Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton for stimulating this debate by tabling his Bill. I say that not because I support it but because I do not see him as an opponent; I still see him as a friend. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Joffe, started the ball rolling with this, and since then the momentum has gathered pace. My noble and learned friend’s commission, followed now by the Supreme Court’s intervention, requires that we address this issue and find a way through it.

This also gives me an opportunity today publicly to thank the scores and scores of people who have written to me on this topic—people whom I would judge, rather like myself, as ordinary people expressing their views overwhelmingly in the majority against the Bill. They are frightened by the possible change that such a law might bring, no matter how it may be dressed up or caveated with safeguards for the time being. They are frightened that it will be the start of a journey that will lead to other changes that not only will be about assisted suicide—helping someone with six months to live—but will go beyond that, as indeed we have started to see in Belgium.

Many who have written to me are carers, disabled people, nurses, doctors. They are people who, from reading their letters, are as compassionate as any of us can be. They are people who give service to the public over a wide area. They are people who have been expressing, too, the concerns that they have had in dealing with death and changes within their own families. They have written to me about their emotions and feelings on seeing loved ones depart, sometimes with suffering. They have also described their fears about where this change may lead and how it will affect their vulnerable family and friends. Those with disabled members of the family are particularly concerned that that may be further down the line under another agenda.

The unintended consequences cannot be ignored. I wonder how in law we can avoid someone coming back to raise fundamental questions, amendments and challenges to the law. Like my noble friend Lady Meacher, I raise the point about death. We have not had sufficient debate previously about death and how we approach it. Those who have written to me have talked about their fears, not just about their family but about how they may approach death, and their fears of it.

I am frightened of dying too, as I get older; it is an issue that comes into my head virtually every day, in a way that it did not when I was younger. That leads me to consider the nature of my life, where I am going and what it is about. It leads me to think about whether I can continue to control everything in my life—and I have controlled a good deal of it, for much of my life. But I know that, as I get towards the end, I will not have that control open to me. I have learnt that I will be required, and need, to accept what is coming to me—to embrace it and to move forward, whichever way life or death is taking me.

I have come to the view that there is a power in my life that is greater than myself, far greater than the controls that I can exercise, and I must render myself up eventually to that power, as all my forebears have done. Do we now have more suffering than our forebears had? Do we have greater difficulties in dying than they had? I believe that death is part of the journey, the final rung on the ladder, and that we need to concentrate increasingly on those unfashionable issues of trust and faith that, regrettably, have not been mentioned too much in the debate today.