Assisted Suicide

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Peter Bottomley

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who in fact takes me to my next point, which is that no one could fail to be struck by the clearly unaffected joy of Debbie Purdy and her caring husband, Omar Puente, when they believed that there had been clarification of the stage at which they might jointly have been able to decide when she could die. The fact that they seemed to be overjoyed by that showed an essential truth in relation to them and to the decisions that they personally needed and wanted to make—and wanted the law to allow them to make.

Having rattled through the difficulties in relation to the issue, may I move on to the motion and to the amendments before the House? The motion welcomes the Director of Public Prosecution’s guidance on cases of encouraging or assisting suicide, and it is certainly my view that, as others have said, the guidelines are sensible and proportionate. The hon. Member for Croydon South rightly said that they are compassionate, and many members of the public believe that they are.

When the public saw that Diane Pretty, despite all her efforts, eventually did suffocate—exactly what she did not want, because she wanted to be able to end her life before that with assistance, if necessary—they found the DPP’s response to the case of Debbie Purdy a few years later was proportionate, and it had their broad support. The motion does not seek to change the law.

Amendment (a), in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford, would not change the law, either. It

“invites the Government to consult as to whether to put the guidance on a statutory basis.”

When looking at amendments and at quasi-legal documents, I think that the safest way to interpret them is to interpret what they say as meaning what they say, and the amendment simply asks the Government to consult on whether the DPP’s guidance should be put on a statutory basis.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

The hon. Lady is helping the debate. If the Government were forced to hold such a consultation, would it be based precisely on the DPP’s guidelines as they are, or would it open up the debate to state that some of the guidelines are wrong, that there should be not just assisted suicide but death on request, or that the situation ought to involve the chronically ill and some of the physically handicapped? Would the consultation be constricted, because if it were not, why would we hold it?

[Emily Thornberry]

The hon. Gentleman, too, anticipates what I am going to say next, because having clarified what I believe to be the purpose of amendment (a), which is to invite the Government to consult, I believe also that it would invite the public to become involved in a debate, and no one in this House, given the difficulties in relation to the issue, should be afraid of that.

There are issues related to the current guidance, but there are wider issues, too, and we should not be afraid of debating them. There are the results of the Commission on Assisted Dying, which recommended permitting a doctor to assist suicide for the terminally ill and defined who the terminally ill are, and there is the issue of whether that recommendation would assist people who suffer from locked-in syndrome, or even Debbie Purdy, who suffered from multiple sclerosis but might not have been considered terminally ill. We should not run away from debating those issues, and it is important in these circumstances that there be a debate. That is why there is some good sense in amendment (a).

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

The unofficial commission started, it might fairly be described, with a majority of commissioners who believed in some of the results that they came out with.

[Emily Thornberry]

I do not wish to apportion any motives one way or the other to people who want to be involved in the debate; it is best that we have the debate and that the public are encouraged to be involved. The DPP has, in my view, come up with very sensible guidelines on when a prosecution for assisted suicide should begin, because it is appropriate for the Crown Prosecution Service and the DPP to be informed by a wider public debate.

For the reasons that I set out at the beginning of my remarks, I believe that the public would not necessarily like to have a debate, unless they have coming up in front of them cases such as Debbie Purdy’s, which they cannot avoid, but it is our responsibility as elected representatives to listen to the public and to encourage and engender debate, and that is the good sense behind amendment (a).