I just want to pay my deepest and sincere compliments to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, whose humanity and speech were quite remarkable. We fully understand where she stands and have a huge amount of sympathy with what she says.
In moving my amendment, I was fairly careful to adopt a neutral position, but one thing in this debate that remains a problem for me is how it has been assumed that it is the autonomy of people who are dying, or are likely to want to die, that is at stake. The problem is that, in spite of what the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, said, it is about the autonomy of a lot of other people—health service workers, carers, people in the street, people who clean hospitals and, most importantly, our society.
It is very important that the people who have written to me—I have tried to reply to nearly all the letters, as far as I can, but there has been a vast number of them
and it has been difficult—understand that there has to be further discussion of the Bill, that it should progress in the normal way and that the convention of the House, which is usually respected, is that we do not move amendments at the end of a Second Reading.
When we come to the next stages of the Bill—if we do—it is important to recognise that the Bishops’ Bench is extremely important in this. I am not a Christian—I am a Jew—but the influence the bishops have on the moral compass of this debate is extremely important. I am not going to deal with any cognitive geometry, as the Minister suggested, but it is not an argument about religion; religion is irrelevant. The debate is about how we understand what our ethical standards should be and how we maintain the ethics of our society. That is perhaps more important now than it has ever been before, with the problems, for example, that technology produces. Having said that, I do not want to detain the House any longer. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Amendment withdrawn.
Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House .