted to die. I, too, was very moved by the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean. It reminded me of Alison Davies, who wrote to me recently and gave evidence to the committee. Several years ago, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She was also quite severely disabled. She wanted euthanasia. Of course, that was refused. Difficult although it was, she tried to commit suicide on several occasions, but was always rescued by her friends, who persuaded her that life was worth living. Then she took on a new lease of life and started looking to help other people. She says:"““If Lord Joffe’s Bill had been law, I would have taken advantage of it and been killed and I would have been deprived of the best ten years of my life and the thousands of orphans in India that I have been helping would have been deprived of my services””." How do supporters of the Bill answer Alison Davies? If anyone is totally confident that the safeguards in the Bill are foolproof and impregnable to error, exactly what is the basis of that confidence? Does it rest on the solicitor who will sign a declaration to say that the patient appears to be of sound mind and that the declaration appears to be made voluntarily? If so, that confidence is misplaced—not because the solicitor will not do his honest best but because the solicitor has no special skill or training that enables him to discern the mental capacity of the patient. Furthermore, he has no way of knowing whether the declaration is truly involuntary. We all know that appearances can be deceptive. A solicitor serves to give the declaration a spurious gravitas, but that is not a true safeguard. Judged objectively, no one can be satisfied that the safeguards in the Bill will always be sufficient and effective. Patients know this, of course. To pass the Bill would therefore not only disadvantage patients but would also risk undermining the trust between doctors and patients, as the noble Lord, Lord Nickson, has said so eloquently. If the Bill becomes law, I could put a lethal tablet in the hand of patient who had made the declaration, and if he swallowed it and died, that would be lawful. If, on the other hand, I took the pill and put it on his tongue and he died, that would be illegal. If he is incapable of moving his hand at all, and I put the tablet on my hand, put it within a few centimetres of his mouth, and his tongue whipped out and took it, would that be lawful? As he is the one taking the medication, I am simply acting as a sort of platform. This is far too fine a distinction for law. Considered from the point of view of the patient, it is also an unprincipled distinction, and one that would not be sustainable in the long term. Proposers of the Bill should know this. They probably hope that the Bill will prove to be a significant and first step on the road to lawful euthanasia, but sometimes first steps are best not taken. This is one such step. A few years ago, supporters of the Bill were very much in support of euthanasia as practised in Holland. But they now seem to be moving away from that position. The present Bill now involves only assisted suicide, but that is where it all began in Holland. Within a few years, they moved to euthanasia for depressed patients, for disabled patients, and then for newborn babies. There is now a proposal that people over the age of 75 should be considering this. When I look around the Chamber, I see that that might involve quite a few people here. Once the law permits for the first time a particular action such as euthanasia, even though it is only for a few people, the law cannot prevent the boundaries being extended. That is the problem. Some Dutch doctors have actually been disciplined for not agreeing with the principle of euthanasia. One Dutch doctor was no longer allowed to teach medical students because of that. It is worth mentioning again that when a Dutch doctor was asked what his first case of euthanasia was like, he said, ““It was dreadful. We agonised all day. But the second case was much easier, and the third case was a piece of cake””. Many elderly people in Holland are so fearful of euthanasia that they carry cards around with them saying that they do not want it. I was so glad that the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, mentioned the death penalty. Other noble Lords mentioned polling. It is true that many polls show that British people want the restoration of the death penalty, but presumably we would not countenance that. Why? Because misinformation leads to wrongful conviction. Misinformation to patients leads to wrong decisions, too. Forecasting the outcome of disease is also notoriously difficult. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, that the risks of the Bill are too great, and with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who described the Bill as a legal minefield and an ethical nightmare, morally indefensible and completely unnecessary.