Among the first items of parliamentary business for new UK prime minister Andy Burnham is yet another attempt to introduce assisted suicide into British law.

Labour MP Lauren Edwards reintroduced the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in July, just before parliament’s summer recess. In doing so, she took up the baton from Kim Leadbeater, who failed to pass her bill during the previous parliamentary session. Edwards’s bill will have its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday 11 September.

Leadbeater’s original assisted-dying bill contained so many flaws and loopholes that the House of Lords simply ran out of time to amend it into a functional piece of law. Yet the bill introduced by Lauren Edwards is to all intents and purposes identical to Leadbeater’s. That’s no accident: Edwards must present the same bill if she wants the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949 to come into effect. These acts allow for the same legislation, if passed in the House of Commons in consecutive parliamentary sessions, to automatically become law regardless of what the Lords think.

The decision to use the Parliament Acts is revealing. Supporters of assisted dying could have brought back a radically reworked version of Leadbeater’s bill that addresses the criticisms raised by doctors, psychiatrists, disability campaigners and legal experts over the past year. But instead, they have brought back exactly the same bill. The goal seems simply to get the legislation over the line, whatever state it’s in or however widely experts may critique it. This should concern everyone, whether they support the principle of assisted suicide or oppose it.

Over the past year or so, in both houses of parliament, the assisted-dying bill has received one of the most exhaustive examinations ever faced by a private members’ bill – that is, a bill introduced by MPs and members of the Lords who are not government ministers. Royal Colleges, professional bodies, domestic-abuse charities, disability organisations, mental-health experts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission all identified significant flaws in the bill. Many of those organisations and experts were not ideologically opposed to assisted dying. Several supported assisted suicide in principle or were neutral on the issue. They were concerned above all with whether this particular legislation is safe, and whether it can protect vulnerable people.

Even Lord Falconer, one of Britain’s longest-serving advocates for assisted suicide and sponsor of Leadbeater’s bill in the Lords, has acknowledged that important changes are needed. He questioned the safeguards for younger adults, the treatment of patients with suicidal thoughts, the risks of remote consultations and the absence of proper recording requirements.

Using the Parliament Acts to push the legislation through is not simply about avoiding the Lords. It also means that MPs will be unable to amend the bill in the House of Commons. This is a wholly inappropriate way to legislate on a question of life and death.

Private members’ bills have never before been forced through parliament using the Parliament Acts. Nor has this bill earned anything approaching an overwhelming democratic mandate. It was absent from Labour’s election manifesto, and passed the Commons only narrowly, with fewer than half of all MPs voting in favour at the third reading. Now, after months of criticism, it has returned unchanged.

Andy Burnham’s recent intervention makes the problem even sharper for supporters of the bill. The PM has now said the debate on assisted dying should not happen while palliative and social care remain poorly funded, confirming, ‘that’s the position I will stick to’.

This is a major setback for the assisted-dying lobby, which had relied heavily on the backing of then PM Keir Starmer. Burnham has correctly made clear that the question of assisted suicide cannot be separated from the state of palliative and social care, and that the funding and reform of the latter must come first. At the very least, that puts him at odds with the strategy of forcing the bill back through parliament and hoping to avoid scrutiny.

Those MPs backing this zombie bill need to think again. Making it acceptable to bypass parliamentary scrutiny because it is convenient to do so sets a very dark precedent indeed.

The UK’s asylum system has been broken for years. As the British public knows all too well, anyone can arrive and seemingly no one can be deported. This week’s revelation that just one per cent of asylum claims are genuine strips the British state of the little credibility it had left.

The Home Office whistleblower who leaked this information to The Times has caused a predictable degree of outrage. But we shouldn’t be so shocked. Our asylum system has been completely overwhelmed and incompetently managed for some time.

Since the start of 2021, there have been over 200,000 grants of leave or protection at the initial decision-making stage. This inexplicably includes individuals from Canada, Ireland, Germany and a host of other developed countries that are quite clearly not in a parlous state.

The UK government will point to a recent increase in initial rejections, but three-quarters of these go on to appeal. This adds to the already huge immigration-tribunal backlog, where a significant number of claims are subsequently upheld on spurious, scarcely credible grounds.

Historically unprecedented pressures are being placed on the asylum system. Between 2003 and 2021, the number of annual asylum applications rarely exceeded more than 45,000. In 2024, there were a record-breaking 108,000 applications. Despite Labour’s talk of bringing down applications since entering office, there have been 86,000 lodged in the past 12 months.

The Home Office is not fit for purpose during the best of times. It is manifestly incapable of dealing with an escalating crisis such as this.

The department’s own data suggests that just half of asylum claims are actually being processed to a satisfactory standard. This week, the UN – hardly a cheerleader for strong border protection – has warned that Britain is awarding asylum to undeserving individuals.

Rejecting a claim takes time that caseworkers do not have. When faced with a mountain of paperwork, it is much easier to copy and paste a boilerplate approval letter than to spend hours refuting every point raised by the applicant. In the rare instance that the Home Office does issue a rejection letter, it acts as nothing more than a stimulus for more inventive claims to be conjured at the appeal stage.

This is how we end up with, according to the Home Office whistleblower, hundreds of Kurdish men being granted asylum on the basis of being in a relationship with the same woman – the daughter of Kurdistan’s prime minister. A running joke in the Home Office apparently, but an example of what most of us have long suspected: that our asylum system is a farce.

In March, home secretary Shabana Mahmood proposed that refugees should be expected to return home once their country is deemed to be safe. But this misses the point. Asylum seekers are not being allowed to stay because their country is in upheaval. They are here because they have been able to concoct tales of woe that hit all the right notes for our naive human-rights and modern-slavery framework.

We have on our hands here a system that is beyond reform. The longer it is allowed to continue, the greater the social corrosion and economic ruin that must be contended with.

The Home Office spent £4.9 billion on core asylum provision last year, not including the eye-watering amounts squandered on legal aid and healthcare. And these are just the immediate costs. The cost to the British state stretches far into the future. Even eight years after being granted asylum, less than half of migrants will be in work. The median wage of those actually in a job is less than £14,000 per annum.

The pressure on the UK’s infrastructure and finances is one thing, but it is nothing compared to the impact on our social fabric. Outrage over the near-daily reports of sexual assaults and heinous crimes carried out by asylum seekers is ubiquitous. The anger is exacerbated by the fact that these atrocities are entirely avoidable – each one the direct result of government failure.

Our public spaces have now been commandeered by groups of young men, squeezing the pre-existing citizenry into the margins. The average British town is now an asylum seekers’ playpen, which just happens to have a community attached. Public order has been obliterated by the number of illegal immigrants brazenly working for delivery companies, in vape shops and at car washes.

We have voted against this mess, consistently. We have been told the problem will be sorted, and that the very best brains are working on a solution. But the situation only seems to get worse.

We are staring down the barrel of a democratic crisis. Regaining public trust will require more than simply a commitment to prevent future error. Those mistakes already made must be reversed. This entails not just the suspension of the asylum system, but a root-and-branch review of all grants made in recent years, and the removal of all who entered via illegal means. Enough is enough.

Rob Bates is the research director at the Centre for Migration Control.