Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

We debate this subject on the anniversary of 9/11, the day on which over 3,000 people had their lives snuffed out in an instant, so it is not surprising that we are debating many deaths and citing our personal experiences, such as my experiences with my parents at the end of their lives and of seeing people in Trinity hospice in Blackpool, and so many other individual examples. Of course there are good intentions on all sides, but good intentions are not enough. The balance of probability that my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) mentioned is not enough to prevent us from going down a road not to hell but to dangerous and difficult decisions.

I listened with great respect to the comments of the former DPP, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), but drew a very different conclusion—that hard cases may make bad law, but they do not necessarily make bad individual judgments. That is the point. It is not right, in my view, that we should assume that we should just accept the right of Parliament to delegate to the DPP these difficult decisions where the detail has to be tried and tested to a generic principle.

The issue of capacity is clearly worrying many people here, and rightly so. I was a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department when that was brought up. It is a fluctuating issue, and that is why Scope and Mencap are very concerned about it.

We have already heard about the large proportion of medical professionals who would not be prepared to take forward the procedures in this Bill, even if they were not flawed. What does that say about the small pool of people who will have to deal with this? Words matter, as George Orwell said, so we should be using the appropriate terms. This is about assisted suicide, not assisted dying. It is not about medication—I am not going to use the word “poison”—but administering something to someone that will kill them. These are important issues.

John Donne famously said,

“No man is an island”—

and no woman, for that matter. It has been suggested today that the decision that we make is simply for the individual. It is not simply for the individual—it is for the families who are impacted by it, for the doctors who have to go through agony trying to decide what to do about it, and for all of us in society who will take the consequences on board. That is why I shall vote against the Bill.