‘Parliament said no. The suffering doesn’t stop there’ | Andrew Copson

Author: Andrew Copson

‘For politicians, there may be another vote. For people like me, there may not be another time.’

Hannah Slater, a 38-year-old mother living with a terminal illness, put the stakes of today’s decision better than any speech in the chamber managed to. MPs have rejected the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. Hannah and everyone else who asked them for a choice now has to live with that refusal.

What makes this harder to accept is that our analysis suggests there was no great ideological shift against assisted dying. Just five MPs moved from support to opposition, well short of the 12 needed to defeat the Bill. Yet 43 previous supporters abstained, more than enough to determine the outcome.

Ahead of the vote, we knew that a visit to Ukraine, a wedding, and constituency commitments would keep supporters away. These were foreseeable absences. What confidence can people have in a Parliament where a decision of such consequence can turn on whether MPs can be physically present? Dying people have been denied a choice because our parliamentary arrangements couldn’t accommodate MPs voting while attending to other responsibilities.

Those celebrating should be asked what, exactly, they’ve won for her. No extra funding for palliative care came with this vote. No new disability support. And nothing to protect people who, desperate enough, try to end their lives anyway under a law that offers them no help in doing so safely. Whatever needs brought this Bill to parliament in the first place are still there tomorrow morning. Parliament just chose not to meet them.

Victoria Denning, a former headteacher, mother of two and humanist celebrant in Monmouth, was unexpectedly diagnosed with mesothelioma this year. Told she probably had a year left, she wanted some control over how it ended: time to say goodbye, get her affairs in order, decide for herself when the suffering had become too much. ‘Today, I’ve been denied that choice,’ she says.

A decision about her own dying, one she wanted to make according to her own values, is still against the law. The people who voted to keep it that way won’t be the ones living with what that costs her.

The inequality this leaves in place hasn’t gone anywhere. Getting to Switzerland takes money, and it takes being well enough to travel, and both of those are unevenly spread across the population. People without them can’t buy their way out of a law that won’t help them at home. Some will go on suffering in ways they find unbearable. Some, in the end, will try to end their own lives alone, often earlier than they otherwise would. None of that changes because parliament voted no.

Nor does it fix what opponents of the bill were right about, when it came to care. People need proper access to palliative care. Disabled people need real support to live full, independent lives and with full freedom of choice, not just warm words about their value. And nobody should ever reach a point where dying feels like the only way out of poverty, isolation, or a system that’s failed them. Those are things that take money and political will to fix. Voting down this bill did nothing to fix any of them. It just meant parliament didn’t have to try.

For humanists, respecting life means respecting the person living it. We get one, and it’s made worth living by the people in it and the things we get to do and hope for. Taking that seriously means actually listening when someone near the end of that life says they want some say over how much suffering they have to go through first. That deserves more than sympathy and then a locked door.

There’s a democratic failure here too. The Commons passed the last version of this bill. It died in the Lords after months of proceedings where opponents talked openly about how to run the clock out. That’s what forced MPs to start all over again. Today’s result doesn’t erase the fact that obstruction is what made a second attempt necessary in the first place.

An unelected chamber shouldn’t be able to grind down a bill that already won the argument in the House that’s actually accountable to voters. People who helped make that happen might feel they’ve won something tonight. Terminally ill people are owed an honest answer about whose interests that process was really serving.

There’s a particular responsibility now on the MPs, and the professional bodies, who said they backed assisted dying in principle but couldn’t back this bill. Saying that isn’t free. It comes with an obligation to say, specifically, what eligibility rules and safeguards and oversight would have earned their support instead. Look at what other countries have done, work out what actually holds up, and say how it would work here. Vague sympathy isn’t a policy.

Government should make that work possible, and give whatever comes next an actual route through parliament. Support ‘in principle’ has to turn into something MPs can vote on, or it isn’t worth much more than a more polite way of telling dying people to keep waiting.

Lauren Edwards deserves real credit for bringing this bill back, and so do the campaigners who handed parliament some of the hardest moments of their lives to make their case. 

Hannah told MPs she might not get another chance. Silence isn’t good enough as an answer to that. The people who voted this down owe her, and everyone else living with the result, a clear account of what they intend to do instead.

Andrew Copson is Chief Executive of Humanists UK.