Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, I absolutely agree with one aspect of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile: I too will approach the Committee stage in the spirit of cherishing life and the living.

Today’s debate has illustrated that there is not some enormous divide between those who care about people’s lives and those who do not. Can we agree on one thing: that there is no unanimity on this issue? There is no unanimity between lawyers, between previous Lord Chancellors, between doctors, between people with disabilities, between Christians, between Jews, or, as I believe the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said, between Buddhists. People of faith can take genuinely different positions on this. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that there is an issue here about the precedent we give to autonomy, to choice and whether we can, as legislators, look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning and say we passed legislation like this without the dire consequences —the road to hell—that we have had described today.

I should have said that I am a member of the General Medical Council, but of course I speak in a purely personal capacity today. Another interest is that I was also a member of the committee so ably chaired by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. That experience, which I went into not having a settled view on this issue, made me support the Bill. It is my sense that it is possible to find the right balance, to provide compassion without a slippery slope or a criminal’s path. It is difficult in just the same way as when this House chooses to try to balance the needs of security with individual liberty. However, that is what we are here for. With the greatest of respect to the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I do not regret that this debate is taking place in your Lordships’ House and that the legislation will have the line-by-line scrutiny that we know does not happen with Bills in another place. It is right that we should do some of the heavy lifting on the Bill in Committee in order for the Commons to take its part.

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said that she had had to rewrite her speech. I wish she had not pinched mine in rewriting it. I will not say the things that she said, but I will give one quote. I was very struck when I read that wonderful novel Revolutionary Road by a quote that went something like: “He was left standing in the door of his home, dying imperceptibly, as we all are”. But actually that is not right. Some of us are not dying imperceptibly; some of us die in terrible, unbearable physical and emotional pain. I have listened to the stories of some of those people, as well as having read the letters.

I end with the words of a doctor whom I was talking to recently. He told me that he had changed his mind on this subject because he had had experience of a family who had gone to Switzerland. He had changed his mind because, he said, “We have to be able to do better than this for our patients”. I believe that we can do better than this, and it is Parliament’s job to see that we do so.