While state-sponsored death was approved by the House of Commons last week, Kim Leadbeater’s dangerous assisted suicide Bill faces much stronger opposition in the House of Lords.
The Commons vote was much closer than expected, as a significant number of MPs saw the failings of the Bill, despite the shortage of time to debate it. With more scrutiny due in the Lords there is a real hope that the monstrous law could be blocked.
Baroness Monckton MBE, whose daughter has Down’s syndrome, has said she is “petrified” at the lack of protections in the Bill for those with learning disabilities, branding it “breathtakingly cruel and ignorant”.
Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, a founding member of Not Dead Yet, warned that disabled people’s lives “will be at great risk if the Bill passes into law”, while disabled Peer Lord Shinkwin feared the proposals ‘puts a price on his head’, and Lord Frost said opponents would contest Friday’s ‘shameful vote’ in the Lords.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Lady Monckton explained: “The biggest concern for every parent is what will happen when we are dead. Who will look after our ‘child’, who will understand their needs, care for them in the right way and facilitate their way through life?
“But now, to add to that worry, is another enormous and unspeakable question – how can we stop them being killed?
“I cannot believe that I am having to write these words. Yet the assisted suicide Bill makes no special provision whatsoever for this disenfranchised group.
“How have we got to this place, where some lives are valued more than others?”
She added: “All legislators – of which I am one, in the House of Lords – should be considering the weakest and most vulnerable when making momentous, and in this case, literal, life and death decisions.”
Consequently, she said, Leadbeater’s plans make her angry: “Angry at the lack of rigour in this bill. Angry at the lack of understanding of people with learning disabilities. Angry at the implicit assumption that their lives are not worth the same as the rest of the population.
“This should never have been a Private Member’s Bill. It has not had the scrutiny or the parliamentary time necessary for such a momentous change in the way we live and die.
“It is a law for the strong and determined against the weak and the vulnerable. All of us in Parliament should know which of those needs the most protection.”
Celebrating the Bill’s passage through the House of Commons, Dame Esther Rantzen claimed that it was now the duty of the Upper House “to scrutinise, to ask questions, but not to oppose.”
But Lord Jackson of Peterborough said it was right for the House of Lords “to amend or delay a bill which was never put to the people in a manifesto, backed by only a minority of MPs, was poorly drafted, rushed and barely scrutinised and will have hugely profound effects on vulnerable people and the resources of the NHS”.
The Daily Telegraph warned that the Bill threatened “potentially calamitous consequences” and that the “only hope of mitigating its worst aspects now lies with the House of Lords”. However, it concluded, “the revision required to make this legislation workable and safe will have to be radical”.