Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Lord McColl of Dulwich Excerpts

Friday 12th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

My Lords, I have attended and spoken at most of the debates on euthanasia over the last 35 years, and one feature that has always struck me is that they have been full of anecdotes. Perhaps we ought to consider that the Greek word “anecdote” means “unpublished”, which is arguably what most anecdotes should remain.

I will avoid anecdotes and stick to my practice over the last 50 years, looking after people who are dying. Perhaps I can best illustrate that by referring to a lady aged 28 who came in with an inoperable cancer of her throat. She was in pain and in great respiratory distress, and I said to her to that I could relieve all her symptoms with an intravenous injection of an analgesic. I said to her, “Would you like me to do that?”. She said yes. I put a needle into her vein and started to titrate her, as it were, with a very powerful drug, and I was amazed at how much I had to inject. Eventually, all her symptoms went. She died three weeks later, having had three weeks symptom-free.

Cicely Saunders, with whom I was a contemporary at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, was the founder of the hospice movement. She devised this technique of keeping the level of analgesia in the blood at a constant level. She found that it was best to prevent pain rather than wait until it had come. That worked, and the patient was much more wide awake and could enjoy what life remained with this technique.

One of the worrying features of this whole subject is that many of those who are keen on euthanasia have taken it into their heads to rubbish the hospice movement and spread rumours that it does not know how to relieve pain. This is a lie. I have worked in hospices for all these years, and that is not the case. They say, “Oh, well, we weren’t allowed to give more analgesia because of the law”. There is no law that prevents that. You can give as much as is needed. That is what Cicely Saunders promoted and did so very well.

We hear a lot about freedom, that people must have freedom. A man came into a hospice, and he had multiple myeloma, so it was infecting his bone marrow and releasing large quantities of calcium. Too much calcium in the blood means the heart stops beating. He said, “No no, I want euthanasia”. They said, “Look, you are having a drug that keeps your calcium down to stop you dying. If you want to die, all you have to do is stop taking the drug”. He never stopped taking the drug until the day he died—so much for freedom.