Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

My Lords, I offer three short stories to illustrate the false thinking behind this mistaken Bill.

The first takes place in a dark private room in a famous nursing home. I am the visitor beside the bed of a very sick, motionless and almost speechless friend. In comes a doctor who, during a brief two-minute patient record check, comments loudly that this patient would be better off dead. Five minutes later, an agency nurse comes in. I thank her for her work to ease the patient to a more comfortable head position. She answers, “This patient should be dead; we need the bed”. I murmur an objection, fearful that the patient can hear and will feel distressed. The nurse replies, “All these old people taking up NHS space should not be allowed to survive. Those beds are needed for the living”. The wish to dispose of the old is prevalent in our society. We must fight it and not succumb to its throttling embrace through death on demand, which underpins this Bill.

Another night, another private room—this time in a famous NHS teaching hospital. The patient asks for more curative action from the nurses. The doctor explains that no more remedies are available and that all curative channels have been exhausted. The patient, understanding, asked next for palliative care. That never came; instead, the executioner—the youngest nurse—came with the dose of death. I realised that I, the visitor, was witnessing an unrequested, enforced and medically authorised killing. It was not a comfortable death and it left behind an overhanging sense of personal guilt for all, and of mistrust of the health professionals—another fundamental weakness of this Bill.

A third and final tale concerns the great Lord Tonypandy, formerly the much loved Speaker of the other place. His stomach cancer, he was told, was terminal. “How long?”, he asked, and was told, “You have still three weeks to live”. As he lay on his bed across the river, gazing from St Thomas’ at this Parliament, where he had given so much service to us all, an ancient Roman Catholic priest came as an unknown visitor to him, a lifelong Methodist. A real miracle took place and later that afternoon doctors declared him in full remission. His life, and joy in being alive, continued for another 20 years.

Doctors, as they are the first to say, are not God. They truly cannot tell when death will steal upon us. That argument underpinning this Bill is also false. Nor will the doctors act as the executioners themselves: the nurses will be instructed to act, or, more likely even, the untrained, unmonitored health assistants. The rigorous overview the Bill offers will not take place in the cash-strapped, overworked NHS. I do not want our trusted NHS to turn from being the National Health Service into the national death service—the change that this Bill offers. As for pain and caring for the acutely ill and dying, just five minutes walk away inside St Thomas’, I found the Lane Fox ward, the ultimate in NHS hospital permanent palliative care. It is calm, welcoming and staffed with brilliant professionals, where the memory of the late Lady Lane-Fox is gleaming. The patients have real lives, and each one exhibits personal value despite their highly vulnerable medical conditions.

Do not use my taxes on the proposed state death department, with its inevitable growth in records of hits and misses, of targets and bonuses for each bed emptied. Instead, spend funds on replicating the best of care offered by the model across the bridge, by the hospice movement and other home-based forms of GP-led patient care. I profoundly oppose this Bill and strongly oppose the thinking behind it for the malign actions that it would create.