My Lords, there is a deep reason why so serious a Bill should be particularly careful about the language it uses. One of the problems we have today is that people use language in order to establish not the truth but a slight version of the truth that they wish to pass off. I hope the House will excuse me if I use what may appear to be a flippant example but I think it sums it up.
In the register of interests, I declare that I am the chairman of the Association of Professional Financial Advisers. The Financial Services Authority decided to call the changes that it wanted in the industry, “treating customers fairly”. This was done to suggest that anybody who did not agree with every fact in the policy would be treating customers unfairly. It was designed to have a particular effect.
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The public outside are very often as uncertain about the Bill as many inside. I cannot say how many of my noble colleagues have said to me, “I really am very unhappy about this Bill but on the other hand I feel I ought to take it very seriously and I am really trying to work my way through it”. Any of us who do not admit that we have to treat this issue very seriously indeed are ignoring the seriousness of the way in which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, has introduced it. Even those of us who have taken a view that the Bill is not one that we can support have a duty right the way through to make sure that people who are struggling to find an answer are not misled.
This is a narrowly drawn Bill and I believe that those who promote it should be very concerned to ensure that the world understands it as a narrowly drawn Bill. That is why I find that I am on the side of the noble Lord, Lord Winston, because I think that “assisted dying” gives people outside a misunderstanding of what this is about, which should be to the detriment of those who want the Bill to pass—I do not, but they should understand that it is to their detriment. I also think that this House has a real duty in a world that increasingly uses language not to explain and express but to change people’s approaches, because it is worded in that way.
I will make just one last comment. Cardinal Newman, in his great debates with Charles Kingsley, said that truth was not what left the mouth but what was heard in the ear—that we can tell the truth in the sense that we can defend that what we said was absolutely correct but we can say it in a way that we know will be heard differently from the way in which we have expressed it. When we discuss a Bill of this kind, we have to be very careful to remember that absolutely essential definition: truth is what the hearer hears. I think “suicide” is what the hearer needs to hear, and all sides of the House should accept that. “Assisted dying” is not what the hearer needs to hear because that will mean something quite different.