Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Ind UU)]

My Lords, it is no secret that I oppose this Bill on the basis of both my religious faith and on my ordinary day-to-day sense of moral values—values, or what in my part of the world we used to call oul dacency. Am I not correct in thinking that that old decency is being incrementally eroded for mere financial and statistical convenience? Has intellectual arrogance totally usurped what in less interactive times was the natural progression of life?

Capital punishment ended in the 1960s but, if I remember correctly, its restoration was voted on a number of times right up until its irrevocable end back in 1998. It had involved those who had committed horrendous crimes, but we ultimately acknowledged that ordinary human judgment was inadequate to make decisions that meant the difference between life and death. I remember Enoch Powell and I being the only two in our party who consistently voted for the abolition of the death penalty or its continued abolition. It is almost 50 years since this nation decided that it was inhumane to convict people for attempting suicide, not with any view towards encouraging such an action but, again, in the realisation that our human judgment was inadequate to allow us to condemn others in such a situation.

Now we are faced with a challenge by those who sometimes feel that we have a responsibility to hasten to death those who are most vulnerable: the aged, the ill, the lonely and the neglected. However one seeks to dress it up as a service to society, we, with some new intellectual self-assurance, are apparently no longer to be constrained by our own human frailties. How much more could we achieve? In fact, how many of us contribute or work to sustain the hospices that understand the aged, lovingly nurse the ill, comfort the lonely and tend the neglected, some of whom may say “I’d be better dead”? Our humanity, and whatever else drives and motivates our behaviour, should lead us to question our role and responsibility in such circumstances.

I doubt that I am unique in so far as I have never had, in almost 77 years of life, anyone say to me that he or she wanted to die or would want help to commit suicide; perhaps I am fortunate. In more than 90% of the letters I have received in the past week, the writers have asked me to vote against the intellectual arrogance of those who presume to play God.

I am a simple old village schoolmaster. I do not say so out of any sense of false modesty; I mean that I am not a philosopher or statistician. However, I know that I am subservient to a greater power than I possess as an individual or that I believe doctors possess. I know that many of my colleagues here feel as I do, and I am rather alarmed that we do not feel able to admit that we subscribe to a higher power when we think about life, death and our responsibility to our fellow man.

My wife and I have a family; thank God they are a good family. We have been blessed. However, do we in your Lordships’ House really want to promote legislation that facilitates the worst elements of family carelessness and greed? Should we not be promoting a more humane society and a more compassionate message? Whoever you are, whatever your problems, is it not our responsibility to make you think in your last days and hours that you are valuable and have a place? It is not our role to abbreviate that.