Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Warner and Lord Ashton of Hyde

Friday 16th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord May of Oxford (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

We cannot have two people speaking at once. I am sure that the noble Lords can resolve it between them.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I have been sitting through these debates on assisted dying for some 12 years, sometimes on the Front Bench and sometimes on the Back Benches. I agree that I am getting older and my memory may be getting a little faulty, but I do not recollect in many of those debates people standing up with such skills of advocacy as we have heard this morning about this definitional issue in the wording of the Bill.

We have been talking about legislation which has been labelled assisted dying Bills over the 12 years from the first efforts in this area of my noble friend Lord Joffe. We have had commissions on it which have used the term “assisted dying”. The public have got used to the term “assisted dying”. If we really want to confuse the public at this point, changing the terminology of the Bill is a really good thing to do. We have sat through long public debates over this particular—