Assisted Suicide

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Fiona Bruce]

I will, and I pay tribute to the entire hospice movement in this country. The care and treatment of patients provided by such services embodies the culture that we have in this nation of prioritising care at the end of life, and does not prioritise foreshortening life by months or years at the end-of-life stage.

The DPP has said that the guidelines that he operates are working well; indeed they are. Prosecutorial discretion is part of our criminal law and applies across a wide range of crimes. We cannot fetter it in law because each case is different. The law gives a clear message that one person should not encourage or assist another’s suicide.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I am proud to be supporting my hon. Friend’s amendment today. Does she agree that this is not about choice, but is about people being forced to make choices? Does she also agree that rather than having debates about assisted dying it would be much better if we had more debates and discussions about how we could improve palliative care?

[Fiona Bruce]

I do, and that is entirely the intent of my amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I wish to make three points. First, as the right hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Alun Michael) said earlier, I believe that the people who have pushed forward today’s debate are, in essence, introducing a Trojan horse. I respect the genuine feeling that many have on the issue, but my worry is that whatever the intention of some Members, this will ratchet towards euthanasia.

Secondly, there is a risk of abuse because of the serious abuse that exists in Oregon and the Netherlands, where assisted dying is legal and, dare I say it, in historical examples of state-sanctioned euthanasia, such as in Nazi Germany. Thirdly, I would argue that this is the wrong debate. In terms of resources and philosophically, surely we should put everything into helping people to live, not helping people to die.

My fear is that this is a Trojan horse motion. I accept that the motion simply welcomes the DPP’s advice, and that the Director of Public Prosecutions said in February:

“The policy does not change the law on assisted suicide”,

but he also admitted that there had been changes to the policy. As my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) said, Parliament has never voted on these measures, even though they de facto amend the Suicide Act 1961. There is a risk that the guidance will tilt the legal balance towards euthanasia, not least because it clarifies how people can deliberately avoid prosecution.

[Bob Stewart]

I do not understand how they would amend the Suicide Act. It is my understanding that it has not been amended.

[Robert Halfon]

My argument is that the guidelines are too flexible, and that Parliament has not made a decision about the matter. As I said, Parliament has had no say in designing the DPP’s guidance, and that is not how law should be made in Britain. We are simply being asked to rubber-stamp what the DPP has said. This matters because there is a risk of abuse—it could become a lawyer’s charter—and because of the kind of country it would make us.

Sadly, there is a real example in history of how the move to assisted dying has led to something much worse. In 1920, the eminent German medics, Binding and Hoche, argued strenuously that doctors should be protected against prosecution for assisted dying. Their research was popularised during the Weimar era, and by 1932 created the intellectual climate that allowed Prussia to remove support for the disabled and terminally ill. In 1939, we know that Hitler issued orders that doctors be commissioned to grant a mercy death to patients who were judged to be incurably sick. A small step perhaps; each step along this path was a small step. Two years later we know that 70,000 patients from Germany’s hospitals had been killed. We know that in 1941, the gas chambers were moved from the hospitals where they had been used for euthanasia to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Nurses, doctors and technicians followed the equipment. That is why I am worried about a conveyor belt. Of course, we live in a benign country, and we think that such things would never happen, but it is precisely because we are a benign country that we have to put in every safeguard to ensure that it does never happen.

I argue that the DPP’s guidance can become a lawyer’s charter. Who will define “compassion” in the DPP’s guidance? What is “minor encouragement”? How will we know the victim’s story if only the suspect can give evidence. Moves towards assisted dying would seriously damage our national character. As the National Review reported, a 1991 Dutch survey showed that 2% of all deaths in the Netherlands were caused by deliberate euthanasia, but 10% were from euthanasia by neglect, omission or other forms of poor care.

This is the wrong debate. We should be supporting palliative care, and I am proud to be very involved with my local hospice, St Clare’s. We should remember that about 40% of hospice in-patients return home and 66% of hospice at-home patients die in their own homes.

As a society, we are beginning to devalue human life, whether it is on television, in computer games or in other forms. I accept that we give people choice, but we are not talking about going to a supermarket and choosing a brand of chocolate. Harold Shipman was mentioned earlier, and he got away with what he did because human beings became digits on a computer: form filling. I wonder whether he would have got away with what he did if we did not devalue human life in the way we do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

During the Budget debate last year, I collapsed in Central Lobby. It was not, I assure hon. Members, the Budget that made be ill, but a tumour the size of a small fist in the left part of my brain. I was taken to St Thomas’s hospital, where an A and E doctor advised me that I required a craniotomy to remove the meningioma from my brain.

That was extremely frightening. I was advised as to the likelihood of death, paralysis, loss of speech or sight, and so much more. It was a week before I had my operation. I was one of the lucky ones. I survived with a few scars and with no deficit whatever. However, I have to face up to the possibility that I might not have been so lucky. I had a week to contemplate the situation. It made me think about what might have been.

One comes back to a simple issue which, I suggest, is at the heart of this entire debate: to whom does a person’s life belong? I suggest that a person’s life belongs to the individual themselves. It is for those who are not as lucky as I was to make their choices about how they live their lives. That somebody cannot take those choices does not mean that we in Parliament should deny them any choice. It upsets me tremendously that the state prescribes that it knows best. It cannot be right that individual members of the public are prevented from doing something in this country that they are able to go and do at Dignitas in Switzerland, where they can die in the manner of their choosing.

[Robert Halfon]

I am glad to see my hon. Friend so strong and alive in this Chamber. He talks about choice. Does he not agree that this issue is not just about individual choice, because people can be pressurised into making choices? That is what is really at the heart of the debate.

[Guy Opperman]

There is a great need for strong protections. Everybody accepts that. Not a single person disagrees with that, just as there is not a single person who does not wholeheartedly endorse the need for palliative care. However, that is not enough. I suggest that the principle of clear self-determination must be the core of any concept of human rights.

I am a huge supporter of palliative care, like all other Members. I pray in aid the Charlotte Straker home and the Tynedale hospice in my constituency. If I need to declare an interest, it is that I have raised considerable sums for both those organisations.

I welcome many constituents of mine who have come from Northumberland today. Many of them were friends of Geraldine McClelland, the former BBC TV producer and founding member of Newcastle’s Live theatre, who took her life at Dignitas last December following an unsuccessful battle with cancer. Her letter has already been read out. Her good friend Nick Ross, the “Crimewatch” presenter, said:

“Gerry had to abandon her home and be driven across Europe…to end her life in a light commercial estate in an impersonal Swiss suburb.”

He continued:

“It sometimes seems that each concession to freedom in this country has had to be dragged out of a reluctant and controlling instinct that someone else knows best.”

I endorse entirely those remarks and urge the House to address the issue that dare not speak its name, which is that we need to consult properly about assisted suicide. I will of course support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) and the motion moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway), but in the longer term, the matter will not go away.