It’s time to kill off this zombie assisted-dying bill

Labour MP Lauren Edwards has brought the assisted-dying debate back to Westminster, reintroducing the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The bill received its first reading in the House of Commons last Wednesday, formally marking its return to parliament.

The legislation, first introduced in 2024 by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, ran out of time in the House of Lords earlier this year. Supporters of the bill accused opponents in the Lords of deliberately blocking it by tabling more than 1,200 amendments.

There are substantial difficulties for Edwards, who must present the exact same bill if she wants the Parliament Act 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.

For proponents and organisations like Dignity in Dying (DiD), which have spearheaded the campaign to legalise assisted suicide and written many an MP’s cliché-ridden speech, this is a long shot. Their strategy is to maintain the moral high ground by insisting that democracy has been thwarted by the bill’s original failure to pass.

Invoking the Parliament Act for a private members’ bill is near enough unprecedented. In fact, it has only been used seven times in British history. Clearly, the assisted-suicide lobby is getting desperate.

Let’s remind ourselves of some of the problems with the bill. Doctors remain free to raise the possibility of assisted suicide with patients, thus opening the door to coercion. Clinicians have warned that hospices could be forced to close if they do not wish to have people killed on their premises. And despite Leadbeater claiming the bill has the ‘strongest safeguards anywhere in the world’, it even allows for private companies to profit from killing people.

Then there’s the key problem with legislation of this ilk. Inevitably, the scope of who can apply for assisted dying will broaden from beyond what is laid down in law. This is the lesson from every jurisdiction where it has been introduced. Regardless of what Leadbeater, or now Edwards, might have to say, assisted suicide will become available to everyone, for every reason under the Sun.

Take Canada. Ten years ago, it established euthanasia and assisted suicide only for those with ‘reasonably foreseeable’ deaths under its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme. MAID was expanded to all people with permanent disabilities in 2021 and is set to expand to those suffering from mental illness next year. Since MAID was introduced a decade ago 100,000 people have been given lethal injections. That means that more Canadians have been killed under MAID laws than during the Second World War. Do we want that for the UK?

Unsurprisingly, the thought of raising this zombie bill from the dead is causing concern among professional organisations. The Royal College of Physicians, neutral on assisted dying, has been forced to reiterate its concerns about the bill. Hospice UK has also criticised the bill’s reemergence, especially ‘at a time when hospice and palliative care is under strain’.

None of this touches on the biggest difficulty Edwards faces – namely, that parliament itself is increasingly hostile to a re-run of this debate. Clearly, a lot has changed in the two years since Leadbeater’s first bill emerged. Not only is Starmer’s authority shattered, his likely successor – Andy Burnham – is also unlikely to go anywhere near such a divisive issue. Besides, former prominent supporters of the bill, such as Louise Haigh, Ian Murray and Jeremy Hunt, have all criticised any attempt to use the Parliament Act to revive assisted dying. Former public-health minister Ashley Dalton – who herself is terminally ill with cancer – said: ‘We have debated this deeply divisive and flawed assisted-dying bill for over a year and supporters have refused to listen or to make the necessary changes.’

The last word should surely belong to Tory MP Simon Hoare, who, when it was announced that the bill would return, shouted: ‘Oh, not again!’