Lord Patten (Con)

My Lords, I have two points that I wish to make. First, I do not support the Bill in its stated aims; neither do I support the increasingly strange and weird way it has proceeded before Parliament, mutating into some sort of ever-changing hybrid Private Member’s Bill invention. HMG have been giving some covert, and now more overt, help to these beleaguered measures, rather than taking their own responsibilities, which they should have done from the start. It was truly prescient of Cardinal Nichols when he said on 5 February that there was “something deeply lacking in a government that isn’t prepared to guide and sponsor, if it wants to, this process of legal change”. If I may say so, I think His Eminence has been proved spot on in what he said then. This unholy legislative mess can be helped—a bit—only by the excellent and still to be consummated proposals of the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, and all that she has suggested for a time-limited Select Committee. That must be a help to improve it. My second point after procedure is on palliative care. I am not in favour of suicide facilities being provided by the state in the face of possible terminal illness. Illness is not always accurately diagnosed in the first instance. I do not believe there is some automatic choice between dying badly and, if you do not want to do that, having some self-styled assisted suicide. Rather, we must look after the very seriously ill with great compassion, and so much better than we do now. We need much greater protection from, and legal penalties against, coercion to die. Families are not always very nice places in the way in which they behave, alas. The domestic setting can sometimes be one for domestic abuse, elder abuse, abuse of the mentally disabled, which I am very worried about indeed, and the physically disabled. We need a much more precautionary effort to protect and safeguard those at risk, maximising the opportunities to safeguard the vulnerable, which I think the Bill fails to do in what it has said so far. Lastly, I do not pretend that we can make death lose its sting; of course, we cannot. As Mother Teresa, who has prayed here in our Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, once so wisely said, the real freedom is to value all people exactly the same and to value them all, not to think of them as trouble or a nuisance. We need more palliative care, which is woefully underfunded in this country, and it has long been so; it is a shame on us all. Its provision remains a patchy postcode lottery, with current estimates of around 100,000 people per year who should be getting it not getting it. From my own entirely personal point of view, worst of all, if from now on death becomes the default solution to perceived suffering—if it becomes the new normal—I believe this will have implications which will be more than significant just for the way we live now.