The wheels are falling off Leadbeater’s Bill

I had an interesting time at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference last week, in part because I had the rare opportunity to speak with attendees from parts of the world where euthanasia and/or assisted suicide have already been introduced.

Canadian attendees I met were keen to share their horror at what has taken place in their own country since the introduction of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016. Even more interesting was what some of the Australian attendees had to say. As I’ve covered recently, these attendees were from the same Australian states to which Kim Leadbeater has developed such a liking, ensuring that six out of eight of the international witnesses who gave evidence to her Bill Committee came from such jurisdictions.

One by one the various regimes that have been introduced across the world relating to euthanasia and assisted suicide are being exposed. I’m unsure whether places like Canada and the Netherlands were ever trumpeted by Kim Leadbeater and her supporters as being success stories. But it has been interesting how she seems to talk less and less about Oregon, the state whose regime is meant to most closely mirror her own Bill, and oddly there were no witnesses from Oregon who gave evidence to the Bill Committee.

It is almost inevitable that those who make the final decision will lean in favour of the principle of assisted suicide

I think there is every chance that by the time we get to the vote at Third Reading, Leadbeater will be unable to point to anywhere in the world where there have not been major issues with the introduction of euthanasia/assisted suicide laws. It seems quite possible that she has deliberately focused on the Australian states precisely because of the limited data on assisted dying — a result of these laws being in place for so little time.

The simple reality, though, is that there is no perfect set of laws anywhere in the world that govern euthanasia/assisted suicide. When it comes to Third Reading, MPs will not be voting on assisted suicide in some vague sixth-formerish debating club manner, but on the specific Bill Kim Leadbeater has put forward. Let’s hope they remember that. 

This week, Leadbeater’s Bill Committee will continue its line-by-line scrutiny, having only made very limited progress during their first week — of the forty-three clauses needing examination, they did not make it past the first. In which case, it seems likely Leadbeater will try and inject a sense of urgency into the Committee even after she had the cheek to criticise MPs with concerns about the Bill tabling too many amendments while tabling dozens herself.

One of the more notable Leadbeater amendments concerns the removal of the High Court safeguard and its replacement with “death panels” and a “death czar”. Over 60 MPs specifically cited the High Court safeguard as being a key reason why they backed the Bill at Second Reading and its proposed removal has understandably caused alarm.

The replacement of this safeguard with a panel of three — containing a legal figure (who could be a KC, rather than even a retired judge), social worker and psychiatrist — has led to the same concerns about pressure on already overstretched services that the original High Court safeguard had to deal with. The new amendment has simply heaped pressure on social workers and psychiatrists in a similarly unsustainable fashion. This amendment is about as poorly thought through as every other aspect of Leadbeater’s Bill.

Understandably, concerns are being raised about whether the process for appointing the senior legal figure to head up the death commission and the death panels will be self-selecting. It does not seem likely that many people who are opposed to the principle of assisted suicide or who have even minor reservations about it are likely to sign up. It is almost inevitable, therefore, that those in these key positions will lean in favour of the principle of assisted suicide and consequently more likely to rubber stamp requests. 

Further, whilst the new “death czar” may give guidance on the practice and procedure of the “death panels”, as drafted by Leadebeater, there appears to be no requirement for the panel members to meet with the applicant and no power to summon witnesses. It’s true that a senior representative from the social care sector gave evidence to the Committee, making a case for the role that social care workers can play in detecting coercion and understanding more fully the mindset and life of someone requesting assisted suicide. However, these arguments are irrelevant when it comes to the social workers on the death panels because the social care worker on the panel will not know the applicant and will not even have the opportunity to meet them. 

Those on the panels will be remunerated and the panels will be overseen by a “Commissioner”, dubbed the “death czar”. The thought is that the Commissioner will be a judge or a retired judge. They will be appointed by the Prime Minister who, in the case of the current Prime Minister, is ardently pro-assisted suicide.

During the first week of line-by-line scrutiny, Leadbeater and her allies rejected every single amendment that was proposed by critics of her Bill. This included an amendment tabled by Lib Dem MP, Sarah Olney, which looked to replace the need to have the “capacity” to make the decision to opt for assisted suicide, with the “ability” to do so. This would have been a higher bar. Leadbeater and her allies rejected this amendment citing evidence provided by Chief Medical Officer, Sir Chris Whitty, relating to the Mental Capacity Act as being a key factor in their decision. The Chief Medical Officer later had to apologise for the misleading advice he had provided in this respect.

It does feel like the wheels are falling off Leadbeater’s Bill. It’s hard to see why any MP who voted against it at Second Reading would now change their mind. Instead, there are a growing number of reasons why someone who did vote for it at Second Reading would vote against it at Third Reading, and a number of MPs have already gone public indicating this is what they intend to do. However, for those who oppose Leadbeater’s Bill, this is no time for complacency. There is a long way to go and there will surely be many more twists and turns.