Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Gordon of Strathblane Excerpts

Friday 16th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O’Loan (CB)]

My Lords, by convention I must apologise to the House: I was unable to attend Second Reading as I had had major surgery 10 days before. I have listened to the debates and the element of compassion is very clear in all the Members of your Lordships’ House—but compassion is not enough. The Bill is introducing a significant change that is secured by the terminology that it adopts. That is why it is so important that we support the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the other noble Lords who put their names to this amendment.

The BMA stated yesterday that skilled and compassionate palliative care with good communication and patient involvement can help many patients’ fears of death. By focusing on assisted dying as a solution to people’s anxieties about end of life care, society is having the wrong debate. If we pass the Bill, people will know that there will be circumstances in which we as a society have decided that we want people to be able to commit suicide with assistance from the medical profession. The Bill provides that people must be assisted to commit suicide in specified circumstances; it does not provide that they must be assisted to die.

I have seen close family members die of motor neurone disease and cancer. I know that they were helped as they came to death by the loving care of good doctors, professional and expert nurses and other medical professionals, and by the appropriate application of palliative care. The Bill is about people who want to take their lives being provided with the wherewithal and being enabled by the medical profession to do so, and it is right that the content of the Bill should reflect that reality. One of our duties as legislators is to try to ensure the greatest possible clarity as we make laws—and it is for that reason that I support the amendment.

[Lord Gordon of Strathblane (Lab)]

I join the noble Baroness in arguing for greater clarity on this, and I am genuinely surprised at the level of opposition to what seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable, understated amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, pointed out earlier, this does not at all affect the principles behind the Bill. There are still powerful arguments for allowing assisted suicide—and, although I am opposed to it, I recognise them. However, let us call it what it is. It is close to misleading to have the title of the Bill as it is the moment, any more than the title of the Homicide Act should be “Assisted Dying (Involuntary)”. No one would seriously describe a terrorist attack as assisted dying—but they have helped people to die, so I suppose you could justify it on that basis.

We try to narrow down a definition. If it is taking someone’s life against their will, we call it homicide or murder. If it is someone taking their own life, we call it suicide, and we have the Suicide Act 1961. It is that Act, not any other, that is amended by the Bill. How anyone can argue that a Bill amending the Suicide Act should not be called the Assisted Suicide Bill genuinely escapes me.

I draw noble Lords’ attention, although I will not quote it at length, to the Second Reading speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, at col. 834, where he drew the very vital distinction between the withdrawal of artificial impediments to death taking its natural course and active intervention. That is a Rubicon that I think the public do not want to cross. I do not want to accuse the promoters of the Bill of any ill faith, but the fact that they choose to position the Bill as though it is on one side of the Rubicon when everyone knows that it is on the other rather gives me cause to think that they recognise that it is a Rubicon that the public are not yet ready to cross.

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

I wonder if I could briefly settle this matter. I have just taken the extraordinary step of going to the Library and consulting the Oxford English Dictionary. I take it that most of us would accept the definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary. No one seems to dissent from that, so I will tell the House what it says here:

“suicide, n. The … act of taking one’s own life, self-murder”.

Can we settle the matter now?