The KILL BILL is back!
The David Vance BriefingRead More
We shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Labour backed euthanasia bill has been reintroduced by Lauren Roberts, who is the MP for Rochester and Strood.
As you know, the “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill” was originally introduced by Kim Leadbetter back in 2024. It almost made it through, passing in the Commons in June 2025, but it narrowly failed to get through the legislative stages in the Lords before the session ended at the end of April this year. That was never going to be the end of it.
So what has now happened is that Roberts has reintroduced the Bill on June 17th and it has a second reading in a few days time. As you can tell there is an absolute determination from Labour to pass this into law. It’s my view that euthanasia has always been a core Fabian value and this Government will not rest until it becomes law here in the UK.
I know that my readers will hold different views on this issue and of course there will be individual circumstances where it may seem humane to allow ‘assisted dying” but I cannot go along with this for several reasons.
To my way of thinking there are several inherent problems with such legislation.
There is the hard to ignore slippery slope argument. The safeguards that accompany the legislation in the first phase tend to get wiped away over time. So even if you are reassured to start with, circumstances may change
If you look at countries like Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands which all have all introduced such legislation it’s obvious that the reach of the Bill gradually extends to children, younger adults, those with depression or even disabilities. I find that heart-breaking and not something that we need in the UK.
Canada is a stand out example of the dangers of this. Medical assistance in dying (MAID) was introduced in 2016 for people whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2021, eligibility was then expanded so that a person no longer had to be approaching natural death. Canada has also now legislated for eventual eligibility where mental illness is the sole underlying condition.
Then there is real worry about invisible coercion. Just imagine an 82-year-old widow with advanced cancer. She has full mental capacity. Nobody threatens her or tells her that she ought to die. But she knows her daughter has stopped working to care for her. She also knows that her savings are dwindling. She hears her son worrying about the cost of residential care. She repeatedly says: “I don’t want to be a burden.” So, is her subsequent request for assisted death completely spontaneous and how on earth would a doctor know? It is really tough to get certainty.
The other thing here is that I simply don’t believe that doctors can accurately predict with absolute certainty just how long someone has to live or even how their quality of life may change. Patients given hopeless prognoses can live far longer than expected, while pain, disability and despair that initially seem unbearable can sometimes improve dramatically. I have had family members given a fairly accurate estimation of end of life diagnosis and others who lived way beyond what had been forecast. The fundamental problem with assisted dying is that a mistaken prognosis can be revised — but a death cannot be reversed.
I suppose I ultimately revert to my Christian faith. The Bible does not promise us freedom from suffering. It commands us to stand beside those who suffer. Thou shalt not kill remains true no matter how you want to dress up the killing bit in flowery language.
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