So, the NHS-Assisted Suicide Bill that just will not die is back in the House of Commons today, with Labour’s Lauren Edwards MP set to kick off the Second Reading of the very same – so identically flawed – Bill that Kim Leadbeater 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 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 35.

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.