Assisted Dying (No. 2) Bill

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Friday 11th September 2015 Commons Chamber

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

I shall keep my remarks short. I did not expect to be pitched, so early in my parliamentary career, into a conflict of morality, philosophy and the mundanity of legislation, but here we are. I have listened very carefully to many of the powerful speeches today, quite a lot of which, I am afraid to say, have been guilty of a cultural romanticisation of death. That is no surprise in a society in which many centuries of art, literature and religion have underlined that romanticism, creating a sense of nobility and grace about death. Even the murder and torture of Christ is referred to as the Passion. The reality for many people, of course, is nothing of the sort. It is anything but noble. The death bed is a place of misery, torture and degradation, a reign of blood, vomit and tears. It is often hard to see the compassion and the beauty in that.

The truth, as the hon. Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth) said, is that the reality is already here. Doctors are hastening and helping people to their deaths every day. The Liverpool Care Pathway, and what remains of it, was about exactly that. Many people show up at hospital to find that awful acronym DNR hoisted above the bed of their relatives. The machines are turned off on a regular basis. As the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) underlined, the Rubicon has already been crossed with regards to compassionate assisted suicide. This is not something from which we in this House can shy away. As the hon. Lady has just said, we already have a business class carriage to a dignified death—if anyone has the money, they can go to Switzerland to achieve it. The reality is here and we should not abrogate our responsibilities to regulate, control or have some view on it.

A number of Members have raised questions about worth. I can understand and respect those with a religious belief who believe that the spark of life, however long and whatever the quality, is worth preserving. I would, however, ask people to question the notion of longevity versus quality. When my wife’s sister was in the final throes of breast cancer four years ago, my wife was very frustrated and angered by her unwillingness to participate in clinical trials. She had reached the end of her life and really did not want to prolong what had been an agonising and painful five years. She was focused on the quality of her life rather than on its longevity.

Finally, we have to start at the right end of the telescope in this argument. I am with my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) in believing we have to start with human rights. If we decide that someone else has dominion over my body when I am in extremis, in pain, in the final months of my life, the argument is settled and everything else becomes rhetorical. If we do not, it is for the House to find solutions to the problems that might emanate from that decision. That is why I will be supporting the Bill into its next stage. We need to have that debate to come to those decisions, if we decide that I have dominion over my body in the final stages of my life.