My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, made the accusation that lots of the amendments to the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, were a sort of Machiavellian plot to subvert the democratic process. I want to point out that I had tabled one of those amendments, about mental health, partly because I thought that that was our job here, that when a Bill was before Parliament, we followed it through—to every Bill that I have followed through here, there have been myriad, endless amendments. I thought that our role was to scrutinise proposed laws, to debate the merits and demerits and so on. I was therefore disappointed that there was no Committee stage of that Private Member’s Bill. So I do not accept the suggestion that those who put down amendments did so somehow to avoid debate; in fact, it was the opposite.
My general view on the problems of parliamentary and democratic process was best summed up by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I also feel queasy that there is a kind of subverting of the parliamentary process by an amendment on assisted dying or assisted suicide being put down on the Health and Care Bill. It is totally inappropriate. It is hijacking a Bill. Whatever else assisted dying and assisted suicide is, it does not contribute to improving anyone’s health. It requires ending a life; it is not a healthcare matter, and it will require a major change in the criminal law, so this is the wrong Bill.
However, I have every sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and feel his frustration. I feel all the time that there are lots of laws I want to change; there are lots of things I want to change about the country; there are lots of times when I feel as though the public think one thing and the Government ignore them. What one therefore needs to do is to lobby the Government—the noble Lord probably has closer access to them than a lot of us—or, as maybe I would do, to organise a demonstration or a protest, unless the Government had got away with banning that by the time we got there. In other words, in a democracy, there are lots of frustrations that need to be expressed if you want to change the law. Using our position as unelected legislators to add an amendment to an inappropriate Bill seems to be completely wrong on a matter of such huge importance.