As debate over Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill became fiercer and less forgiving, there was an extraordinary intervention by Lord Falconer of Thoroton. He delivered a sharp rebuke to his successor as Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, for her opposition to the bill, after she had told The Times that her decision sprang from her faith:

As a Muslim, I have an unshakeable belief in the sanctity and the value of human life. That is a really core belief and it does inform my views in these areas.

Falconer, who served as Sir Tony Blair’s Lord Chancellor from 2003 to 2007, is a long-time supporter of assisted dying. He first presented a bill in the House of Lords to create a legal framework in 2013, but its progress through Parliament was brought to an end by the 2015 general election. During an interview on Sky News, it was clear he found Mahmood’s intervention intolerable:

She, and I respect this, has religious and spiritual reasons why she believes completely in the sanctity of life and in her statement or letter to constituents she makes that clear and that is her starting point. I respect that religious belief but I do not think it should be imposed on everybody else … so I think she’s wrong, I think she’s motivated, and I respect this, by her religious beliefs, but they shouldn’t be imposed on everybody else.

Superficially, it is an argument that seems reasonable: everyone is entitled to freedom of religion, but to “impose” religious beliefs on other people sounds archaic and unacceptable, a relic at best of the days of Test Acts and sectarian discrimination, if not of the Acts of Uniformity and the persecution of non-conformists and dissenters. It is the embodiment of the broad-minded, secular, liberal establishment of which someone like Falconer — Cambridge, King’s Counsel, House of Lords, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP — is comfortably representative.

On examination, though, the rational veneer crumples.

The vote on Leadbeater’s bill was declared to be a free one early in the process. It is understood that assisted dying, like abortion, capital punishment and other issues with a dominant ethical component, are matters of conscience and that it is inappropriate and unfair for political parties to use the whipping system to insist on one outcome or another.

If we accept that, then we accept that every individual Member of Parliament is reaching a decision on the bill not simply on the basis of empirical data, but also on the basis of his or her sense of morality, of whether something is right or wrong. Falconer supports assisted dying because he thinks it is wrong to deny relief to terminally ill people experiencing intolerable suffering. That is not a conclusion determined by “evidence” but by compassionate feelings.

… every time an MP or peer casts a vote, it is an act of imposing beliefs on others

By contrast, Mahmood’s determination turns on her belief in “the sanctity and the value of human life”. Falconer does not dispute her conclusion: he objects fundamentally to the way in which she has reached it. He thinks it is invalid or insufficient for her to ascribe that principle of the sanctity of human life (which is hardly a controversial or uncommon one) to “her religious beliefs”. Yet he, and supporters of Leadbeater’s bill, are “imposing” their views on other people to exactly the same degree. In a sense, every time an MP or peer casts a vote, it is an act of imposing beliefs on others. That is why they are there.

What Lord Falconer means, what he must unavoidably mean, is that there is a hierarchy of morality, and judgements reached openly through adherence to a mainstream religion are subordinate to those reached by some other, more bespoke and presumably secular thought process. You can owe your principles to Voltaire or Thomas Paine, but not to the Qu’ran or Thomas Aquinas.

I am an atheist — though by training an historian of early modern religion — yet I find this hard to see as logical; unless there is, hiding in plain sight, an overriding presumption that organised religion is bad and its followers uncritical fools. Strangely, in a column for The Times which was intended to be supportive, Matthew Parris gave the game away. Declaring Shabana Mahmood was right and Lord Falconer wrong, he went on:

Unlike so many opponents of the bill, she is open about her religious motivation. Not being a Muslim, I am therefore enabled to disregard her views.

Is he really? Would he say of someone whose ethical stance was not based on an Abrahamic faith that he was “enabled to disregard” their views? Again, it is a hierarchy of thought: religion bad, non-religion (in whatever form) good.

On moral and ethical questions, everyone will have a view. Some people, no doubt, will without self-inquiry follow the tenets of their faith. But if we have any intellectual honesty, we are required to listen to those views critically but openly, and determine for ourselves whether they are persuasive. To perform a kind of philosophical triage, prioritising the opinions of non-believers, is an act not only of intolerance but of monstrous intellectual arrogance. Lord Falconer, a former Lord Chancellor and Keeper of the Queen’s Conscience, should have known better.