So, the NHS-Assisted Suicide Bill that just will not die is back in the House of Commons later today, with Labour’s Lauren Edwards MP set to kick off the Second Reading of the very same – so identically flawed – Bill that Labour’s Kim Leadbeater MP failed to sneak into the Statute Book via the ‘back door’ of the equally flawed Private Members’ Bill process during the two years of the directionless Keir Starmer government.
In November 2024, Leadbeater’s Bill passed its Second Reading with a majority of 55, but by June 2025, when MPs gave the Bill its Third and final reading in the Commons by 314 votes to 291 to send it off to the House of Lords, that majority had fallen to just 23.
It’s unclear how many MPs have changed their position on the Bill since then, but earlier this week Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch hit the nail on the head when indicating that, despite supporting the principle of state assisted suicide, she will once again vote against the Bill, on the grounds that it is not fit for purpose:
One of the things that has gone wrong in our country is how we make laws. Not based on whether something works or not, but how it makes us feel. As legislators, we have to do more than that. It is not enough to ask what we want the law to achieve; we need to question whether the system we build to achieve it will work.
However, despite having said in July that the government needs to fix the palliative and social care systems before introducing NHS assisted suicide, newbie prime minister Andy Burnham will be taking the soft option of abstaining. Apparently, he’s now happy for his government to just go with the flow, and ignore the consistently expressed concerns of the hospice charities and others, including many of his own MPs.
As is the former TV personality and prominent supporter of Kim Leadbeater’s Bill, Esther Rantzen, who was given less than six months to live three years ago, in 2023. Somewhat predictably, Rantzen popped up in the rabidly pro-assisted suicide Guardian yesterday to conveniently ‘reveal’ that she is now “too physically fragile” to travel to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Which is odd, because Rantzen’s family told the Guardian the very same thing 18 months ago, in March 2025, when Leadbeater’s Bill was at a crucial stage.
The use of such emotional blackmail is no way to debate and legislate for significant social change in the 21st Century. Burnham should step out from behind his inadequate fig-leaf of supposed government ‘neutrality’, and – as I suggested in 2024 – put the issue to bed, for now at least, by establishing a Royal Commission on assisted dying, or by asking the Law Commission to examine the issue and make recommendations for legal reform.
Update, 3pm: Well, some sanity at last. After almost five hours of debate, MPs have just voted 286 to 270 against giving the Bill its Second Reading. So, the assisted dying Bill is finally dead. Not that you’d know it from the Guardian politics live blog, which was determined to have it both ways:
(The first vote, won by a majority of 75, was simply a procedural vote on whether to now have the actual vote on the Bill. Parliamentary democracy in the 21st Century, innit. If the Guardian politics live blog team would like a tutorial, my rates are very reasonable.)
It’s fair to say that Lauren Edwards MP – who was given a rough ride in the Commons – and the pressure group Dignity in Dying (formerly the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society) have not taken defeat well, accusing MPs of having “dropped the ball today” and characterising the vote as “a failure of our democracy”. But Edwards and Dignity in Dying arguably brought about their own downfall by insisting that MPs pass her Bill without amendment before sending it on to the Lords a second time, simply so that they could invoke the Parliament Acts if the Lords did not do what they wanted.
Yet it was Dignity in Dying who chose to use the deeply flawed and chronically anachronistic Private Members’ Bill process to try to force assisted dying into the Statute Book, rather than do the hard work of convincing one or more of the major political parties to commit to NHS-assisted suicide in a general election manifesto. To my mind, it’s rather telling that Labour did not make that commitment in July 2024, despite the personal commitment of Keir Starmer. And, of course, Andy Burnham has no electoral mandate of his own – he’s only Prime Minister because a majority of Labour MPs belatedly realised that Keir Starmer is a technocrat, not a politician.
Meanwhile, some bloke called Gordon has posted on social media: “I hope we can all now come together to radically improve end of life care”. If only someone like Gordon had been in a position to do something radical about the funding of end of life care in the UK, eh?
Maybe it would have been better for someone like Gordon to put upwards of £30 billion towards funding the UK’s ludicrously under-resourced palliative care system, rather than towards helping George Bush’s US of A slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though Afghanistan was a basket case of no risk to anyone, and Iraq not only had nothing to do with 9/11 but did not possess the mythical weapons of mass destruction that gave Alastair Campbell and others such a hard-on.
Yes, these things are connected, people! You need to get intersectional!
Labour Pains 