Assisted Dying

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Sir Robert. I am co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on choice at the end of life, so it should come as no surprise that I support the aspiration of the petition.

Over the last 10 years of my involvement in the campaign in Parliament, I have become used to converts—very welcome converts—to the cause, but of course they almost always convert to the cause after they have been through the horrible experience of watching someone they love go through an awful, agonising and degrading death. When Esther Rantzen stepped forward and talked about the impact that her disease was having on her, as well as about her decisions for the future, it should come as no surprise that there was an outpouring of support from the British people, because for many people she was part of the family. She regularly appeared in their front rooms, with her smiley, sunny demeanour, on a Saturday afternoon. Now that she is facing a horrible death and, with money, has decided to make the choice, the British people have obviously stood up and listened to the fact that she is supporting the campaign for a change in the law.

The British people listened to such an extent that they now do not really understand why politicians tolerate or talk about three particular things. First, they do not understand how so many Members in this House can stand for the status quo when, as has already been stated, the status quo is appalling. We have hundreds of people taking their own lives in this country—thousands dying agonising, horrible deaths when they may wish to do something different. Of course, we also have business class, so it is even worse: if you have the money, you can have what the law denies to everybody else. It is an outrage, and it should change. Worse than that, many Members who would oppose me making the choice are quite happy for a doctor to do it for me, as we have already heard. They are quite happy for a doctor to give an extra squeeze on the morphine and take away my own agency, choice and rights about my life. The British people just do not understand how so many people can tolerate that.

Secondly, the British people do not understand this view that the country is teeming with granny killers—that all of us are just waiting to bump off a wealthy relative so we can pocket the cash, like we are some kind of nation of Jeremy Bambers, intent on remunerating ourselves. The vast majority of British people love their parents and grandparents. They want the best for them, and they agonise when they die. If you go to the funerals or see them greeting each other at airport terminals, you will see the love there. That is not to say that there should not be safeguards, but we have safeguards in lots of other areas, and we should in this, too.

Thirdly, the British people do not understand how people of a genuine religious faith can seek to impose their own morality on the rest of us. They have not done so on gay marriage. They did not do so on homosexuality, adultery, abortion or sex before marriage. Why on this issue should the British people be denied a choice, because of the—certainly legitimately held—religious convictions of others? If the law changes, as I hope it will, and assisted dying becomes available, in extremis, to me and others, people need to realise that it is not compulsory. You may not want it yourself, and you may not want it for your relatives, but please do not stop me having it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

May I say that I did not actually know that my hon. Friend had had that diagnosis. I am so sorry to hear that.

I will just repeat that although those from the medical profession said that they did not wish to be tasked with assisted dying, they also thought that they might want assisted dying for themselves. They recognised that was a morally inconsistent position to take, which was a point echoed by the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq). We must recognise that this tension exists in the medical profession.

There were also counter-arguments elegantly expressed by my hon. Friends the Members for Aberconwy (Robin Millar), for Devizes (Danny Kruger), for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) and for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal and the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), to name a few. One of them more or less echoed the decision that was reached by the divisional court in the Noel Conway case in 2017, which said that section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961 served to

“reinforce a moral view regarding the sanctity of life”

and

“to promote relations of full trust and confidence between doctors and their patients”.

That position was echoed by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). As parliamentarians, we cannot duck the difficult issues that this question engages.

[Kit Malthouse]

The Minister has talked about the medical profession and the various arguments for and against, but she is a distinguished member of the legal profession. One of the things that many people suffering with terminal diseases find so confusing is that the law as it stands is inconsistent and a mess. We have a situation where it is technically illegal to accompany somebody to Switzerland, but upon return, the Crown Prosecution Service has a policy of not prosecuting. We have the example of Mavis Eccleston, who agreed a suicide pact with her elderly husband, but survived. She was prosecuted in court, effectively for murder, but was acquitted, having gone through this dreadful experience. The current law is a mess, and I wondered if we could have the Minister’s professional view on that.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (in the Chair)]

Order. There is a Division in the House. The sitting is suspended for fifteen minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

Well, I have been told I do not.

The other issue is evolution of the wider principle. What if a right to die evolves, perhaps slowly and imperceptibly at first, into a duty to die? My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy put it beautifully. Once we have allowed people to rationalise the quality of their life, how do we avoid it becoming incumbent on them to do so? There are also the hard cases: some of the cases described in the Chamber today are heartrending and sound clearcut, but we cannot ignore the difficult ones. One in particular jumped out at me in relation to something that the hon. Member for Gower said: the case in Belgium of Nathalie Huygens, who ended her life because of the extreme psychological suffering that she experienced after she was raped. The hon. Lady—I mean this very respectfully—said we should give people the choice to take themselves out of suffering, but that is exactly what Nathalie Huygens would have argued she was doing. We cannot ignore these difficult cases.

[Kit Malthouse]

I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way and I appreciate the point that she is making. However, around the world, different countries have legislation to deal with abortion, and there are different time limits and different attitudes to it. For example, in Canada, it is technically legal to have an abortion up to the point of birth. The fact that other countries have different rules, or indeed different cultural nuances around this or any other issue, surely does not mean that we should not have and design our own framework for the same purpose.

[Laura Farris]

I am not presenting any particular argument; I am reflecting the arguments that were made. I accept that we would not be in any legislative straitjacket, but these are the concerns raised by Members and they deserve to be ventilated in my summing up.

The final issue was manipulation or coercion. The hon. Member for North Antrim made the point very powerfully. I was listening carefully to what the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Sir George Howarth) and my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire both said: that a majority of people are well meaning and love their relatives, but implicit in that is that a minority do not. Some people live in dysfunctional families, or may not have loved ones; we must consider the consequences or the potential risks for them, too.

My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) and, I think, the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) talked about the subtle coercion that a person might experience from being made to feel a sense of guilt at the cost that their illness is imposing on family members, not just in terms of money but in terms of stress and time; they could feel that they are becoming a burden. It is right, necessary and incumbent on us as parliamentarians to contemplate and recognise the enormity of the proposition, given the moral and ethical and medical issues that it engages.

I thank the Health and Social Care Committee for its excellent report. One of the Committee’s recommendations is that the Government consider how to respond to potential changes in other jurisdictions in the UK and the Crown dependencies. Of course, should they move on this issue, we will work closely with them to consider the practical implications for England and Wales.

Finally, I emphasise that end of life and palliative care is of the utmost importance. In the Health and Care Act 2022, the Government added palliative care services to the list of services that an integrated care board must commission. Our response to the Health and Social Care Committee’s report was published today. The report’s recommendation 5 was a request for a national strategy for death literacy. I do not think that we went that far, but I reassure the Committee that the Government have committed to including palliative and end of life care in wider strategies.

To conclude, I thank everyone who has spoken and assure the House that the Government will reflect carefully on everything that has been said today. In the meantime, I thank all hon. Members for their sincere and heartfelt contributions to the debate.