Oral Answers to Questions
Peter Bottomley Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Robert Buckland
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that point. The level of appeals and the number of successful appeals remain stubbornly high, which has been of concern to all of us who have taken an interest in this for many years. I want to see the mandatory reassessment process be as meaningful as possible so that the courts are not having in effect to overturn these decisions. I take her point onboard and am looking at it anxiously.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I am aware of two cases in the last year where the most senior Appeal Court judges have come to a unanimous agreement only for that to be followed by unanimous disagreement in the Supreme Court. The Justice Secretary might know of more. Would it be a good idea to have an independent body to write an explanation so that those of us who are not lawyers can understand what is actually going on?
Oral Answers to Questions
Peter Bottomley Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Gauke
As I said earlier, there is a wider debate on this matter. I believe that the earlier such support can be provided, the better. When it comes to reform of divorce law, my argument is that by that stage it is often too late. In any event, the current requirement in our divorce law to attribute blame and fault makes it all the harder for marriages to be reconciled.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I think my right hon. Friend and the Government have got the approach right. Divorce is not the time to start putting difficulties in people’s way. When people get married, they know it is going to end in desertion, divorce or death; on the whole, death is the one we would choose, but preferably not as a result of too active participation by the other half.
May I reinforce what my right hon. Friend said, and ask him whether he will try to make it better known, not just in his Department but in others, that if people can get into stable households, all sorts of things go better? Poverty is reduced, anguish is reduced, life is extended and people have better lives, so times of family formation, reformation and even de-formation can lead to a better life for most people.
Mr Gauke
I do agree with my hon. Friend, and I am interested by the insights into the Bottomley household. The fact that our current divorce laws introduce conflict at the point of divorce can make the break-up of relationships more confrontational than it needs to be in what are already difficult circumstances.
Mr Speaker
I believe that the hon. Gentleman has been married for 52 years.
Assisted Dying
Peter Bottomley Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Nick Boles
I do not think that I have ever had a more intelligent set of interventions, so I thank the hon. Gentleman for another one. There has been change, but I do not want to pretend that the change has gone far enough, which is why we are not proposing, at this point, to bring forward a new set of legal measures.
Perhaps the most significant change is in the opinion of the medical profession. We have seen a number of royal colleges move from having a formal position of opposing assisted dying to having a position of being neutral about it, which reflects the fact that they will always have some members who are very much opposed to it, but they now have an increasing number of physicians who are in favour of it.
We have seen not so much a change as a consolidation of public opinion on this issue. In the latest opinion poll, which, frankly, is not very different from any of the opinion polls over the past couple of years, more than 80% of the British public support an assisted dying law for people in the final six months of a terminal illness, and well over 50% of people who declare that they have an active faith take that view. So although Church leaders, apart from the very honourable exception of the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, are opposed, their flocks are actually finding that they, too, believe that a change in the law is justified.
I also agree with the hon. Gentleman that, before any further proposals come forward, we should study closely the experience in the state of Victoria in Australia, for example. As he will be aware, New Zealand recently passed on Second Reading an assisted dying law, and there is the much longer standing experience of Oregon as well as Canada more recently. We should study all those and look at the precise legal and medical safeguards used to try to devise something that avoids many of the risks that have been raised by other hon. Members.
Sir Peter Bottomley
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his response to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin). In the Netherlands, the number of physician-assisted deaths is 3.5%, which, in this country, would translate into 21,000 deaths a year. There are about 5,000 suicides a year in this country, of which about 400 are estimated to be people dying at their own hand because they have a terminal illness that they do not want to live with. How can one explain to anyone else the difference between that 300 or 400 and 21,000, which is four times the number of suicides that we have at the moment?
Nick Boles
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point, because it allows me to point out that the Netherlands law is a completely different law, and I would vote against it if anyone proposed it in the House of Commons. It is a law to enable people to commit suicide more or less whenever they want. That may work for the Dutch—I have nothing but respect for the Dutch people—but I could not vote for it, and I do not believe that it would get more than 100 votes in this House.
What we are proposing is something that has existed in the state of Oregon in the United States for 20 years, and it has never crept anywhere near being the kind of law that the hon. Gentleman is talking about. Yes, of course, there will be much more lax and liberal laws of assisted suicide in other jurisdictions. That is of no relevance at all to the question of whether, in the final six months of a terminal illness, a narrow assisted dying law, with legal and medical safeguards, can operate safely in the United Kingdom, as it does in Canada and in the state of Oregon. I am entirely confident that it can.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
The number for the Samaritans is 116 123. If anyone thinks they need help or is contemplating suicide, other than in some of the circumstances that we have heard about, they should think about calling up, sending an email to jo@samaritans.org, visiting a branch, or writing to them.
It is obvious that a lot of people in many countries around the world want to end their lives because of depression or mental pressures, and people ought to start a debate like this by talking about that.
We then ought to get on to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), who stated that this was not about changing the law. However, it was fairly plain from his speech and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) that they are talking about changing the law, and that was confirmed by the speech we just heard from the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb).
I have experience of some of these issues. My brother’s life support was switched off after an accident, and my mother died six hours early because of pain control. My father clearly told me he would never go into a hospice. He said he would go to bed and make sure he did not wake up in the morning. I asked when that would be, and he said, “When I stop playing golf.” The third time he gave up golf and put his clubs in my car, I rang my sister and told her what was happening. She told me he had said the same thing about when he stopped playing music.
A year later, I discussed with my father whether he might ever think of going into a home, and he said he would—he never did—and that he had thought about what he would take. He said he might take three CDs with him, because he might want to play music, but he had not actually played any music for six months.
My father’s story echoes what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) said in an early debate on this subject about 20 years ago. Barbara Wootton, the founder of the national assistance service, had made him swear that, if she were in hospital and asked for drugs, he would go and get them from her bathroom cabinet and give them to her. She was in hospital for six months in awkward circumstances, but she never asked.
I spoke earlier of the equivalent of 21,000 people having assisted deaths or euthanasia in the Netherlands. In Switzerland, where Dignitas provides a service for some people, the rate is under half of that in the Netherlands and, I think, Belgium—that needs checking.
Some people say we might have an initial peak but that a second order, polynomial best-fit trend line will show that, in time, the rate of increase slows and the overall rate levels off. That may be so, but what is also so is that 15 jurisdictions in the past two years have decided against changing the law, and 96% of jurisdictions around the world do not have laws that go further than ours.
Of course there are difficult cases, but we should not use hard cases to justify a change that can lead—not will lead, but can lead—to a major change. Nobody in the Netherlands said in 2002 they were anticipating 5,000 assisted suicides or euthanasia cases a year. They did not say it. People may say that because Oregon has not changed further, things there will never change, but in Oregon they are having the same debates about euthanasia as we are having about assisted dying.
There is a whole series of expressions: medical aid in dying, physician-assisted suicide, physician-assisted death, aid in dying, death with dignity, right to die, compassionate death, end-of-life choice, medical assistance at the end of life and advanced care directives, and the like. I understand all that, and I have taken part in more of these debates than anyone else in the Chamber because I have been here longer—I am probably nearer my death than other Members are—but what I want to say to colleagues is that we should not build on individual cases.
Our first lodger was the first person I knew with motor neurone disease. In the days, weeks, months and years before he died, he never once suggested that he wanted to end his life. A constituent of mine—she has authorised me to give her name, but I will not—says that her family has Huntington disease, and most of us know what that involves, and she asked me to oppose this, so I shall.
Oral Answers to Questions
Peter Bottomley Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Phillip Lee
The hon. Gentleman arranged a good and well-attended debate. He is aware that I have committed to producing a women’s strategy. It will be published once all the moving cogs of government are in place, and I can promise him that it will be about how we can do more in the community to prevent locking women up.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
May I invite the Minister to join me in saying to our hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) that most people in prison never voted and are unlikely to vote when they come out? By making it compulsory for them to register to vote, they are far more likely to think about other people, not just themselves.
Mr Lidington
We hope that all prisoners will be fully integrated into society when they come to be released from prison and will lead a law-abiding life of constructive citizenship. As I said a few moments ago, the Government will make clear their approach at the forthcoming Committee of Ministers meeting and in an announcement to Parliament in the usual fashion.