Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

James Frith Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 29th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

The Bill asks us to make a profound and irreversible decision on the principles of our health service and end of life care. With end of life care funded too often on a shoestring for many, the Bill takes our focus to ending life, not improving living as life draws to a close with terminal illness. I believe it poses significant risks. Our wider societal and cultural norms will be changed forever. Those who refuse to acknowledge that prospect now do so with the benefit of things as they are now. My point is that this concept changes immediately today if this Bill is passed.

The safeguards may sound rigorous on paper, but the strained state of our NHS means that many patients do not have a consistent relationship with a named doctor. We are attributed to health centres nowadays, not named doctors. Someone’s consideration of this decision could depend on which doctor they see—one who raises assisted dying as an option, versus one who refuses. That is a deeply troubling prospect. The ideation of assisted dying will become a ballot. We know our GPs have a range of views on assisted dying, so we cannot deny that who someone ends up seeing with their terminal illness might be how they end up. That could be at the doctor’s, possibly in the presence of a loved one who is under strain and in need of respite themselves, and the first suggestion is the beginning of a journey towards, yes, assisted dying. That is before we consider the forces of marketing and commercialisation, and the industry that will spring up if the Bill proceeds and is sewn into our NHS.

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Frith]

No, I will not.

It is possible that we cannot imagine being the victim of coercion, or that as MPs our agency is so baked in to our experiences of living, that we cannot envisage a scenario where those who already claim to feel unseen are directed towards meeting their end sooner than it otherwise might have been. Our casework from constituents is already full of people struggling to access the rights that we have enshrined in law—access to justice, health, education support, the disaster in our special educational needs system—and of victims often of state neglect or state coercion, and the failure of safeguards that were once supported on paper and passed into law.

Disability rights groups and advocates have raised their voices, wanting us to talk about the dangers of normalising assisted dying. For many the Bill represents not a choice but a principle shift that undermines the value we place on protecting the vulnerable. It falls to us as the strongest to stand up and vote against the Bill. Passing the Bill today will not improve palliative and hospice care. My belief is that it will forfeit it. The end of life is complicated; end of life care often is not complicated enough. On reflection, my mother-in-law deserved a frank, trusted conversation about the risk of secondary illnesses and amputation that would follow with the automatic cancer treatment that she was given in her final months of life. We should expect more agility from our NHS, and while dying is the ultimate binary experience, end of life care should be more sophisticated and more personalised. Shortening those expectations with a system that endorses assisted dying would forfeit that too.

Finally, as legislators our responsibility is to protect the most vulnerable and consider all eventualities. We disagree on slippery slope arguments, but if the Bill proceeds it will be a moment of no return, and that is why I am not prepared to support it.

Oral Answers to Questions

James Frith Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shabana Mahmood]

I have been lobbied by the same group in the west midlands. I will certainly look at the representations that have been made.

[Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

Thomas White was sentenced to three years for theft of a mobile phone in 2012. He remains in a category A prison 12 years later, having received an imprisonment for public protection sentence. Two medical reports this year have confirmed his deteriorating mental health. He recently attempted to set himself on fire and has since stopped taking his medication. Will the Secretary of State meet me and his sister, Clara White, to discuss his case?

[Shabana Mahmood]

I am very sorry to hear about the circumstances facing my hon. Friend’s constituent’s sibling in prison. We are determined to make more progress with IPP prisoners, but never in a way that compromises public protection. If my hon. Friend writes to the Department with the specifics of the case, I will ensure that he receives a response.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

James Frith Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

I join the House only 48 hours after the birth of my son, Bobby James. Dads on this side of the House proudly change nappies before coming to Parliament; we do not get out of changing nappies because we are in Parliament.

Having considered how we exit the baby, I am now considering how we exit the European Union. As many Members have said, this is not about whether we leave but how. For me, opposing the Bill is scrutiny, not mutiny, on Brexit. I maintain a commitment that I made to the people of Bury North in my election victory to fight for a practical Brexit. I do not trust the Government to show Britain the best exit, let alone set it out with vision and aplomb. Bombastic swagger, yes; vision, zero. It was going to be easy, we were told, but I ask for more grace in negotiation. Perhaps Ministers could remember the 48% as well as the 52% when handling Brexit. The referendum result was clear, fair and decisive, but in exiting we need a deal that works for the 48 and the 52, not the 1922.

I stood at the election with a clear view on Brexit that, as a remainer, I would fight for a Brexit that worked for everyone in Bury North. Whether people were leavers or remainers, it was time for unity—a practical Brexit that kept uppermost in people’s minds jobs, skills and opportunities for all. The result of the election did not change the Government’s instincts overnight. They have not changed their position on workers’ rights, on access to justice, on working time, or on security and safety at work. Those measures were bombarded on their way into law, and they will be picked apart by Government Members in the transition. The repeal Bill should be a copy and paste exercise, but instead the Government seek measures that would allow them not to copy and paste but to copy and cut. Decades of social progress, enshrined in law, are at the mercy of the pick-and-choose brigade who run the Tories. If foxhunting and grammar schools are back on the agenda, what of workers’ rights? I urge Members to vote against the motion. They should accept Brexit, but how we leave matters: they should not support the Government on the Bill.