Proposals for assisted suicide panels fall “lamentably short”, the former President of the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales has warned.

Sir James Munby says he has examined Kim Leadbeater’s new proposals for her assisted suicide Bill and concluded that the plans need to go much further if the panel is to be anything more than a rubber-stamping exercise.

The ‘multidisciplinary’ panels are part of a hastily introduced amendment to try to fix the backbencher’s controversial Bill by replacing her ‘ultimate safeguard’ involving a High Court judge giving approval to a person’s request to be killed, with a three-member panel, comprised of a social worker, lawyer and psychiatrist.

The former judge raised concerns over the scope of the panel, explaining: “The panel is given an extraordinary degree of discretion in relation to the process it is to adopt.”

He highlighted that the only mandatory requirement of the panel is to hear from one of the two doctors involved in the patient’s request, and that anything further – even hearing from the patient – is at the panel’s discretion.

Sir James wrote that it is “very troubling” that there is an absence of “any requirement that the panel ‘must’ hear from and question both doctors (and not just one)”, and that the absence of “any requirement that the panel ‘must’ hear from and question the patient” is “quite extraordinary”.

He added: “Moreover, how is the panel to assess whether the application before it is voluntary if it does not hear from the patient?”

Sir James commented: “the Bill is silent as to the process and procedures to be adopted. For example, is the panel to hear evidence on oath? Indeed, will the panel have power to administer an oath?”

Another omission, he noted, is the lack of a procedure for challenging evidence: “It says nothing about who should exercise that function; nor about the nature of any independent evidential investigation and nothing about who is to undertake this and who is to pay for it.”

He continued: “Without this, it will not be proper for a judge to be involved in the process as a member of the panel. For otherwise, the judge, and, indeed the panel, is little more than a rubber stamp providing a veneer of judicial approbation – and that is fundamentally unacceptable.”

The NHS’s new puberty blockers trial is unethical, will harm children, and not add anything to existing medical knowledge, critics have warned.

The health service has announced details of a puberty blocker trial by King’s College London, which will give the banned drugs to children, and monitor them for two years with brain scans and tests. Funding of £10.7 million has been allocated to the trial, which is jointly run by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR).

Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced an indefinite ban on the drugs last year due to evidence that ‘the current prescribing pathway’ posed an “unacceptable safety risk” to children and young people.

Baroness Cass is author of the Cass Review, which identified that there was “remarkably weak evidence” for puberty blockers, and said the drugs “may permanently disrupt the brain maturation of adolescents, potentially rewiring neural circuits that cannot be reversed”.

But she suggested a study might “address some of the uncertainty about the impacts and efficacy of puberty suppressing hormones”.

The NHS National Medical Director for Specialised Services Prof James Palmer claimed the trial would be subject to “strict ethical and regulatory approval and follow stringent safeguards in scientific research.”

However, psychiatrist Dr David Bell, who famously exposed what was going on at the NHS Tavistock gender clinic, criticised the trial, stating: “how can we justify conducting a trial when we know that a significant number of children will be harmed?”.

He said: “The prescribing of puberty blockers introduces physical harms to a physically healthy child. There is significant evidence that puberty blockers seriously impact on bone density.”

Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters, Helen Joyce, stated: “We have good reason already to think these drugs are harmful, and that the benefits are limited or non-existent.”

She added: “It seems that £10 million of public money is going to be spent on this unethical experiment.”

Dr Louise Irvine, the Co-Chairman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, said: “The Cass Review said there was a lack of long-term outcome studies and this [two year trial] is just more of the same.

“I am shocked they are putting children through the known risks of puberty blockers for no gain in knowledge, and I consider it totally unethical”.

She warned: “They are going to test for harms to cognitive development – but by the time they discover any harm it may be too late to do anything about it.”

The horror we and other pro-lifers predicted when abortion was forced on Northern Ireland by Westminster and Sinn Fein has come to pass.

The bill to introduce euthenasia into Britain is hasty and deeply flaawed, warn a group of leading psychiatrists. Their intervention comes after the Committee scrutinising Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill rejected proposals to strengthen the safeguards.

Writing in a letter to The Times earlier this month, 24 psychiatrists expressed concern both about the “haste” of the assisted suicide legislation and the consequences of the Bill becoming law which, they argue, could put pressure on vulnerable people to end their lives.

The week following the letter’s publication, the Committee rejected amendments that would have strengthened the Bill. The Committee voted down an amendment that would have raised the bar of the Mental Capacity Act to ensure an appropriately high test for mental capacity; rejected an amendment to make it explicitly illegal for someone to ‘encourage’ another person to seek an assisted suicide; and rejected an amendment to protect people from choosing assisted suicide because they feel they are a burden. The Bill’s supporters on the Committee also spoke against attempts to protect prisoners, where suicide rates are already high, and the homeless.

Calling for the Bill to be “overwhelmingly rejected”, the psychiatrists warned that the legislation would undermine their work, which includes suicide prevention, and put vulnerable people under considerable pressure to opt for assisted suicide instead of seeking medical or psychiatric solutions.

They wrote “A law on doctor-assisted suicide will undermine the daily efforts of psychiatrists across the United Kingdom to prevent suicide. Those who have suicidal ideation at any time in life may be vulnerable to pressures to take their own life by the introduction of doctor-assisted suicide”.

“Vulnerability can arise due to external factors such as lack of decent palliative or social care; overt coercion or undue influence; personal losses including bereavement, poor housing or financial hardship. Internal factors may include major depressive disorder, a sense of burdensomeness, loneliness and social isolation. Understanding and responding to these vulnerabilities is at the centre of suicide prevention”.

External factors mentioned in the psychiatrists’ letter, including housing and burdensomeness, were both highlighted in last week’s Committee as serious concerns but supporters of the Bill rejected the need for stronger safeguards.

MPs gave in to pressure and allowed representatives from the Royal College of Psychiatrists to appear before the parliamentary committee scrutinising the assisted suicide Bill, despite the fact that, hours earlier, MPs on the Bill Committee had voted against their involvement.

The psychiatrists criticised this “reluctance” of the Committee scrutinising the Bill to involve the Royal College of Psychiatrists in its discussions, describing the decision as “shocking”.

The psychiatrists wrote “The initial reluctance of the committee to see the need to call the Royal College of Psychiatrists to give evidence is in itself shocking and betrays a lacking understanding of the job that we do in understanding suicide and its prevention”.

The letter to The Times came after the Committee met to examine witnesses who gave evidence on the content of the Bill, in which a number of psychiatrists shared a variety of concerns about the Bill. Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Professor Allan House, expressed significant concern about the adequacy of the assessment proposed by the Bill.

He stated that, in cases of assisted suicide, a psychological assessment would need to go beyond assessing mental illness and explore social issues like poor housing and financial insecurity, which can be related to feelings of worthlessness and low mood. Additionally, he said that the Bill does not acknowledge peoples’ psychological state. Depression is well known to be difficult to detect among the elderly, as they do not express distress as openly and obviously as younger people do. Depressive disorders are also far more common among people with a serious physical illness compared with the general population.

The politicians trying to force eathanasia into law in Britain know full well that it would lead to people chosing to die rather than be a financial burden on their families.

As the Assisted suicide bill brings legalised euthanasia ever closer for Britain, a nightmarish vision of the slippery slope to state-sanctioned murder is emerging in Australia. The state of Victoria is further down the slide to Hell than we are, and offers a dire warning for our future.

Britian's Labour government is planning a new attack to try to silence Christian efforts to save homosexuals. The Starmer regime is considering a new law on so called conversion therapy.

‘Conversion therapy’ is the phrase LGBTQ militants use to try to demonise measure intended to help homosexuals who want to go straight. It includes repentance as well as preaching, prayer, pastoral care and even parenting that fails to endorse liberal theology.

So biblically faithful preaching, prayer, pastoral care and parenting are all comin under attack.

The Christian Institute has instructed solicitors in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland to prepare the ground for a potential judicial review of any new laws on ‘conversion therapy’ that restrict religious freedom.

This is based on legal advice received from one of the UK’s leading human rights KCs warning that an indiscriminate ban could criminalise the ordinary work of churches. This would put the UK in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and open the Government to legal challenge in the courts.

The Institute has won both its previous judicial reviews against UK governments. The first, in 2007, resulted in a partial strike down of the Northern Ireland Sexual Orientation Regulations. The second, in 2016, resulted in the repeal of the Scottish Government’s unlawful ‘Named Person’ scheme.

Aidan O’Neill KC has also provided two legal opinions for the Institute.

In the first in December 2022 he warned that the Scottish Government’s extreme ‘conversion therapy’ proposals are “beyond the powers of the Scottish Parliament to legislate”. He explained that the “fundamentally illiberal” proposals also breach Holyrood’s competence as set out in the Scotland Act of 1998 as they contain measures which change UK equality and discrimination law which is not devolved to Holyrood.

Liberals always scream about "choice", but look how they react when people make choices they don't like!

"Unborn life is sacred in the eyes of God,” Vice President JD Vance told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C.

Asked a direct question about the Trump administration’s commitment to the pro-life position, Vance encouraged those in attendance to defend the unborn, saying life in the womb is “sacred in the eyes of God and it should be sacred in the eyes of man, too.”